My vote:

- Faction differentiation:

1. buildings: all factions have to have a unique buildingstyle - with this engine it's childplay to make new building modells, i don't understand why have missed this opportunity this game so far

2. units: the armors could represent the ethnic differetiation as well - it would be cool if you could distinguish between nations by looking at the armors what the units are wearing.

So I would like to see nations with their own artstyle. The world of Elemental is nice, but I feel the nations plain. The culture needs some flavour.

At EWoM I didn't want to play with Capitar after Gilden (e.g.). There was minimal difference between them and I hade to manage cities and unites with the same looks. And some initial differentiation between nations will fade in the middle and late gameplay, but the differentiation of artstyle remains.

I love the game so far, but if you play on a big map with a lot of opponents I start to get the dreaded "out of memory" crash.  Like with the first version of Elemental, it happens all the time.  Loading saves, saving.   Triggers also include fighting monsters in the wilds (for some reason bears are a problem) sometimes just turn to turn crashes. 

Think about what 1% crash rate means, Progress.  One time out of every hundred someone who owns the software tries to use it, it crashes.  Let's say there's 100,000 units of a piece of software sold.  Let's say each of those users tries to use the software 3 times a week (a really low number).  At a one percent crash rate, that means there's 3000 crashes a week.  If even one percent of those users get on a message board and complain about the stability of the product, that means 30 posts a week in the first few weeks of the software release of some very unhappy customer talking trash about your product.  Think about what that would look like on a webstie on your product, and how many posts it takes to make your product look bad, and start to affect sales.  I'm not talking about trolls and flame posters, these are legitimate complaints about real problems with your product showing up in the first weeks of its release.  Yes, I think 1% is a PR problem.  But, this isn't my industry and sales and PR isn't my world, so if I'm way off base here, maybe you could explain where my error is?

Crashes are not evenly distributed. I haven't gotten a crash in the last 1000 turns. Some of you are getting them on every play session. So if 1% is all crashy, the devs can fix the configuration problems for those comps after release with little to nothing heard about it. I am sure there are devs working on your crashes until release though. Still, this is why I say gamers need to buy the most purchased hardware and software over the cheapest or highest performing options. XP 64 is kind of a bad choice for a gaming orientated computer. 

I am planning on building a new windows 7 64bit with an 8 layer CPU for the release. I want to be able to have immense maps.

First of all, thanks for letting me in on the Beta. My first taste of Elemental.

I usually get a crash every couple hours. My system is pretty blazing though so it doesn't even bother me (default map size). Ive got win 7 intel i5-2500k oc'd to 3.5ghz Load times and game start-up takes seconds, just like loading an Excel worksheet (just a small exaggeration)

Not sure if this has been mentioned already, but... I feel that the implementations of vassals is a must for this game and there should be an incentive to make someone a vassal. My games seem to always end up with me getting whooped or rolling through everybody else (only dependent on difficulty setting). And just as there is an incentive to make vassals, the vassals should have the potential/ power to overthrow over time.

Also, I feel the attacking of capitals should spawn more units, and not just militia.

Didn't vote because I want to see more work on the core mechanics such as the discrepancy between city income and item prices, lack of options for focusing on economy/growth early game, sparsity of early game buildings, general pointless-ness of food techs/buildings early game, etc. That didn't seem to be an option in the poll.

I build cities in a direction to reach a patch of forest so I can build a lumber mill.

I build cities to block off the ability to walk around it, limiting access to part of the map.

I build cities to touch resources in the immediate vicinity, this will extend the city wall around them. They then can't be separately destroyed.

I extend cities along transportation routes to make travel faster. Crossing a city takes no time.

I'm not sure we are playing the same game.

Except in those cases where the army stubbornly refuses to go through the city and goes around instead.

alright it's better than a hat customization program.

I would like to see the maps more refined and more resources distributed.

I would also like to see the option to make more then 1 - 2 cities per Large map. It seems after the first city I can get another one if I am lucky about 15 tiles away and usually only 2-3 tiles allow for the new city.

It all depends. I played game on Medium map and had bunch of cities. Try different world/resource settings at the beginning. And even with the map you described - use outposts to gain the resouces and scouts to find a spot for new but distant city - one suggestion rises - add trait 'cartographer' to unit workshop so it could watch for city suitable spots. 

Wow, just checked this poll after a few days and I can see that computer AI is right down on the list of priorities - does that mean that people are generally happy with the AI as is? I feel the AI is coming along but there's more to do yet

hi 

1st i want to tell, how great this game looking atm. i did like gal civ 2 too, also elemental. but this last version (0.86) is showing how it will be at end. its great.

imo the next upgrade should be make factions/races unique whit buildings, weapons, base stats of armys/soldiers etc.

thx and keep on good work guys

well i faced some AI isues, but i also read, that they continuesly work on AI. and i didnt find AI that terrible. playing on rediculius dificulty is hard and fun

I couldn't vote for AI as how can it be built for a game which in many purposes does not yet exist?  That's a bit over the top but with drastic changes to come it can be pretty hard.  First a balanced STRATEGY game - then an AI which can play strategically.

(What I mean is that if the AI was built for 0.77 it would be programmed for stacks of doom for the win, if it was built for 0.86 it would be city and zombie spam AI, if it is to be built for a balanced strategic game then that game needs to be balanced and strategic - FE is not at the moment.)

BTW, I voted for city management.  Dearly want to see a viable option to build a FEW cities rather than one or many.  One per faction/world buildings promote one mega-city, the per city buildings promote spam; perhaps some thought can be given to what will promote a few cities?