The further I get into my current 2.2 game the more obvious holes start opening up in the game left right and center. I'm just about muddling through despite it all for now, but it's seriously immersion breaking.
It's not like these are all minor, edge-case issues either, it seems like vast pockets of regular-play content just do not function.
So far I have experienced:
I could talk a lot more about the game's balance, mechanical issues and so on, but at this point that's just me griping about things, and my main point are some of the extremely severe bugs up there. I've only played two games on 2.2, and so I haven't even scratched the surface of the possible routes/event paths, so lord knows what other gamebreaking issues are lurking out there.
I love the new 2.2 features, but (and I know that I am preaching to the choir here, but I wanted to say it myself), the sheer quantity of broken major features really makes me think that this one needed a fair bit longer in the oven. I really appreciate what Paradox do, and don't want to sound entitled (although I have sunk a fair bit of money into this game at this point...), but I really hope there's a plan to address these things instead of pushing ahead past them. I think the game needs a fairly comprehensive period of bug-fixing updates, because at the moment it's really hard to play a game through without having immersion broken, or some feature not working correctly in a way that sabotages part of the game. I really want to get deep into the game, but something always knocks me back, and that's... not great.
It's not like these are all minor, edge-case issues either, it seems like vast pockets of regular-play content just do not function.
So far I have experienced:
- Contingency ship and starbase models rendering with a placeholder model instead of any actual model.
- The Contingency don't seem to be able to purge pops/take over worlds, so their fleets will just hang around above my planets indefinitely.
- The resource trade UI menu bug! This is almost *constant* and turns attempting to trade resources into a new chaotic minigame. Half the time, the expanding menus of resource buttons will oscillate between expanded and collapsed, meaning that to select a resource you have to try and click the flickering mass of bars and get lucky. Restarting fixes this but it comes back within a few trades. I almost forgot about this one due to how ubiquitous it is now.
- The Desanu Consonance L-Gate outcome still tells me that I'll be granted "unique strategic resources", but these no longer exist. I am given an empire modifier that does absolutely nothing.
- I have crashed to desktop several times since I started playing 2.2; this didn't really happen before.
- Awoken empires fielding multiple Colossi. Is this meant to happen? I don't even know if it's a bug, but it seems like one.
- Market monthly trades and outgoing diplomatic trades will calculate *before* the month's income is calculated, meaning that even if I am getting +1000 of a resource a month I will be forced out of a trade deal if I overspent and didn't leave enough of a "pool" of resources for it to draw from, incurring massive diplomatic penalties in some cases.
- Performance issues aren't as bad for me as some other people, but it is still pretty jarring in the late game.
- Various dialogue options still refer to the grid planet layout...
- In my previous game (still 2.2) I repaired a ringworld section, and the repaired section spawned in the wrong way round and awkwardly clipped with the existing sections.
- A whole host of weird bugs where I will take over systems but the game won't regard them as explored. At one point I repaired an entire megastructure to working order, before one of my science ships entered the system and declared that it had "discovered" the broken megastructure I'd already repaired.
- Ships will routinely route through systems belonging to hostile empires that I'm at war with, causing all my reinforcements to throw themselves lemming-like at starbases and die. I can't manually reroute them without messing up my fleet loadouts.
- The AI in general makes terrible decisions, which means that I have to micromanage everything. Sectors are tiny, highly expensive, don't seem seem to generate their own resources, and so I have to micromanage hundreds of different worlds solo.
- The AI in a neighbouring empire went crazy and ended up building habitats around almost every body within their empire, half of which it didn't even bother to colonize.
- At one point the game refused to acknowledge that I had a scientist assigned to lead research, which seemingly lead to the game getting confused and cancelling an ongoing research assignment on load.
- Generally, the balance of the game is really weird now. The alloy construction chain I like, but it makes all major constructions twice as expensive, and nothing else has been adjusted to compensate. The game can take an absurdly long time now as I wait for my empire to accrue enough alloys to grow fleets large enough to take down crisis fleets. I still haven't managed to get enough fleet power to take on a Contingency machine world, and it's well past the year 2500 at this point. (Granted, this game is going slower than normal because I was stalled by a War in Heaven early on, but regardless).
I could talk a lot more about the game's balance, mechanical issues and so on, but at this point that's just me griping about things, and my main point are some of the extremely severe bugs up there. I've only played two games on 2.2, and so I haven't even scratched the surface of the possible routes/event paths, so lord knows what other gamebreaking issues are lurking out there.
I love the new 2.2 features, but (and I know that I am preaching to the choir here, but I wanted to say it myself), the sheer quantity of broken major features really makes me think that this one needed a fair bit longer in the oven. I really appreciate what Paradox do, and don't want to sound entitled (although I have sunk a fair bit of money into this game at this point...), but I really hope there's a plan to address these things instead of pushing ahead past them. I think the game needs a fairly comprehensive period of bug-fixing updates, because at the moment it's really hard to play a game through without having immersion broken, or some feature not working correctly in a way that sabotages part of the game. I really want to get deep into the game, but something always knocks me back, and that's... not great.
