Stardock's new game -- Elemental: War of Magic

[Xiahou]

I cant get this game to load past the artwork it shows after you start a random map. Ive waited for 30 minutes one time. Its not freezing though... Its driving me off the deep end, and add my issues with wireless I just cant seem to get anything to work for me....

I'm starting to think I must be the luckiest guy on the planet when it comes to this game. Other than the slowdowns- mine gets down to 18FPS, which is still entirely playable for a TBS -I've had nary a problem.

I think I might not be ready for a large map epic game. After the last patch, I started a small map, normal paced game and I'm doing much better. Early on, I absorbed one of my fellow empires because they were sitting on lost libraries and other great resources that I just had to have. After that, Pariden started to get aggressive towards me once again and was hemming me in territorially. I managed to quickly capture their city that was hemming me in, kill many of their armies, and curse their best research city with ignorance. After that, I offered them very generous peace terms and they've essentially been my vassal since.

My next war was with yet another empire- Umber, when I decided to come to the aid of my new allies, Pariden. I took one of their cities(killing the sovereign's wife and daughter in the process) and intercepted their sovereign and his army when they were coming to retake it. I've still been researching heavily into magic and have a large force of summoned creatures and was able to kill their sovereign in the field, thus ending the Umber empire. My remaining opponents are the kingdoms of Pariden, Tarth, and Altair- the last of which I still have no contact with. Now I'm able to summon demonic troops, and frankly, it's hard to imagine how any of them could oppose me.

My first demon, about to set to work on some hapless bandits:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

My empire as it now stands:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: