Thank god I found this post - I can confirm this is indeed happening. I'm a new player and was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. By the way this is imo something that needs addressing ASAP or I'm afraid there will be lots of newcomers dropping the game.

Good to hear they know about this. I wonder how something so big could be overlooked. On my end I lost maybe half an hour of gameplay before heading to the forums (I played a custom game before that, so I realized 0 pop was weird). On the other end I can't imagine the disappointment of a new player who simply thought the campaign would be a good starting point (seems very likely to me)

I'm curious - How can you tell the devs are aware of it? Are you in contact with some of them or is there some sort of bug centralization site/post I'm not aware of? I saw a bunch of individual bug reports but not for this one in particular. What's the best place to look for this kind of information?

Too bad you had to go that far. I feel for you but at least you did get blocked at some point rather than letting you go indefinitely with crap pop.

I really wish this gets fixed soon as I'd like to play some sort of storyline rather than custom games.