• dang dude. Thats just rude.

Though I am sympathetic to the players experiencing the CTD's, I agree about the attitude issue brought up above;

There is no denying Elemental was not in a good shape upon release. SD confirmed that on several accounts and has apologised for it. They even offer the first expansion free to anyone ordering until the end of the year and even the first AND second expansion free of charge for the early adopters! How's that for an apology, huh?

Do the complainers expect some sort of disclaimer with every patch apologising over and over again that the game is not finished yet and the devs kneel to every player experiencing problems?

We're past that. They have admitted the game's faults already enough. It's time to build now. And you can either contribute in a grown up manner to help improve the game, or just whine and scream like a little child in an unproductive manner.

Elemental needs work still. We all know that. And its nowhere denied. Yet the devs are very open to what the plans are and what and when they're planning to address certain issues or gameplay overhauls.
Stop the whining already, please!  

Everyone is allowed to express their critisicm, but it's the tone that makes the music.

Sure I understand that must be dissapointing.
But the game runs without crashes on other systems as well. There are thousands of configs out there and unfortunately its a given fact that games might have problems with certain configs. But its unfair to say the game is broken just because it crashes on your particular PC. The fact that it does run without crashes on others proves that its not the game alone, but a combination of game/PC config, but that wasn't my point in my previous post above..

Nonetheless it does suck when you cant play.

I'm just curious, why all the rabid defenders assume that anyone posting with problems hasn't already done the things they suggest?

It's not like this is day 1 here; My drivers are up to date, I have a decent system and yes I have submitted reports over the months since launch...and the game has *never* been stable for me or many others. Is it playable? Barely, if I set autosave to 2-3 turns and just accept that I am going to have CTDs and have to reload 3,4,5 times per play session...

Sorry that I don't suffer from battered gamers syndrome and consider that acceptable.

The "every PC is different" defense really doesn't cut it in the modern game market...maybe you can make the case if it is wildly under game specs or some 'frankenputer...doesn't really apply to a 1yr old Alienware, now does it?

There are tiny, unheard of design shops from places like Hungary and Turkey who somehow manage to produce games that run just fine...yet after months post-launch Stardock can't? Please, it's hardly like there is even a single aspect of this game which should be pushing the capabilities of a good machine 10yrs ago.

As for "crying over it"...get a clue. I'm a customer, I'm unhappy with the product I paid for and I am expressing that unhappiness to the company after giving them plenty of chances to "make it right".

Back in the early GalCiV II days there was an issue that caused some GPUs to run hot and hard lock the system. I mean power down by switch, not hit the reset button.

It was pretty frustrating, but the bug reports and crash dumps came in and it was soon fixed.

If it were me, I would give them a little more time.

They care more than any other developer that I know.

To be fair, Elemental has had many more problems then GalCiv2.  Some of this is due to Stardock being overambitious with trying to make a game engine from scratch.   I think in retrospect, this will be one of the things when Elemental is done Brad will self-criticize himself over as a business decision.

That said, vast improvements were made in 1.1.  The real problem for SD in 2011 with Elemental is going to be balancing the need for gameplay improvements, balance, and stability.

I'm not going to be satisfied with Elemental until I feel the game is clearly more fun then Twilight was.  That's the standard I'm holding Stardock to on this.  While I don't have stability problems (yet), others seem to- but gameplay (Twilight needed some improvements there, but was overall very good), and AI are sore sports for me right now (Stardock's main selling point to me is good gameplay with an AI that can handle it provided you don't exploit).

And yes, I am very difficult to please, I'll admit it.   You can make a great game, and it may not be good enough for me.   

One thing I am seeing from the changes so far, is really making me excited for GalCiv 3, I can see some ideas from Elemental really shoring up the rough spots in GalCiv 2 (though I think when Brad was designing Elemental- he was thinking too much GalCiv in some areas, some thiings felt cut and pasted from there, and some of that is still in 1.1)

@ebelser: First of all most are not 'rabid' defenders. Its about fairness and reality.
Your 'tone' is exactly what I referred to in my previous post. Using words like 'rabid', 'battered gamers syndrome'.

Can you come up with examples of why "every PC is different" defense doesn't cut it? I think its even more true nowadays then is was when we're still on our XT's. Now we have dozens of different hardware brands and hardware component types to mix and match. So howcome doesn't it fly anymore, you think?

Then you generalise by saying Stardock hasn't produced a game that runs fine despite small companies from Hungary and Turkey can do this aparently. The only title that suffers made by Stardock is Elemental and this has been acknowledged already by the devs and the players on many accounts. No need to generalise and besides, what's your point by refering to those small developers from Hungary and Turkey anyway?
There's also a lot of crap games coming from there, Germany, Russia, the US, you name it.

If you think v1.1 is THE only chance they had to make it right in case of Elemental, then you had your hopes up too high. SD has been nothing but transparant in what v1.1 would be and would not be. If you bothered to follow the beta builds that would been clear even more.

