Discover the World Keeps Breaking

[Camkitsune]

I have three issues with Discover the World, all of them coming up around the 50-70% point. One seems to be a skill issue, one is the game being incredibly counter-intuitive (assuming it's working properly) and the third is definitely a bug.

Issue 1: When trying to establish connections between isolated, high-demand cities like Beijing and New York, inevitably they end up backing up to the point where even 5 level 6 planes from the closest point isn't enough to stave off death.
The obvious solution seems to be to provide additional routes, but...

Issue 2: The pathfinding for passengers keeps breaking. Once passengers start queuing in one of the access points, they ignore any other available routes unless you connect the city in question directlyto their destination.
The most egregious example of this I've run into happened in my most recent attempt:
-I tried making a direct connection between Tokyo and Los Angeles.
-LA ended up filling up, so I made a second route between LA and Shanghai.
-Shanghai then filled up with people who wanted to go to Tokyo and Osaka via LA. This is in spite of there already being a route to Tokyo by way of Beijing.
-I tried drawing a route between Shanghai and Osaka - the Osaka passengers took it, but the Tokyo passengers did not.
The most consistent fix to this seems to be exiting and reloading. However...

Issue 3: When re-loading a Discover the World save - especially one that's a good ways into things - a random city will suddenly fill with an insane number of passengers, potentially ending the game. Sometimes it's a city like Vilnius and it's resolvable, sometimes it picks a major artery or an isolated city and there's nothing I can really do to save things.

TL:DR;
1) What are some good strategies for handling passenger loads for distant cities? Do I need to create the routes preemptively to avoid excessive backlogs?
2) How do passengers decide what routes to take?
3) Is loading a save supposed to flood a random city with several thousand passengers?

[Late555]

Wow. A week and no reply? Did the game die completely, or just the forum‽

1) A route between cities on opposite sides of the map will never be able to handle the load - especially big cities. If you're flying LA to Tokyo you want to have at least a couple of transfers.
(5 jumbos flying directly can't handle that traffic, but 5 jumbos LA to Quebec, 5 going Quebec to Marseilles, 5 going Marseilles to Baghdad, and 5 going Baghdad to Tokyo might fare much better.*)

* I haven't played in months, so picked those cities as a general example from the top of my head - I'm definitely not saying that route is optimal.

2) Route finding has always been incredibly temperamental, especially in the second half of the game and especially when you load a save file. It might be better these days (I refer you to the above disclaimer). I think the devs said it's been patched a while back, but I certainly can't confirm or deny that.
It certainly doesn't sound right if passengers are trying to move between two far-east cities by going via the USA when there's much shorter routes, but it's incredibly difficult to work out exactly what our passengers are doing.

3) Still happening, huh? Yeah, that's why I haven't played in several months. (You can save it, play for a few more in-game ticks and everything be running smoothly, turn it off for the night, load it up the next day and replay the couple of ticks you played yesterday and dozens of routes quickly go red - it seems to be passengers flying from one airport to the next, staying on the plane and flying back to the first airport, staying on and repeating the process so the planes quickly overload and your airline empire crashes and burns, but as I mentioned above - it's hard to be sure what exactly is going on. Deleting routes and making new ones along different paths sometimes seems to help but often it just pushes the problem to another route. The only way to avoid it is to play the full game in a single sitting without ever saving, and honestly who can realistically be arsed to do that? At least it stops save-scumming, I guess :/ )

I log in once a month or so to see if the devs have reset the leaderboard yet, since they completely revamped the scoring system to be significantly lower, but I see they still haven't bothered. I'm not sure why they think people will want to play if the leaderboard is untouchable. I scored over half a trillion points on the old system. Could've smashed that score, too, but the game was suffering the save file issue and effectively unplayable even back then. From the description the devs gave when they changed the scoring system, I doubt that sort of score is even remotely possible, but again - I've not played in ages so can't confirm or deny that.
_________________

TL;DR: the game is very much broken, but the devs keep denying there's a problem so it seems extremely unlikely they're working on fixing it.

Shame. This used to be a fun game.

[Camkitsune]

Originally posted by Late555:

Wow. A week and no reply? Did the game die completely, or just the forum‽

Since another thread directed me to the Discord, and the Discord is also a bit dead... It's not looking good.
Considering the developer appears to be Russian, there might be more serious issues there.

A route between cities on opposite sides of the map will never be able to handle the load - especially big cities. If you're flying LA to Tokyo you want to have at least a couple of transfers.

