Okay so I had 2 of my friends over to give the new Civ game a go in multiplayer.
Here is some of the things we found.. (will add more if I remember, because there were a LOT of bugs!!)
* If a player drops due to lost connection, no-one gets notified and the game will just play on like nothing happened.
* Every 5-10 turns or so, someone would get stuck with "choose production" and have to work around it by clicking different cities and units until it "let's go" and actually lets you choose your production.
* There's no way to interact with the game after your turn is finished. This might be intentional, but it's very frustrating if you have the "auto end turn" option on, move a (your last) unit and it auto ends for you, so you can't fire on those barbarians standing outside your city. Only way to deal with this is to turn the option off resulting in people forgetting to end their turn quite a lot.
* Lots of nonsensical messages in the popup logs. Like "has declared war on" with no prefixes or postfixes. In one game we played, the English was wiped out and about 10 turns later there was a bunch of messages saying that this and that city state "has declared war on" and the symbol for the English civilization even though it had been wiped out long before.
* Actions can not be taken until the (never displayed) animation is finished. Example, when moving a unit with a move of 2 into unknown territory I like to perform 1 move at a time, so i right click on where I want to go, then the unit moves and I want to right click on the next tile to make it move there, but this action does not respond immediately so I have to click again. (Click, click... "grrrr", click)
* "Huts" that give a culture bonus does not appear anywhere in the log or anything. It got to the point that whenever someone found a hut they had to monitor their culture, because otherwise there was no way of telling what the hut gave. This might apply to other things as well, but this is the only one we noticed.
* The French razed one of my cities while having a trireme inside. Once the city was gone, the trireme still sat on the hill where the city used to be, Noah's ark style.
* Barbarians are easy to exploit for free XP: Find a barbarian galley and fortify your scout on a forested hill next to the shore. The galley will keep firing at your unit each turn earning it 2xp, but it will never be able to kill it.
* In a game started at the Renaissance era, barbarians still only had archers in their camps.
* Okay this might not be a bug per se, but seriously.. Conquest is SOOOO much easier than any of the other victory conditions. I've played on Emperor level, and the AI does not put up any fight at all! You can just buy your time, set up for an ambush on all the capitals at once and win the game with no effort whatsoever. Meanwhile culture and science victory just seems almost impossible to achieve. Culture mainly due to the amount of rubbish social policies required making it a very undesirable path.
* Civilization unique traits are not balanced at all! I played as the English in one game, and their navy is just plainly insane (especially with Great Lighthouse). The AI does not seem designed to predict that you're gonna have insanely fast ships with a huge sight radius and they will just embark all their land units giving you tons of easy kills. Moreover, the AI will not learn from this mistake and just keep doing the same thing over and over until you will pity them enough to take them out of their misery.
Other civs with insanely imbalanced traits include Japan and possible others.
Conclusion:
This game (while it has some good stuff too) seems to be very rushed. There has been very little focus on testing and balancing issues.
The very first time you play a game, you don't want to notice 5-6 bugs and numerous other obvious mistakes and huge balancing issues.
Thanks for listening...
Here is some of the things we found.. (will add more if I remember, because there were a LOT of bugs!!)
* If a player drops due to lost connection, no-one gets notified and the game will just play on like nothing happened.
* Every 5-10 turns or so, someone would get stuck with "choose production" and have to work around it by clicking different cities and units until it "let's go" and actually lets you choose your production.
* There's no way to interact with the game after your turn is finished. This might be intentional, but it's very frustrating if you have the "auto end turn" option on, move a (your last) unit and it auto ends for you, so you can't fire on those barbarians standing outside your city. Only way to deal with this is to turn the option off resulting in people forgetting to end their turn quite a lot.
* Lots of nonsensical messages in the popup logs. Like "has declared war on" with no prefixes or postfixes. In one game we played, the English was wiped out and about 10 turns later there was a bunch of messages saying that this and that city state "has declared war on" and the symbol for the English civilization even though it had been wiped out long before.
* Actions can not be taken until the (never displayed) animation is finished. Example, when moving a unit with a move of 2 into unknown territory I like to perform 1 move at a time, so i right click on where I want to go, then the unit moves and I want to right click on the next tile to make it move there, but this action does not respond immediately so I have to click again. (Click, click... "grrrr", click)
* "Huts" that give a culture bonus does not appear anywhere in the log or anything. It got to the point that whenever someone found a hut they had to monitor their culture, because otherwise there was no way of telling what the hut gave. This might apply to other things as well, but this is the only one we noticed.
* The French razed one of my cities while having a trireme inside. Once the city was gone, the trireme still sat on the hill where the city used to be, Noah's ark style.
* Barbarians are easy to exploit for free XP: Find a barbarian galley and fortify your scout on a forested hill next to the shore. The galley will keep firing at your unit each turn earning it 2xp, but it will never be able to kill it.
* In a game started at the Renaissance era, barbarians still only had archers in their camps.
* Okay this might not be a bug per se, but seriously.. Conquest is SOOOO much easier than any of the other victory conditions. I've played on Emperor level, and the AI does not put up any fight at all! You can just buy your time, set up for an ambush on all the capitals at once and win the game with no effort whatsoever. Meanwhile culture and science victory just seems almost impossible to achieve. Culture mainly due to the amount of rubbish social policies required making it a very undesirable path.
* Civilization unique traits are not balanced at all! I played as the English in one game, and their navy is just plainly insane (especially with Great Lighthouse). The AI does not seem designed to predict that you're gonna have insanely fast ships with a huge sight radius and they will just embark all their land units giving you tons of easy kills. Moreover, the AI will not learn from this mistake and just keep doing the same thing over and over until you will pity them enough to take them out of their misery.
Other civs with insanely imbalanced traits include Japan and possible others.
Conclusion:
This game (while it has some good stuff too) seems to be very rushed. There has been very little focus on testing and balancing issues.
The very first time you play a game, you don't want to notice 5-6 bugs and numerous other obvious mistakes and huge balancing issues.
Thanks for listening...
