The ever increasing list of bugs

[SimBurger 0]

My biggest issues are as follows:

1) Font is way too small on menu zoning and other menu items. Please increase, or allow user to increase.

2) Navigation, panning,etc is very difficult. Pressing up arrow pans down. Pressing down arrow pans up. Drives me insane.

3) Completely unable to make my avatar walk when i go into someone's city. Sometimes he will. Other times he will start running. Other times he'll just jump a little.

4) One keystroke that makes the avatar do something will do absolutely nothing the second time around. The exact same keystroke.

5) Install process does not create an executable program file to run the game. Nothing on desktop. Nothing in program menu. Nothing. Please fix!

6) I created a city named Priapism, then deleted it within 15 minutes. Went to a new location an hour later and tried to use same city name. Said city name already taken.

7) Absolutely no help text anywhere during the install process informing the customer to check mail, unlock program, etc before being able to play. Tried to log in after registering a username and password and it said "invalid login". Nothing about having to check my email to click a link to enter a certificate code. No information.

Capital letters on login result in a vague "Invalid Characters" error which left me stumped for 20 minutes. Try saying "Lowercase Only" instead.

9)

[adrbe 0]

PLEASE DO SOMTHING FOR CRASHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!the game every time i try to build everything crashes to desktop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!vista ultimate 64,5870x2 9.9catalyst,8gig ram,9550 oc 3,8.what's going on with this game????many people complains for crashes!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[b3rglund 0]

I can't connect highway with highway bridge, always says "Invalid Junction", quite annoying.

[Spritzen 0]

Couldn't see a thread for known bugs so I thought I'd put one up and see what others have found.

CXL PO - Congestion - It seems that if you put a city highway junction and only that on a congested road it clears the congestion. I was playing around trying to replace a large avanue last night with a highway and tested it several times putting just the junction on with the other end on nothing and everytime the congestion issue disappeared when it was attached.

~Merged~

[genepooldesign 6]

I have 4 cities with a combined population of around 20,000, and I've been playing every day in online mode. When I go to the website to log in, the information on my profile isn't syncing properly. It hasn't updated in 5 days, and I KNOW I have allowed the game time to perform the server saves. That's very annoying.

[nezroy 0]

In the trade city status window, the available tokens and tokens needed numbers sometimes take into account tokens being used up by trade contacts, and sometimes don't. It makes those numbers basically useless as I'm never sure what it's showing. The numbers on the market place tab always seem to be correct and up to date however.

[nezroy 0]

Originally posted by: genepooldesign

I have 4 cities with a combined population of around 20,000, and I've been playing every day in online mode. When I go to the website to log in, the information on my profile isn't syncing properly. It hasn't updated in 5 days, and I KNOW I have allowed the game time to perform the server saves. That's very annoying.quote>

This thread talks about the fact that they have supposedly changed the update interval to once a week. I have not seen any official comment on it one way or another though, or seen anything on their website about it.

[Stef42 0]

I think that to many people are playing at the same time, compare it to WoW but then without the server capacity

[Rikaelus 0]

Originally posted by: b3rglund

I can't connect highway with highway bridge, always says "Invalid Junction", quite annoying.quote>

I've had this as well. I can build a highway bridge directly into one of the highway/avenue exchanges, but not into a normal piece of highway.

Auto-terrain leveling for exchanges would be a huge plus, too. Not a "bug" as is, but just as annoying as one. Same with the fact the only exchange option takes so much frakking space.

[alonzo 0]

I'm not able to hear any city sound. Background sounds volume doesn't work.

[zerosugar 0]

Ive been writing a list of all the stuff i find wrong, annoying or simply ideas that would probably be welcome in the game.

I actually posted these through the CXL feedback page but the answers i got back were very defensive and somewhat dumb to be honest.

So heres the list.

• Roads should be less Snap to Grid, they are very hard to place when in close proximity to anything else
• Option to choose which size roads to use when laying grids for houses etc
• Tell me what rankings im in, not just how many im in
• When i delete a city id like to be able to use the city name again straight away, for some reason you cant, i think it has to do with incremental server saves
• Middle mouse rotation is way to fast in my opinion
• Every time my Internet goes down (which for some reason due to loosing my gateway constantly) means my single player game freezes and the game becomes non responsive until the Internet is back up and running
• I have found many times that buying a token does not balance the - token totals, many times i have found that i have had to buy 2 tokens to make a -1 turn into a 0
• The whole % theme throughout the game is very vague, whats wrong with giving us some proper statistics, its nice to know that if i buy 6 more offices, im going to need No of citizens

[kusanagi-sama 1]

Originally posted by: zerosugar

Ive been writing a list of all the stuff i find wrong, annoying or simply ideas that would probably be welcome in the game.

