[RegnorVex]

I know that Stardock tends to get a lot of kudos from players, but in my experience they've been *awful* as a company. I finally gave up on Demigod, which could have been a great game, because of the extraordinarily bad problems they've had with their online play.

Still, to this date, after months of poorly timed announcements claiming they'd fix the problems and blaming customers for any remaining problems, their forums are populated by unhappy users who can't get Demigod working properly. Brad Wardell has not helped the situation at all, insulting the people for whom the game still does not work (like me) and treating us like haters instead of customers who would like to enjoy the game they've paid for.

There are enough players who *are* working and who keep propping up the company that Stardock appears to have considered their work done and have moved on to the Elemental project. So I will remain quite wary of this title until I read reviews.

And don't get me started on Impulse. I tried installing Europa Universalis III on Vista 64 using Impulse and it made a mess of my computer, installing game files on my root drive and leaving bizarre, incomprehensible messages. I received zero support from Stardock, despite posts explaining in polite detail the problems. Not a single response. Their Impulse forums are scary with unanswered complaints. I finally had to download a patch available from the game developer, extract it myself, and figure out which directories to install its files into in order to get my Impulse product to even run. Last time I buy anything from Impulse.

Elemental sounds truly exciting and, like many here, I look forward to trying it out when it's shipped. And I have been quite happy with most Stardock products in the past. But you have to judge a company not by how they respond to things going smoothly, but by how they respond when things don't go well. I will be far more careful spending any money on a Stardock product next time around.