Game has so many issues

[Levantine]

I want to like this game, it's got charm and I like that another start-up geosimulator exists. But man does this game make me pluck my hair out sometimes.

• The RNG is horrible. The whole thing. There's so many problems with how it operates, that you might as well not show what the percentages of success/failure are, because they seem made up. You guys really need to rework the RNG. Over the course of a game, I've seen 85% rolls fail just as much as 40% rolls. Figure out a new system for determining success/failure or allow the player to influence them in some other way.
  
  
• Warscore slows the game down to a halt. None of the warscore points were well thought out by the devs. They need to be divisible by 100 since 100 is the max you can get, so that you way you can mix and match multiple options. The point is the reward the player for completely conquering a country, not reward the loser. You can't mix and match ANY option with political victory, you can't mix and match much with demilitirization, and you can BARELY squeeze two provinces out of a nation that you just spent that last several years beating to a pulp. This is probably the most enfuriating part of the game for me. Wars need to be more realistic. Right now, they're too 'gamey'. You should be able to severely punish an opponent. You should be able to work up a complete conquest in just one war. Do you know how ridiculous it sounds to declare war seven times to get 14 provinces and still not conquer the nation? If you wait for warmonger to go down, that takes about 30-40 years if you manage to win each war within 6-9 months. Otherwise you're looking at an ENTIRE GAME'S worth of campaigning. I finally just pushed totalitarian and beefed up military units and didn't care about warmongering. By the end of the game I had defeated the UN several times and had over 999 warmonger. If you want to charge a lot of warmonger points, that's fine, but don't do it through an arbitrary "oh, now you have to declare peace for these two provinces first before declaring war again" - that is so breaking of immersion.
  
  
• Stock market whack-a-mole. The AI has no freaking clue how to work the stock market. So it will just non-stop try to crash markets across the world. I've seen Azerbaijan and Uganda on roller coaster rides where UK and China get taken out. This feature is so silly, that I once went 30 years by completely ignoring the stock market, not adding a single nation to mine, and I still managed to have 70%+ stock market power the whole time.
  
  
• Unit technology is irrelevant to the power of the insanely stupid RNG. I invested an entire game's worth of tech into fully maxing out military policies. How does the game reward this? Random Number Generator nonsense. You're fighting terrorists in Uzbekistan? Lol - 10 fighter jets from Gryffndor! What in the hell is this ridiculous system? The technology just makes the progress bar more favorable and has nothing to do with unit survivability? Are you serious?! Giving terrorists everywhere more fighter planes than some first-world nations? What the heck are you guys doing over there?
  
  
• Progress bars are way too slow. It takes almost 10 years to build up a province and almost 5 years to unlock certain policies. Do you understand that most people quit the game before 2050 because of the AP bug/feature? Nevermind the mess with warscore, diplomacy RNG shenanigans, and stock markets whack-a-mole. Why do you guys insist on making the game so slow?
  
  
• Random diplomacy events have no indication at all. You have to scroll through the map and catch them at random. I'm talking about the ones where an icon pops up over the nation's name, and you click on it and it gives you a random option for things like development, diplomacy, rebellions, etc... Give us an indicator for these, for the love of God.
  
  
• Cooldowns on diplomacy actions, combined with how long some of them take, are yet another thing that make this game really boggish. At least give us options to speed these things up for people that don't want to play 'staring at the beautiful map simulator 2017' Why does it take almost 20 years to core an entire country?! Oh that's right, because it will take another 20 years to conquer them!
  
  
• Bloc wars, my God, I'm getting angry just thinking about it. Not only do you have no clue who's units you're fighting, you can't do anything about it. You can't launch operations in bloc members to mitigate reinforcements, you can't demand anything from bloc members in peace even if you have 100 warscore. Why do you guys make it so painful?!
  
  
• Reinforcements. I've seen countries literally tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick... reinforcements in like the game can't decide when to stop counting. Oh you eliminated the country's air force? On day 7 I'll give them 1, and on 8, 2, and on 9, 3, etc... Stop the stupid reinforcement spam! Or at least make the battle actions meaningful in some way instead of just being some pretty pictures and a plea to one's imagination. If I win air superiority, make it so they have to fight that type of battle to not have a penalty to their air force units. If I take over their airfields, make it so they lose ALL their air force units and have to take them back before they can reinforce jets again. How did no one think of these things during development?
  
  
• Diplomacy is non-existing. You have no idea why your closest ally suddenly broke its economy and lost all its nukes and is in the middle of some "civil war" (I'll get to that later). That's because the game won't tell you ANYTHING about what's going on in other countries other than random events coded in. You just have to use your imagination at everything. This includes when all of the sudden the game says "UN target Germany" or some other nation, saying "Germany has 50 warmonger" all of the sudden. Why? Why does Germany have 50 warmonger? It isn't in any wars right now. What did Germany do? "Trust us, yous guys, they really bad right now." .. uhhh.. okay?
  