I actually posted these through the CXL feedback page but the answers i got back were very defensive and somewhat dumb to be honest.

So heres the list.

• Roads should be less Snap to Grid, they are very hard to place when in close proximity to anything else
• Option to choose which size roads to use when laying grids for houses etc
• Tell me what rankings im in, not just how many im in
• When i delete a city id like to be able to use the city name again straight away, for some reason you cant, i think it has to do with incremental server saves
• Middle mouse rotation is way to fast in my opinion
• Every time my Internet goes down (which for some reason due to loosing my gateway constantly) means my single player game freezes and the game becomes non responsive until the Internet is back up and running
• I have found many times that buying a token does not balance the - token totals, many times i have found that i have had to buy 2 tokens to make a -1 turn into a 0
• The whole % theme throughout the game is very vague, whats wrong with giving us some proper statistics, its nice to know that if i buy 6 more offices, im going to need No of citizens

quote>

Its possible that this last one was to make the game less confusing for the casual gamer?  It had been this way during the beta and MC changed it to the % instead, this actually made me confused for a bit, because giving actual numbers for housing, I actually knew how much to build to get it to zero again.

[CSanchez 0]

I have a simple bug, When I make a road one-way the portion of road  I select sees the arrows either pointing towards each other or away thus preventing any traffic flow. I attach a screen shot.

I contacted the support and the response time was MAGNIFICENT, the result not so. Simply, yes this can happen, tough, re-lay the road and see if it happens again. 

[Stef42 0]

The bug you mention now happens to me so much!

This happens when I first build a piece of road, make that one-way and then make the rest (also make that one-way)

The cars pash good, so the simulation is good..

Only the graphical view with the arrows is not correct...

[etatauri 0]

After waiting a few weeks since I bought the game the day it came out, I sadly uninstalled it from my computer. I logged in to see if any bugs I had were fixed, but nothing seemed to be addressed so I'm freeing up space for something else. I bought it through steam so perhaps next year when I get a new computer I'll try again but I've almost abandoned hope on this game. Too many bugs, uninspired gameplay, and way too taxing on my computer. Time to move on.

[bluetooth 0]

There is demand for Heavy industry in the city even if I don't build any structures that demands it. A bug?

[hasoon 0]

This one is a KILLER that made me delete my city!!!

I call it "economy crises" bug

I had a good city one day with many resources, so I was making good cash per turn

then I over spent a lot to a degree that I went into a negative cash flow, did not care as I had millions in reserve!!!

here is the bug:

Phase 1:

I could not sell any of my resources, players can see them on the trade board but when they click on them nothing happens (no one can buy from me)

I did not know what to do, I panicked (should have deconstructed the services building!) it was late at night, I closed it and went to bed.

Phase 2:

the next day many of my contracts expired so the negative cash flow almost doubled. deleting the service buildings does not help anymore.

My millions are gone, I have no money left

phase 3:

My economy collapsed, went into negative budget. no one can buy from me and I have my city going to a dead end.

I had no fuel, no water, no electricity, my city got paralyzed

phase 4:

The Mayer decided to evacuated the city. then I sadly had to deleted.

The End

[wolfpost 0]

I have a similar problem that I stated in another thread hasoon. Except my city's economy crashes every time I get between 550k and 650k  population. Then after I tanked to about 2.8 million in debt for no apparent reason I started making money at the rate of 70k/hour until I had about 300k in the bank. I did hardly anything at all. Certanly not enough for such a wide variance in cash flow.

I logged on today and wit in 5 minutes my 20k/turn cash flow I left the game with last night crashed to negative 70k/turn. It says I have no trades active and I know I did at least 3 or 4 with my own cities before I logged for the night, Yet still it said my freight was maxed and it wouldn't let me make any trades. A little later I made one trade with one of my cities for 15 oil but it's not giving me the oil as it still says I need 11 oil but it says I have an active trade I'm looking for oil. But my Oil city dosn't see the request.

Unrealted. I built several Large offices on the banks of a small river. It said they needed excutives so I built excutive housing on the other side of the small river and connected them with a bridge. The peeps in the new excutive zone refuse to go across the bridge to the new offices even though it is very close to each other. As soon as I built offices on the same side of the river they ran to them. I see traffic on the bridge so i know thats working. Same thing happened with that specilal hotel that helps the offices make money. Said no office to buy it services. I have like 20 large ones and a hundred medium not more than 2 inches away but it can't find them becuase they are across the bridge.

[jantolini 0]

OMG! That's bad!