I've worked that much out - shorter distances allow for greater maximum density on the route.
The issue is that....

Route finding has always been incredibly temperamental, especially in the second half of the game and especially when you load a save file...
... it's incredibly difficult to work out exactly what our passengers are doing.

This leads to something of a frustrating catch-22, in that cities on the edges of the map - most commonly the big ones in India and China, Mexico City and Tokyo/Osaka/Seoul - cause horrific backlogs to form regardless of approach.

3) Still happening, huh? Yeah, that's why I haven't played in several months. (You can save it, play for a few more in-game ticks and everything be running smoothly, turn it off for the night, load it up the next day and replay the couple of ticks you played yesterday and dozens of routes quickly go red - it seems to be passengers flying from one airport to the next, staying on the plane and flying back to the first airport, staying on and repeating the process so the planes quickly overload and your airline empire crashes and burns, but as I mentioned above - it's hard to be sure what exactly is going on. Deleting routes and making new ones along different paths sometimes seems to help but often it just pushes the problem to another route. The only way to avoid it is to play the full game in a single sitting without ever saving, and honestly who can realistically be arsed to do that? At least it stops save-scumming, I guess :/ )

There is another work-around - instead of saving to one of the save slots, simply exiting and continuing via the auto-saves seems to dodge the issue.
I haven't tested this rigorously enough to be sure, but it does appear to work.

I log in once a month or so to see if the devs have reset the leaderboard yet, since they completely revamped the scoring system to be significantly lower, but I see they still haven't bothered. I'm not sure why they think people will want to play if the leaderboard is untouchable. I scored over half a trillion points on the old system. Could've smashed that score, too, but the game was suffering the save file issue and effectively unplayable even back then. From the description the devs gave when they changed the scoring system, I doubt that sort of score is even remotely possible, but again - I've not played in ages so can't confirm or deny that.

I can confirm that the scoring system has been revised - passengers and infrastructure are no longer counted for scoring purposes.
Unfortunately this change appears to have been done hastily and broken several other things, namely several achievements and at least one scenario.

[Late555]

They have a new game out. Perhaps they've abandoned this one, to focus on the other one?

[B4U]

Tried playing again after seeing there have been some updates, but I discovered the same things as have been already stated here. I'd love to be able to play the game, but I've lost hope as well. All the updates seem to just be beating around the bush without ever really fixing the core problems, although I must admit they seem to have at least tried by now.

[Camkitsune]

Originally posted by Late555:

They have a new game out. Perhaps they've abandoned this one, to focus on the other one?

A couple of updates have happened in the last couple of days.

The new game probably has a lot of their attention, which would explain the nature of the response, but there is at least a response.

[Resident007]

Hello, I'll try to answer your questions as best as I can.

Originally posted by Camkitsune:

Issue 1: When trying to establish connections between isolated, high-demand cities like Beijing and New York, inevitably they end up backing up to the point where even 5 level 6 planes from the closest point isn't enough to stave off death.
The obvious solution seems to be to provide additional routes, but...

Yes, the solution is indeed to provide additional routes.

Originally posted by Camkitsune:

Issue 2: The pathfinding for passengers keeps breaking. Once passengers start queuing in one of the access points, they ignore any other available routes unless you connect the city in question directlyto their destination.
The most egregious example of this I've run into happened in my most recent attempt:
-I tried making a direct connection between Tokyo and Los Angeles.
-LA ended up filling up, so I made a second route between LA and Shanghai.
-Shanghai then filled up with people who wanted to go to Tokyo and Osaka via LA. This is in spite of there already being a route to Tokyo by way of Beijing.
-I tried drawing a route between Shanghai and Osaka - the Osaka passengers took it, but the Tokyo passengers did not.
The most consistent fix to this seems to be exiting and reloading. However...

Another solution is to remove the direct route (from Tokyo to LA in your case) or wait a few minutes. This happens because pathfinding system takes some time to rearrange everything once a new route is created. If that wasn't the case, the game would freeze or drop its framerate drastically for a few seconds when any route is created, which we don't want. So, this process happens asynchronously in the background.

Originally posted by Camkitsune:

Issue 3: When re-loading a Discover the World save - especially one that's a good ways into things - a random city will suddenly fill with an insane number of passengers, potentially ending the game. Sometimes it's a city like Vilnius and it's resolvable, sometimes it picks a major artery or an isolated city and there's nothing I can really do to save things.

This one is a real issue, however. We are aware of it and the fix is hopefully coming soon.