I have been running in windowed mode and having sessions over 12 hours in 1.2, and have not had a chnce to test 1.121 yet

harpo

You actually can use the ALT-TAB BUT it's better to go to the option menu instead of being on t he playing part of the game. I always go to the options menu before alt-tabbing out of the game. I've noticed I get less errors and crashes that way

Just make sure you're not rolling with an ATI Radeon graphics card, dual monitors, and Vista. The DX errors will make you want to throw yourself in front of a school bus.

Shool buses hurt, even the short yellow ones. 

Ask us again after 1.3 comes out.

Then we might have a more meaningful answer.

The game is currently poorly balanced and the AI is worse. It is also plagued by out of memory crashes as you get deeper into the game. Moreover, from a design POV, the dynasty implementation is so weak as to be irrelevant except for producing the initial bunch of four bonus channelers with one of your initial heroes, and there's very little magic about the "war of magic" in general; Unless you are as stupid as the AI, you'll be using a tiny fraction of the available spells over and over again as the majority of spells either aren't worth the mana they cost or are only useful in situations that do not arise because your AI enemy is utterly incapable of finding its digital arse with its equally digital hands.

The shop for buying hero equipment and the whole hero-equipping deal is as poorly implemented as it was on launch. You'll be buying identical equipment for your heroes one item at a time from a list that grows ever longer as you research more items.

Army design reduces to creating a couple of clearly superior choices every single game unless you want to be deliberately ineffective and wars mostly boil down to having larger squads than the AI and/or higher attack rating through better weapons.

Since Elemental's tactical combat engine is based on first-strike-trumps-all and the AI happily allows you to get the first strike each and every time by zerging you and stopping movement right in front of your troops, tactical combat is about as one-sided as it gets. Opposing magic could theoretically spice this up, but when you see enemy channelers they'll usually just suicide charge your front line rather than use magic. Presumably the AI either doesn't research any useful battle spells, wastes its mana on worthless overland spells, or just values dying without inflicting any damage over spending mana. Who knows? And by this time, who cares?

That said, it is certainly possible that you'll have fun playing and modding it if you can overlook those issues. After all, I've played two 1.2 games to turn 300+ in slow conquest mode (and saving frequently to recover from the OOM crashes) to test out the game improvements and I had some fun doing so, though mostly from a testing perspective, and if your interests in game design and testing are the same as mine you might find such experimentation fun too, so long as you aren't actually expecting to play a fun game.

But the short answer is that the game in its current form isn't worth buying if what you want is a game to play. It is not releaseworthy. If it were released in the state it is in today it would still get disastrous reviews from anybody not limiting their playing to the initial phase, though it wouldn't get as terrible reviews as it did in its original state. Quite simply, despite the considerable work done it remains a bad game with a lot of potential.

For my rig, the 1.2 version of Elemental is stable, after previous builds caused numerous reboots.  My 2 cents.

Yeah, I'm pretty much with the later posters.  The game runs fine on my computer but I still get bored with it fairly quickly.  The AI is the main issue as it just makes really terrible mistakes and is far too easy even on the harder difficulty levels.  And the game just lacks that big immersion factor that sucks you into games.

With the 1.3 update, if the AI is improved enough, you are really itching for this type of game, and you find the game on sale, I say you might have some fun with this one.  I have a friend who bought it and has enjoyed it (although I don't think he's played it much).  However, I'm with most others and say just wait for FE - that one is looking quite promising.

Is it stable enough to play?  That totally depends on each situation.  For me, the game has crashed only once in nine months.  So it's very stable for me.