[rismisner 0]

Whole bunch of defects/issues I've seen, in no particular order... (also please note I like this game a lot overall, enough to motivate me to keep playing it despite all these problems, so I don't want this to come off as a bad review)

1. (bug, usability) "area not bounded by roads" when it is actually bounded by roads.  Can take some time to find exactly where it's allowed to click to add a decoration fill effect... on one precise pixel in the middle of the area you're trying to fill, and nowhere else within the same bounded area.

2. (bug, usability / cosmetic) placed farms along a river bank. using a pre-placed curved road as the border of the farm... flood filling that bounded region with farmland somehow broke through the road and filled a large triangle that stretched out across the river in some kind of bounding area error.  It felt somewhat related to the oddities around problem 1.

3. (bug, usability) trade lag. even when playing solo mode, the trade interface can take 30-60 seconds to say "contract accepted" During this time, there's no busy cursor or other indication that it's processing or working on it, and I have a hard time imagining what's taking so long... online, I could imagine it's server communications and I would just overlook slowness there, but in a solo game, the delay makes no sense.

4. (bug, cosmetic) trade interface green coloring on checkmarks for valid deals vs. deals you can't afford, always initializes the window with all checkmarks gray. After purchasing one deal, or toggling between resource types, it will properly refresh the green coloring on valid deals. Fortunately, it allows you to click on the gray buttons anyway so it's not really enforcing that grayed-out state.

5. (limitation, enhancement request) trade window selected resource type should have an orange box around the selected token along the top of the window, so it's more obvious what I'm looking at, which reminds me I wanted to say...

5.5 (limitation, cosmetic issue, enhancement request) the UI in general needs rollovers and 3D depressed button state graphics so I can tell when I click on something that it's being recognized in some way and feel a sort of expected feedback that my mouse button works. Given that clicking on things is often unresponsive, particularly in the trade interface, all the more reason I want some visual feedback to acknowledge where I'm clicking, or where I'm mousing over, so I can tell the software is still running and responsive to my input, even if it takes a while to complete the operations.

6. (bug, cosmetic) when opening the trade window, it sometimes shows the big orange text for the selected resource type... except you're on the wrong screen where it shouldn't be showing this, so it's like it's bleeding through from the Market Place screen, even though the window inits to the City Status screen. Toggling to the market place screen and back to city status will correct it.

7. (bug, usability) sometimes the city status view of the trade interface will not show any contracts or offers.  close and reopen the trade window will usually fix this.

7. (bug, usability) the bridge laying tool height adjustment - must go up first... does not accept lowering the bridge height with Shift + Move Mouse Down, unless you do Shift + Move Mouse Up to raise the bridge height first in order to kick start it. Only after it has let you raise the height will it let you lower the height. Even then, it often sticks at the default minimum height and just won't let you go any lower than that (though it will let you go insanely high).

8. (EDIT: removed, i don't really a problem with this observation)

9. (bad design choice, usability, needs keyboard alternative) he bridge laying tool height adjustment... shift + move mouse up/down is a bad interface design which desperately calls for a keyboard alternative. Lowering the height to make a tunnel is very difficult because typically I will run out of screen space before I can lower the height below ground, and then moving the mouse position down any further past the bottom of my screen will scroll the map instead of further lowering my bridge height. Please add a keyboard alternative to this control.

10. (bug, game play issue) buildings sometimes do not realize they are connected to roads. This is especially frequent at an intersection. Easiest way I can repro this bug is to make a T interesection of large avenues, and place an Avatar Park at the intersection, trying to make the stem of the T road end at the gates of the park... the park snapped to the road as I was laying it, but then will say it's not connected to city hall.  Maybe it is just a display bug and the park is still having it's effect like it's connected?

11. (bug, cosmetic) more disconnects from city hall... (maybe same bug as 10 but different way of observing it or slightly different manifestation)  since introduction of the new icon to show disconnects from city hall in the patch from the other day, the single player game is frequently showing me that new buildings that I placed, and especially farms, are not connected to city hall, even though they are. They will get population and show profitability, but continue to show the disconnected from city hall icon. It appears to be a false icon as a cosmetic issue only, and I think the buildings are in fact connected to city hall and appear to be functioning despite the icon lying to me that it's disconnected (but the icon makes me worry it's problem 10 above where sometimes it really does fail to connect to a road because of an intersection or some oddity like that)

11.5 (bug, cosmetic or exploit, I can't tell) Roads do not have to connect to city hall to connect to city hall... Add a water tower somewhere by itself away from a road in the middle of ground water territory. It will correctly say that it's not connected to city hall. Build a road segment along the edge of the water tower - but not connected to any other roads, just a 5 foot long section of road that touches the little red dot "front door" of the building. The building will stop showing the error that it is not connected to city hall, even though it is still not connected - I tricked it with a 5 foot section of road. I can't tell if the building is having any effect this way or not, to decide whether this is a cosmetic defect or exploit. See also the following points about lacking information...

