relaxrelax2's Recent Posts

Sometimes you need to manually post 100+ things to SELL in a row, and then once you run out of the stuff you accidentally post 180+ BUY at the same price accidentally.

The "sell" button shouldn't disappear when you run out of stuff, it should BECOME GREY so that distracted people posting 100+ things don't accidentally buy what they want to sell PRETTY MUCH 3-4 TIMES A WEEK FOR A LARGE CHUNK OF THEIR INCOME LOST.

The fact you can't take your own deals only adds to the frustration
5y ago
The other update after that had the same problem and the same solution; Ape-apps still hasn't fixed this very annoying bug.
5y ago
You may be missing a material. On some planets, you have to realize you lack uranium, then build an uranium silo, then buy some uranium from the black market since you probably can't make any.

If it's not uranium, check the black market and make sure you have some storage for every ressource, and have at least 1 of every ressource, which the black market seems to be build to do but it won't give you uranium if you don't build a uranium silo... this may occur for other materials as well.

Took me 41 hours to figure it out, can't we have a FAQ somewhere for headbanging-level documentation holes??? I can't seem to see any guides about this topic or the related several-days-of-research headbangers on other planets I tried.

P.S.: if the robotics tech required 1 uranium or more to unlock, there wouldn't be a problem. Similarly for other techs. And keep in mind SOME PLAYERS DON'T BUILD A BLACK MARKET!!! Their self-challenge or cluelessness shouldn't cause massive quitting from lack of documentation or proper new commodity unlocks.
5y ago
Also change job doesn't work.

Despite having a robot factory and both tech the reference site says I need, I can't build "Construction Drone".

The fact the game doesn't warn I need to make construction drones to make buildings (since I'd have to manually look up tech I already have to look what can construct buildings I could make if I had a construction drone) is compounded by the fact making construction drones isn't fully documented by the reference material.

3 days stuck. Chat didn't help. This is a decent case of lack of documentation making players stuck.

OF COURSE you could tell me the anwser, but why is it not inside the game itself in an OBVIOUS place? It would have saved me several hours of reference database diving to know why I am not progressing, and which buildings I can't make for unclear reasons.

If you expect players to manually write down buildings each tech unlocks just in case it's an "unlock but not really" and the building isn't available in construction menus, just to make sure they don't miss anything, you REALLY are the enemy of game documentation.

PLZ document the game better. It would certainly double the time people spend playing average, and thus double premium sales.
5y ago
Ansom said:The game is almost full documented.

https://www.my-colony.com/reference/index.html

In this site, you can read everything (building cost, tech, Requirements, build by, ecc), storage value, Resource transformed and produced every tick or minute.


Yes, this is where I spent an average of 1.5 real life days until I figure out what should have been in a tooltip all along --- so that I KNOW WHICH INFORMATION I WANT BECAUSE THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM IS OBVIOUS.

But without the tooltips, I can't know what information I need since the problem can be a large number of not-documented-ingame things so I have to check them all --- and once I check them all I am usually wrong on all guesses, and the ENTIRE database has to be scummed one by one to finally stumble on an UNGUESSABLE rule somewhere that requires something.

...For the love of God --- let us know why we're stuck, and let us eyeball the full building stats ingame each time we look at the building tooltip or from the menu or something so we're not forced to do a 3-minutes database dive for EACH AND EVERY SINGLE NEW BUILDING.

P.S.: the database is viewable at a rate of one entry per 3 minutes at best, since last year, for some reason. Usually worse when searching for building whose name starts with something really common. It was BAD when it was FAST, now it's making the game unplayable.
5y ago
I have all of these except transcendent academy. It's been 1 real life week since my IQ stopped at 110 but a large chunk of my population is student in the high end buildings who has lots of teachers, but there is no progress and not a SINGLE colonist seem interested in some jobs.

All students and all teachers under view have no age, no happyness, no money number, all NaN style, so I suspect the game sorta simulate what it can't calculate individually --- but for some chunk of education that's done wrong.

