Serious problems

I'm having a lot of problems with the game. It appears to be *very* buggy.

1) Saved games. What is the deal? There's no option to save the game, and there's no option to load a game. But if I go through the process of starting a new game, then cancel out, when I get back to the main menu there's a "resume auto load" option that wasn't there before. Bizarre.

2) On a related note, I cannot find any way to continue my campaign. I finished the first contest against Wesley Clark and I don't see any option to continue on to the next battle. It just kicks out to the main menu. Using the process in point 1) will load an autosave of the Wesley Clark contest at the end of turn 41, starting the whole process again.

3) Often I can't select operatives or ads with a mouse click. It just stops working. I discovered I can use the TAB key to go from object to object, but this takes far too long since it stops on every Campaign HQ in the game in seemingly random order. Once I start tabbing around I can't select my candidate with the mouse again, either.

There's more problems, but I'm gonna leave it at that for now.

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ScottTykoski

Join Date 03/2001

+132

1) This was a miscalculation on our part. All games played by us in the office lasted 45 minutes or less. We felt saved games would just end up being a silly feature to put in (think putting samed games in Tetris). What we discovered after release, however, was that players would take 1 to 3 hours per game, calculating each turn with complete persision (which we lack the paticence for). So, in the upcoming Ubisoft patch players will get the ability to save / load games. Moral of the story...don''t base major features on gamers with A.D.D.

AUtosaves were put in just in case gamers experienced a crash and wanted to pick up where their game dropped them off at. This was good in theory, however...

2. The Autosaves weren't remembering if they came from a Campaign mode game or not. Thus, people that use the auto saves to resume a campaign will find they're aren't advancing to the next candidate. THis will also be fixed in the UbiPatch.

3. That's a weird one. We did put the tab in for cycling through the player's units, and the C key will auto select the Candidate, but i don't know why your mouse would stop responding. COuld you post your full sys specs so we can get an idea what kind of machine you're playing on?

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3) (cont...) My PC is a P4 1.7 Ghz, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP Home, GeForce 2 video card. It has happened on 2 of the 3 games I've played, late in the game when there are lots of ads on the map, etc., and it might be ads/units that are too close to the state borderline or too close to other units/ads that cannot be selected (even by zooming in so you're certain to click on the proper place).

4) The game could *really* use a state-by-state display of resources, in particular ads, so that you can see what all ads are being run in a big state in one glance (especially including your opponents ads).

5) The pop-up newspapers bug me at the start of a turn. When I'm trying to spot any "political opportunities" the last thing I need is the New York Post screaming headlines at me.

6) My least favorite design decision are the endorsements. When Bush can buy an endorsement from the NAACP, The Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO, something is amiss. (This actually happened in my 2nd game. I beat him anyway by purchasing the Council on Foreign Relations and Taxpayers Union endorsements for Kerry

.) You should only be able to purchase endorsements from groups who's position you've been supporting.

If Bush and Kerry had to campaign like this the next President would be Ralph Nader. There'd be a downside as well, but I'll get into that later.

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