12. (bug, usability) lots of false or misleading advisor suggestions. For examples...

"build more unqualified workers" when I already have 25% unemployed...

pollution is hurting farms, build more parks...the parks help residential satisfaction, but do not have any effect to help the farms remain profitable...

"this building needs unqualified workers" is what it wants to default to if the business needs any workers at all. Say the business needs 1 executive, 5 qualified, and 10 unqualified. Suppose my city offers all the qualified and unqualified that it needs, but I don't have any executives. The building will say it failed because it needs unqualified workers, even though what it really needs is 1 executive to be full.

A related problem, which is an interesting effect that I can't decide if I like or not actually, is if you a lot more jobs than workers, the businesses will fight over the workers in a way that all the businesses fail because none of them are fully staffed.  Building A might get all the unqualified workers, and building B gets all the qualified workers, and neither can operate because they have to be fully staffed... and you have enough population to fully staff one of them, but the population doesn't distribute itself that way.  Maybe this was just something peculiar about that one city where I had this happen to me /shrug.  I've tried to avoid such economic collapse since then.

13. (enhancement request) there is not enough information available to allow me to make properly "theorycrafted" gamer-style decisions about my strategy. I don't have enough numbers behind anything in the game. Some of this information is available online in this forum or on the wiki, but finding that information is very difficult even if you know where to look, and most of it is incomplete. A wiki exists, but there's almost no information in it yet.  I feel like I know more than many of the pages just from playing for a week, but doubting the accuracy of my info, and the fact I'm a ***** at this still, I'm hesitant to edit the wiki.

14. (bug, defect) tax adjustment always jumps 2% on the first click, making it difficult to edge up 1%. You have to go up 2 then down 1 to reach 26%.  This doesn't appear to be an oversensitive mouse issue.

15. (bug, cosmetic) tax satisfaction gets stuck... advisor popups and general satisfaction icons show that industry is suffering from high taxes even though they are not. Set the corporate taxes up to about 28% or 30%, enough to make them disatisfied and turn red and start leaving the city. Then adjust the tax rate back down to 25%. The businesses will come back into business. Your revenue will go back up as businesses return to your city. Clicking on any individual business will say it's profitable and satisfied and no complaints about the taxes. But the satisfaction icons along the top of the screen, and the advisor popups will continue to complain that industry is suffering from the high taxes. It takes a game restart to reset it so that it recognizes that you lowered the tax rate.

16. (bug, gameplay, tutorial) when I played through the tutorial, many things I was asked to do as practice (add whatever kind of building to my city) I would get credit for it to move the tutorial forward, but my city didn't reflect any change from adding that building. So the tutorial is trying to tell me how to read the satisfaction report for example, and says to add a building to improve satisfaction, so I add the building, and the tutorial says something like "good job, now do you see how the satisfaction was improved by that?" and no I don't see any change at all to the satisfaction levels, because the building didn't actually have any effect... this defect seems to be limited to the tutorial.  it all worked much better once I started playing the real game.

17. (bug, website) My account on the website says my planet offer expires 4/11/09, which is about 6 months before I bought the game. I've checked it several times, while I was on the free trial, during the free weekend for the blueprints, and the day my free trial expired, and it has always shown 4/11/09.

18. (edit: removed this point for out of scope for this thread)

19. (bug, usability) trade servers were down for me a lot.

This is most likely what caused most of the problems described in a previous post about economic collapse. Given the requirement to trade because air pollution makes self-sustaining cities unviable, when the trade servers go down, your city becomes unplayable.

20. (critical lacking feature, trade) no sorting options on trade window. Managing more than about 5 contracts is almost impossible to search the list, with no sorting, and no mouse wheel scrolling, and no single-line scroll up/down buttons... I have to click and drag on the slider... and my city reached 130 contracts in 3 days, so it's pretty easy to grow past the bounds of usability of this interace.  Latest patch notes said this area was improved, but I can't get online to the PO to see if this was added.

21. (critical lacking feature, trade) not enough info in contract accepted/suspended popups. Patch notes for this week's version said this was enhanced, but my trial expired on patch day, so I didn't get to see these enhancements

22. (defect, trade contract popups) "don't show this again" has no effect.

23. (defect, trade, design issue or UI defect) it is too easy to oversell yourself, either by offering more tokens than you have available, offering more deals than you have freight available, and/or offering to pay more money for something than you have available. When posting an offer, whatever you offered should be reflected in what you have remaining, so I know how much more I can offer before other people can't accept.  And ideally, it should just not allow me to offer more than I really have.  On the other side of the trade deal, I should not get the error message "you can't buy that contract because the other city needs more freight" why would you even show that offer to me when you know I can't accept it?