And of course my population is terminally unhappy from being uneducated for the duration, except logically the teachers (I have max teachers in each school) but even calculating how many teachers I have in my small community college, the number of people unhappy from lack of education doesn't make sense since the requirements of that teacher job. It's same in all my education building types.

So where does the database help???

NONE of the buildings have a education/IQ gained by tick math on it. I can't know if one is 1000 times less efficient than the other, and how much 1 teacher is different from 0, and so on. GUESSWORK hasn't worked and having some of each never broke the 110 IQ limit.

There are currently 250 people in the small community college, whose IQ limit is 130, the teachers are maxxed and teachers require 130 IQ...

...yet since ALL students and ALL teachers in ALL education buildings have NaN stats, and are probably estimated from the non-simulated truly calculated individuals (of which there is none) then that means no education progress. IS THAT THE PROBLEM? Fire drills doesn't fix it. Killing simulated colonists doesn't fix it. 1 week of real life time doesn't fix it.

I looked at the entire database, there is no info in the database about education that isn't in the ingame information. The database does not have an "IQ" entry either. There is simply no way to know for sure ANYTHING about why my colony is stuck.

And oh, it's probably stuck at several undocumented levels simultaneously, but education is an obvious one.
5y ago
Colony slow death by lack of documentation has been a feature of the game ever since my first colony...

with my 10th, it's still an issue.

Known traps:

-I can't figure out the learning rate for schools (with or without teachers) VS internet stations, so I can't pick the most efficient one. Having PLENTY of internet stations who don't require teachers didn't help, the schools didn't help, 99% of population TERMINALLY UNHAPPY from being uneducated from immigration day to the day they die (several centuries played)

-Even with my 10th colony, I frequently can't progress to the next thing before some documentation loophole kills my colony slowly. Sometimes it's because the buildings won't say what I need to build them (what buildbot) and I can't build them and I don't know why for months. People don't anwser these questions when I asked in forums. It REALLY should be a part of the game explaining "why can't I build this?" under a "cannot build even if you had ressources" type submenu.

-The game should give me a popup once in a blue moon if I need more atmosphere to get to the next level. I was stalled for 2 entire years the last time that info was missing.

-I still have colonies becoming "Everyone has a job, everyone is happy, everyone has food and water, everyone is off duty all of the real life day I try desperately to produce 2 microship more or 255 science more to get something" and putting no-rendering-colonists and other performance friendly options, nothing seems to help.

-At my 10th city, I still can't get halfway thru the game, and still have 3 to 4 different unexplained problems EACH TIME

-The game needs a NPC robot advisor to give you some GODDAMN HINTS once in a while. YES, REALLY. With a capacity to turn it off once you learn what the game should have explained in tooltips all along.
5y ago
This seems to be the same "firefox thinks this is a malware site" type warning you get from several browsers. Ape-apps.com and some others maybe, have been flagged probably by error.

I suspect it has to do with the fact the installer installs facebook game room, and definitely shouldn't.
5y ago
thanks, worked, tho it gave a weird DLL missing error the game launched updated after a reboot.
5y ago
firefox reports some of your websites as malware infected, this is why we're unable to play normally.

Since this isn't the my-colony.com site itself, it can be learned by going to pages like ht tps://apps.ape-apps.com/colonial-tycoon/ and then clicking one of the broken image links such as ht tps://market.ape-apps.com/screens/1517936056019.png

As such I expect the problem to affect all ape-apps.com games.

Since firefox is a glitchy paranoid mess, I expect it's probably a false positive for infection; BUT...
...since my last installs of my colony installed facebook game room, which is a frequent name used by malware (because it is so common) and by itself a generally very badly behaved spyware, I can't trust you to be clean of infection either...

I also suspect google play of malware-flagging stuff that simply lags and crash a lot (like my colony, pre recent patches).


