If you had pushed it back for one day it would come out at my birthday:)

Sounds like a good amount of time to continue the awesome work of polishing.

Would love to see some improvements to the interface screen (bigger icons/scaling, improved sorting/reordering, etc.).

Honestly, this will be your full return to grace. LH is, quite frankly, fantastic.

Please tell me that there will be a standalone version and that I can play without that festering STEAMing pile of rubbish.

It's plenty of time. Aside from a few bug fixes and some balancing, LH is already a better game than....well, just about everything out there, 4X wise right now.

"This is pretty obnoxious. If you feel the game is being rushed (just like people thought GalCiv was rushed and Sins was rushed and so on) then feel free to wait until February to play it." 

© Frogboy, July 20, 2010

He just points out that the game is more than good enough to play and nobody tells that it cannot be polished by few later patches after release.

And they might need some income for future work either, you know ppl who develop it need to eat either Postponing release means you have to live from your savings, game industry is built on real life basis not on mana you know...

Not to mention, FB was, ironcially right. Anyoen who bought War of Magic the following February would never have known that the game had trouble when it first came out. 

Legendary Heroes could ship 0.80 and be considered a good game. Nobody thought WOM was a good game. If you at my posting history, I was one of the first people to condemn WOM when it shipped.

With a company like stardock it IS less of a concern if a game is released in a kind of advanced beta state rather than fully polished retail product due to Stardock's  ongoing commitment to improve and refine and patch their games BUT I would hate to see the game not do as well as it should due to ill informed reviewers marking it down due to lack of polish and/or bugs upon release.

Yes, I think FE was a great game, yes I think LH makes it even better, but why ever release a product that isn't your best?  There are a lot of bugs and niggling issues that have lingered with the game for a long time, please take the time to fix all known issues before you release it.  You are a great company and deserved to be recognised as such, so please release LH in tip top shape instead of just assuming you can do the polishing later. 

I would not like this overall result as well, but it would be responsible reviewing in my opinion to mark it down for being what it is, if what it is is unpolished and bug-ridden. I don't think the game is either. The game is remarkably polished and bug-scarce to me. 

I do think they are going in a strange direction right before launch in the patches, where they are just beginning to tacitly acknowledge that they sucked a lof of the fun out of champions and leveling with slow leveling, split exp, and excessively long trees through changes to exp and trees each patch. I don't know what it looks like to a new user anymore, so I cannot say how it will be received as a whole by reviewers, though as a long time user I wish they would go back to the point where you could play this game simply and have fun. The party of champions was a strategy that was fun, I never understood why they wanted to stamp it out of the game in favor of forcing players in to much more complicated strategies, or leaving their champions parked in cities. It seemed like death to non-grognards, because it is very complicated making an army for each champion while exploring, expanding, and improving cities. This complicated dance could be a very good (or optimal) strategy with a viable party of champions course, they don't have to be mutually exclusive.

As it is, I think they had better make more explicit that champions split experience (could be awkward, maybe a "Don't cross the streams!" pop-up when the user puts two champions in the same army? Something less intrusive, a kryptonite icon perhaps?), because the first instinct among new players is to band their strongest units together, and I think they will be disappointed by the trees that seem to taunt them with abilities they will never be able to earn.

Too true JShores (although I disagree about LH not adding more bugs, it feels like there is enough new code that  there will inevitably be a moderate number of new bugs).

The bigger bugs have been fixed and overall LH is a pretty stable game but there are still a moderate number of  little bugs and annoyances, quite a few of which can be tracked back to much earlier in the development. These little things really get in the way of it feeling like a AAA game and I think it would be great if LH got a month or so of dedicated polishing where Stardock ONLY fixed bugs or UI issues/annoyances.

However I've said this before several times and I don't know what trade-offs that would require at Stardock, maybe it isn't viable.