24. (critical lacking feature, trade interface) when a contract is suspended for lack of tokens, tell me who's fault that is - mine or the other guy. It is very difficult to figure out who is at fault for suspending the contract and exactly what is wrong. I recognize 4 cases which should be color coded or something: a) I ran out of money for a purchase, b) the guy I'm purchasing from used the token and can't sell it to me anymore, c) I used a token that I can no longer sell, d) the person buying from me ran out of money.

25. (edit: removed this feature request which is out of scope)

26. (defect, game play issue, prematurely unlocked buildings) it is possible to unlock the +40% resource office building for water (maybe other resources too) before you are able to build elite housing to staff it.  It should take the additional requirements into account before unlocking the building, not just that you have enough water, but also that you can build elites, and any other requirements to place the building.

A similar issue applies to unlocked holiday hotels on maps that don't have any holidays, and any other resource-limited buildings like fuel zones should not unlock unless you have the capability to place them on your current map.

27. (defect, cosmetic, unlocked buildings) the new buildings that I just unlocked are marked with a + sign overlay that does not work properly. Sometimes a building category is marked with a + like I have new buildings unlocked in that category, but then there's nothing new there, or it's buried under a sub-category that wasn't marked with the + sign even though it's sub-items are.  Some items also will get stuck always showing the + sign, such as the small road bridge.  Residential zones also often reset to show the + even though I've had that kind of zoning all along and it's not new.  I many ways I think this + icon overlay is meant to indicate "you just unlocked this" but in other cases I wonder if it's supposed to me "i recommend you build this" - those are slightly different things, but whichever definition it's supposed to have, and it does it wrong, because it doesn't quite fit either of those.

28. (critical lacking feature) no ability to widen roads short of destroying them and rebuilding them... but when you rebuild them, they want to snap to road endings, and there's never room around the existing buildings... so the work-around to this lacking feature is inadequate.

the issue was mentioned above about replacing an existing road and getting "no room for this road" and I think it happens because of the way the road snaps to the other road.

Given the sophistication of the road layout system, would it be too much to ask for the roads to automatically wrap themselves around obstacles rather than complain that it's in the way, at least on a small scale like for that 2 pixels near a building?

29. same kind of issue, but when game says "road endings are too close" - it's a pointless limitation on laying roads where the UI is just not being flexible enough.

30. (defect, game design balance, solo mode) Solo mode is unviable above 500k population. Large city demands for electricity, fuel, waste, heavy industry, and manufacturing creates air pollution ... large city demands for food require farms... air pollution can't coexist with farms on that scale, forcing you to trade... but the NPC trade partner is not viable at 4 to 1 ratio, which  appears unattainable given the need to import so much of one thing or another without the ability to properly export enough (4 times as much) of anything else to pay for it.  This robs you of all your tax revenues, leaving you nothing to pay for city services.

This is fine for an expert mode, but there's no normal or easy mode adjustment option... tons and tons of options exist here for changing numbers to easily fix this problem... make it a 2 to 1 ratio... buff how much money everything makes so I just get more tax revenue... nerf air pollution... reduce cross-industry demands like office usage of heavy industry... you name it, any one of the numbers that you defined in that whole chain of balances could be tweaked to make the solo game feel viable.

This relates back to 12-13 above that if I had more info and the precise numbers assigned to all these things were visable to me in-game, then I could crunch out a viable strategy for the solo game under the current restrictions... maybe...

31. (defect, resource leaks) as mentioned above, after playing the game for a while it grinds to a slow halt. I can play for at least 2 hours before it gets that bad (longer than the 30-40 mins described above) but at around 3 or 4 hours it's terrible.

32. (edit: removed out of scope feature request)

33. (defect, game play) harbors are very difficult to place. No indication of which part has to be on land vs. which part has to be on water. Simply not possible to place one without a road first, and I have no idea how to guess exactly how far back from the water to build the road. It takes a dozen interations of building a road, trying to put a harbor down, fail, bulldoze road, lay a new road it at a slightly different distance from the water, or slightly different angle, and try again through trial and error for, ohh, about half an hour before successfully placing this one building.

34. (lacking feature) A screenshot posted above showed arrows on the street to indicate the one-way section and which way it pointed. I have also tried to set one-way streets but never seen those arrows, so I have no feedback which direction I set the traffic to flow on that one-way street.

35. (limitation, one-way streets) Street segmenting makes managing a long one-way street a nightmare. Each segment of the street in between crossings, or between bends in a curved road, or where a crossing used to be, are all separate streets with separate one-way options... and there's no way to select more than one at a time to set a whole actual street of many "street segments" to be one-way or a certain road upgrade type all at the same time.

