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!

Réponse du développeur ,

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!

Great game, horrible developers.

I have never experienced a game with so much glitches/ bugs ever! It’s sad because it’s such a great game! My family and I used to always play the board game in person. Since we live I different cities we were all so excited when we discovered we could play this online on our phones! That excitement quickly became anger/frustration when we realized it’s almost impossible to set up the game to play with your family/friends online. Always get an error message when trying to invite a friend from your friend list. It was just a nightmare. In about 6 months we were probably able to make it work just a few times. Every time an “update” would come up, we were positive and thought maybe they had fixed that issue, but NOPE, same problem as ALWAYS.
If you want to play with family/friends online, do yourself a favor and try Colonist io. I discovered it about 2 weeks ago-download it- asked my family to download it-created and account- added each other as friends- and guess what? It actually works. No glitches/ bugs/ error messages/ lost communication with server/ nothing like that. Just fun playing with my family. You can become a member which unlocks more maps, modes, etc but it is a bit pricy (monthly payment) but I personally think it is worth it as it connects me with my family and allows us to have some fun. We play it all the time now. Sad these developers have never been able to fix that issue.

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.