Firefox said:

"market.ape-apps.com has been reported as a deceptive site. You can report a detection problem or ignore the risk and go to this unsafe site.

Learn more about deceptive sites and phishing at www.antiphishing.org. Learn more about Firefox’s Phishing and Malware Protection at support.mozilla.org."
5y ago
I had to go into my account to manually kill old sessions, and it has allowed me ability to go online apparently.

I still can't make the game update, clicking on the update green button in the windows version will do nothing, double clicking it will resize the window which never helps (the upgrade button may be displayed over the title bar, but the clickzone of the titlebar may still have priority and somehow confuse a title bar click for a resize window icon click)

I also can't trade since no one is selling anything, for some reason, and if I need to join a commonwealth to trade or something the game should most definitely tell me that but it doesn't.

Still a problem:
https://apps.ape-apps.com/my-colony/ doesn't have images, and have no link to where I can play my colony in the browser; and since it doesn't have that, I forgot where my colony can be played in the browser and can't check if killing the session made me able to login into the web version again (which before killing sessions, was stuck at 'loading')
5y ago
Short of someone offering an entire hard drive image for the developper to have a bug to observe (please specify which browser you use when attempting to play) the developer will have no idea how to test where the bug comes from and will keep thinking all people with the bug may be using some ad-blocker or other addons that don't like my colony or somesuch --- and thus never fix the problem.

5y ago
This happened to me 8 times, and follows the "workers refuse to get a job" not explained by distance, colonists being unhappy, colonists being too rich to care for jobs(which I honestly think makes half the player quits because it has no warning message), or fire drills.

Once this sets in for long enough, the colony loses contact, the game cannot update from the windows green "click here to update" button, the web version is stuck at "loading" before I even login even with all firefox addons disabled or deinstalled fully, online colonies in the windows version can't save or can't load (either way they're dead and have never revived), and changing an account and rebuilding from scratch doesn't help unless you also change your real life ISP, which would change the IP.

I suspect some sort of auto-ban runs super-predictably often when trying to save the colony from the colonists refuse to go to work problem --- which may force some players to:

-Reload from backup, looking like a cheater for it?

-Complain a hell of a lot, causing a not-so-automatic ban?

-Make odd trades (selling high materials in large quantities because they're selling buildings colonists refuse to work in)?

-Making uneven trade as a friend is offering super cheap help to save the colony from the workers refuse to go to jobs problem?

-Have large colonies which may trigger not so much as an IP ban but more of a file size / bandwidth triggered stuck state (with the game trying to contact the server with enormous file every fraction of second because the server always refuses them), which triggers the IP ban proper?

In any case if the problem is hard to figure out, YOU NEED TO HAVE ANALYTICS TO KNOW WHAT TENDS TO HAPPEN BEFORE THIS PROBLEM TRIGGERS because re-building a colony to maturity from scratch 8 times, only to have the last time result in an IP ban, tends to aggravate people into quitting a game they otherwise would have loved.

P.S.: I am not going premium for regions until they have proven to be free of both late-game-destroying bugs:

1- the IP autobans(?) or server won't connect no matter what which affected me, my cousins, 3 friends, and basically everyone I know in real life. Considering quitting a year doesn't fix it, maybe it's more of a "game can't contact server for some other reason" problem.

2- the worker won't work even if I raze everything but some solar panels, a single houses, an entertainment facility that doesn't require colonists working it, and some simple jobs matching the number of colonists present, storage full of 10 million food and water, and wait real life 2 days for the colonists to find the job next to their house!! (starting with educated, healthy colonists, happy with 50 cash each with no-IQ-required jobs and solid government approval)

The solution to untrackable bugs is analytics, analytics, analytics!
5y ago
The "update ready, click here to install!" green button in the windows desktop version doesn't do anything when clicked, so I can't update.
5y ago
I have removed it, because it's a pain, and REALLY should be removed from the installer.
5y ago

A lot of players want decorations off the "all buildings" menu. They're just AGGRAVATING 99% of the time at least, even to players who do want them but only under the decoration menu.

