I'm having the same problem I can't even start the game from the latest "fix". My concern apart from mild anger from having paid money for a broken game is that the sales will plummet and that they will jot be able to develop it in the future which would be a damn shame as there is so much potential.

Adamfostas wrote:

It's poor business practice to launch a game with showstopper bugs in it. I don't want to give my money to companies that do that, as it encourages such behaviour. You're welcome to do what you like with your money, but I want a refund.

Bad news man, you probably aren't going to get a refund. Is there a single game on Steam that allows refunding after Steam's refund policy, because I don't see one. I also think that you might be overreacting a bit here. This game still has nothing on Skyrim/SimCity/EA games in general/AC games

MrJade wrote:

Adamfostas wrote:

It's poor business practice to launch a game with showstopper bugs in it. I don't want to give my money to companies that do that, as it encourages such behaviour. You're welcome to do what you like with your money, but I want a refund.

Bad news man, you probably aren't going to get a refund. Is there a single game on Steam that allows refunding after Steam's refund policy, because I don't see one. I also think that you might be overreacting a bit here. This game still has nothing on Skyrim/SimCity/EA games in general/AC games

Nah, this game has single worst launch bug in all my 15 years gaming experience. 100% reproducible game breaking bug which cannot be worked around or fixed by loading saves? That is 10/10

YouFlyLikeACow wrote:

I am in the same boat. I played 19 hours and my singleplayer match is broken (endless pending bug at turn 121). 

I also started a multiplayer match which I have to expect will be broken too.

If this is not fixed in a couple of days I want my money back.

That "pending" bug is the worst bug I have seen since Fallout 2 (had a broken save near the very end), including a couple of Alphas, Betas and Early Access titles (that are still in EA).

Really? Are you that lucky or...

Have you been playing games since fallout 2 at all?

Game breaking bugs are (unfortunately) not that uncommon, especially in our day and age. Back in F2 time that may have been something, but nowadays... nope, not outstanding in the least.

Bad? sure. REALY bad? Maybe, depending on how often you get it and how high your personal quality standards are. Outstandingly bad? Nope. Not in the least.

That said, I DO agree that ES2 got out of EA prematurely.

However I don't see anything here that's not fixable. So long as they DO fix the game's issues, the whole "I payed for your game when it wasn't yet ready" is not as big a deal as refund requesting shitstormers make it out to be.

Don't get me wrong, I do understand the ones with real monetary concerns and/or principally high standards. But a lot of those refund demanding complainers are usually more than willing to fork out top dollar to preorder a cat in the bag, to "beta test" it, or even to crowd-fund it. Compared to that kind of spending, what happened with ES2's release is practically nothing. So for the ones who generally don't participate in those kinds of activities, I feel you on that people - you got into what you usually try not to get into and feel cheated because of that. The rest of them should get of the high horse and/or stop being drama queens. This mess will most likely get sorted, and furthermore, it's not even that much of a mess if you look at it relatively to what you can get elsewhere. GC3 was a mess and still is. Stellaris was a HUGE mess and still is (not a such huge one anymore, but still a mess). ES2 however has nothing wrong in it that's so deep-coded (AFAIK) or deep-concepted that it's not fixable.

It's a well designed and well coded (I think) game, just not a well polished one. Thankfully, unlike other sources of problems, lack of a finishing touch is rectifiable.

That's interesting, well coded but not well polished. I'd actually go the other direction. I think it's a beautifully polished game with bad code. The media they have, like the riftborn's intro movie shows they have very talented artists in house (or that they bought from outside). But the way the game gets all janky around turn 150-200 for most people on high end systems means bad code. Not polish.

Make a new game, max the system size, max the total AI's. Now put half the AI's in an alliance, so they have shared vision. Test to see if your game runs correctly. If the framerate plummets, you have bad code. Now, what is bad code? Simple, it's just not written tight enough for this kind of problem. You can write code in a lot of ways, and a lot of code, at lower thresholds, works fine, ie: doesn't crash, completes tasks, etc. But that same code at a high threshold might either take up too much time in the processor, or accessing resources on a harddrive, etc, to be "good code" at that point. That's why the coding language they use is so important, as well as making sure all the parts are talking smoothly.

It's tough when you have 11 AI's trying to decide what they're about to do based on 10 other AI's and a player. When you have dozens of systems they can see and try to calculate for simultaneously. But. That's why as a developer, you have to take your max, your worst case scenario, your "has full vision of the map with max AI's" version of a turn, and say "Will this still run as intended?"

