I am posting to counterbalance many of the impressions and reviews seen here and on the main page of MotBW.

I am running the game on a Win 7 Pro, Intel i7 box with 12 GB RAM and an nVidia 570 GTX card. I could not get Genesis to run well on my PC (not without throttling it down to 50%) and decided to wait for MotBW to begin playing Eador, so I come to this series with no prior knowledge about gameplay or mechanics (I have watched a few videos online, but that is all).

I have to say that much of what people are taking issue with I do not see. I was FULLY prepared to take this $20 preorder as a loss and a lesson on the folly of preordering. The game runs well for me . I do not have a frame counter, but it is smooth from what I can tell (there is an issue when zoomed all the way out on the map where when I try to pan to the edge with the mouse, there is a little bit of shakiness). I also wish I could zoom out further.

With respect to distinguishing between the hills and the plains, while I can somewhat see what people are taking issue with, I can tell the difference between the land types pretty easily. The tool tips help in that regard and I find them very useful and adds a layer of polish.

The movement animations are slow, but I haven't checked to see if there is a way to speed them up on the main menu just yet.

I find the building wheel to be intuitive, personally. I haven't played Genesis, so I do not know how it was implemented there. This may or may not be an improvement over Genesis, but using it with no prior knowledge of Genesis proved easy enough for me.

Honestly, I see nothing so far (I am still doing the tutorial; I am at the point where my 'instructor' has told me I am on my own now) that makes me regret this purchase. The animation movement speed MAY grind on me a bit later in the game, but for now, it is completely tolerable. I don't happen to care for multiplayer, so I cannot speak to how it not being there affects the value of the game.

I have been on the other side of this (only one GOG game besides Genesis didn't run well for me, initially).
Believe me, if I felt as if I were ripped off, I would not be posting this (I probably wouldn't be posting if I felt ripped off, but I would NEVER buy an Eador/Snowbird product again unless is were made by a different team that didn't want to rip me off). When Suoslov posted in the 'Soo much for Preordering thread...' and didn't answer my question about if the game was still being released on 4/19, I was expecting a crap release. So far it has not been anything like that. My impression may change as I play more with the game, but for now, it was a great investment.

If you hold down the mouse button, they speed up.

(But it was a little fiddy for me, I kept accidentally making my dudes do stuff)

Wait until you've played a few hours beyond the tutorial you may be singing a different tune.

To Everyone saying this would be a rip off I have to tell this:

Heroes 6 (yeah, UBI Soft ...) is absolutely unplayable after 2(!) years and the publisher and devs don't care. If you have a nvidia gfx card, then you are out of luck and you will have freezes and other quirks after a few minutes of gameplay.
That said I think we can say this release is pretty stable and I have more faith in Snowbird than I have in UBI (the devs themself also aren't ashamed).

Well I've finished a couple of maps now and... dun dun dun... no real problems encountered.

Two minor quibbles :

The journal thing is readable right away which is kinda spoilers.

Combat music doesn't play. You just get the usual background music.

So to summarise. Not perfect, but in a better state than most strategy games on release.

The thing i was worried about from feedback was long turn times. Not an issue at all, basically instant even on a colossal map.

@ioticus, can you give some details. Not technical issues as I'm not seeing those. I have a pretty bare bones gaming system with no dwarf porn or weird codecs. What kind of gameplay issues are ppl seeing so I know what to look out for.

My 2¢

Game world looks gorgeous... however it's compromised by a lack of information. This is probably more noticeable on larger displays (27" here, there's a screenshot to illustrate my point of view) but the icons and radial display don't scale and are really tiny.

Added to that is the design decision to have icons rather than words. Consider the icon for province unhappiness - it's almost unnoticeable if you don't know what to look for. I have similar issues with most of the other artwork. However I presume that not everyone is running a large monitor and probably this is one area where a stretched game developer might not be able to focus too much!

A second issue, which becomes more irritating as you play more, is the amount of 'bling'. I understand that you need to differentiate things on the map but the amount of sparkles, glows, glitter et cetera on the map (especially combat map) is a bit overdone.