  
• "Civil Wars" - oh you mean those "rioters"? Wasted time is all this is. Don't bother taking over any "rebellions" because they do nothing other than drag on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Like I said earlier about reinforcements, well the AI will just cheat away during a "civil war" and so you running air clearance or tank destruction operations are meaningless. You're stuck just hoping the AI decides to randomly reward one of your battle choices and slowly move the goal post closer to your kicker (Final Push operation). And then when you finally win, after years of just begging for it to be over (because you CAN'T give up, you just have to be defeated or you have to do the defeating), what happens when you win? Achievement unlocked. That's it. Nothing in the nation changes. You don't get any fancy pop up. Nothing. Those rioters went back home. There is only one advantage to this feature I have found. Bogging the AI nation down. It won't get involved in anything else if it has a "rebellion" it can't win. And it allows you to prepare for your war with them, if you want. Another disappointing potential lost out on.
  
  This game... it really makes me so mad with all the potential. I so badly want to like this game. It's really neat especially with the things like space colonization. But man, I didn't even count the save-corrupting bugs or the AP point apocalypse among other misgivings this game has.
  
  Top it off with a discussion board where the devs have taken a permanent hiatus from community interaction, and it's nothing but regret for investing my time into this product.
  
  But anyways, kudos to the art department. You guys are the only part of this game that I have zero complaints with. Well done.

[Bartender Tails]

Thanks for your detailed essay :)

[Levantine]

Originally posted by Dave Kachel:

Thanks for your detailed essay :)

That was the pretext. Steam servers would crash if I said how I really felt about this game.

[Melekavic]

Your rioters aren't cheating. you probably made a lot of enemies so they are supporting the rioters. You can do that to other nations experiencing riots through spy commands.

[Levantine]

Originally posted by Melechavic:

Your rioters aren't cheating. you probably made a lot of enemies so they are supporting the rioters. You can do that to other nations experiencing riots through spy commands.

I'm talking about terrorist operations, not rioters. Unless you're referring to me saying how the AI country will tick in reinforcements while I support a riot rebellion. In that case, my point was more a dig about the combat system.

[Rexx]

*claps*

[1C_Dan]

Originally posted by Nanuk:

I want to like this game, it's got charm and I like that another start-up geosimulator exists. But man does this game make me pluck my hair out sometimes.

• The RNG is horrible. The whole thing. There's so many problems with how it operates, that you might as well not show what the percentages of success/failure are, because they seem made up. You guys really need to rework the RNG. Over the course of a game, I've seen 85% rolls fail just as much as 40% rolls. Figure out a new system for determining success/failure or allow the player to influence them in some other way.
  
  
• Warscore slows the game down to a halt. None of the warscore points were well thought out by the devs. They need to be divisible by 100 since 100 is the max you can get, so that you way you can mix and match multiple options. The point is the reward the player for completely conquering a country, not reward the loser. You can't mix and match ANY option with political victory, you can't mix and match much with demilitirization, and you can BARELY squeeze two provinces out of a nation that you just spent that last several years beating to a pulp. This is probably the most enfuriating part of the game for me. Wars need to be more realistic. Right now, they're too 'gamey'. You should be able to severely punish an opponent. You should be able to work up a complete conquest in just one war. Do you know how ridiculous it sounds to declare war seven times to get 14 provinces and still not conquer the nation? If you wait for warmonger to go down, that takes about 30-40 years if you manage to win each war within 6-9 months. Otherwise you're looking at an ENTIRE GAME'S worth of campaigning. I finally just pushed totalitarian and beefed up military units and didn't care about warmongering. By the end of the game I had defeated the UN several times and had over 999 warmonger. If you want to charge a lot of warmonger points, that's fine, but don't do it through an arbitrary "oh, now you have to declare peace for these two provinces first before declaring war again" - that is so breaking of immersion.
  
  
• Stock market whack-a-mole. The AI has no freaking clue how to work the stock market. So it will just non-stop try to crash markets across the world. I've seen Azerbaijan and Uganda on roller coaster rides where UK and China get taken out. This feature is so silly, that I once went 30 years by completely ignoring the stock market, not adding a single nation to mine, and I still managed to have 70%+ stock market power the whole time.
  
  
• Unit technology is irrelevant to the power of the insanely stupid RNG. I invested an entire game's worth of tech into fully maxing out military policies. How does the game reward this? Random Number Generator nonsense. You're fighting terrorists in Uzbekistan? Lol - 10 fighter jets from Gryffndor! What in the hell is this ridiculous system? The technology just makes the progress bar more favorable and has nothing to do with unit survivability? Are you serious?! Giving terrorists everywhere more fighter planes than some first-world nations? What the heck are you guys doing over there?
  
