This is ridiculous. Wish I'd seen these threads before I purchased the game and ran head-first into the same game-breaking bugs.

Really appreciate the post and I hope you have good fortune in solving these bugs. I think you should post this up on the steam page too.

All the best.

Hi, it's nice to report about the situation.

As there is fatal bugs doing an real "end game" at a point, I will stop to play ES2 for a while.

I reported as many bugs I found for helping you, but for now the game is not enjoyable or playble.

I wish you good luck for solving all of that, I will come back in some weeks.

The game is quite nice and ergonomic, but there is still gameplay misschoices (according to me).

SPACEPORT : damn, I writed 2 ideas about that, it's impossible to dispatch correctly pop, because ingame tools and screens aren't what needed. And it need automatization also (see Ideas).

You need just to play the game, as any player do, and you will find that yourself.

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/ideas/607-stargate-and-auto-migration-tools

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/ideas/483-remade-civil-spaceport

Actualy, this is a problem really making me give up about the game. Because it's impossible to play high difficultys without a good optimisation.

HEROS : here, same but less problematic. Heros get abilities interacting with planets biomes. But it's near impossible to choose well where to send an heros or recompose affectations, because here too, there is a lack of information at the right place. I didnt posted any idea. But IF you play the game, you know what I mean.

POLITICS : it's very sad because you put a lot of efforts in this part of the game. But player is just spectator of this. Screens are not interractives, there is nothing to do except to support a vote or another. I just don't play with that feature (as there is no way to really play with it). So actualy, it's just an additionnal stuff doing nothing.

My gameplay is very simple : focused on production, choose techs, and fleets. Politics part is a miss.

Thank you for making such an awesome game! I have long loved 4X games, and this is the best.

I would also recommend prioritizing bug- and performance fixing over other improvements. 

Could a Steam mod make that a sticky? It's a timely and much needed communication that ought to be more visible.

Honestly, I've had a great number of criticisms of this game and its Dev relations. But since release, the patch history within the last week is more than almost any studio i know of. You are doing just fine. This post also is swaying my criticisms that the Devs may not be paying attention, i now believe you are. I still have many game design criticisms, mostly focused on mechanics, UI,  and balance, all of which i post in Ideas. All other concerns have since been satisfied. 

-Gray

You guys release a game that's unplayable and im not sorry for said that.

Thanks for the detailed report, is really appreciated.

I hope your full focus is on this kind of issues, they will be the most reputation damaging items by far.

Honestly, I was the one worrying that ES2 were going to be released too soon, and sadly it came true. 

There are so many bugs buzzing in this game, making it unplayable by freezing, crashing, and even prohibiting players from achieving victory condition.

I'm still pessimistic about this situation, but don't get me wrong, I loved Amplitude's games and still enjoy them.

And I have to admit that I was a bit touched by devs' effort to improve this game better, not like other studios away from keyboard for months.

I hope I can play ES2 'entirely' as soon as possible. Keep trying your best, taking lots of cheers from here. 

Dear all,

Since the release of Endless Space 2, you have reported a number of issues. First of all, we are very sorry for that, and we are doing our best to fix those. Another point is that our games rely on a technology, Unity. We have a great relationship with Unity, and they support and help us, but sometimes it takes more time to fix the reason for a bug, especially when it is linked to the hardware or operating system.

In the days following release, we have fixed in priority the bugs which prevented the players to actually launch the game. Now we work in parallel on game breaking bugs and optimizations. Here is the status of the major issues we have met so far.

I am a bit surprised by the quantity of issues, but the ones we have found are usually linked to stuff we added last (we wanted to make a big game), and which may have lacked some testing time : spaceports, 12 empires games, research advisor, spaceships in the main menu.

AMD / cannot launch the game

We have discovered that some of your spaceships, on some older AMD graphic cards, could crash the AMD driver, while it works as a charm on other system. The bug became prevalent when we added spaceships in the main menu in the last weeks. Removing a certain option in Unity (when making a build) fixes the issue, but removing this option could be detrimental to the game performance. So far our solution has been to provide 2 builds (a normal one and an AMD branch), until we find a better solution with Unity / AMD.

Fail to launch game / AI DLL

Some people using non-english OS and international characters in their steam path could not launch the game. Such characters are badly handled by the low level layer of Unity, Mono. We have performed a workaround in the code, (better than having to reinstall Steam to a path without accents)  waiting for a cleaner solution from Unity.

