Most bugs ever » Forum Post by harlequin969

If you believe this game has the most bugs ever, you are, quite frankly, an idiot.

1. THIS IS DELIBERATE. It's to stop people from save/reloading and changing the outcome of a game.
2. Please post a debug.err, so we can see why this is. I'm willing to bet you haven't upgraded your drivers. There is a possibility it's the game, but this game is VERY well made. Most porblems have been resolved in newer versions.
3. A corrupted save file? debug.err please
4. No it isn't, it may seem that way due to lower morale, due to higher growth. Outgrow yourself it will cut off. And before all the 1.1 betas, it makes no difference at all anyway.
5. Beta. BETA. Do you even know what that means? Of course it's buggy, it's a beta. Go back to 1.0x which has very few bugs.
6. Fixed now in beta 3.

DO NOT flame without a debug.err people are liable to think you a troll or idiot. I do. I understand why you're frustrated, and I want to try to help if you just post the debug so it's possible, but if you think this is the buggiest game ever, you really haven't played many games. And don't touch the beta's.

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1. THIS IS DELIBERATE. It's to stop people from save/reloading and changing the outcome of a game.

Is this true? I've posted this same issue in the Bugs forum since I bought the game. I usually play this game for about an hour in the evening or when I'm taking a break from work. I've loaded the game while on the phone talking to clients before just to check out all my planets and tweak production queues and then resaved it. If this is deliberate, there should be a way to disable it. Some times I play for 10-15 turns before resaving it and doing something else. I'd hate to think I'll be losing 10% of my production forever...

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Well, consider how easy it is to cheese. Save before UP vote, get a bad result, reload. It's implemented so that you can't exploit this, by penalising you. I don't think it'll ever be turned off.

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Marcathonas, while I appreciate and agree with the general tenor of your reply, your response to the first bug on his list is not at all helpful:

1. THIS IS DELIBERATE. It's to stop people from save/reloading and changing the outcome of a game.

I don't believe this is deliberate. If it is so, then it is highly misguided policy. For one thing, I can tell you that if the devs intended to stop people from changing the outcome by reload, then the devs have failed miserably, since it is still quite possible to do this in a great many ways. It is possible to make a game difficult to change critical outcomes by reloading, but to date, GC2 devs have not chosen to do any of the more reliable means of doing so.

GC2's very sloppy save/reload code (and believe me, the extra move turns are not the only issue here) file is a huge irritant to those of us that like to play long games on gigantic maps, and can only afford to play 1-2 hrs at a time. If SD wants to extend its reach beyond hard core gamers into a more mainstream audience, they must tighten up their code, and get their bug count down. Much though I love this game, it is in fact a very buggy release by any objective analysis.

That said, I am enjoying this game immensely. I am highly impressed by the absolutely incredible rate at which the devs are patching this game. Not only are they fixing bugs at rapid pace, they are also adding substantive features that truly enhance the game. They show every sign of playing close attention to this community, and that is an excellent sign of things to come.

While I would certainly call the game buggy, In its current state, I also find it to be more than just playable. From the evident dedication of the devs to improving the game (based on what I'm seeing in patches), I expect to see this develop into a truly awesome game. Harlequin969, it is to your own misfortune that you hold grudges, I think a year from now if you were to come back to this site and update your game, you'd be truly amazed at what you would find. Personally, I am willing to forgive a game company a buggy release provided I see dedication to updating, and I have never seen such an agressive set of updates as I have seen (so far) here with GC2.

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While I would certainly call the game buggy, In its current state, I also find it to be more than just playable

Name some. Really. Come on. OH by the way, you can't name any in the BETA due to the nature of how beta works, so you can only name those that came from 1.0X. BUT once its officially final and released you can name those IF there's any left.

I think people have no idea what a beta is and/or confusing it with real updates/releases.

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Name some.

Name some "what"? Do you mean name some bugs?

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He meant name some major bugs.

it is in fact a very buggy release by any objective analysis.

Remember most of the crashes were caused by people either overheating their video cards (Dev's were working on getting low end machines to work, didn't think of problems with high end) or people who just fail to update their drivers.

GC2's very sloppy save/reload code (and believe me, the extra move turns are not the only issue here) file is a huge irritant to those of us that like to play long games on gigantic maps, and can only afford to play 1-2 hrs at a time. If SD wants to extend its reach beyond hard core gamers into a more mainstream audience, they must tighten up their code, and get their bug count down. Much though I love this game, it is in fact a very buggy release by any objective analysis.

