And then there is the bridge pathfinding bug. In fact, the reason I came here in the first place! I knew things were wrong with the game before coming to this forum; it's why I came here at all.

Let's LIST:
2h bug
Shield bug
tower bug(s)
pike bug
princess bug
battlefield pathfinding/bridge bug
cav rundown routers bug
task switch on video bug
"random" seed issue (since previous games!)
upgrades bug(s)
guild bug(s)
Aztec bugs
loaded ship movement bug

And I know I'm forgetting quite a few.

And we'll ignore historical/logical inaccuracies like crossbows firing parabolicly. But just about everyone acting like everything's fine act like the only problem is one bug. It's not, the shield thing is merely the last straw for a lot of people; we kept feeling like things weren't playing melee right, were assured it was "balance" by some people, and found it's a bug. With the exception of the video bug, everything I've listed impacts actual gameplay. Not aesthetics, or smoothness, or occasional crashes (though we have issues there too) like most games. It's a plethora of broken gameplay mechanics. And true, someone who never played TW before might not have noticed, but to most vet players and people who payed attention to the IN GAME TUTORIALS it was clear things didn't work as advertised.

But here's a way you can tell if a software product should be shipped: how many coders are still working on it? If too many coders are being kept on the project post release, it shouldn't be released yet. If a product is actually ready for release, only a residual coding team should need to be kept on for bug fixes. However, in the case of this game, I'm pretty sure it's just about everyone still. I know, other software companies do it to. That DOESN'T mean I'm going to let a company off the hook when they lose on this kind of gamble. It's not a good business practice to release incomplete software and people need to let companies know they don't like it.

You might have been trained in coding, I was trained in marketing and PR just fyi. Everyone in the PR game knows that every bad review you hear about represents a fraction of the bad impressions out there; more importantly, dissatisfied customers tell a lot more people than satisfied ones, by a factor of 5 to 20.

"It's fun but a bit frustrating" is competing against "It has more gameplay bugs than any other computer game I've bought in the last 5 years." There are people in Sega who are seeing this stuff, and they need to, and yes, it does make a difference in how things get done. More than you'd think.