Leave a Review Catan Universe
Awesome Game, Terrible Implementation
I’ve been playing this game for 6 months now. I loved the board game and I thought it would be fun to play and get better. I’ve played a couple online custom matches with friends but I mostly play offline.
Initially when I started playing I thought it was great. Couple bugs (when clicking on the info button the messages often don’t fit the screen) but playable.
After I paid the $5 to play unlimited the issues with the game started to appear:
1) The AI refuses to trade most games. In a full game with four people the total trades is less than five.
2) The dice roll after a seven is rolled is nearly guaranteed to be the number the robber was placed on. I’ve actually seen people use this as a strategy.
3) The dice distribution is so bad it’s disgusting. I just finished a game where a four was rolled more than an eight, nine, and ten. I don’t expect a perfect distribution, but there are far too many issues with this (as can be seen by all the other reviews). I even went into the discord group to make suggestions about changing the dice algorithm and was pointed to the “card stack” mode (I tried this already), which is somehow just as bad. The developers actually want this uneven distribution. It apparently allows for a more random experience, but it’s not like the actual game at all.
Overall, I enjoyed the game for a couple weeks just enough to pay the $5 for it and now despise it so much I’m writing a critical review.Show lessCatanHater
Awesome game but frozen or disconnected from time to time
Love the game very much. However, I wish that it wasn’t freezing all the time. I had to close off and re-open the app to unfreeze. Hope devs can rectify this issue. Otherwise, i could have given this game a 5/5. I play on ipad pro 2021. Not sure if the game doesn’t work well on mac. My friends are playing on Windows and haven’t heard that they are having any issue so far.
Furthermore, there is not a lot of benefit getting the development coins above level 3. It doesn’t do much except for keeping me from losing my metropolis which is only 2 victory points. Please enlighten me if my understanding around the development coins is not correct.
CheersShow lessjo sexton
Fun, but buggy
I love Catan, and the ability to play so many game modes and expansions in this app is fantastic. But the game bugs out a lot of the time.
I tried to purchase the premium version, but it was too bugged to play, so i asked for a return.
Sometimes the game keeps me from building some things, or spending certain resources. The 12hour token regen to be able to play a game makes sense for the free version, but when I have a token to use, i usually have to close the app a few times before it will actually let me start a game with it. Often times it just resets the timer when i open the app, which is frustrating. The Barbarian function in cities and knights imposes inconsistent city destruction rules - taking out defended cities and leaving undefended ones. Unlike the boardgame, the app allows NPCs to build settlements at owned intersections. And even the “balanced” dice mode leads to drastic uneven roll distributions. It would be nice to have a more accessible list of special rules for the special game modes. The cities and knights additional cards from dice rolls is also inconsistent. The additional rules are tough to find, and seem to be missing some observed mechanics.Show lessLacticAcidLoser
Amazing game, app could use a little work
Catan is obviously an incredible game, and I have a ton of fun playing it in this app. Really great being able to play with friends, being able to send messages back and forth etc.
The reason I am not giving this 5 stars is because the app itself could use a little bit of work. For example, I am on an iPhone XR. A lot of times when I click to see info on something, the text window that pops up has a portion off screen, which makes it unreadable. It is quite frustrating sometimes when I need to be able to read something and can’t. I payed the 5 dollars for the app, and I would be willing to bet many other people have too. Some of that money should be used to pay a programmer to fix these issues. It would not be difficult and I would be more than happy to fix it for free just to get it done.
