I speak for a lot of people when I saw "Where are the god damn formations?" Many like myself fell in love with the screenies and numerous vids of gameplay footage, where we could have our men in nice formations and fire like a volley and be able to make them face in a certain direction. That was one of the big positives that I saw with this game. Im very big on positioning and organisation when it comes to anything and seeing those screenies really made me go 'WOW'. Now this whole issue wouldnt be so bad if the crap formations that have been shoved in with the demo actually made sense! The defensive formation makes some kind of weird box. The volley formation does nothing the only formation that seems to be working is the stagger one. So we have two formations that seem bugged/serve no purpose and one that is useless anyways.
Whilst reading through the numerous previews and 'developer questionaires and surveys' one of the guys kept repeating "We hated how in AoE 2 the massive piles of crap for battles" now from playing the demo and seeing this in effect it seems ES has managed to contradict themselves.
I think it needs to be shown that the majority of us dont want the game dumbed down so much that a 5 year old could play it. Please people that are interested show your support in this thread so that we can make it known that we want to receive the proper formations in the full version.