  
• Progress bars are way too slow. It takes almost 10 years to build up a province and almost 5 years to unlock certain policies. Do you understand that most people quit the game before 2050 because of the AP bug/feature? Nevermind the mess with warscore, diplomacy RNG shenanigans, and stock markets whack-a-mole. Why do you guys insist on making the game so slow?
  
  
• Random diplomacy events have no indication at all. You have to scroll through the map and catch them at random. I'm talking about the ones where an icon pops up over the nation's name, and you click on it and it gives you a random option for things like development, diplomacy, rebellions, etc... Give us an indicator for these, for the love of God.
  
  
• Cooldowns on diplomacy actions, combined with how long some of them take, are yet another thing that make this game really boggish. At least give us options to speed these things up for people that don't want to play 'staring at the beautiful map simulator 2017' Why does it take almost 20 years to core an entire country?! Oh that's right, because it will take another 20 years to conquer them!
  
  
• Bloc wars, my God, I'm getting angry just thinking about it. Not only do you have no clue who's units you're fighting, you can't do anything about it. You can't launch operations in bloc members to mitigate reinforcements, you can't demand anything from bloc members in peace even if you have 100 warscore. Why do you guys make it so painful?!
  
  
• Reinforcements. I've seen countries literally tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick... reinforcements in like the game can't decide when to stop counting. Oh you eliminated the country's air force? On day 7 I'll give them 1, and on 8, 2, and on 9, 3, etc... Stop the stupid reinforcement spam! Or at least make the battle actions meaningful in some way instead of just being some pretty pictures and a plea to one's imagination. If I win air superiority, make it so they have to fight that type of battle to not have a penalty to their air force units. If I take over their airfields, make it so they lose ALL their air force units and have to take them back before they can reinforce jets again. How did no one think of these things during development?
  
  
• Diplomacy is non-existing. You have no idea why your closest ally suddenly broke its economy and lost all its nukes and is in the middle of some "civil war" (I'll get to that later). That's because the game won't tell you ANYTHING about what's going on in other countries other than random events coded in. You just have to use your imagination at everything. This includes when all of the sudden the game says "UN target Germany" or some other nation, saying "Germany has 50 warmonger" all of the sudden. Why? Why does Germany have 50 warmonger? It isn't in any wars right now. What did Germany do? "Trust us, yous guys, they really bad right now." .. uhhh.. okay?
  
  
• "Civil Wars" - oh you mean those "rioters"? Wasted time is all this is. Don't bother taking over any "rebellions" because they do nothing other than drag on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Like I said earlier about reinforcements, well the AI will just cheat away during a "civil war" and so you running air clearance or tank destruction operations are meaningless. You're stuck just hoping the AI decides to randomly reward one of your battle choices and slowly move the goal post closer to your kicker (Final Push operation). And then when you finally win, after years of just begging for it to be over (because you CAN'T give up, you just have to be defeated or you have to do the defeating), what happens when you win? Achievement unlocked. That's it. Nothing in the nation changes. You don't get any fancy pop up. Nothing. Those rioters went back home. There is only one advantage to this feature I have found. Bogging the AI nation down. It won't get involved in anything else if it has a "rebellion" it can't win. And it allows you to prepare for your war with them, if you want. Another disappointing potential lost out on.
  
  This game... it really makes me so mad with all the potential. I so badly want to like this game. It's really neat especially with the things like space colonization. But man, I didn't even count the save-corrupting bugs or the AP point apocalypse among other misgivings this game has.
  
  Top it off with a discussion board where the devs have taken a permanent hiatus from community interaction, and it's nothing but regret for investing my time into this product.
  
  But anyways, kudos to the art department. You guys are the only part of this game that I have zero complaints with. Well done.

Hi there,

sorry for the late reply!

Let me answer you point by point :)

- We’re not super satisfied with the RNG system in the game ourselves, but for now there are no plans for any reworks, as it serves it purpose. We may look to that in the future!

- This system is build that way to slow player’s progress down, so he won’t ‘outrun’ everyone else in the matter of years. It’s far from perfect though, we may look at it again in the future.

- “The AI has no freaking clue how to work the stock market.” So how is that any different from real world countries? ;) Stock Exchange is a simplified feature. Admittedly, it has it’s faults, but it’s not our priority at this point.

- Terrorists are meant to provide obstacles for the player, so there must be some force behind them. Don’t treat their numbers literally, as in fact they are more of an abstract concept rather than the actual logical one. Destroying 2 jets would be a walk in the park. Keep in mind that you don’t fight them very often. If you were at peace and had to fight some almost non-existent terrorist forces then where’s the challenge? But if you’re at war or two already, and suddenly you have reallocate a bulk of your forces to deal with terrorists or rioters than that adds more strategic aspects to the game. As for technology then it’s certainly more important than the sheer numbers. Small, yet technologically advanced army can often defeat a much bigger enemy.