Other than that, I’m very happy with the purchase.Show lessAlexisdeadstill
Nice breadth of options but questionable design
Overall it’s not terrible for a free app but Catan Classic is far better for $5. My biggest issue here is that the dice rolls are very obviously not random. You might think this is just a sore loser but I’m serious, if you play cities and knights but expand victory points to 21 play repeatedly and you’ll agree within 3 games. I like the randomness of dice rolls so I’m hesitant to use the stacked deck of numbers but it’s a must for this app. One of the apps work arounds for not making this skewness in rolled numbers so obvious is by timing your numbers for when they’re under a robber so you won’t get resources but if you check the stats it’ll look closer to even in rolls than it really is. The bots also rob at random, I’ve been in last in a 6 person game with bots that are at 8-12 VPs while I’m still at 4 yet they’ll place the robber on a tile that only I’m on and steal from me. Alternatively, I’ve been a point away from winning ahead of the closest bot by 5 points and they’ll steal from a bot that is no where near winning. I wish they’d program the bots to just stealing from the current leaderShow lessHdsfjokvfdhjjMe
Obviously rigged
When playing the AI (especially of “Master” difficulty) it just happens to be that the robber is insanely lucky to be on your best resource for the whole game. Try to buy 1,2,3 development cards to get a knight to move it? They will all just happen to be road buildings, monopolies, victory points. When you finally get a knight, within 2 more turns a 7 is guaranteed to be rolled so that the AI can put the robber right back on your resource. Then a 7 will not be rolled for probably 25 turns as long as you dont play another knight. But once you play a knight to move the robber off, its guaranteed to be back on in only a couple turns. Also if you have 8 resources there are very high odds of AI rolling 7. Im pretty sure catan just cant come up with an AI that is actually good enough to beat a skilled human so in order to make it “hard” they need to adjust the luck of the game.
What is worse than this though is when your resources magically “disappear” from your hand. Several times when I get robbed by the AI i have seen the resource that the AI took from my hand disappear and then about 1 second later another resource just disappears from your hand too (no 7 rolled or knight played). No explanation for that. You could at least do a better job at hiding the fact that the game is rigged. 👎
Also when playing multiplayer 90% of the time a 7 is rolled in the first 2 turns and then not rolled again for a long time. Not saying its rigged but just very annoying.Show lessmcresh1
Fun but has some fundamental flaws
I wanted to learn how to play this game before buying the real board game. For that purpose it did it’s job. However, there are some flaws in this game that make it not fun to play at all. There is definitely a problem with AI trading. I had games where I was middle of the pack and I kept only getting 1 or 2 resources ( because of odd dice rolling but I’ll get to that late) AI will not trade with you even if they have excess resources and even if you offer ridiculous abundance of every resources. You have to rely solely on the 4:1 trade ratio unless of course you get robbed which happens to me almost every single time I have 8 resources. Which brings me to my next point. The dice rolling is so odd in this game. Over the course of my last 4 games I payed closer attention and noticed that 2-3 numbers which have statically low chances of getting rolled get rolled significantly more by 3-4x the amount of other rolls ? Some times that happens in real life too but not every game? During the game I’m thinking okay it’s not a big deal I’ll just have to use the 4:1 trade. Nope, think again, most times I try to do that I just get robbed. So now I have no resources and I’m just in a perpetual state of AI not trading me and getting robbed. Now that I know how to play I will just play with friends, the way this AI is designed make it not fun to play.Show lessplzfixyourapp123
lovely game, but i hate how it penalises my ELO whenever the game bugs.
Really nice game to play and I’ve purchased a few expansions, however it is full of bugs. I’ve had 2-3 games crash midway where it states “rejoining game” and then “all players have left and the game is closed”. After which my own elo is penalised and deducted just because the game itself has crashed??? it had nothing to do with my wifi (it’s always full bars when this happens) and I did not click out of the game at all. please fix this because i feel it is very unfair.Show lesspotatoMonsta
Hope you change the developer to other
Log in process looks like really random. Mine works fine but one of my family members can’t login. Tried tons of times to change password. Even we typed the new password inly one time, but it shows ‘typed wrong three times and blocked’ We spent an hour to figure out but still can’t login. I was exciting to play with all my family members together during this pandemic, but… I really exhausted just to do logging in. Now I’m facing all family members look disappointed.
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Dear owner of the Catan app, I’m seriously recommend you to switch the company who developed the app to other company. As I know, the Catan Universe first appeared in 2017, but the app never ever worked smoothly so far. And still have the same issue during the most important process - on boarding process. I bet you are really losing tons of potential gamers because of the very poor/non-reliable on-boarding process. No improvement for 4 years? Seriously?
I just bought/played Monopoly app. The on-boarding process was smooth and even register/login doesn’t require at all to play with friends. Hope you learn something from it.
I love the Catan game itself but I would avoid any apps that the developer created. Really bad company.
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Also, regarding the dice roll. Yes, as many people said, I also see it’s actually not random. The dices are controlled by a certain rule.Show lessXoundStudio
Grata game but
Timing out.
Sometimes you’re just concentrating on playing and you get timed out. Was about to win twice and I’ve been kicked out. You should give us a notification saying are you here with another 15 sec timer on it. So frustrating!Gudders
