Hi. I would love to support the devs and buy this game. I played it on a friend's pc and it is awesome. However I hear because people complained the game couldn't run well on their not-so-great pcs, the devs had downgraded the graphics with a patch they released after the game's release. Did this really happen or is it just rumour? Something about Patch 1.03 I believe...? My friend also complained that there have been fps drops a lot since he got the updates and dlcs, and from what I've read it sounds like the more they update the game the more of a nightmare it becomes to play.

Is it possible to get the vanilla day-1-release version of the game, without the patches and updates? This is my essential question, and whether the graphics downgrade from an update is true or just a rumour. Thanks.

Totally untrue - in fact I had the exact opposite experience and I played the game Day One (GoG version).

On release the game was great, but had some SIGNIFICANT performance issues. I can't remember the exact measures I took, but there were a few pointers in the release thread and on the forum here that had a few recommended tweaks to get the game running a bit smoother.

I'm almost positive that it was actually the 1.03 patch (about a week or so after release?) that finally got the game running RIGHT. I remember commenting in a thread here that this was how the game should have been released

I was able to actually increase a few settings because the game was no longer sort of misbehaving with how it was using resources. My PC is far from bleeding edge but the game ran nice and looked extremely pretty.

I *didn't* play any expansions, so I can't comment on that (I was actually always curious about the one that let you build up a town and will probably grab that at some point).

Thanks for the response! I believe the rumours I have heard and read were somewhat unjustified, and could have been just the players' settings resetted after their games had updated. After reading your response I researched it a bit and it does seem as though they have improved the game very much with every update, which is awesome to hear. I would love to support these developers, with any scrap I can muster from my meager earnings, so I have went ahead and purchased it at last. Thanks for the feedback on the updates and performance/graphics concern. :)