I love Elemental the more I play it.  I spent several hours last night on an Elementerra random 128x64 map and had a blast.  This game is so deep.  I'm on about turn 700, have played this game around 12 hours so far, and am still only about half-way through the tech tree.  I have not had a single crash the whole time on my two year old laptop.  Contrary to common belief, the AI is actually pretty good, I am in last place among all the factions and keep getting my butt kicked by the Magnar.  Their combat technology is far beyond my own and their armies are 3 times the size of mine, venturing into their land feels like walking into Mordor.

The world is a joy to explore, there are lost islands, full of nasty monsters and unclaimed land.  It literally takes 30 turns to go just halfway across the map in a ship.  The maps simply dwarf all other maps from other TBS games I've played on before.  There are lots of NPC's to recruit (I just proposed to one for the first time).  Like X-Com, I just LOVE how you can name each one of your recruited NPCs, it gives you far more attachment to them.  The game is just incredibly deep for me, I'm getting much much more out of this game than I did with Civ 4.

Each time I play, I continue to discover new things that I never knew.  In most 4X games, I pretty much figure out the whole breadth and depth of the game within an hour.  I'm many hours into playing and still find myself going, "wow, this is cool, I didn't know this existed!".

Elemental is now in my top 5 games of all time, just below Dwarf Fortress and Morrowind.  I know a good game when I see it, and Elemental is one.  I say buy it ASAP, it's only going to get better.