Woah Sorry for this experience - got your message in support too. Thanks for such detailed description, we are currectly trying to found hte problem. We'll keep you informed.
Thanks for the quick reply! Sorry I got rather grumpy, I didn't sleep well tonight (had nothing to do with your game, of course. No "just one more turn" syndrome here. Nothing to see, please move on ) and without enough naptime I get irritated very easily. Fingers crossed you can figure this out quickly. And if I can help with anything (e.g. test a new version via Testflight), let me know. It's almost weekend, no problem at all with not getting an update from you till end of next week. I work in tech support, so I try hard not to be one of those annoying customers
As soon as I'm back home today, I'll give it a try. I just wanted to congratulate the dev on the great game concept. Predynastic Egypt is full of greatness. There are a lot of engineering and science in that era. Good luck!
A bit earlier today I finished a game on easy difficulty. Had maybe half a dozen crashes on the last 20 turns or so, but the savegames held this time. And it was quite difficult, I only had 5 or 6 turns left. No idea how I'm supposed to win on higher difficulties. Guess I'll have to take lots of notes on which things to do in what order.
Try choosing different starting circumstances. I did the ones marked historical and I can't even beat the other tribes to building the first temple. LOL!
I put everything on the middle row, and barely managed to build the first temple one turn before the other guys. Two turns later my folks starved and I quit - minus food and nothing to build to improve it. I'd really like to see how someone plays who can beat the game with all starting settings in the bottom row. UPDATE: Oh lookie, just found some stuff via the ingame "contact support" link: https://clarusvictoria.zendesk.com/hc/en-us That page has links to guides and the discussion board on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/app/461620/guides/ and http://steamcommunity.com/app/461620/discussions . Going to do some reading before trying harder settings again...
Really awesome game, both the look and worker placement gameplay! Are the non-story events random? It was a huge bummer in my second play through when all farmland suddenly stopped producing any food, which seems impossible to recover from :/
Apparently some events are random, and some are fixed. Take a look at this guide for exhaustive details: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=799842560
Oh nice... I just read on Steam that they are planning two more games about later periods of Egypt. @clarus: Do you have a rough release date for the next one already? Or is it too early for that? You definitely got a fan with me, I love the historical approach you took.
Just hopping by to say that our kid really likes your game, too I just spent almost 3 hours explaining everything to him, both the gameplay and the historical Egyptian background (he likes Romans and Egyptians). Quite exhausting, especially because I have to translate everything for him from English to Dutch, and into words and concepts a 5.5 year old can understand. But lots of fun nonetheless, for the both of us On the downside, I encountered another bug: Sometimes, the game freezes completely and I need to forceclose and restart it to continue. Unfortunately it seems completely random, so I cannot give you repro steps for it.
Got another request: I redownloaded (savegame bug hit again), and now I have to go through the tutorial again every time, even when I complete it (I think that's after completing the Falcon temple, yes?). And the option to skip it does not show up when I start a new game. So, can you either add a menu option for "disable tutorial" (which would be the best choice, I think), or make sure that you get the "skip tutorial?" popup for every new game - and right from the beginning (some players like to skip them even on first play)?
Excited to get started with this one. Bought it on day one, but haven't had time to play it yet. For those of you still on the fence, here's a gameplay video/review I found on YouTube (there are several, but this reviewer really digs it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_5tGdra1gk
I've been playing more with the more difficult starting conditions, and I'm making more headway. You definitely have to use your head, particularly if you intend on meeting the victory conditions with silver or even gold ranks. I'm honestly not sure if I'm going to continue playing like that or keep the difficulty down and just keep free-playing. I'm not a big fan of games with bronze/silver/gold completion ranks when my expectations were more along the lines of a simulation/strategy game. It feels like you have to do some very specific things to get the best ranks on each victory condition, i.e. complete the Horus temple by turn 37. It almost feels like ... a racing game or something, in that there's only one specific approach to reach that goal. I'm not a fan of rails in a game like this which is what that is, and that's what it feels like when I'm trying to play for the medals. I really love the concept of a strategy game with multiple "boards" to play on. I think it's genius that you have the first map of the location of your city-state on one of the central Nile's tributaries and then the second opens up the game to span the whole of Egypt. It'd be a helluva game if there was an expansion that allowed you to play through the dynastic era of Egypt with a map of the whole Mediterranean sea, or at least the eastern half from Italy to Turkey/Israel. So far the presentation isn't getting old. I love that your "units" make sounds and perform their assigned task perpetually. It gives a real sense of life and activity. It feels like I'm in control of a growing society engaged in the day-to-day activities of a primitive country. Hopefully this massive leap in presentation translates to more sales for the developer, as this is certainly a huge leap over their previous two iOS games. I also think how units and resources are handled is great game design. Instead of producing military and worker units and moving them around a map like with Civ, you slowly get more and more worker cards that you assign to spaces on the map, and depending on what symbols are on that space, you get food/production/culture/faith/etc from having a worker there. Military units are just another resource like food and production, but in much higher quantities. What this all adds up to is a strategy game that feels like a board game in how it's structured. But it still feels very much like a 4X game despite these unique characteristics. One thing I'd like to have is a random game mode. I'm sure it'd be hard to implement a random map generator at this point, but it'd be interesting to be plunked into a random desert wasteland and tasked with surviving with the game mechanics and rules that have been established for the main campaign. The other big challenge here would obviously be how buildings are handled. They're all pre-ordained in terms of location on the main campaign map, i.e. the first farm you build always pops up on the same tile as you're building the historically accurate Hierakonpolis as it hypothetically existed.
