devtrackers.gg
So I've mostly played this game single player and the new coop mode with my wife and friends (amazing mode btw!). I've noticed a few things that I think will help make the game a bit less frustrating.
1) Bugs! So many crashes still! My wife and I both get random dx12 crashes to desktop, which results in having to reload the save, start Anno back up, ect. It's a pain. We noticed it doesn't happen for the first 3-4 hours, but if we do a long session the crashes slowly occur faster and faster. A restart of our computer resolves the issue so this leads me to believe there is a memory leak. We both have a 1080 gtx and 1080 ti, 32 gb of ram, i7, ect, ect. I realize the alternative is dx11 but we both lose about 10 fps which is significant towards endgame.
If I play single player for a bit, and my wife wants to play, I'll load up multiplayer only to find a de-sync issue with our saved game. It will hang forever on both our computers and we will both have to alt f4. Restarting the game fixes the issue, however. Basically single player > multiplayer coop is broken without restarting the game.
The last crash we experience is alt tabbing to look up production ratios or layouts crashes to desktop occasionally. It's weird because I've never had the issue as a host, but on my wife's computer it will crash, but only rarely.
Some ability to reconnect to the host after a crash would be amazing. It sucks to have to back out and reload a save when 1 of the 4 players crashes. If you could add drop in support that would be great for existing players.
2) Trade ships and expeditions meandering into enemy ports and dying. This is REALLY, REALLY frustrating a times. I already have a 100x things to micromanage, If I send a ship on an expedition, I'd like to think the captain of the ship would be smart enough to avoid hostile ports. Trade ships aren't so bad because you can drag those pin's around, but it would be nice in general if trade routes and expeditions just had built in ai to avoid hostile island ports.
3) Influence doesn't feel amazing mid game. Between being at war with pirates and multiple ai, my wife and I couldn't build enough island defenses on all our settlements to defend AND build enough ships to defend our trade routes. You can't really afford to settle less islands as it puts you pretty behind economy wise. It seems like the ai cheats and doesn't have the same influence restrictions as you. As every port of theirs has 4-6 guns on it. This is all pre getting investors (which can be a long road if you have multiple wars going on).
I suggest making the first 2-4 guns on each island cost ZERO influence and additional emplacements cost influence. This cost would go up exponentially to prevent turtling. For example the first 3 guns are free > 7 > 10 > 14 > ect. Another neat feature, would be an inactive (paused) gun status. Resuming this status would spend influence and manning the emplacements would take time, but not as long as building them from scratch. This way if the island is being invaded, you could turn on your guns to have time to defend, but turn them off to spend that influence else where.
4) Few other things I'd like to add. No passive trading in Cape Trelawney sucks. It wouldn't be so bad if Nate bought a few more items at least but ideally it would be awesome if the old world NPC's just bought stuff passively. In general I think it would add a bit of depth if all the npc's had a few more items they were willing to buy to set up some interesting selling routes besides soap, rum, and fur coats.
Love the sunken treasure mini game, but I wish I could buy just ONE more ship in a 4 player coop game. This would let at least two people search around and you could have different setups (one that looks for animals and one for museum pieces. Especially with 4 regions to explore.
Some rare, interesting ship blueprints you could get would mix things up and add some fun instead of just spamming ship of the lines for maximum dps. Imagine finding a blueprint for a faster frigate with torpedoes. Or a ship of the line with a built in mortar. Or a clipper blueprint with better expedition stats and an extra cargo slot. I'm not that creative, but maybe the developer could come up with some great rare blueprint ideas to mix the game up a bit. This blueprints could even have limited runs, so you couldn't just spam them.
The Arctic region looks and feels really good, but there isn't really much to do there and it's not really worth colonizing. I wish this area had some rare resources that sold really well or had a need in the old world to make it more meaningful (for those that didn't have the DLC this would be turned off).
Anyway, I hope this feedback reaches someone Blue Byte who can put some of it to use. I'm really looking forward to future content, I absolutely love this game. Seriously, it's probably the best city builder I've ever played.