It doesn't feel like the devs did that this time. If they had, maybe the max AI's would be 6, or perhaps 4. Honestly, I can't say how many this code can really handle. We just know that it can't handle the options currently present. Who knows, maybe it's the pirates that are the code breakers, with their random spawning wherever they spawn. Maybe it's AI to AI diplomacy. Maybe it's... well you get the idea. There are a dozen plus different systems in this game, which is what makes it so awesome and fun and exciting. That's a dozen plus different places something could be going wrong, with thousands upon thousands of lines of code to try to comb through to find that one static variable that isn't playing nice with a random tiny 3 line method over in a totally unrelated class that was just trying to call the float as an int, that works up to a certain number...

Coding is messy. The polish though, oh the polish is gorgeous.

You shouldn't speculate about AI or code things cause you're miles off, you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Scalability issues can (and often do) hit all projects, it has nothing to do with being "messy" or being "bad code". 

Nizaris wrote:

You shouldn't speculate about AI or code things cause you're miles off, you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Scalability issues can (and often do) hit all projects, it has nothing to do with being "messy" or being "bad code". 

You know I said it before. People want bigger and more complex games but don't want to think about trade-offs. The world does not work that way. 

Did you download and test latest patch ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41n3mwCcZQ4

Nizaris wrote:

You shouldn't speculate about AI or code things cause you're miles off, you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Scalability issues can (and often do) hit all projects, it has nothing to do with being "messy" or being "bad code". 

What a weird concept. Telling someone else they shouldn't speculate on something... is kind of like speculating on what the other person knows isn't it? Scalability in a 4x game that will always get to a certain degree of complexity has to be addressed with very tight code. If your code is at all sloppy, when you get to that level of complexity it'll go from "being code that can get the job done" to "bad code".

"Bad" code is just code that doesn't make the product act as intended, and unless I'm mistaken, massive lag spikes and framerate issues on high end systems at high turn counts are more than likely not what Amplitude intends!

I suppose if you're a coding purist, then bad code could mean mean all sorts of different things. Like spaghetti code, to some, would be considered bad code because it might be hard to read through and fix. Variables that are named x or y rather than with proper, descriptive names could be considered bad code by some others. But to consumers, bad code usually means the product doesn't act as intended, so that would be the "bad code" I'm referencing.

Thanks for your attempt to censor another person's opinion though Nizaris! Always useful when people do that. :D

Slashman wrote:

Kaada wrote:

And than what? Do you really think a game can be finished just like that? What we have at the moment is not a finished Product. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is a finished bugfree product. And it took years of development. You cannot create a good game in 2 years, roughly spoken.

The release was a mistake and anyways why are you guys complaining? We would be still able to play the EA as we do now. But the people who buy the game thinking they get a finished product have something else to say. That results in a negative review and other people may consider it again before they buy.

If the showstopper bugs are resolved in less than a month, then a month was pretty much all they needed. What else is missing from the game? Races? Techs? Features?

The game is feature complete. No developer can indefinitely hold back the launch of a game. The game launched less than two weeks ago. How is giving them at least a few weeks to fix things ending the world for people? 

It's poor business practice to launch a game with showstopper bugs in it. I don't want to give my money to companies that do that, as it encourages such behaviour. You're welcome to do what you like with your money, but I want a refund.

shrike81 wrote:

I'm having the same problem I can't even start the game from the latest "fix". My concern apart from mild anger from having paid money for a broken game is that the sales will plummet and that they will jot be able to develop it in the future which would be a damn shame as there is so much potential.

Have you deleted the XML. files? I believe in th epatch 1.5 (?) description was mentioned that.

My pending game issue was fixed. Thanks a lot for the prompt action. I also promptly changed my Steam review to positive.

If you are Australian you can get a refund.

http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

There are of course limitations to the refunds depending on where you live. I recommend you take the issue up with Steam rather than Amplitude/Sega.

NovaBlazer wrote:

http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

There are of course limitations to the refunds depending on where you live. I recommend you take the issue up with Steam rather than Amplitude/Sega.

In the US, you don't even own the game, and there has never been a successful case on getting a refund for digital goods.

MrJade:

I own the game: See the purple badge in my profile.  I have successfully returned items to Steam. 

While, I found the process a bit hard to figure out how to initiate, once I did a Google search, I was able to complete the return and get my funds back.

NovaBlazer wrote:

MrJade:

I own the game: See the purple badge in my profile.  I have successfully returned items to Steam. 

While, I found the process a bit hard to figure out how to initiate, once I did a Google search, I was able to complete the return and get my funds back.

He doesn't mean you don't own the game specifically, He means that digital goods aren't seen by the goverment as phisical goods that you own. I don't know if It explained it but I don't know other way to explain it XD.

I understand now.  Thank you Trynstark.   To be clear,  I have returned Digital purchases to Steam before.  =)

Not saying it couldn't be better, because I think the conditions are 2 hours or less of gameplay for the United States, whereas other countries can make a return days later with no limit on gameplay time.  Ah, being American.  Capitalism rules.