Given those difficulties, I just ignore the one-way streets option.  Maybe when the mass transportation comes out, the traffic management features in general will become a lot better.

36. (bug, program crashes) game crashed on me twice so far in about a week of playing it... can't be more specific than that, no apparent rhyme or reason to it, nothing repeatable here for me, just 2 random crashes... maybe my video card just overheated /shrug.

37. (bug, exploit, or cosmetic) it is possible to build farms that go outside of the fertile ground area by first building roads to bound those farms. Only the corners of the farm must be inside the fertile ground area, and the rest of the farmland may go outside the area if you can make it do a "snap to fill in this area" kind of mouse mode, with the mouse pointing inside the fertile ground, and all of the corner intersections of the farm inside the fertile area, but some bounding edge road going outside the fertile area and back in. This works with a nearby square intersection of small avenues also for example.  The farm will flood fill to use that existing road as a boundary even though it's outside the allowed area.  I don't know if the extra farm land provides any benefit outside the fertile ground area, or if this is only cosmetic.

38. (unclear, needs feedback, maybe bug) screenshots don't work.. or I can't find them. I see the button on my camera controls to take a screenshot. Clicking that button doesn't appear to have any effect. I don't see any text on my screen to confirm that it just took a picture, nor does it make any sound, or show any depressed 3D button graphic. It's like the button doesn't do anything except show a tooltip.

I hunted through my hard drive looking for the pictures I tried to take, but I don't see anything under my documents, or my pictures, or my game saves, or any of those default microsoft-defined folders, and I don't see them in the citiesXL program folder... I can't think of anywhere else to look. I'm running vista 64 bit home edition.

There's no info about the screenshot feature in the user's manual, and I can't find an answer on this forum or the wiki or anywhere, yet I have seen people post a lot of screenshots... so what's the trick to it?

EDIT: I saw someone mention Fraps was required to take screenshots.  I am familiar with Fraps from a failed attempt to make some WoW machinima videos a couple of years ago, but there's this screenshot button in the game UI, surely I don't really need Fraps and that was an old post where I saw that??

EDIT: edited all of the above to try to make this a shorter post and not rant so hard at the devs.

39...

I could go on listing other oddities that I've seen, but I've already been typing this list for a couple of hours... suffice it to say I like this game so much I kept playing it despite all these bugs, enough to enthusiastically report all these bugs in great detail. Like the OP on this thread, I want to emphasize that despite all these bugs, I think this is a really great game, or at least it has really great potential, but it's not been polished to the extent that it deserves for it's potential.  I'm excited to see what it will be like after a couple of months of patches.

[hasoon 0]

+1

[morriswalters 16]

You get no feedback from the screenshot button but the images are located in the folder Monte Cristo  in My Pictures(Win 7).  The down side is that it dosen't capture the interface

[masochist 111]

By the way...to take a screenshot, press [F11]. To take a ridiculously detailed screenshot, press [sHIFT] + [F11]. To create a level map of the entire city (bird's-eye view, landforms and city only, no water), press [CTRL] + [F11]. And to create a ridiculously detailed level map, press [sHIFT] + [CTRL] + [F11]. All screenshots are stored, as morriswalters stated, in the Pictures/Monte Cristo folder.

If you want the UI in the picture, you'll simply have to use the tried-and-true [PRNTSCRN] key.

[rismisner 0]

Thanks for the screenshot answers! Yay I found my screenshots!

Thanks to that tip about F11, I can add another bug report: I tried Shift+Ctrl+F11 to see the ridiculously detailed map it would create... but it crashed the game. I found 4 *.png files containing pieces of the map it was trying to make when it crashed, which looked like 4 of 9 total segments, so it got about half way.

After that, I tried F11 by itself, without shift or control to see what that would do, and I think it worked.

I like the idea of taking a map image that's all one high detail picture (ctrl+shift+F11) so I can have a way to view my whole city on the screen at the same time. As it is, I wish the game camera would let me zoom out one more level so I could take in the whole city on the screen at the same time - the most it will show is about 40% or so. Maybe I'll try Ctrl+F11 to get the whole city without the "ridiculous" detail level.

Moving on, I have some additional bug reports surrounding specialty buildings. I'll start my numbering at 40...

40. (bug, cosmetic, tooltip error) for several of the unlockable buildings that require lower level buildings, I have frequently seen the tooltip show "this building requires: cb_curtitle_abc23" where it should be saying "this building requires: lower level buildings" Where I said "cb_curtitle_abc23" I made that up - I can't remember the exact text I saw there, but it was clearly a programming identifier instead of the text it was supposed to represent.

