...finally able to complete a game with no frozen tactical battles.  I like the new information bars, showing who you are at war with, and I like the warning when enemies are on your turf.  I miss not knowing when a city has completed a building.  Several times, my cities did no construction when I would have liked them to, simply because I did not cycle through my cities every turn in order to find out they were idle.

Loading from saves is much faster, and when using the archer skill, it is nice to be able to take shots fairly quickly, instead of waiting 7-8 seconds between each shot.

The AI builds cities and armies more effectively than in the past.  They seem especially good at getting out archers.  Well before I can get an Yithril bow, the AI will have archers (sometimes massed) in their armies.  If the AI gets the first move, they can sometimes take out the weakest leader in my stack.  I haven't seen an enemy leader expose himself away from his own land.  I have seen only windscren used by the AI in tactical combat.  The game was played on a small map, so there wasn't much time for the AI to develop strong spellcasters before the end of the game.

Janusk never showed up.  As mentioned in my post above.  This makes for a VERY tough start, going solo for a long time.  With the teleport spell more expensive, it is difficult to hold more than 3 cities for a long, long time.  The creatures just spawn too often, and I had things backed down to the hard level.

I started a new game on a large map today.  Janusk showed up on turn one.  By turn 180 or so, I was not doing well, the nearest AI was able to build far faster than I could.  I was about to give up, but decided to save the game, just in case I might give it one more try. I received the dreaded OOM when I attempted to save. Rats....

I will have to drop down one level in difficulty to see how things go, and I'll re-try a large map.   Right now, I find the AI gets off to a far faster start than in v1.1, at least on the higher levels of difficulty, and I can't keep up, mostly because the creatures spawn so often that all of my attention is directed at keeping them off my back, while the AI is attacking much earlier and much more effectively than in v1.1.

I’m probably fairly unusual in this community, running Elemental on an iMac using Windows XP via Parallels Desktop. You might think that was a recipe for disaster, and by and large, it used to be. The new version, however, hums along (with one or two crashes which are probably related to the setup) and I managed to finish my first game with a score of 60. Since Stardock give us no idea how this score is arrived at nor allow us to see past scores, I have no idea whether that’s good, bad or indifferent. 

I have some points that maybe people can help me with; I was playing as Ceresa. (I won by vastly superior magic with 2 spellcasters allowing very easy conquests against armies more than twice as strong.)

Firstly, I had several warg kennels, but none produced a single warg, even though their index cards said they were producing 0.25 or 0.3 per season.

The contagion spell didn’t seem to work at all.

I found 4 pieces of elementium but had no clue what to do with them.

Is there a logic to which technologies in Adventure/Domination put your leader up a level for questing?

There were only 2 lost libraries, both in the same country. Seems mean.

Things that need fixing: unit exits from city – keeping to caravan paths on intercity routes; some goodie tiles still don’t disappear. You can’t have a Consular’s Palace – consular is an adjective, it should be Consul’s Palace.

The game needs some unpredictable events to throw you off course. It’s just a tad too predictable at present. The sea part seems to be all but useless at present, but will probably be more fun later. I had one priceless moment when I put my crew on a boat, moved the boat and the crew were left behind up to their chests in water! But enjoyable none the less. I going to try a large map now!

We like Parallels on the iMac. Stardock technology is in there.

Gypsy Davey...I'll try to answer a few questions, but I play very differently than you, so I can't answer everything.  The elementium helps you build some VERY strong units later in the game.  Just keep it on hand for now.  You will find them helpful in making custom units.  Lost libraries often show up in pairs, I have no idea why, but I do take advantage of them as soon as I can.

I play Elemental on a Gateway PC, but play most of my games on a MacBookPro using bootcamp, so I understand what you are doing.  Bioshock I & II, Europa Universalis Complete, and Civ IV worked perfectly.  This game is so erratic that I have tried to keep it on XP.

You can control a unit's exit from a city.  Select the unit while in the city, then click on an exitspot.  The space can be several spaces away.  Using the city's exit screen allows no choice.  This can be tedious late in the game if you have a lot of units in a city.

For Warg Kennels...did you go to the nearest city and select them as units to train?  They will not show up automatically, you need to go to the city training screen to select them and build them.

Like you, I would like some unexpected events.  GalCiv I & II had them and you had to be a good player to recover.  It made for an interesting game.

I have been experimenting with v1.2.  I was deep into a large map, just starting to feel that I was in control. I had conquered 4 of 9 AIs. Then the game froze.  I could find no way to recover.  After 10 minutes, I pulled the plug.  Upon re-boot and re-launch into Elemental, I was told that Elemental had bad sectors and I had to run Scandisk.  I did that, got the game to start, but all of my saves are lost. 

I have had so many crashes in v1.1 and now 1.2, that I completely give up.  I'll be back when 1.3 arrives. 

The game has such potential that I hate to say goodbye.  I have well over 350 hours invested.  I have also had over 350 bugs, crashes, or freezes along the way.  It is time to take a break.

 I loved Oblivion.  I bought the expansion packs of Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles on eBay, not so long ago. Playing those expansions on an old familiar game (I never once had Bethesda's Morrowind or Oblivion crash) will keep me busy long after v 1.3 is out.

I'm also excited that these are in the works. I think that they would add a lot to the game. Having said that, I much prefer Civ4/FfH style random events to GalCiv2 style random events. Just a personal preference, of course.

This update is very frustrating, is has fractured the graphics making each avatar look as if they no longer have a face and has also fractured the appearance of the map. The new additions to the game look great; however, I the loss of the game looking playable are not worth it. 

I still would like to play the game, so I hope either you (stardock) can fix the bug and send out a workable update or make it possibe to get the 1.1 update available again.

Thanks if someone from stardock read this.

Also if anyone out there knows how to get the 1.1 update could let me know I'd greatly appreciate it.

Drifter-san, thanks for your response. Re warg kennels: they don't show up in the city training options, unlike darklings etc. Re city exits, I have adopted that method, but it's very frustrating when I forget sometimes. It's also annoying when another unit on a caravan path forces yours to make a detour.

Incidentally, I have no set method of play (unlike most hardcore Civ-type players) - I just go with the flow! If there are libraries around I'll go one way, temples another. It's much more fun.

I have those Oblivion extensions - you should have a good game!

running on a nividia 8200 gm I have had no graphical hiccups, slow downs, there were two major freezes that caused me to d a hard shut down, but I think that may have to do with my os,vista 64 bit has been giving lots of trouble, the only time I do have slow downs is when I bump up the shadows to highm but then thats normal  (8200 gm has a hard time rendering shadows).

outside of graphics everything works fine, but then I just got the game and updated it as soon as I could so I cant really say if there is anything wrong.

Very Beautiful!!  I like this alot!

Thank you for the wonderful work!

-Teal