Elemental: War of Magic - Drama Cleansing thread

Yet another Brad Wardell post explaining what happened and answering other questions, including (apparently) emails that he kill himself and other idiocy.  The intro:

On August 24th, Stardock released the long-anticipated PC strategy game Elemental on schedule…

Except, of course, that’s not quite what happened. Stardock released the game a couple days early to beta testers and pre-order customers – the same version reviewers were given (v1.0) and the results were painful in two basic ways:

1. The new engine that Stardock developed turned out to have a lot of compatibility problems resulting in crashing and out of memory errors for a significant percentage (I’d go as far as to say as many as 30% of users – which is a gigantic number – anything over 5% is considered unacceptable).  It’s not commonly known but the engine in our previous games (GalCiv II, The Political Machine, etc.) was developed originally in 1997 and enhanced over the years.  Nowadays, most companies just license their engine from Gamebryo (Civilization V, Oblivion, Fallout 3) or the Unreal engine. You are now seeing why they do. 

2. The above ensured ruinous reviews but even without them, the game UI and some of the game mechanics just didn’t live up to people’s expectations, and AI issues.

The purpose of this blog is to help answer questions so that we can move forward.

So here are some of the questions / comments I’ve gotten in emails and private messages and on various forums that I’ll try to answer.