Well, most people agree that this was an implemented feature, but I have to admit it wouldn't be that much of a shock to see it disappear. While I see no evidence to the alternative, the more I think about it the more it does actually look like a bug. Don't forget, Stardock only really expected the game to reach people that knew Stardock, and could handle bugs themselves, powerusers and hardcore gamers. Penny arcade and a LOT of word of mouth meant they got more than they expected, including people who have little time to play.
I'm just not sure what alternatives there are.

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God I hate this forum. Made a nice reply with examples and everything and poof! It got lost when I submited it. all too oft......

anyway. Another cheat made possible by the reload bug is you can steal a trade good from the AI with it, and double rush buy social projects.

Who gives a crap what someone does in their single player games. If they want to reload until their esc key cracks in half, let em.

The solution is fairly simple actually. If your playing a normal SP game, enable the save game functions (and fix this stupid bug). If your playing a metaverse game, the only load option available should be "continue game" (main menu).

This is also broke currently. The only time the "contine game" options works is when you go to the main menu from in-game. Loading the game from desktop has the continue button disabled.

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Well, if it kills it then press the back button without refreshing, keeps the data before it resubmits.

Yeah, save/reload should be disabled for MV. Too many ways to exploit it already, without skipping past the bad luck bits. If I get a piece of bad luck, I take it, and get whooped. Adds to the replayability (who wants a game where you either win or lose all the time?)

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Thank you Marcathonas.

Let me start off this next point by saying I'm not trying to insult anyone in this thread, just making some points.

Granted we're not all power-users, I wouldn't even call myself one. I think its reasonable to ask people to update their drivers. HOWEVER, note the number or volume of folks posting about bugs that when all is said and done.. its their drivers. Also, some have been attacking Stardock's reputation (can't code for shit, etc.. ) or asserting the game is bugged and d00med. That's not very nice and uncalled for.

I see a new "trend", there seems to be just as many claiming the betas are bugged ( well duh ) as didn't update their drivers. Beta testers are there to report bugs and help out. Wait for the official release of the updates. " Don't download the betas its buggy! " was actually posted in the forums.

The best way to report a bug is first off, calmly state the problem. Leave out any attacks and/or arrogance. Seriously, its not nice to be on the recieving end of that BS, when its not deserved. Send a mail to [email protected], use smartexception to 'capture' any CTDs and your debug.err is located in your games install directory.

Ok. I think I expressed myself better this time.

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1. THIS IS DELIBERATE. It's to stop people from save/reloading and changing the outcome of a game.

I'm quite sure this is wrong since the AI doesn't produce anything during this turn either. Easily seen in the manufacturing timeline, every race's manufacturing drops to zero for that turn. So it is pointless if it's deliberate.

This is also broke currently. The only time the "contine game" options works is when you go to the main menu from in-game. Loading the game from desktop has the continue button disabled.

Ever thought that this may be the way it's meant to work.

Yeah, save/reload should be disabled for MV.

Ideally the metaverse game would be saved when exiting the game with no other saving allowed. However, how fun would it be if you played for a couple of hours and then had a crash.
And there would still be ways to cheat: Quitting before something important happened, reload and if things didn't went well, shut down the game from the task manager and then reload again.

I see a new "trend", there seems to be just as many claiming the betas are bugged ( well duh )

Yeah, people are fairly stupid.

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Ever thought that this may be the way it's meant to work.

Actually, yeah. I tried to imagine a situation where "continue game" would only be available from an in game path and could only come up with accidently exiting to the main menu. I do believe the game asks for confirmation before exiting to the main menu, so that shot that. You tell me why they would set it up the way it is.

I find it more likely that it is not working as intended. And that being said, since it's there, it could be used to fix MV reload concerns.

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Ideally the metaverse game would be saved when exiting the game with no other saving allowed. However, how fun would it be if you played for a couple of hours and then had a crash.
And there would still be ways to cheat: Quitting before something important happened, reload and if things didn't went well, shut down the game from the task manager and then reload again.

True. However, this combined with the "end turn click" trend, should cause enough RSI's to stop people for a while

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Actually, yeah. I tried to imagine a situation where "continue game" would only be available from an in game path and could only come up with accidently exiting to the main menu. I do believe the game asks for confirmation before exiting to the main menu, so that shot that. You tell me why they would set it up the way it is.

I find it more likely that it is not working as intended. And that being said, since it's there, it could be used to fix MV reload concerns.

Yeah, you are right. It should be fairly simple to make continue load the latest saved game. However, that's quite far down on the list of things I want to see implemented.

If your playing a metaverse game, the only load option available should be "continue game" (main menu).

