I did a bunch of reading online in forums about elemental and I read that it is very buggy. The impression I got was that it is just as buggy and unbalanced as Civ 5 and that I should wait a few months before buying elemental.
It's much worse, Civ5 contains an amount of bugs similar to other games on release, while in case of Elemental they also made some very bad gameplay decisions (now being fixed by Keal), which made the game "bland", for example:
* factions of one side being almost the same (even the civs in Civ5 are more different because they have their UAs, UBs and UUs, and in a fantasy game the factions should be much more distinct)
* (related to the above) lack of different races (theoretically there are a few races in the game, but the differences between them is only visual, they should have a least slightly different unit stats)
* very unintuitive and obscure interface (as opposed to Civ5)
* uninteresting unit creation (there are many weapons, armors etc. to choose from, but they don't really make a big difference, it's best to pick the best available ones and mass produce units with them instead of creating a varied army)
* cities of minor factions don't grow at all, even after you capture them (city states in Civ5 are much better)
* the campaign contains only one mission which is something like a tutorial (a good campaign is a very important to me in a fantasy game)
* tactical combat is very primitive, compared to other games like Age of Wonder series, HoMM series, and the new versions of King's Bounty
* there is not much difference between spells of different schools of magic
Overall, I think Civ5 is much better that Elemental, but with Kael working on the latter, this situation may change in a year or two.
