Y'all doing a great job. This is easily my fav digital board game adaptation and I play it all the time. Thanks for the constant updates and the continued support with new DLC. Much appreciated!

<3

After a rocky few months, this game is getting there. Keep up the good work!

Yeah, great work. (Sarcasm).

They simply CONTINUE to ignore the broken cards and rules that have persisted for years.


Instead of supporting this garbage product from these garbage developers, I hope people flock to the Board Game Arena version once it is out of Alpha testing.

(Or use the free online version, which is great for solo mode and can be used for multiplayer, as long as you are okay without the fancy graphics and sound effects, which I personally do not care about at all.)

Thanks, please keep working on it!

When over 50% of my games result in some error that someone has to reload and get save couldnt be loaded occurs... game is literally unplayable right now. Believe me I want to play this game but I play with a group on private games and its unplayable because almost every game we cant actually finish it...

Thank you for your AWESOME work

New patch released 11/30 is bugged: we can no longer deselect Solar Phase on solo challenge. This makes it way too easy.

Originally posted by Dragon Dai (Uey):

Y'all doing a great job. This is easily my fav digital board game adaptation and I play it all the time. Thanks for the constant updates and the continued support with new DLC. Much appreciated!

Wow, how much they pay you for this review.

The original guy who programmed this - graet job . The people who came after him are useless, they couldn't programme their way out orf a paper bag - never ever let them get near anything which impacts on real life - total garbage. just one problem after another.

so you guys do 0 testing then sell us stuff so we can test it?
I'm with Ripley, your current devs and QA suck.

Im lucky Steam accepted my Venus Next refund

Originally posted by Ripley:

The original guy who programmed this - graet job . The people who came after him are useless, they couldn't programme their way out orf a paper bag - never ever let them get near anything which impacts on real life - total garbage. just one problem after another.

Some historical context here:

It wasn't "a guy" who originally programmed this.

The first development company was called "Lucky Hammers". The game was an absolute joke and had literally hundreds of bugs, many of them completely absurd.

(Example: Mining Guild got +1 steel production for ANY tile placed ANYWHERE. Another early bug: Optimal aerobraking gave +3 MC and +3 heat for any space tag OR any event tag, including its own space tag when the card itself was played. AN actual space event card triggered twice since it has one of each tag, and therefore gave back 6 MC and 6 heat. This bug made the card an automatic win for any unscrupulous player who used it anyway despite knowing the bug. Another one: When using search for life, a player could keep the card for free, making Search for Life an amazing card instead of just a mediocre one. Etc. )

This company created the original spaghetti code that other companies (including the actual publisher of the digital game - Asmodee / Twin Sails - tried to repair instead of just scraping and starting over.

That original company no longer exists (probably because its programmers were so incompetent.)

So, no. Not a "great job" by the "original guy" who programmed this.

Originally posted by Ripley:

The original guy who programmed this - graet job . The people who came after him are useless, they couldn't programme their way out orf a paper bag - never ever let them get near anything which impacts on real life - total garbage. just one problem after another.

This is purely speculation but my view as a professional software engineer is that what we have been seeing is likely explained by the opposite: the original implementation was horribly unmaintainable spaghetti code written by a developer of questionable competency (or just under huge time/resource constraints), and the new developers have been left with a tremendously hard challenge of fixing systems through major refactors (but introducing inadvertent bugs through unexpected entanglements you'll expect from spaghetti code) and trying to add new functionality. When small features and fixes are causing unrelated bugs at the rate we've been seeing, the most likely explanation is not that the current team is incompetent, but that the original code was written in such an unmaintainable way that only that could explain the level of regressions we are seeing. I am sure the new team is working to build a testing suite, but it's the original developer's fault for not fundamentally architecting the whole system around tests as it should have been. I feel the pain of the developers who have to muddle through terrible code and make the best of it. And I really commend them for continuing to support the game despite how frustrating that must be for years after release instead of just abandoning it like they absolutely could have done. The situation isn't great, but I appreciate that it's slowly getting better. And I personally really enjoy the look and feel of the game when I play it 1v1 with a friend (but I know the wild west of online games can introduce a greater variety of bugs that I personally don't encounter). Anyways, just my two cents from my perspective as a software engineer speculating on what's likely going on behind the scenes.

^^^^

Yeah, I pretty much said the same thing.

But, I feel no sympathy for the current developers or any of the ones that followed the original developer. They should have just started over instead of foisting one problem after another upon us. There's no indication they have been "working hard" to repair the original code. There's no indication they even care. Many of the most annoying and game-breaking bugs are ones that occur every time and therefore would be caught by a single playtest before releasing the patch or update. How long would it really take to code the game properly? Writing the code to resolve a card's effects is not difficult. Update variable values, and check for relevant blue card effects such as discounts, rebates, plants awarded or removed, etc. It's just a bunch of if/then statements, essentially. Basic stuff. What's the problem ????? Then play the game one time, dealing out all 208 cards (more now that there are two expansions, but still the same idea) and play all the cards and ensure that they work properly. If something fails to work properly, execute a debugging routine, for which there are any number of relatively easy techniques that any competent programmer should be able to do. The entire situation is absurd.

Furthermore, numerous bugs (including many that occur literally every time the affected card is played) have been reported dozens or even hundreds of times without being added to the list of known bugs.

They don't care. They want to publish and release DLC as soon as possible to get as much money as possible. And it works because the number of people loudly demanding more money for DLC outnumber the unhappy players who actually want a game that works properly.

I have zero sympathy for the newer players who buy the game and then complain that it is broken. What were they expecting? There are thousands of negative reviews and complaints about game-breaking bugs. This is not a new problem. Why would anyone give money to this company?

The Fryx family is to blame also. They greedily went after the money and contracted with an incompetent developer (probably because that developer was willing to be the lowest bidder for the job) and didn't put anything in the contract that required the game to function properly.

That's an especially insulting and frustrating choice considering that one or more highly skilled programmers worked together to make a fully functional web-based version of the game that is free to play and has all the expansions and promo cards. But that version gets little attention because people apparently prefer the bells and whistles of this version with the fancier graphics and sound effects, even though the cards and rules have never been correct, and an astounding number of games end in freezes or crashes (and the timers are abysmal).