What if I or someone else played another game on my computer in between. Would the metaverse game be gone for good then?
No, in that case I prefer my idea, that the metaverse game automatically saves itself when exiting with no other saving allowed. And 'continue game' would simply load the latest saved game, whether it's metaverse or not. But I doubt it would be implemented because of crashes.

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What if I or someone else played another game on my computer in between. Would the metaverse game be gone for good then?

Good point. Guess a character log-in to launch the game would be a bit much.

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I guess that if you have your heart set on never playing again that no amount of talking would help. Yes I agree that there seems to be ALOT of bugs and I too have become very frustrated at times. But GalCiv2 is a great strategy game that can eat an afternoon away very quickly. I try to look past the bugs and enjoy the game in spite of the bugs. I am guessing that 1.1 is taking a bit longer to come out because Stardock is trying to address the majority of bugs. As with any game, we can only rely on publisher game support to remidy the situation. Thankfully, Stardock seems to be very good at game support. With that said, I think with a bit of patience, the game should be up to full speed relatively soon. At least lets hope so

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Still no debug.err log from the OP. Hmmmmm.

A LOT of bugs? Hardly. At least not of a serious nature.

I have been playing this game since 1.0D, and I have yet to find a bug serious enough to be a deal killer. Yes, there are glitchs, but if you take proper care, have the latest drivers, set your viddoe resolution properly, there have been very few game crashing bugs reported.

If you read the manual, watch the tutorials, go to the Databanks section here on the site, and check out the Wiki site,and play around and experiment with the interface to learn it's intricacies, there have been very few interface bugs that are real.

If you take a little time to open and explore the user editable XML files, browse the Modding section, use the Wiki as a resource, and check out some great Fan sites, you can teach yourself how to change things more to your liking if you want to, thus resolving some gameplay issues to your satisfaction.

If you read the Journals section here on the site, you will get an insight into what are game decisions made for play balance, what are features, and what may be real bugs.

If you have an issue, and post it here in a gracious manner, or go to the SDC chat rooms, you will almost always get help to figure it out. The Devs and regular users of this forum go above and beyond the call of duty trying to help out IMO.

All games have glitches. Most never patch them. They just pump out expansion packs you have to buy with more fluff to disguise the previous glitches. Most never have oficial forums where you can complain about the smallest thing as if it were a major bug. Most don't have forums.

This game will always be a work in progress - SD's dedication to trying to make it the best it can be and satisfy all levels of gamers as best they can makes that a foregone conclusion.

Never want to play it again? That's cool, but it's your loss. If you are too stubborn or whatever to take advantage of the resources at your fingertips, don't put the blame on others.

Now how about that debug.err log so we can get started to help you?

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A LOT of bugs? Hardly. At least not of a serious nature.

Well, I guess it depends on your threshold of "serious". I would agree that even under 1.0x there were no game killer bugs, at least for me. However, I would certainly say that there were a lot of significant, and at the least, annoying bugs. For example, I had regular CTDs occuring under 1.0x (and yes, I've got all the latest drivers). In a few minutes, I'll write up a reply to another post with some details of the bugs I'm referring to.

At the same time, I have to admit that there has been stunning progress made up through beta 3a - at this point my frequency of CTDs is down to once every 3-4 hours, or perhaps even less. For anyone reading this whose still playing 1.0x, I highly encourage using the 1.1 beta, even if you generally shy away from using betas. At least for me its been far more robust and far cleaner playing experience than 1.0x.

The Devs and regular users of this forum go above and beyond the call of duty trying to help out IMO.
All games have glitches. Most never patch them.
...
This game will always be a work in progress - SD's dedication to trying to make it the best it can be and satisfy all levels of gamers as best they can makes that a foregone conclusion.

I have to agree with these statements. Anyone that has read this list of changes of beta 1 through beta 3a (it's a freakin' book, I'm telling you!) would have to admit to the dedication of the SD devs to this product. Moreover, it looks like 1.1 will be coming out quickly on the heels of the original release (in fact, I would argue that beta 3a is release quality).

This has all the marks of my other favorite game company, Paradox (forgive me for mentioning the competition

). Historically, Paradox has delivered a stream of updates to products, even years after the initial release. I don't know if SD has this kind of history of support, but everything I've seen over the past couple of weeks is quite promising. In the long run, support of a product is everything to me. I know that if a game company is committed to fixing whatever problems may exist with a game, that that will far outweigh a less than perfect product launch.

As a rule, I am particularly tolerant of 2 types of bugs/issues on initial launch: hardware compatibility bugs and game balance issues (these generally don't qualify as bugs, but still are potential game killers). I would say that GC2 had too many bugs that fall outside these categories (and I'll mention a few in an upcoming post), but in my mind none of those were game killers (not even by a long stretch).

