There are still a lot of bugs and polish left. I to hope they take a bit more time.

I would never disagree with this, traditional QA Testing is always needed. Even more so with the whole GUI/multi-threaded stuff.

But for instance if the graphics were sufficiently separated from the game logic, which would be good design (for instance according to the Single Responsibility principle), it shouldn't be such a big problem to write a test that assures that AI players can see goodie huts. Setup a small mao (2x2), a goodie hut and a hero unit of the AI player. Stub/Mock external dependencies.

I don't know how the game is build though and must admit that I don't know too much about your code base or game development and C++. I just know that testing often is hard, but if you're dedicated enough to automated testing and quality you often find a way.

edit: to clarify: I'm not speaking about acceptance testing. I speak about unit testing to integration testing. So I'd also love it if all the methods of a single sovereign were tested, which is definitely possible. Not speaking of all the other benefits that TDD brings with it.... Oh and yeah if you haven't already guessed, I'm kind of a hardcore TDD guy.

Have to disagree here. CIV V got the score it deserved. Yes it was buggy but it still felt more complete and I like the new CIV combat system which turns the world into one big tactical battle.

Warlock does the same thing which I love (turning the world into one big tactical battle) And it is basically CIV V with a fantasy setting. There is however a lot missing from it that CIV V has which I wish they would put in. However it is a very fun game.

Now currently both CIV V and Warlock blow away FE in it's current state.

1) They look better. Never liked the art in FE

2) They are more polished which is understandable since FE is still in the beta so this is not a big deal now.

3) FE is just not that fun yet. I have to force myself to play it and get very bored of it quickly. Not a good thing for any game. Not nearly as fun as the other two games. Now again the game is not finished yet so I'll reserve final judgement until the release of the game. (It has potential to be more fun but has not made it yet)

It is much better than WOM but then again Tic Tac Toe is more fun than WOM.

Look we are in Beta 5 (Bug killing phase) and Brad said there will be at least two more phases after this so it gives me hope that this game will be good when it is released however if they release this year it will be a disaster (not as bad as WOM but still bad neither the less)

As a Softewear Developer and a part Time Brain Surgeon (I can claim this because I'm on the internet) I will have to disagree. The Sandlot game is the more important part of this game and should come first. The Campaign should take a back seat besides campaigns are kinda lame in TBS/RTS games anyway

It is to you, and it is to me.  But the campaign is what will make or break the reviews, and there is a chance a campaign can be polished in the time left.  For the right kind of player (read: someone like me and many of the Beta testers) the sandbox is enjoyable as it is, with home rules, modding, and a lot of tolerance for bugs.

I'm not saying to cast it a side.  I'm saying that if they insist to release soon, they should be focusing mostly on the campaign.  If they hope that "the campaign will just work because we will perfect the sandbox by November"...  They better be very, very good, and need no sleep.  Which may be the case.  You'd be amazed how foolish we men can be and what stupid sacrifices programmers do for their projects (and egos)

Do I feel a dig here?  No, it's my wife that's the Brain Surgeon... well, the Cognitive Science researcher.

Absolutely.

Ugh I keep forgetting this game will have a campaign. It saddens me to think of the time and effort that is spent on the campaign that could instead be used on the core game. 

Oh, I forgot that Jon Shafer worked on CIV V. Hope he isn't reading this thread, but CIV V had terrible balance and an AI that couldn't fight back. The primary limiting factor on military conquest was economic penalties. I could go into it more, but if you like you like it. No reason to rehash opinions. I did have a lot of fun once they fixed the game breaking crashes a few months later.

My 2 cents...

I wouldn't say that the game is ready for release right now. But I think anyone suggesting that it's months away is being hyperbolic. You could spend 10 years on something and there will still be people who will say it's not ready.

Just a casual look through the beta reports makes it patently obvious that the game is just about ready for release. It's no longer about crashes or game stopping bugs. It's UI nitpicks or balance nitpicks.

Even the OP goes out of his way to list the inability to have multiple weaknesses in character creation as if that's a bug instead of a design choice he just happens to disagree with.

I think the next update will tell us a lot about where it stands. Maybe it's ready for release in a week, maybe it'll take a month. But more than that? Please.

Like a lot of people said here - fun factor is a major problem. Most of us who find ourselfs forcing us to play are real, true old school veterans of the 4X and RPG-genres. And there just is something, something that the game is lacking or has wrong. 

From my point of view the bugs aren't a big problem. It's a beta and I can live with bugs. Sure, it might crash or behave weirdly, but I kind of trust Stardock to get these fixed over time.

Starting position problem is big fun-wise. Map generator needs to have "2nd phase" after starting positions have been set. If it has that already, improve it. A fun game needs to start "easy", so that you can quickly and somewhat fast settle a couple cities, get attached to them and think your doing fine. It's important to feel you are actually doing something. Only after getting attached to your little empire challenges should start.

Cities and troops being simply irrelevant is possibly one of the biggest problems. I know I don't need those cities. I know I don't need to built those troops. What I don't know is if 5B will fix this. You will just use those now cheap troops to defend your cities, but still use your sov and your sov alone to to kill and conquer everything.

Minimized UI design is annoying and actually obstrusive. It works on some games, say space RTS-games like Homeworld or The Jupiter Incident. In fantasy setting hiding and making the UI to "tell" as little as possible is just annoying. In this kind of a game seeing UI adds to the immersion, not take away from it.

Btw, font improvement was massive.  

Maybe the biggest problem is that the game cannot decide what it is.  There's a lot of stuff but it's not really connected well, you don't get attached really to any parts of the game, your empire, your heroes or your sov. It's a little like Microsoft OneNote, you kind of want to like it, you kind of want to use it, it kind of has lots of nice features, but you don't really need it for anything. Take a deep breath and talk together why game lacks fun. What was fun in the games it's recreating or trying to improve upon. What kind of a play session is fun in the first place.

Why would 'monthes away' not be realistic? Two monthes from now would be late November, would qualify as 'monthes away' and could be considered by many to be more realistic a goal than in two weeks. Obviously, the relativity of such a statement is based off of how much beta tester thinks Stardock can complete in the time they alot themselves and what they hope to acquire as a final product.

I have this same feeling for the game.  I like to play after each new release, just to see whats new, but then it doesn't have that replay fun factor for me.  I thought maybe it was just balance, and maybe it is, but I think you have a point.  Why do I want to build more cities and troops?  I can just smash everything with my heroes.  I like the idea of wildlands, but do they help the game progress? no.  By the time I can clear one, I am already the most powerful empire in the game.  Wonders/Unique building?  I don't really care about them and am not dissapointed when an opponent builds one.

I dunno, it just feels like something is missing.

I was thinking about Fall From Heaven and what made that fun, and I think it was that each faction played so different.  Cool traits, different troops, different heroes.  I wanted to start a new game and play as a different faction each time.  With FE, it just feels like I make the same choices each time, which is basically to just make my heroes powerful and then trounce the world with them.

I think it will get good reviews, because it does have that immediate cool factor, but replayability is low IMO. But, maybe I've played it too much and need a break.

You should try Civ 5 with the expansion... The AI is significantly better and the game overall is just that much better ..  its easy to forget Civ 4 wasnt that good or balanced before its expansions.

In saying that Civ 4 remains the greatest TBS game of all time IMO.

As far as FE goes review wise, personally I think its going to get savaged deservedly or no particularly in its current form. Each component needs to gel together alot more coherantly, it was said more eloquently in another post that the game currently feels like an RPG-lite, with a city sim lite tacked on. Id add that the tactical battles feel tacked on as well.