I've really only had the time to set down with this game twice since it was released, so my impressions will be quite different than those of you who've been doing the whole Beta thing.

Background about myself: Been playing Civ since Civ2. Experience in TBS genre basically limited to Civ franchise, and although I could regularly beat Civ4 on Prince and sometimes on King, I'm only about a 50% victor on Warlord on Civ5. Never got in on WoM cause it never ever went on sale on Impulse (only reason I installed it was to watch for a WoM sale), and it was $50 in the box stores locally. I kinda wrote it off as a game that would be in the Age of Empires 3 vein and not have a price drop until its 4th anniversary. Found out about FE when I started searching around for FFH for Civ 5 and found out that the FFH dev got a job at Stardock. Got excited, but not enough to pre-order to jump into the Beta (did eventually pre-order on steam this past weekend).

Release night, I fired up the FE scenario first thing. Took me 5 minutes to figure out how to move Relias. Got to thinking maybe I should have looked for a tutorial game first. Breezed through Map 1 in about 3.5 hours, doing a full clear. Quest system could use a bit of work, not all objectives are displayed in the quest area. I only kinda skimmed Gnarri's introduction message and had absolutely no idea what to do to get him in my party (until I actually killed an ogre and Relias was like "Hey lets go give that guy this club."). Impressions: Wow, fun and easy but a high barrier of entry.

Got to map 2, started running into bugs. My UI halfway disappeared, I got multiple duplicate Heroes, the sea was a walkable sand (i thought it was a desert til after I reloaded), huge memory leak evident when I closed the program and its still chugging in Task Manager. Impressions: Release build blues. I'll go back to scenario after patch.

Last night I did a sandbox game. Random generated map, easy settings (2 opponents, easy AI). Started figuring everything out from scratch. Knew how to build stuff and train guys from my scenario game, but sandbox had a lot more options and management to do. Found out that Kraxis makes 10,000 pioneers and claimed like a third of the map before I built city 3. Played for 2-3 hours, retired in 3rd place in faction power at war with both other factions. Impressions: Wow, this game is hard. I really should have found that tutorial game the encyclopedia talks about. Barrier of entry is still high, and units take a while to make.

Good game so far. Hope to put in a few more hours into it over this weekend.