Ape Apps

My Colony v0.97.0
Premium purchased.
Platform: iPhone 7 Plus - OS 12.4.1

Because of the issue of super-slow colony loading that I described in another thread, I thought I better back up all my colonies. I was then going to bring the slow-loading region colony onto the desktop and see if it loaded slow there as well.

Only, the save and backup feature isn't working. I've tried every single one of my colonies, large and small, one-city and regions, and the app freezes when trying to save. I closed and restarted My Colony. Restarted the iPhone. Tried it while connected to the internet and when now. No matter what I did the app would freeze and when I went to the files area of my iPhone the backup file was not there.

In previous versions I've had no issues with saving colonies. I think the last one I saved a backup was about 3 months ago. Sorry that I can't narrow down the versions further than that.

Is anyone else having a saving problem on mobile?

My Colony v0.97.0
Premium purchased.
Platform: iPhone 7 Plus - OS 12.4.1
Render Colonists: OFF
Low Res Mode: ON
Multithreaded Pathfinding: Have tried on and off. No difference.
There are a few other syncing and saving options I've toggled on and off, but with no change in the issue described below.

Since I've had limited internet access this summer, I've been building offline regional colonies. I'm doing this post with information from memory as trying to get into the two bigger regions I've developed has become a nightmare, as described below.

Colony: Regional, with 8 regional cities (the other regional colony I think has 9). Approximately 52,000 colonists. The last time I was in the colony I tried to find a listing of how many buildings were across all the cities, but I could not find the statistics for such things.

The issue is getting INTO the colony.

When I start the game and choose this particular regional colony, it takes a long time for the region to load. When I say a long time, I mean 2 1/2 hours or more. It will remain in the loading and syncing data screens spinning and spinning.

If I go outside the app to answer a phone call, text, or check another app, then the app will crash and I have to start all over again. So, to start my region I have resorted to setting it to start loading before I go to bed, and if I'm lucky, it will have loaded by the time I wake up.

But then comes another issue:
Region finally loads and I'm in the regional overview. The moment I go into one of the regional cities there will be another app crash. If I'm lucky, the regional city will try to load, error out, and I will be thrown back to the regional overview. If I'm unlucky then the app crashes and I have to start the entire process all over again.

Once I get into a regional city I do not experience any game lag. I can then hop between regional cities just fine once I get past the loading cycles described above.

I can then play, build and increase populations just fine, until...

...once I get into the game and play, if I'm outside the game for around an hour the game reloads and then I'm into the loading cycle above, trying to get back into the region. When I'm at work it's impossible to log into the iPhone and go into the game to make sure it stays active and doesn't shut down at least once an hour (yes, I know this is a function of the iPhone to save resources, but just describes what a time-suck it is just to keep the game GOING even once I'm finally into a region).

Trying to get into a region and STAY in the region is a huge issue that has made me not play now in a month. I just don't have the time. Not to mention I don't want, need, or like the frustration.

The one good thing is that you seem to have fixed the regional city corruption problem I had before. So, none of these crashes have corrupted any cities or regions.

This issue has persisted for about 4 months (at least, that's how long I've had big region colonies). If I remember correctly, the huge loading time issue starts becoming a big problem once over around 4-5 regional cities. I do not recall if it related to population size on the two regional colonies. I'll try to keep that mind as I work on new colonies to see where the loading slowdown occurs.

I'm about to start a new colony (I'm thinking a medium regular colony and not a region. Although I LOVE regions because I can organize classifications of resources and buildings) because I enjoy the game, but it would really be nice to continue development on the region I've spent so much time developing.

Just wanted to let you know that the update before this fixed a lot of the saving and corruption issues I'd been struggling with for months and months. Yay!

This new update seems to take a lot longer to start up than previously. Getting into a region, or a regional city can sometimes take 5 to 10 minutes to open. Sometimes trying to get into a regional city will throw me back to the regional overview, but thank goodness this has not resulted in a corrupted city like it did two versions before.

Despite the long loading time, it's fun to play My Colony again. Thank you for fixing so many of the saving and city file corruption issues.

Looks like you are having the same issue I reported here: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=25591

No answers yet. I haven't found a way to recover a corrupted regional city.

Looks like no Region bug fixes this time? Understandable with the holiday season now upon us. So far my Mac Region is doing great, with no hanging saves or corrupted Region cities. Still having several big problems with the iOS version with both Region and single city hanging saves and corruption.

Over the last 5 days I've been trying out Regions on the Mac platform. I have the save frequency set to 'normal.' So far I have not had a corrupted city within the region. However, the corrupting of Regional Cities on iOS is continuing.

Have had another regional city corruption. But, this time it wasn't corrupted after a hanging save (although hanging saves are still happening).