41. (bug, game play) unable to unlock some buildings (offline solo mode) The XL-Office - Merchent Guild - +35% food production office building says "requires more of this resource" ... I am playing a solo game on the Wetlands map. This map has fertile ground covering about 60-70% of the map. I have 1.3 million population and I export 170 tokens of food. And I need more than that, seriously?

I was able to build the XL Office for water, electricity, waste, and manufacturing, but not the one for food. I suspect the food building is bugged, or perhaps it was purposefully not allowed in the solo game because it would fix my offline economy, and then why would I pay for the PO?

41.1 (aggravating limitation) Instead of "requires more of this resource" I wish it said "requires X more of this resource" or "you produce 190 of 200 required food tokens"

41.2 (more than just the food building) There are other unlockable office buildings that I am unable to unlock. It's hard to pin my finger on which ones exactly because...

41.3 (unclear game rule or bug) building certain resource specialization buildings blocks you from building others in a way that is unintuitive and not defined in the tooltips or the wiki. I did an experiment last night with this offline city of 1.3 million population. I destroyed all my specialty resource buildings, then started rebuilding them - everything that gave me a bonus to +X% resource production. I had buildings to buff water, waste, and electricity. After bulldozing those and carefully rebuilding them one at a time, I found I could build the XL office for manufacturing... prior to bulldozing, that manufacturing building didn't show up in the UI - not showing up as locked or unavailable or anything - and I thought it must not exist in the game. But apparently there's a limit to how many specialty buildings you can make, or they conflict with each other in more specific ways - it's very unclear to me. After building this XL Office for manufacturing, I was unable to rebuild the shell building for waste. So one blocks the other. Nothing I have found documents any restriction that you can only build 3 resource specialty buildings, or that building the XL office for manufacturing will block building the XL office for waste or vice-versa. I suspect if I destroyed one of my water buildings, then I could replace it with the shell building for waste that I no longer have. but I have multiple buildings stacking with water (the XL Office and the research facility) and I need it more for my food industry than I do the waste.

Long story short, I know there are at least 3 more resource specialty buildings that I did not build because I needed more of that resource. However, now that I built a few resource specialty buildings, the rest that I did not build do not show up at all in my UI. They don't show up as locked requiring more of that resource anymore - they're just not there at all, as if they don't exist. They should continue to show as locked at least, and ideally tell me why I'm not allowed to build them - not just "requires more of this resource" but whatever reason is causing them to disappear completely from the UI, like "you already have 3 of 3 XL office buildings" or whatever the restriction is.

42. (related to 41, and 41.3) The related research building for food, that other resources have (+40% to the resource, +5% education) doesn't even show up as a locked building, as if it doesn't exist, but I found a reference to it on the wiki, so I think such a building should exist.

43. (bug, expert mode doesn't work as described) The game play option for "expert mode" says it unlocks all buildings. It does not unlock anything for me in this city. It appears to unlock population-based buildings so that you can build high population density zoning when you have a lower population city. At 1.3 million population, you've already unlocked all of the population-based locks, so expert mode has no effect. I tried using it to unlock the merchant guild and other specialty buildings, but it didn't have any effect.

44. (bug, exceptional buildings button can become improperly disabled) This is intermittent. I encountered this a few times with the exceptional buildings button - the 4th button below low, medium, and high density categories. The button is gray and mousing over it shows a tooltip that says "locked building" However, I restarted the game and looked through the building options right away, and found I could build an XL Office listed under this category. One time, I selecting an XL Office I was going to build, and about a minute later as I was trying to find a place for it, auto-save happened, and it took away my building cursor, and this bug happened again so I could not access the exceptional buildings category to be able to build this building again. Restarted the game and it allowed me into that menu again. Waiting about 10-15 minutes after loading the game, that button grayed out again (maybe after the second auto-save? it auto-saves once immediately on load, so I'm thinking maybe the one after that triggers the bug, but that's more of a guess than an observation) There was a limited window of time when I could pull up this building to construct it. It's a bug one way or another - maybe the intent was for the building to be locked, but I found a bug/exploit to let me build it anyway? Hard to tell. Given my resource production levels, I think the building was correctly unlocked. I forget exactly which building it was. I want to say it was for manufacturing, either the XL Office +35% resource production, or the storage building +30% resource production.

