That's a pretty entitled attitude to make. My suggestion in the future would be to wait for a demo. That's what I tend to do. I can only say that we're doing our best to make sure people enjoy their purchase.

We released two expansions for Sins of a Solar Empire which were $10 apiece. The idea behind an expansion vs. a patch is that an expansion adds or changes a core game mechanic (Starbases in Sins: Entrenchment and Diplomacy in Sins: Diplomacy).  It has nothing to do with the quantity of the content being added but rather the scope of the change.

yes! yes! yes! this will be awesome! please make this happen!

I have AOW 2 and SM as well infact my boys 8/9 are playing them on another computer and I had intended that all 3 of us next year or two might play EWoM on our Home LAN, but ...  We may have to settle for doing that with AOWII:SM instead it all depends on how Single player turns out first...  Given the limitations on MP and the scope but first I must be convinced that the game is complete and we are nearly there but not yet. 

The problem that TBS games have in MP is ppl dropping as soon as they think they lost equality or the upperhand and the games turn into a scientific method optimized early game and whoever comes out on top in the early game then others drop or the game takes too long and I just do not see it going over well with randoms... But close Friends and family well then maybe MP adds real value, but it must be balanced from the start.  Of course dad taking on a couple of preteens might not be the fairest either  

My god, get over yourself.  All these posts like this you keep putting all over the place help noone.  The fact you bought it from amazon is not any ones fualt but your own(you know you can be at fault right?) 

Next time wait for a demo...I'm just hoping that you left a bit in your bank account to afford some food as well...

While I'm of the attitude of "I'll like it if it's good, I don't care what you call it"

I think you'd be better off calling them mini-expansions.  People have an expectation with expansions- and I think it will be difficult to deliver what people would consider 2 XP's of material in the 6-month timeframe you gave.  A mini-XP, like what you called the Sins XP, would have more reasonable expectations.  One of the reasons you guys caught so much flack was the expectations for Elemental, including my own, were insane.

Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised.

On the people specialists, how about Civ 4-style slots which buildings can grant.  A farm can generate 1 farmer, A study can generate one scholar, an arcane lab one sage, etc.

Another idea would be to expand the number of notable NPCs, and allow them to level up their bonuses?

My concerns with your idea are can the AI handle, and would it be too much  micromanagement, especially in high lvl cities that get over 1000 pop- that's 100 specialists right now- could be a micro nightmare.

Expansion... DLC... patch... the lines are blurry i don't think its any form of trickery or false advertising to call something an expansion if its not a huge amount of new content. In the end you will decide to buy it based on 2 things: Price and Content. Unless you are a casual gamer in which case you will go "oooo shiny! gimme gimme!" Are you seriously going to boycott the expansion because of what the devs call it?

Anyways after I play the demo I will probably buy the game before oct 31... here's to waiting patiently!

FROGBOY: Please arrange for more cool spell effects to be added to the game. Modders can make 100's of awesome spells but who wants to see the same effect used over and over again.

So long as you fix

1.  Out of Memory CTD error.

2.  End Turn stops working hundreds of turns into a game issue

3. Annoying towns renaming themselves to enemy towns names between turns

Anything else after those is a bonus

People.

The 1st "expansion" won't add content nor make the game deeper. It'll just be an attempt to make it into a working game (by changing things that have been universally reviewed as broken).

It is to be developed in a month.

It is a PATCH.

I remember some of Brad's promises about this which I'll have to dig up and make a final post about when I have some more time.

It's really a sad conclusion for my whole experience with Stardock.

Well first off I just want to say thank you for continuing to work on this game and improve it.  There are a lot of game publishers / developers out there who don't even put out two patches, let alone rework the game after release.  Speaking as a strategy game novice, one of the things that would be nice for Elemental is for some form of guidance in the form of feedback.

For example, a setting that can be enabled or disenabled depending on player preferance, that warns the play if they are about to send their economy into negative mode. The number of times, I've been floating alone, seemly going fine, only to have my economy start losing money then after hovering over the coin resource counter to learn that I'm losing -2.8 gilder per turn, are numerious.  What's frustrating is I have no idea what's tanking my econ, or how to fix it, or prevent it from happening in the first place.  An 'danger Will Robertson' message when you decide to build a unit, or construct a building, etc, that would tank your econ would be very helpful for those of us who are strategically challenged .

Another area that could use some improvement is the UI.  It took me ages how to figure out how to exit a city, and even longer to work out that how to get groups to exit a city, and I'm still kinda unsure how to get unit's to exit a ship or transport.  It would be nice, if the UI somehow detected you were trying to do a common task, (like exiting) and gave you some tips as to how to do that.

Lastly it would be nice if there was at least one of each of the common resources (such as metal, gold, materials) in mine form available within reach of a players starting position, or at least the option to have them made available.  The first two games I played after the campaign, I lost due to lack of resources, which the opposing AI had.  The third game, those resources were available, and things went a lot more smoothly, until the game crashed to desktop with an out of memory error.  Still that's what autosaves are for .

Sorry for the rambling post, and thanks once again for all the hard work you are putting into fixing up this game.