@iosgamer: you are right about the game being "on rails" on the harder difficulties. But I see that more as figuring out the optimal play path, and once you got that you are "done". Almost all strategy/4X games are like this, that they have (at least) one optimal path. Eqypt has a very focused approach; i.e. you don't have several possible builds that are all equally viable for a win like in, say Planar Conquest or Starbase Orion. So, naturally, you end up with one build and optimal path only. But for the scope of this game, that's perfectly fine with me. And Bastet's shiny whiskers, it's insanely hard, even with following the great guide from Steam I posted a few posts back. You pretty much need to get almost every turn exactly right. And the random nature of certain game elements (like placement of and rewards from enemy tribes) makes it outright annoying, to be blunt about it. I have some ideas for adding a linear and non-random "story mode" for those folks who want to complete it on hardest difficulty settings, which should remove a lot of the annoyances. Will post that in detail early next week, I guess Tuesday. And you can do the first Falcon/Horus temple on turn 35 for the gold reward, it's perfectly possible Oh, and I agree. The "double map" is fantastic. Would be great to see more of that in their future games, e.g. a larger-scale region map of Egypt or a province or whatever, and smaller-scale maps of several important cities. Lastly, I don't think a random game/map mode would work well for this game. But from what I read on Steam, they have two more in the pipeline. And once you reach the point where you manage the Egyptian empire in its heyday, you have enough territory, time, and events to play with to make a random mode fitting and feasible. I can even see several overall settings/scenarios, like fighting against the Romans, conquering the surrounding lands, defending a province against invaders/pillagers, or stamping out a rebellion. For now, I just hope they get the savegame bugs fixed really soon. I lost several great games today, for now I give up and wait for a fix.
[BUG] Game freezes at random, sometimes every turn Encountered another nasty bug: Now, the game freezes at random, sometimes as bad as every turn. After a device reboot, at first I could play for a few hours without issues. Then suddenly the game started freezing every 4-5 turns. And it got progressively worse from there: then it was every 2-3 turns, and shortly after every 1-2 turns. That's when I gave up. Nothing I tried helped: device reboot, memory cleanup, deleting all savegames, switching autosave off completely. When it freezes, I have to force-quit the game and restart it. The only other thing I have running is Safari with one tab with the Steam guide open, and that's it. I think it might be related to the number of saves/reloads you do: I can play the first 12 turns without save/reload, and during those everything is fine. Once I do the first reload, things start getting worse fast. I didn't test though if the "freeze every 1-2 turns" happens more after a specific number of saves/reloads, didn't have the patience for that
Fantastic game! Thank you very much. Played through for the second time. Won with second try on lowest difficult. Please add some more games like this! Romans?
Hey! One little bug report here. On Iphone 6s latest IOS. The pause button worked one time. And now even after multiple reset the pause button simply won't work. So I can't save nor load etc etc.... Other than that. The game is simoly brilliant addictive and beautiful. Good work devs!!!!!!! Sorry, my bad. I still can do everything with the Settings icon lower right corner. Maybe the || pause button top left is only aesthetic.... No bug, sorry!
This! Or the Greeks. Or both. I basically just really like the concept. I've been coming back to this game pecking away at it and thinking about what it is I like so much out of all of its qualities. I think one reason this game and I jive so well is that I have always enjoyed the initial phase of games where you build up from nothing while trying to survive and make your way against great adversity. From Civilization to Fallout, this has always been the case for me. Nothing's more exciting in a game than taking those first few steps while simultaneously feeling your way through an unfamiliar world with unknown rules and trying to conserve your resources and make judicious decisions that prepare you for the unknown. That's basically what this entire game is like. You're scrapping all the way to becoming a nation, facing threats that grow in challenge as you grow in strength, and then just as you transition from being one tribe among many to nationhood the game's pretty much over. Even on the easiest settings, you can't really mentally go on auto-pilot and just throw your weight at things willy nilly. Well, you can, but then you end up with a score like that one I got my first game.
