Catan Universe 4+

Extremely Buggy

EDIT 1: some of the main concerns were addressed and - to some extent - corrected. Game breaking bugs in matches were reduced substantially, from about 90% of matches to a healthy 15% (yep, I kept an excel). The in-game interface is still the same, and in my humble opinion, not very intuitive. Regardless, the app is moving in the right direction. Adjusting stars from 1 to 3. REALLY looking forward to the update that was supposed to happen a few hours ago(?).

ORIGINAL:

The board game is amazing and the app has so much potential. However, it is ridiculously common for a game to get bugged. The problem with that is that it affects all other players, not just whoever got bugged. So the game hangs up thinking no one is having issues, meanwhile this one player is stalling for upwards of 20 mins (and the game cant figure out that something is wrong and just kick him). Kicktimers trigger for no reason when you’re in-game and everything else seems to be doing fine. Not much incentive to level up. Not much to buy in the shop (honestly if there were more items available, with better perks than a viking hat, I’d be throwing money at you guys). Elo visibility is really nice tho, kinda only thing that keeps me and my friends around. Just a tip, elo games tend to not show opponents’ elo in the pre-game screen so that it won’t affect in-game tactics (i.e. 3v1, etc). Really looking forward to an update and hopefully adjusting this rating. Thanks for your hard work!

Entwickler-Antwort ,

Hi ExperiencedProjectEngineer, version 1.4.5 was releasd yeasterday with lots of improvements to the game. Thank you also for your feedback on other issues!

Obviously rigged

When playing the AI (especially of “Master” difficulty) it just happens to be that the robber is insanely lucky to be on your best resource for the whole game. Try to buy 1,2,3 development cards to get a knight to move it? They will all just happen to be road buildings, monopolies, victory points. When you finally get a knight, within 2 more turns a 7 is guaranteed to be rolled so that the AI can put the robber right back on your resource. Then a 7 will not be rolled for probably 25 turns as long as you dont play another knight. But once you play a knight to move the robber off, its guaranteed to be back on in only a couple turns. Also if you have 8 resources there are very high odds of AI rolling 7. Im pretty sure catan just cant come up with an AI that is actually good enough to beat a skilled human so in order to make it “hard” they need to adjust the luck of the game.

What is worse than this though is when your resources magically “disappear” from your hand. Several times when I get robbed by the AI i have seen the resource that the AI took from my hand disappear and then about 1 second later another resource just disappears from your hand too (no 7 rolled or knight played). No explanation for that. You could at least do a better job at hiding the fact that the game is rigged. 👎

Also when playing multiplayer 90% of the time a 7 is rolled in the first 2 turns and then not rolled again for a long time. Not saying its rigged but just very annoying.

Please add these features:

Love the game! Very well done! To any developer reading this, I would like to make a few requests: please add another expansion (I would pay another $5 for easily) that adds another ring of resource tiles around the basic game board. Just like the expansion for the board game in real life. That way the play can edit the basic game to have more players, victory points needed to win, more trading ports, and development cards into the pool. Also please add support for Co-Op for two players using the same device in a game. Possibly even up to 4 players on one device? I would also like the ability to play with only 1 other CP in singleplayer mode instead of requiring 3-4 players. There is also a bug that has happened quite often where the check mark does not work in trades with CP’s and forgoes the trade no matter if you click on the red X or the green check mark. The bug also does not allow you to properly re-negotiation the trade with CP’s. Last but not least I would like more edit features when generating the world map instead of only having a few preset “scenarios” to pick from with their own hidden list of possible resource hexes. Thank you for reading and I would love your feedback!