I was part of the beta and said basically, "I will never use this, let alone pay money for it."
Now with Guilds out and my physical copy not yet delivered I thought I would give it a try.
It's definitely better, but still not a complete product imho.
Opinions:
1- I tried playing without buying, just to get a feel for it. A waste of time. I posted some thoughts while trying to do it in another thread. Just brutal
2- I purchased everything. $45 price is not unreasonable (I think that is lower than it was, no?)
3- I started ou just playing bots to get a feel for things. They aren't good, but they sure aren't bad. Good enough that you have to pay attention, but bad enough that you can always build an engine. Which is kind of fun
4- Then I started hosting games...
5- The lobby takes forever to load.
6- The games save your conditions, which is nice and fast
7- People join games quickly. That's nice. And it's relatively easy to check their stats. Knowing speed of play would be a lot better
8- The games are still pretty slow. Iso games were fast and easy. This makes every game feel like, 'an event'. Which means when a game sucks, it feels worse.Which is more like real life. Which is also why I tend to play designed games in real life, vs random ones. The time it takes means I'm more picky about playing bad ones
9- I've been slow rolled 100% of the time I've been dominating games so far.Things are fine when i'm losing, or when it's close, but when i'm running away with the game, people just seem to sit there and i have to wait them out. it's painful.
Also I like this new Advisor card a lot......
Ed