Too harlequin969, it's truly a shame if you decide to give up so early on GC2. For Paradox games, I have often avoided a game for as much as a year after initial launch. Sometimes I'll even buy the game early, and leave it unopened; I have had so many enjoyable hours playing their games, that by this time I feel that I owe them the initial launch price, even if I'd rather some other (more intrepid?) players endured the early versions. You might consider the same strategy yourself.

Never want to play it again? That's cool, but it's your loss.

I couldn't agree more.

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He meant name some major bugs.

OK, so here goes. I do believe these are all well known issues/bugs; I've seen every single bug listed below mentioned in one or more posts in this forum.

1) free movement turn on load

2) disappearing anomalies on save/reload (possibly fixed in betas, I haven't tested)

3) autopilot targets disappear on load

4) ownership region incorrectly rendered on load

5) music loops over small cut of sound track (30s, perhaps). I believe I see this occur most often when I am well into a game on gigantic map (as if some memory based resource were getting low, and the sound track was cut back to pay the price). If I am in the early turns of a game, and leave it running a long time (like a few hours+), this will occur, or if I am far into a game it will happen as soon as I load the game up. I've pretty much given up on the soundtrack on this game

6) Sometimes cannot create fleets (yes I have enough logistics) - This is from Harlequin969's original list, but I have encountered this bug, as well (and read posts of others encountering it. This may have been fixed in one of the betas, but I haven't seen a reference to this in the history files.

7) Inconsistencies on stat page (F6) on load and during course of game. This is a long story I can go into, if someone cares, but there have been detailed posts on this subject.

8) When upgrading ships, you sometimes get components on ships at lower than correct space cost (possibly fixed in betas, I haven't tested)

From the above, it's really just the first two bugs that I would consider serious. It's these two bugs that force me (and I imagine other players), to be loath to save/reload games. In all honesty, much though I love GC2, these save/reload bugs are stricly bush league. Personally, I tend to leave the game running for as much as a few days, in order to avoid the disappearing anomaly bug, and I've read posts of other players doing the same (although after all the anomalies are gone, I worry about this much less, and am more inclined save/reload). The fact that many players out there are leaving this game running for days at a time is not a good thing for SD, and says that there is a serious problem with GC2.

Now I know the free move turns bug has been there since GC1, and I've read the disappearing anomalies bug was also there in GC1. This is an indicator that there is some legacy/architecture reason for this bug to still be around, but I do believe that is long past time for SD to fix these save/reload bugs. I'm sure that fixing these bugs will be a pain, and considerably less glamorous than all the features included in the betas (which is not to say that there haven't been bug fixes in the beta - there have been a ton of them, though I bet those bug fixes don't have the legacy issues that #1, #2 above come with). But fixing these particular bugs will make the game farmore playable for those of us that can only play for an hour or two at a time. (And btw, yes I've read all the posts of those claiming that it is deliberate, but I believe that claim is untenable, and has been soundly answered in this thread.)

Well, most people agree that this was an implemented feature, but I have to admit it wouldn't be that much of a shock to see it disappear.

I think there is a large community of players on this forum that are quite bothered by how this game plays rather poorly if you need to save/reload frequently.

While I see no evidence to the alternative, the more I think about it the more it does actually look like a bug. Don't forget, Stardock only really expected the game to reach people that knew Stardock, and could handle bugs themselves, powerusers and hardcore gamers. Penny arcade and a LOT of word of mouth meant they got more than they expected, including people who have little time to play.I'm just not sure what alternatives there are.

Exactly! I think one source of this problem is precisely the success of this game. Along w/ word of mouth, they also got great reviews (deservedly so), and that also helped their sales of their game go higher than perhaps they expected. Now SD is showing every sign of working doggedly to really pump up the quality of their game, and for that I applaud them.

That said, I think they have now reached a broader audience, and if they want to keep this broader audience, then there is a certain caliber of bug they had best make sure does not occur, or if it does, that it gets fixed asap. I think most of the bugs I listed here are of a sort you would not find in Civ4, for example (and please, lets not get into a Civ4 vs. GC2 fight here: I happen to prefer GC2 at the moment, but they're both fine games).

I mention these save/reload bugs at every opportunity, because for all the fine work the devs have done, I have seen no indication that they are planning to address these bugs. Because bugs #1, #2 above have been around for years (literally), I am nervous that they will be accepted as status quo, indefinitely. If SD should decline to fix these, I think they would be shooting themselves in the foot. Their traditional audience likely considers them quite liveable (or even "deliberate") but I think they're losing creditability in the more mainstream audience that they have just begun to broach.

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