- The game spans over the course of almost a century, and can be played for a long time after that. Not everyone would be pleased with a quick game, where he would introduce all projects he’s interested in over the course of 10 years. Additionally that could cause severe problems with AI. Players would be able to outrun the AI and would quickly become so powerful that they’d win any war with literally 2 operations. Unfortunately that still may occur, but at the current time setting it will take at least few decades of a challenging gameplay.

- Scrolling the map and searching for this events was actually a main factor of why they were introduced in the first place ;) It may not be the most comfortable solution on a PC, but please keep in mind that our game also has mobile version, and searching for this bubbles on a phone is much easier, and it also players ‘something to do’ as time passes by ;) We may think about the indicator tough!

- We’ll think about speed options. Interesting idea!

- Unfortunately, the game is simplified in many aspects, and this is one of the victims of our limited numbers and resources. It will be address in the future, but for now we can’t offer any quick solutions, as this would required a huge redesign of the current system.

- Thinking is one thing. Time and means are the other. In our future projects combat will be done differently, yet for now we may only take a look at the reported reinforcement problem

- They were probably caught on spy operations. Players are informed when they are under spy attack, but other countries also spy on each other all the time. Being informed about it constantly would mean a huge information spam for the player, which would probably be worse option in the long run. Still, we’ll consider adding it in the future.

- We aren’t particular happy with the current riot system. Addressing it the future is on our ‘to do’ list. For now we can only assure that AI most certainly does not cheat during rebels. Actually, these forces’ modifiers are very weak, so if you’re having so much trouble with it, you should probably invest more in the technology of your army.

Hopefully this will answer your concerns/questions ;)

If you have more please let me know.

[1C_Dan]

Originally posted by epiclolyay:

Um... I only have two things that I really, really, really want for this game.

A) To have the AP glitch fixed (the gradual decline of your AP for no reason as you get further into the game, this makes it almost unplayable after a while as you have to get rid of all your research and you can't make choices in events etc.)

B) To have the crashes fixed. On my mac when I play realpoltiks and open the steam overlay it not only crashes the game but also makes my computer automatically restart itself. I have the newest macbook pro so it is not a computer issue.

Are these going to be fixed in the future? If, so can I please have an estimate of when they will be fixed?

Thanks

We will be announcing a new DLC in the middle of this month but in the mean time we will also release a free update to kind of ease your pain caused by the waiting :) So the free update should not just add new content but also fix a lot of reported bugs including yours.

[Melekavic]

I've aleady played for 70+ hours and I still want to play another round. The game is very balanced and mostly realistic. Keep up the good work.

[Levantine]

Originally posted by 1C_Dan:

- Terrorists are meant to provide obstacles for the player, so there must be some force behind them. Don’t treat their numbers literally, as in fact they are more of an abstract concept rather than the actual logical one. Destroying 2 jets would be a walk in the park. Keep in mind that you don’t fight them very often. If you were at peace and had to fight some almost non-existent terrorist forces then where’s the challenge? But if you’re at war or two already, and suddenly you have reallocate a bulk of your forces to deal with terrorists or rioters than that adds more strategic aspects to the game. As for technology then it’s certainly more important than the sheer numbers. Small, yet technologically advanced army can often defeat a much bigger enemy.

I don't see technological superiority in this game being a factor. I've run a cheated game to test this out. If you have fully maxed out techs that do nothing but add modifiers for your military, even against rebels and terrorists, you'll still have situations where you will get wiped. I'm talking the RNG just relentlessly giving your army bad rolls and losing you so many units. It needs to be more potent of a factor. If you guys are concerned that first guy to +50 attack/defend modifier wins the game, then balance it out with certain operations requiring a superiority ratio greater than 1:1, 1:2, etc... You made a few points that underlined how you guys feel the game needs to be drawn out over a long run. Well then you guys need to also appreciate if a player decides to go for tech superiority, then that's a lot of time and resources spent on small but powerful armies instead of large but weak armies, and so getting units wiped left and right completely destroys any reason to invest in that path. Just spam units. That's all you need to do, as of current build. Balance it out better, perhaps. Small but powerful armies are incredibly difficult to defeat, but can only be deployed in limited fashion across the world due to small numbers and high logistic support costs (abstracted). Whereas large and weak armies are easy to defeat, but can be spammed all over with ease.

I know unit numbers are abstracted, but this is true of the player's units as well. The USA has more than 100 jets and 80 tanks, for example. But in the game, the abstractions are not consistent. If terrorists have 10 jets, and then nations like Cuba or North Korea only have 5, just as examples, it makes zero sense. The abstraction just needs to be consistent.

I think my problem is that I realized too late this was more designed for mobile gaming, or quick gaming, than traditional strategy/geo sim gaming on the PC.