Lag at the beginning of turns / clicking sound

After a number of turns, especially on large games, performance could be choppy, and you could hear a strange clicking sound. This was actually the AI sending half its population in civilian ships through the spaceport. The clicking sound was the actual spaceport manipulation action, which should have been heard only when used by player.

We have reduced drastically the use of the spaceport, and also spaced the rate at which the AI sends its orders, to avoid preventing the player from giving them. Before that, player input could be saturated by the AI decisions.

Also one of the cool features we added is the computation of four suggested technologies at the beginning of the turn. This is actually a complex algorithm which analyzes the player empire needs, and it was computed all the same for the AI, which already has a research computation. So we have removed this for the AI.

Even with all these improvements, we still think some actions of the game take too much time to process, especially when 11 AIs are sending those. We are continuing to optimize this.

Corrupted save games

Prior to the release, we have collected all your saved games reported to be broken during the EA. All the issues we found seemed to be already fixed for the game master, and we did not experience saved games corruption in the final master.

After you have reported this, we looked deeper, and found that some errors could be generated when the game is saved while the AI is making its decisions. We are not sure yet that this will fix the issues you had at release, but this should be in build 1.05.

Locked at battle start / end of turn

I guess this is the most serious issue right now. It has haunted us during Early Access, and I honestly though this was behind us. In some situations, the AI will not acknowledge the start of a battle, or will not end its turn. We have tried a tentative fix to autostart the battle after 15 second, in 1.04, but it has led to other issues.

Also some of you have reported that this was worse than in previous versions. That is not something that we found when testing 1.05, but nevertheless the AI team has analyzed the many saved games that you have sent, demonstrating the issue. The problem is that we have trouble reproducing this bug in our development environment. The AI team has found a possible cause, though, which will come in the next patch.

Multiplayer desync

Once a large number of players have tried the multiplayer on large games, reports have shown that we had missed some the desyncs. Some of these desyncs are not very serious, and the warning is always the same whatever the gravity. Sometimes it is perfectly safe to play more turns, sometime a paradox has appeared between players. Most issues were due to the synchronization of empires visibility. It is a very complex problem, and we thought we had fixed it, but some new cases have emerged.

Our MP engineer has decided to move to another solution, with the host player (server) computing the visibility and sending it to the guest players (clients). This has been tested with some AI simulating players on an 8 players game, and did not desync in 50+ turns. This looks like a good fix and is in preview 1.06.

Multiplayer join/quit desync

Another issue that you found is that random join/quit in the game can cause a desync. This happens only in certain situations, but the diversity of player habits compared to our usual way of testing, has revealed an issue that we missed. Some variables in the simulation are not properly initialized when a new player joins. We have to review the game simulation aspects we need to change, but we think we have found the cause and this will come in an upcoming patch.

This is it for now, thanks for reading. Again, we are terribly sorry and we humbly apologize for the issues you have found. We will do our best to resolve this as soon as possible.

Thanks

Also one of the cool features we added is the computation of four  suggested technologies at the beginning of the turn. This is actually a  complex algorithm which analyzes the player empire needs

It's a neat feature for new and casual players that feel overwhelmed by the tech tree. For those of us that don't rely on it, could you please add a toggle in the Options to completely turn it off?

it is good to see that you are aware of the issues and i hope you fix them soon. i have to stop playing the game until then because i run into the pending turn bug sooner or later. it just destroys any enjoyment of an otherwise working and very fun game.

a question: shouldn't this thread be a sticky?

Thanks for the update!

Thanks to keep us informed. And as ES2 is a game and not a software driving life support system I forgive you :p

If you need reinforcement for your QA team, I'm actually free of commitment, open for telework and not too far from Paris, feel free to ask ;)

Hey amplitude just wanted to let you know that personally all the reports of a buggy game is completly alien to me. I just finished a game session with 10 players over 4 sessions since monday. We have had a minimal amount of issues except when messing around with beta patches. Ive been enjoying the game alot and its one of the more polished games at release I have played recently. Thank you for making the game so stable. One of the best games I have played in a long time.

MikeLemmer wrote:

As a member of the Early Access testers picked to test the Release version (or v.99, at least), I would suggest that next time, you don't keep the final final build (w/ the Unfallen, all the content, latest bugfixes, etc) from us just because you want us to have a few surprises left at release. I would've rather had those surprises spoiled early for us than have all these nastier surprises waiting for everyone at launch.

(I've hit the pending bug myself in v1.06, but never hit it 

I've been saying exactly this, too.