It's ok to express your dissapointment, but keep it real. Hence my point about 'we're past that'. YES we all know Elemental is not there yet, YES they are working on it, YES they have apologised, YES the magic system is not final yet... What more do you want?

It's awfully easy to just yell without any backing up...

Keep behaving like a child who just got his lollipop taken from him doesn't help things.
Look forward. Move on. Help the game if you like it. If not, then quit, sell it, whatever. There have been enough promises and offers from SD (heck you even get expansions free!) so that your "I am a dissapointed customer" arguement doesn't hold anymore.
If you can't see we are still very much in the fixing phase, eventhough v1.1 was out the door, you have only yourself to blame for not keeping tabs on the development.

And this has got nothing to do with being 'rabid defenders', fanboism or whatever other fancy name there is. It's just being realistic, seeing the facts for what they are and have a good spirit to try and help getting a game where it needs to be, instead of just screaming and yelling.

There are many aggressive comments in defense of the game.

It's a community site, sure. Bashing people who have a CTD is not a very positive community attitude either.

The 'the game is not broken it's your machine' and 'many other games are crap' and 'games can't run on all machines' arguments don't change the fact the game crashes. It doesn't change the fact that on the machines on which it crashes, many other games run fine. It is not a valid or useful argument. The useful argument is "send all data information to Stardock so they can fix it".

The OP says he would be ok with more modest play balance and more stability. This has been ignored by almost all posters in the thread, despite it being one third of the opening post.

Isn't that something constructive, though? Like telling the community some member(s) of this community want a stable game, and value this more than the tweaks and revamps?

Now I'm ready to bear with a few CTD if the game is fun, and I think a major revamp was needed to get into fun territory, although it's mostly an AI issue to me.

You're right my "tone" is pretty negative...I tend to get that way when I waste money and yes, this is a public forum...hence why I'd rather complain here than in a PM to someone. Strangely, when I am really happy with a game I don't just PM the dev team...I tell my friends and others on forums like this; So why when I am unhappy with game would I not do the same?

Can you come up with examples of why "every PC is different" defense doesn't cut it? Amazingly, yes I can. There are pretty common standards out there for most things you know; strangely I buy a dozen or more PC games in any given year and while I won't say that none of them has ever trotted out this "every PC is different" excuse, I cannot remember the last time that someone tried it. This isn't some game with cutting edge graphics, amazing textures or even terribly complicated game play. Why does this have so many problems while games from far smaller and less well known companies have done much better? I think we all know why and Stardock has pretty much admitted it; they tried to re-invent the wheel and messed up the coding pretty badly.

Are they working to fix it and do they deserve some credit for that? Of course and even more for being honest about it, they are even trying to make it good. However that doesn't make me like the game more, or a whole lot happier about buying it.

As for my jibe about, "battered gamer syndrome", I stand by it. I think far too many consumers are willing to repeatedly give dev teams a pass for failures and gloss over the extent of problems.

I think your over exaggerating, sorry. Have you tried playing the game a few more times to see if it will crash? I have played the game and hardly had any crashes. I did have one but it wasn't repeatable and I just loaded up my game and continued on for a while with no crash.

 Stardock's Beta and QA process is broken, they never gave the final version of 1.1 to the beta testers, the last version before release was 1.09w which was out for testing less than 24 hrs. Instead they made changes to 1.09w and then just released it as 1.1. This is the same thing they did before the games initial release back in August. Beta testers never saw or tested it before release.

They never posted a Beta testers guide, telling testers what/what not to do, (patch or reinstall new version, use/don't use saved games, custom maps, previous created units, mods, etc, etc.) for each beta release. They would rather tell us blah, blah, blah on how hard they are working, just work smarter Stardock.

Setup a really QA and Beta process with a private forum for those who really want to test, along with published testing guidelines, have a dedicated QA manager to respond to all bugs & crash reports and most of all give time for testing vs. just putting out a new version every day.

Now that is a fair complaint.  There was no good reason why the time difference between the last beta and release was under 18 hours.  If anything, 1.1 should have been today.   This is something I do feel Stardock is wrong on- though I suspect other factors may be involved (Christmas, the fact the team was in crunch mode, which Brad doesn't like to see because it does burn people out)

That said, I think Stardock's beta process is fine- public betas are the best way to find errors, but a dedicated group in addition may be advisable also.  I know SD has done this in the past on specific issues.

Part of the reason the community here is rather defensive- is a combination of the interaction Stardock does with developers, which causes a loyal fanbase, plus the hostility towards SD from some quarters.  SD does have its fanboys- I'm one of them myself.

Again, SD does deserve some heavy criticism for how Elemental has been handled, but the response from Brad has been the best SD could muster, and their track record, to me, indicates that massive improvement in the game is likely- which is one reason why I give them the fanboy benefit of the doubt, one I would not give to many other companies.

Thank you!!  I was starting to think nobody else got this.