The good, the great, and the meh

First off, this game is very very good. Well done Stardock. You've really delivered and should feel extremely proud of what you have produced. I am enthralled playing the game and a good sign is I started playing ten minutes ago and looked at the clock and it two hours later! And I don't want my one hour 50 minutes back!!!

First of all, the only reason I stopped playing was because of a crash. Tried to reload a game. I'll lodge the debug file in the support forum. Other than that it has been very stable.

I absolutely love are the dynamic nature of 'The Wilds'. This is really unique and woe betide the wary traveller who wanders too far away from town. This adds so much flavour to the game.

I also really like how responsive the video zooming is now. Start building in a city and zooom - in you go. Really nice.

I've got a few constructive comments but I don't want this to be any sort of negative reflection on the quality of the game. As stated above the game is awesome.

1. The spell books seem a little too easy to start with in character generation. I'd suggest making these much more expensive or make them limited to wisdom/intelligence factors. Others have stated that there aren't enough spells but I don't see this as an issue at all. Making the books harder to come by would make magic much more important to pick correctly at the start - to really get the flavour of the different elements.

2. There is a setting for ambient sound volume in the options but I don't really hear any in the world map. Ambient sounds would add a heap of mood to the game.

3. Also in the options is a setting for Smart Player Colours. Not sure what this does. I thought it was going to tint the square under the units or something.

4. To activate the mini-map it takes two clicks.

5. I had a character card showing a different character graphic until the other character had moved some distance away - then the correct character card displayed. The details on the card were correct.

6. Had a glitch with the map where all the details disappeared. I zoomed out to cloth map and zoomed back in and they reappeared.

A few other things...

I am one of the Age of Wonders fanboys who had been praying since the moment Elemental was announced that it would replace that game at the top of the fantasy strategy game hill. From what I've seen so far I think it does. And I can see this game just getting better and better over time.

During the beta process I was worried and critical of a couple of aspects:

a. Lack of real racial differentiation. I still think the game could be drastically improved by having real racial diversity rather than just colouring the same human models. Hopefully this will come in future patches or via the mod community. Having said that, the lack of racial differentiation is no where near as great an issue as it appeared during the beta process. This issue has diminished from a 'deal-breaker' to a 'nice to have' for me if that makes sense.

b. Hexes. Once again, I still think the game would have been better based on hexes but in the final version of the game this also doesn't appear to be a major issue now.

Well done Frogboy, and well done all the crew at Stardock.