I bought this game night before release since it was available for early download. I haven't experienced many of the crashes/freezes (I did get one blue screen crash which was weird snice I haven't seen one of those in years), but the performance issues, poorly done UI, lack of documentation and direction, imbalances in units/equipment/heroes/everythingelse is really making this game hard to like.
My campaign game is unplayable (game locks up upon loading it) and was incredibly boring as well (generic quests, no variety, no strategy needed, etc) so I have no desire to restart and finish it. The random map generator has proved slightly more entertaining, but I still don't find myself getting pulled in to the game like I did with Civ3&4/HoMM3/Kings Bounty. Your goals aren't clear, research is too spread out (depending on what you research, you seem to either be left with nothing to build/train in your towns, or nothing to do with your sovereign/armies), its too difficult to get an overall feel for what is going on in the world, AI interaction is limited and generic, quests are generic and boring, the UI is clunky and becomes very tiresome to deal with.
Some of my frustrations may have to do with the fact that I can't get to late game. By mid game the amount of map revealed, number of towns/units on the screen starts causing severe performance issues (I'm not even talking about a lot here, maybe 7-10 towns revealed and less than half of a small sized map), and eventually it locks the game up, and like the campaign, all attempts to load that game again will simply lock it up again within a few turns. Being unable to make it to late game makes it difficult to see the big picture and to understand how my decisions in the early game will affect the game later on. Maybe once they get these performance problems sorted out and I play a few games through it will all come together better, but based on what I hear on this and other forums, I'm not too optimistic.
Overall I can see the basis for a solid game, but it seriously should have stayed in beta for much longer. I understand they had a choice between this Aug release or having to delay until Feb. I feel like if they had kept up development until Feb, they might have been able to release a good finished product. This one is just so buggy and unfinished, I really don't understand how they thought it was release ready. The fact that the CEO is running around on the official forums stating that he thinks this really is a finished product is very disappointing.