I don't think it is fair to say the reviewer is using cliché and have not tested the game in depth. Look at his screenshots, some show quite advanced games, with companies and high end units, sprawling empires.

I bet you can find them all on the net. (Funny to imagine that someone would rather spend his/her time with Google than play the game.) I'll go with DevildogFF (reply #10) and others.

@Mistwraithe: You certainly played more different games than I did. Poor fellow. I won't ask you about them...

And progress is painfully slow at this point.  I am wondering if Stardock feels they do not owe anyone a perfect game as quickly as possible because they gave it away to so many people.  The problem is that many of us did pay for the game and it is not nearly as finished as I had hoped when I bought it.  I didn't even get it on sale as I really wanted a game like this.  

OOOOHHHHH ...

I was fooled. I spoke of advanced screenshots as proof he played a long time, but then, look at the screenshots of the FE official page

https://www.elementalgame.com/fallen-enchantress

they are the ones the reviewer used!

Shame on him

My theory is that at least the core team around Derek Paxton has a perfectly clear picture of the (lack of) quality. That's because they read customer complaints and play the game themselves.

I guess that developers are assigned to the team only if they have no more "serious" work to do. (This shuffling of developers is a common cause for messy code.) And right now hardly anybody is available. They probably hope to gain some time. It's not that Stardock doesn't care for their customers, only gamers are the least important among them.

And, of course, Frogboy was lying when he said that they made the game as good as they possible could. (At least I hope he was.)

I don't feel like it is that slow right now.

I've seen work on the AI, tweaking it pretty nice from what I have seen so far plus the last patch is just about 20 days old. I don't think that is too slow. Wait at least a month before you start ranting about slow progress and take the inofficial patches if waiting is too hard

And if I remember right, there are plans for a first addon focused on heroes.

I just hope this game will follow the same strategy as the other Stardock titles I have seen. Namely Galciv and Sins of a solar empire.

Both started with a pretty solid/good game and brought it to awesome with the patches and addons that followed.

I see something of the same here.

The game has bugs, but the parts of the game work well together and are pretty solid and fun to play with right now. Another three addons, one for heroes, one for the strategy and cities and one for the combat and this game will be a shining gem, on par and maybe beyond the old master MOM.

Since no company would take the risk to run a public forum unattended and this "It's not really as bad as that and we have so many exciting things in store for you." sounds like the typical reaction from the marketing department and the plans have not yet been publicly announced AFAIK, you must have heard about them during an internal meeting at Stardock. Can you provide some more details please?

Thanks for putting me in a marketing department, but no, I just observed how they managed their games in the past.

As for further information:

The experimental .exe from frogboy can be found on the forum and as for the addon... now you mention it, I'm not exactly sure where I read about this. Can't find it right now, but I keep looking.

I just hope I havn't seen it in some mods description and mixed the whole thing up....

It has taken a bit longer than I expected for them to tidy up the bugs. I suspect this is partly because they reduced team size and partly because they don't see the bugs as being as much of a priority as I do (Stardock are starting to focus on downloads/expansions etc, I think the core game is still too buggy to devote much time to that, unless they wanted to go the "paid expansion which fixes all the bugs" route which doesn't seem their mindset).

One factor is likely to be sales. I think they were hoping for a sleeper hit and haven't got it (yet). Certainly they seemed confident the game was ready to release at a point when I was saying it would only get 75ish Metacritic scores (it now has 77, I was close) and at one point Frogboy said FE was the most polished game they have produced... so still a bit of blinkered vision about their game IMO (although not nearly as bad as it was with WoM! at least!)

BUT, on the positive side I think FE does have the potential to be a sleeper hit, they just need to polish it up to A-game level. Hopefully Stardock will stick with it enough to do just that.

v1.12 was released just a couple weeks ago.  

Version 1.2 is in development.  We don't plan to put out more than 1 update per month (though we did put out 2 updates in December but that's the exception).

We are listening to your suggestions and requests and add them to the list.

In fact, the last update was released 5 days before Christmas. A whopping 2 weeks ago.

Apparently Stardock developers should work Christmas and New Years to fix unspecified bugs.  Otherwise, they'll be condemned for slow progress! There should be daily updates! Nay! Hourly! 

I wouldn't give this game 5 out of 5. But It counter balances the 3 out of 5 review I read about last month.  This is a 4 out of 5 game. I could nitpick it endlessly.  If Mistwraithe thinks its so buggy perhaps he could make a post and share those bugs. 

I think the biggest bug I've read about is the tech trading bug and that bug was probably in there for the entire beta without anyone noticing it.

I'm sorry to get all sarcastic. But I think some of you need a little perspective. They put out 2 updates last month and that was with Christmas thrown in there. Suggesting they're not supporting the game is a real slap in the face.