yeah, i think it's important to note that what makes the idea of the game so appealing in the first place is that it's essentially the omni game. civ building, magic, adventure, unit design, tactical battles. pretty much everything that any fantasy game tries to do.

that scope and ambition is part of the reason why it's taking so long to get right, but it's also the whole point of the game.

i think it can be done.

Reporting the bugs would allow them to fix them faster.

You're right, it would. Unfortunately, when I say I see some bug or other ever 4 or 5 turns, I'm not kidding. And reporting each one of those is a monumental task.

I can't focus on enjoying the game while documenting, as best I can, each bug, rounding up the evidence, creating a dropbox account, uploading it, grabbing the links, and making a post here. While it isn't a lot of work per bug, it is something I will have to do every 5 minutes. In the end, I will spend more time reporting bugs than playing. And I bought Elemental hoping it would take me away from the stress of daily life, not compound it.

Some, like the asymmetrical map bugs, require screen shots to highlight, yet print screen only copies an entirely black image to the clipboard. So I've got to download fraps to actually capture working screen shots, crop them to remove the useless portions (and to fit size restrictions), upload them, link them... Of course, this requires me to restart elemental most of the time, because alt-tab causes it to crash...

I don't feel like a beta-tester here, as some have claimed. I feel like the lowliest game tester on the in-house QA totem. And I haven't received a paycheck yet.

I tried, this morning, to go through a short game, documenting the bugs and putting it all together for a nice big "Louist's list of everything" bug report. I made it about 40 turns, finding a number of goodies that would show up on graphical map, but wouldn't on cloth map, a town without any visible influence boarders, a colony of mine with the wrong player color in graphical, a quest hut which couldn't be interacted with, an instance of the Wild Goose Chase quest not spawning the next location....

This took me over an hour. It was extremely demoralizing. In the end I simply gave up and went for a walk around the park to help me relax. No game, not even one I really, really, really want to enjoy, should require that much work from its players. No game should leave you feeling so tired.

Obviously, yes. But some bugs (asymmetrical map ones, for instance) won't cause a dump, and many of them actually fix themselves with a save and reload (making a save file useless as well)

I wish they were the worst of Elemental's bugs. Unfortunately, though, they are still a pain for anyone who plays using the cloth map.

Yeah, I really prefer the cloth map for its clean, cartographical aesthetic. But it is the buggier version of the two.

I should load up the campaign again at some point. It had a number of walls that restricted access to parts of the map, and were only visible in the 3D map. 3D users clearly see a wall blocking the path, but anyone using the cloth map was given no indication at all.