However, comparing ANYTHING to UBI Soft will make it seem amazing. It's like comparing something to a pile of manure, as UBI are the worst lowlife crap company currently releasing games - both in terms of DRM, Lack of support and bugs. So really - if that's the baseline it says very little of Snowbird. Still it's good to hear some positive stories too.

LOL .. ok, you have a point. :) However, I played a while so far without any really major bugs. There are things that need to get patched, but I hadn't a showstopper or something like that. Most feedback is true and some problems are related to certain conditions like the problem with laptop resolutions (1366x768). The game clearly need some further love from the devs but it isn't as bad as some people put it. The release wasn't ideal but ok for nowaday standards.

It's sort of ok. I was really hoping for some genuinely new content. Not a ton, but enough to make it feel like at least a rebalanced game with a small expansion added.

I haven't gotten far at all yet, so I'm hoping that game balance on Beginner will later on turn out to be a bit different and that Beginner won't continue to be one difficulty level above Normal for most American games.

I have a box that's, like, 6 years old. It runs MotBW, but there's a small delay to every click on the "low" settings. It's not severe, and it's probably a sign of age, but on top of how the "speed up combat" options don't work as snappy as in Genesis generally, it's an added layer of slowness on top of a game that's already designed as a massive time sink. I generally have to second-guess whether a click registered for half a second before starting to do anything else. Genesis is just more reliable (except that I've noticed that Genesis occasionally crashes, but the auto-saves make the inconvenience rather tiny).

I was hoping for more, generally. If I see anything when I play more, I'll report back and give some credit. Mostly I wanted smoother balance on Beginner and the odd change and goodie here and there in addition to the nice-looking reskin that we got here.

Playing H6 right now after rolling back drivers to 301.42. Granted you shouldn't have to do this but my point is the game worked with Nvidia drivers on release.

Any game that requires me not to have dwarf porn on my computer is not a game I want to play!

I also didn't play Genesis, and am not seeing any major issues with MotBW. I've had a couple instances of the game freezing up, but the autosave implementation makes it pretty easy to recover. The actual gameplay is pretty smooth; even the slow combat animations aren't a big deal since you can give multiple orders before the animation finishes.

I agree, no dwarf porn = no sale! Regarding the bugs, I don't own the game but my comment was based on reports I've been reading of people who initially had no problems after an hour or two but ran into game stopping bugs after putting in more hours.

Works ok for me as well after a couple of false starts.

Initial impressions are...well average. Small things like all units having the same walking sound effects (so far) suggest that the developers ran out of time/effort but spoil the effect. The hero wields the same weapon regardless of how you equip him. Again its the absense of these small touches I'm noticing at the moment as the gameplay appears to be identical (not in itself a bad thing).

I'm really struggling with the user interface. The wheel for the hero I'm getting use but really needs bigger icons but the stronghold screen feels like a step back. I now have to select quarters and so don't have an overview of what's built or even requirements. And its more mouse clicks - always a bad thing.

The unit icons also seem small. I know my slinger has a double shot because I've played Genesis not because of the small symbol at the bottom of the screen.

There does appear to be more information available than in the original such as damage you'll do and a bit more on game mechanics which is good.

I suspect I'll get use to it but it does seem a backward step.

This "fix" is well known, but not an option for myself, I'm also playing other games and I don't switch drivers around for one bug ridden game. H6 is for a looooong time in this broken state and every few weeks you here something about a patch, the patch gets delayed and DON'T fix the problems. Beside from that there is now communication between the publisher or developer and the community. So fuck UBI and the day where they got the M&M franchise. On the other hand they release quite expensive addons (expensive in regard to hours of play vs. money without new features) ... and I might add the release of H6 was everything but bugfree ... however MotBS is working for me and the bugs and quirks I encountered until now aren't that a big deal.

There is an advanced construction mode that shows all buildings; the small round button on the bottom right of the construction panel switches to the advanced mode.