1) Bugs! So many crashes still! My wife and I both get random dx12 crashes to desktop, which results in having to reload the save, start Anno back up, ect. It's a pain. We noticed it doesn't happen for the first 3-4 hours, but if we do a long session the crashes slowly occur faster and faster. A restart of our computer resolves the issue so this leads me to believe there is a memory leak. We both have a 1080 gtx and 1080 ti, 32 gb of ram, i7, ect, ect. I realize the alternative is dx11 but we both lose about 10 fps which is significant towards endgame.
If I play single player for a bit, and my wife wants to play, I'll load up multiplayer only to find a de-sync issue with our saved game. It will hang forever on both our computers and we will both have to alt f4. Restarting the game fixes the issue, however. Basically single player > multiplayer coop is broken without restarting the game.
The last crash we experience is alt tabbing to look up production ratios or layouts crashes to desktop occasionally. It's weird because I've never had the issue as a host, but on my wife's computer it will crash, but only rarely.
Some ability to reconnect to the host after a crash would be amazing. It sucks to have to back out and reload a save when 1 of the 4 players crashes. If you could add drop in support that would be great for existing players.
2) Trade ships and expeditions meandering into enemy ports and dying. This is REALLY, REALLY frustrating a times. I already have a 100x things to micromanage, If I send a ship on an expedition, I'd like to think the captain of the ship would be smart enough to avoid hostile ports. Trade ships aren't so bad because you can drag those pin's around, but it would be nice in general if trade routes and expeditions just had built in ai to avoid hostile island ports.
3) Influence doesn't feel amazing mid game. Between being at war with pirates and multiple ai, my wife and I couldn't build enough island defenses on all our settlements to defend AND build enough ships to defend our trade routes. You can't really afford to settle less islands as it puts you pretty behind economy wise. It seems like the ai cheats and doesn't have the same influence restrictions as you. As every port of theirs has 4-6 guns on it. This is all pre getting investors (which can be a long road if you have multiple wars going on).
I suggest making the first 2-4 guns on each island cost ZERO influence and additional emplacements cost influence. This cost would go up exponentially to prevent turtling. For example the first 3 guns are free > 7 > 10 > 14 > ect. Another neat feature, would be an inactive (paused) gun status. Resuming this status would spend influence and manning the emplacements would take time, but not as long as building them from scratch. This way if the island is being invaded, you could turn on your guns to have time to defend, but turn them off to spend that influence else where.
4) Few other things I'd like to add. No passive trading in Cape Trelawney sucks. It wouldn't be so bad if Nate bought a few more items at least but ideally it would be awesome if the old world NPC's just bought stuff passively. In general I think it would add a bit of depth if all the npc's had a few more items they were willing to buy to set up some interesting selling routes besides soap, rum, and fur coats.
Love the sunken treasure mini game, but I wish I could buy just ONE more ship in a 4 player coop game. This would let at least two people search around and you could have different setups (one that looks for animals and one for museum pieces. Especially with 4 regions to explore.
Some rare, interesting ship blueprints you could get would mix things up and add some fun instead of just spamming ship of the lines for maximum dps. Imagine finding a blueprint for a faster frigate with torpedoes. Or a ship of the line with a built in mortar. Or a clipper blueprint with better expedition stats and an extra cargo slot. I'm not that creative, but maybe the developer could come up with some great rare blueprint ideas to mix the game up a bit. This blueprints could even have limited runs, so you couldn't just spam them.
The Arctic region looks and feels really good, but there isn't really much to do there and it's not really worth colonizing. I wish this area had some rare resources that sold really well or had a need in the old world to make it more meaningful (for those that didn't have the DLC this would be turned off).
Anyway, I hope this feedback reaches someone Blue Byte who can put some of it to use. I'm really looking forward to future content, I absolutely love this game. Seriously, it's probably the best city builder I've ever played.