To put the score into context, the site and same reviewer rated Civilization V:  Gods & Kings just a quarter-point higher at 8.5, and Warlock: Master of the Arcane one and a half points lower at 6.75.  Very respectable score indeed!

The Warlock review was bullshit, as Brad himself pointed out.

Good to see Fallen Enchantress did well though. 

What about Draconians was cruel..?

8.25 is a laudable score. It means the game has quality, and is a a farcry better than WoM was.

That quote is basically how I feel about FE too.

Also unfortunately true:

"With little room for tactical creativity, the battles are more of a chance to see the units you’ve designed and heroes you’ve customized in action than a whole second side of the game."

It's sad, but Derek focused on merely reorganizing the basic systems and ignored opportunities to add real tactical depth. It's better than WoM, but it could be far better than it is.
Hopefully in the next iteration, eh? Along with fleshed out navy and dynasty stuff.

All in all, I really did agree with the bad as well as the good of this review.

Think a lot of that could have been fixed if the battlefields were larger though.  Right now, some of the battlefields allow fast units like Umberdroths to head all the way past your frontline and hit your rear units, before any of your forces have a chance to act.  It also would be nice for it to be possible to kite slower-moving units if you use good positioning and have a unit with 4-5 speed - right now, the enclosed settings make this option completely unobtainable, reducing non-magical combat against any tough monsters to inevitable melee slugfests (and killing a tough monster with bows or damage spells before it reaches you is either impossible or extremely mana-intensive on higher difficulties).

Really though, the enclosed battlefields are my main gripe.  Definitely like how this has developed - I disagree with the review about the campaign - liking it so far.

A spot on review if you ask me (right in the 80-85 metacritic range I predicted).

I think many reviewers and gamers are always going to have problems adopting the lore of Elemental. It takes too long to appreciate the depth of the world SD built. That's the upside of going with traditional fantasy lore - people bring their own ideas into what they are. Put "elves" on a faction, give them some pretty skins, focus them on magic and bows and high lords, and suddenly people think back to Lord of the Ring. They probably didn't even need to read the story to know that Elves are immortal and generally fight to protect nature/life against the "destroyer" factions. I think a well-thought out faction design is having the traditional fantasy races but spicing it up with a bit more interesting species (hence you'll find in my mod Stormworld factions like the Shadows or the Living Stone, or why not Frost Giants and Golems).

As for shallow tactical battles. Well.. we've pretty much "all" been saying that since the start of betas. The fact that Stardock decided to go with focus on strategy rather than tactics doesn't change that we view it as a negative.

And of course the "stack of doom" issue (or, the AI's inability to build them) is what really keeps the tactical battles from being "half the coin" of the game. The AI is quite something to behold - better than any other strategy game - but it spreads its most powerful stuff out too much. As long as the single winning strategy is to build a singular "strongest" army, the AI should be doing that. Either the game, or the AI, needs to change.

I for one love the soul, atmosphere and indepth lore of this game, but I have played this game for a long time already, and no; insectoids as a player race would not improve the game for me!  I think it's a quality sign when a game gets better and better the more you play it, and not the other way arround that is more usual today.

“It’s the closest anyone has come to producing the game I’ve been dreaming about since I was an adolescent with visions of wizards carving fantastical empires out of a hostile world.”

This is sooo true for me as well! Well put! 

Actually the best thing would be to teach the AI to SoD and balance things so that choosing to focus all your power into one army leaves you at a reasonable disadvantage. My current solution to this is quite complicated. I use every mechanic I can think of to make sure the AI has strong armies and that stacking powerful units does not result in taking no damage. Creating a system where both sides routinely lose units and can replace them at a reasonable rate is going to be the best solution.

I find the comment about lack of soul to be spot-on.The lore still seems weak to me, the game fails to draw me in, make me involved about the factions.

What has improved are all those little flavor texts on monsters, The ingame encyclopedia (I love that in games), and despite many, I consider the game to be visually attractive.

What drags the game down are lack of synergy among its various components, repetetive quests, fact that NPC monsters and characters don't fight each other, poorly designed interface (scattered information, idle town warnings), uninteresting tactical combat (seriously? No walls, just a bonus? Single greatest opportunity to make the tactical combat interesting wasted).

But compared to the first game, the effort put into this iteration is obvious. Still, I think a score in the range of 7.3 - 7.8 would be more fair.

I've actually played the game for an amount of time now.  Tactical combat appears to be less tactical, more waste of time.  Then again, this is a strategy game.

The main counter to a SoD has always been multiple smaller stacks that can be in many places doing things you don't want them to, like taking your cities.  If you have whatever city your SoD conquered, and the enemy now combines their multiple smaller units that made up several strikes forces to take the rest of your cities into a SoD, you now have no cities and a SoD coming after you.

So the question is, in this game, can multiple smaller armies do enough damage economic damage to compare to a single SoD over the same amount of time?

Soulless doesn't refer to the quality of the lore, but to the lack of player engagement with that lore.

As an example of "soulful" gaming, consider the times you've played an Elder Scrolls game and have recovered some ancient, storied artifact/spell; at that moment the lore is no longer just blocks of text, but is substantiated in game terms.  Or think of any LotR game ever released; getting to claim relics from the first and second ages of Middle-Earth connect you, in game terms, to the storied lore that sits on your shelf.

E:FE tries to get this feel: we have random events that harken back to Curgen, and a couple of artifacts as quest rewards, and we have a couple of Wildlands that trace their history to pre-Cataclysm days.  There are monsters that tell you that they are still strong, though their might has diminished.  All of these things convey soul; there's just not enough of it.

Just my opinion/observation.

good job guys!

Larger maps would fix this I"m thinkin, it's good to have a 'stack of doom' but in a large enough world, one isn't enough (64 bit?!?)