Nice! Thanks for the heads up

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

The patch planned for September should improve multiplayer stability, but I do not have any precise ETA for it yet (though second half of September is far more likely than first, though there may be beta branches similar to the current one.)

Thanks for posting an update on this!

It's currently not possible for us to get a game going with our regular Friday Multiplayer group. 8 of us bought the game but none of us have actually played as we want to all go in fresh rather than someone having an advantage.

We currently are unable to actually load into a multiplayer game, there's always at least 1 (usually two) people who get disconnected during loading. This often results in the host playing by themselves. We got closest to getting it working by having the player who consistently disconnected be the one to host, but even then someone else got kicked out. With the prospect of that having a chance of happening every turn, a larger multiplayer session is pretty much out of the question.

I think it would be good to ensure there is some public information about this on the Steam forums & elsewhere to re-assure people that a fix is imminent. I can only speak for the people in my own community, who are generally a bit more patient but even they are talking about refunding the game. This is where some transparent and honest communication can do a lot of damage limitation. None of us are interested in Humankind as a single player game - we were hoping this would take over from Civilization VI.

I've found that the more people you have in the game, the less it works.  I can play "mostly" problem free with just 1 friend and a few AI, but we also have a group that gets on late at night and total about 6-7 people.  We have to remake the game for more time than we actually play it.  Whether its constant disconnects, stuck in combat bugs, turn not ending bugs, someone carashing on load screen.  Usually by turn 40ish we're having to reload a save every 2-3 turns.  Until someone says "i'm not doing this anymore" lol.  

I certainly hope it gets solved as i quite enjoy the game concept more than Civ, aside from some balancing concerns, the foundation is solid.  I wish the stability had been figured out before a full release though, as I feel like its going to hurt the game in the long run.  I'm just about done with it for now, I'll check back in a couple of months and hope the stability issues are solved.

yes please, a roadmap would be very appreciated

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

The patch planned for September should improve multiplayer stability, but I do not have any precise ETA for it yet (though second half of September is far more likely than first, though there may be beta branches similar to the current one.)

So we just got a new patch and I'm still not seeing anything about multiplayer in the patch notes....

+1

+2

+3 yep, still broken.  Sad.

it is worst with the new update.

Please fix it, we are many to play only MP

Thxs

Doubt they tested it even on a lan. Or atleast they never tested the turn timer. Incredible how bugged the turn timer can be. Lagging (memory hole) and crashing the game. / desynching.

swissyciv wrote:

It's hard to fix mp when you didn't test it correctly in the first place. Multiplayer testing can't be done on an office LAN or with a select group of people with top spec computers and top level broadband internet.

This is still happening to us. 2 Players in a 8 player game is much more stable than 4 players in a 10 player game. 

Its horrible, we did a Match 3 Players and another 5 NPCs.

1 Steam player 2 Gamepass users.

Loading into first round one already DC'ed, trying a second time worked but after maybe 20 Rounds we got the Next DC.

Closing the game open a new lobby copy the new UUID to the Steam user and then loading the game again for a minute was tedious… This took like 2~3 Minutes to get going again with laptops which are slow as fuck.

We had this every 10~20 Rounds with around 150 Rounds played this were already ~22-45 downtime not playing the game for us.

It was always “The Internet Connection was lost” but the Internet never was gone.

It is no fun experience without the ability to rejoin a running game without everybody leaving the lobby and creating a new one.

Agreed.  Our issues started around turn 40.  We're at turn 80, but have 3 additional desyncs.  The MP is essentially unplayable in its current state.  

So I've had these issues extensively as well - and run a small multiplayer gaming community where we've been playing Humankind with 7 people. 

Initially, we couldn't even get into a game, just always one or two people disconnecting. Since then we've broke up in smaller groups just to get some game time under our belt, and most of us have played more than 1000 turns (in total, and only multiplayer, none of us really play single player)

Last Friday, we decided to give the full 7 people a go again and successfully managed to launch the game *and keep it going*. Below are some things we learned during this process, for the convenience of others and the developers:

• Your computer matters. It was consistently the slowest computers who got disconnected. We know each other very well and as such have a clear view on who have the better computers. The faster ones have NEVER disconnected, though those are also on the fastest internet so your mileage may vary.
• We had consistent issues with one user especially, who is on an old laptop. We lowered his graphics settings to the lowest just as a test, and after this he succesfully loaded into the game without disconnecting every single time.
• Load times on slow computers are insanely long. When I play the game with my wife, we load in very quickly (20-30 seconds), with above mentioned user in the game all of us are done loading and we wait another few minutes until he loads.
• The game sometimes randomly crashes for whomever hosts, regardless of computer. This is infrequent.
• There is no hotjoin, this is annoying and needs to be changed. The AI also shouldn't "take over" unless the turn is processed, possibly with a 1 turn delay to ensure someone can hotjoin back.
• Combat sometimes locks up, forcing a rehost.
• Out of sync is very rare once all users are on graphics settings which are sensible. Don't use the highest, it's experimental. Even on the best machines we lowered it to 2nd highest setting, everyone else lower based on specs of their machine. It increases stability a fair bit. We actually haven't been out of sync at all following everyone lowering their settings to sensible levels. This may be similar to another game (direct competitor, you can think of it yourself) where weaker CPU's cause out of syncs. Find out who has the weakest PC and lower your settings if you're experiencing this! Focus on CPU.
• People often show as 'disconnected' in the lobby when launching, but will pop back to launching after a while. The UI regards a user as disconnected too quickly and needs to be better at giving the user feedback on the actual status of loading the game.

The above doesn't mean I am saying the problem is at the end of the user, this is absolutely on the developer to resolve - but it might help for now in actually getting a game running and continuing it with less frustration. Our experience is from a relatively small sample size, but it absolutely resolved the issue for the users on relatively weak computers.

So....how about that September patch?

September 2022