All of these bugs are things I found in my hunt for a way to build the Merchant Guild to buff my food production. This is primarily a food industry city but I was unable to build any resource buffing buildings for that (other than silos and fertilizer) and I was really counting on more food exports to balance my economy... as it is, I've been forced to stop importing a lot of heavy industry, fuel, and water, which are all in the negative, but still within the green range where my industries don't complain... I have about +80k cash flow, so I could buy a few more imports, but not enough to get to 0+ on everything. I would need about 20 resource tokens all together to achieve that but I can only afford to buy 8 from omnicorp. If I could buff my food production with +35%, +40%, and +30% buildings all stacking together, like I can with other resources, then I could export another 100-200 food or something like that, and then I'd be rolling in money. So this fits a theme of other defects/limitations that makes me think the food buildings were purposefully disabled in the solo game to force me to go online... which I'd be glad to do if I hadn't lost my debit card last week and still waiting for my new one to come in the mail... I'd love to check these defects in the PO game to see if these are solo mode only issues or whether they happen in the PO too.

[morriswalters 16]

To get that agriculture building the map needs to be fine tuned.  I use a grid on my farm city and keep my farms at the minimum size, about 90 percent.  That changed from 85 after the last build.  It will unlock in the PO and I'm on the wetlands map also.  I export about 320 tokens of ag.  The silos and fertilizer building you need are based on the number of farms not size.  Your close to the magic number I believe.  You should read the posts in Hints and Tips about farms.

[rismisner 0]

good to know that it's possible, thanks.

EDIT: ranting down to this: seems a bit harsh what it takes to unlock that, plus the mystery of it... started a new city, going better with a grid system from the start

[Z3phyr 0]

I think I've encountered a bug for solo.

I've made three cities, haven't encountered any lag, the games never crashed for me and I don't have the PO.

But one time I went to my friends house to show him the game and played offline, no connection whatsoever to the internet.

When I came back to my place and reconnected to my home network (and internet), I logged in, opened one of my cities and as usual the loading screen with the picture with the 2 hands shaking popped up, but freezes after the picture fills with blue.

I tried this with one of my other cities that I played offline with and the same thing happened, though I was still able to open up cities that I did not play offline with and was still able to start a new city.

Any help/support/suggestions towards fixing this problem would be greatly appreciated.

[rismisner 0]

Originally posted by: Z3phyr

I think I've encountered a bug for solo.

I've made three cities, haven't encountered any lag, the games never crashed for me and I don't have the PO.

But one time I went to my friends house to show him the game and played offline, no connection whatsoever to the internet.

When I came back to my place and reconnected to my home network (and internet), I logged in, opened one of my cities and as usual the loading screen with the picture with the 2 hands shaking popped up, but freezes after the picture fills with blue.

I tried this with one of my other cities that I played offline with and the same thing happened, though I was still able to open up cities that I did not play offline with and was still able to start a new city.

Any help/support/suggestions towards fixing this problem would be greatly appreciated.quote>

I haven't had that problem.  One time I had a city take a very long time to load after filling up the office icon loading bar, but I was watching TV at the same time, so I just let it sit there, and it eventually loaded.  It was about 10 minutes I think, AFTER the progress bar was full.  So you could try waiting /shrug

I think what happened was my graphics card crashed, but the OS recovered it (Vista 64 bit home edition) because I've seen it do that for me with WoW several times (or the nvidia card I have is self-recovering that way) and anyway if that's the case, that's my system overheating, not really MC's fault.

Could be it fails to open a graphics object, so you could try a defrag / scan disk / any kind of hard drive maintenance tools you have.

Update on my effort to unlock the Merchant Guild: I made a new city on the Wild River map.  At 350k population I export 233 food.  Eating 1 per 50k pop means I have another 7 hidden tokens that I eat, bringing me to a round 240 tokens of total production.  I placed all my farms in the most efficient grid system I could think of, basically all lined up along the same main roads where I put the silos and fertilzer.  The second or third to last farm I added to fill the last of the fertile ground unlocked a silo that unlocked a fertilizer, so I thought: Perfect!  All the farms are as small as I could make them, like 90-02%, except for a couple that fill in odd shapes around the edges of the grid.  It's still not enough to unlock the merchant guild in the solo mode.  Comparing to the post above where you say you export 320 food, and you have the merchant guild in your city giving you +40%, and I assume also the research facility that I can see in my UI now, but still not unlock ... so your 320 / my 240 = 133%, so even accounting for eating a lot more of it, I think I should be there already if I could place even one of those buildings, if not both.  But they won't unlock in solo mode.

[morriswalters 16]

Token production is not the key.  Number of farms, silos, and fertilizer, are what counts.  And I believe you have to have a three star ag map.  Watch for a post  about silos in a thread started by Jack Hawksmoor.  I have some data I'm collating that may help.

[Stef42 0]

1.) BUG: When using the Tri-Zone option for residential buildings, the park that is automatically created isn't working. It's just an space with no impact.

The houses within the Tri-Zone will suffer under the poor environment...

When deleted the bugged park, creating a park via the decoration screen will have a positive effect on the environment!

This explains the low satisfaction for environment..