It would be nice if buildings who now have a category of their own wouldn't be listed under another vague category (education buildings should not be also under government for example). Or if they ARE, make the buildings who have a more precise category for them listed last?

A lot of players outgrow a lot of buildings and would like to have the ability to filter out (and unfilter) certain buildings they don't like or don't like anymore. Menu buttons only composed of such buildings should have greyed borders.

The menu should have building names sorted alphabetically which would make it a hell of a lot easier to find buildings we remember the name of. Also typing the name as a filter-search would help.

We want buildings to list their IQ requirements both for working there, or for being a student.

Buildings (and tech) who can't ever be useful on the current planet because certain stuff will never spawn should have a red * in the menu so people don't build expensive stuff tricked by the poor state of the documentation about certain buildings.

Buildings which can be built, but you have no citizen with the proper IQ at this time, should have a yellow * which explain the problem as a tooltip.

Have a button for "buildings we never-ever built, but they are unlocked" helpful to find newly unlocked stuff. The current method for checking for missed unlocked buildings currently is manually checking each menu which takes me 7 minutes 40 seconds approx and has been known to accidentally not find them until the next pass due to high boredom past the first 2 minutes...
5y ago
Screen says:

Build version number (clicking have no effect)

Greed (player and/or colony name) clicking leads to eternal sync wait with no proper error message (error message should have shown after a while)

New colony (clicking brings menu, I can't start online games, I don't want an offline game)

Load colony ("there are no saved games")



Workarounds attempted:

1- logout-reboot-restart game-login.

2-Create new account. Same results as before.

3- After manual backup (of colony lost to the workers can't go into buldings to work, fire drills/education no help), delete all old savegames(there were 4 savegames, I suspected together they take too much space and the game stalls WITHOUT A PROPER ERROR MESSAGE). Same results as before.

4- Create an offline game (which I am not interested in), make it online. Save. Exit. The colony will not load again (load bar stuck at "doing cleanup").

I am using the freshly reinstalled win64 version under windows 8.1 with a fast computer. I was highly aggravated by the installer putting "facebook gameroom" without permission on my PC, but I have not removed it in case it was necessary for the game to work (do tell if I can remove it, as it's actively sending packets to facebook.com even with my colony closed and facebook gameroom never clicked, and I pay per data with my ISP so it's a pain).



IMPORTANT: once the bug is fixed, have a proper error message for when it doesn't work so players don't lose their time trying things for an hour or two (or try the wrong thing) when the game could have notified them "the server is down, please try later" or some other useful error message.
5y ago
Will this be available to some degree to non-premium players? I am looking forward to it as a solution to the 7th times in a row reccuring problem of spending months on a game ending up totally stalled due to the colonists not willing to work and fire drills being of no use whatsoever after some more development...

eventually games would no longer load at all. All my games were fully lost. File size wouldn't explain it and using a backup older file and removing 99% of buildings and colonists would still end up unusable after a few days once the game is 'tainted'.

I am hoping regions would fix this horrondous bug, or the pathfinding update fixing the bug, but I am *NOT* willing to pay premium upfront to spend months on a colony only to watch it die from the same super-super-super frustrating bug all over again.

P.S.: people who experienced the need for fire drills and situations beyond the help of fire drill no matter what they do (including radical downsizing of everything, or education) please comment on the current status of the worker problem. I am willing to go premium if the problem is reasonnably fixed. I am not even starting a new colony if this problem isn't fixed even if premium was free.
5y ago

relaxrelax2

Member
Member Since
October 1st, 2018
Welcome
Ape Apps, LLC is an independent software development company founded in 2010 by Brandon Stecklein. Over the years, Ape Apps has published over 400 apps and games across various platforms. You can get in touch with Brandon on Twitter or by leaving a post on his wall @bastecklein
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