Steps:

In one regional city.
Choose to move to the regional map.
See the game save the current city.
Successfully arrive at the regional map.
Tried to go back into the same regional city.
City is corrupted and won't allow me in.

As a side note, when starting this new region, whenever I could successfully get in and out of the three regional cities I would go back to the main screen and then do an export save into the folder of my iPhone. I had hoped that if I did this that I could then reload a saved export file and recover all the cities of the region, losing only the very latest upgrades of the last session played.

But, that did not happen. After the regional city corruption I went to "Game Data" and then "Restore a Game File". Choose the regional colony and loaded it into the game.

However, the same regional city was still corrupted. Even though I had tested it before doing the "Backup Game File".

Question is, when I came out of the regional city to find it corrupted, did that automatic save somehow to the same place on my iphone, thereby replacing the good file with the file with a corrupted city?

I tried using "Restore a Recovery File" but apparently the "Backup Game File" option does not create a .mcb file. At least, I could not find a .mcb file anywhere on my iPhone.

This is so frustrating. Basically two days of regional city building down the tubes.

Hate to say this, but this problem is still happening even in the new update. Just had a second instance occur.

I am having this same issue. When I reload the game after quitting, it resets the research and I have to buy everything over again. Even though I have buildings and such that could not be there if I hadn't bought the research.

I'll try to keep a closer eye on what I'm doing when this happens. See if there are any commonalities.

bastecklein said:So does this only ever happen on auto saves? Never when you choose to save manually?

I should clarify. Yes, it will hang RARELY when saving manually. However, if it does hang, then there is a high likelihood that the region city I was in will then be corrupted.

I've had saves hang when manually saving, but it's rare.

By the way, I have compression turned off. Have auto saving turned off, but it's still sometimes auto saving. These auto saves will then hang and freeze the app at least half the time (if not more). The dialog box also says that it's compressing the file (not sure if it actually is or if the text box that pops up is saying this in error). Had yet another region city corrupted today. So, I've stopped playing with Regions.

I've switched to offline regular cities, large size. I'm still getting hanging saves, but so far no city corruptions. However, I am getting a problem where after a hanging save that the game reverts to an earlier save point. And sometimes it isn't at the last manual save point. One time I did several manual saves, then had a hanging save. When force closed the app, restarted the app and reloaded the city, I found that I had lost several hours worth of progress during which I'd done those several saves.

Just all around strange and annoying save problems.

Platform: Apple iPhone 7 Plus
My Colony Version: Build 0.73.0

Started a new offline colony with the new October 4th build to see if it was still an issue. And it is.

I've had this same problem over the last several versions. Basically, saves are hanging and then corrupting the game file. I've lost so many colonies to this, so many that the game isn't all that fun anymore.

NOTE: I've had this happen before with regular maps, but I didn't save any of the specific information from the splash screens. So, the below are details on what is happening with the new Regions feature in Offline Mode.

Steps:

Start new Regional colony. Have game engine save options set to "Rarely."

Start a new Region City on the Region map. Play in the new region city. Regularly manually save. Save works fine and does not hang.

The "Rarely" auto save comes. Save hangs and will not complete, no matter how long I allow My Colony to remain open.

Close My Colony manually by going to the iphone desktop, then 'sliding' it closed.

Try to open colony. Regional colony map showing all the regional cities opens fine.

Try to get back into the Region city that I was working in when the autosave hung up.

Splash page says:
Syncing Data (sometimes it sits at this stage for quite some time)
Decompressing Data
Restoring Data

And then it defaults back to the Regional map. I can do this over and over, and the region city will not open. I cannot get back into it, yet the game is showing the production of supplies coming from that city just fine.

Even worse, one by one the region cities on my map are succumbing to this. On the main colony I'm currently playing I have 2 regions I can't get into, including the area I've designated for a bunch of government buildings that took a lot of resources to build and upgrade. One Region Colony I just deleted in frustration because all the regions were falling like dominoes.

I also tried:

Setting engine settings to never save. However, I've found that the game still tries to save itself once in a while, and yes, the above corruption happens. I just had this happen with a Regional city of a brand new colony that was started just this morning. So, out of the 3 regional cities I started, one of them is already corrupted and I cannot get into.

Just for kicks I set the engine settings to save "often." it worked for a few hours, and then wham. Corrupted region cities.

This is beyond frustrating. Why play if the cities just become corrupted? It's literally a waste of time to play.

Please fix! I really enjoy this game.

Thank you for continuing the great updates to this game! I'm having so much fun with the new region feature. My organizational OCD self is just LOVING it. :D

Uranium is one of my problem areas. There are no deposits on the land to harvest, so the uranium bots are useless. I built a LOT of the black market bazaars but they produce it very slowly. The uranium refinery does not produce it, it only refines and takes what you have and basically doubles it. Which leaves buying it in the marketplace (I have yet to see any posted for sale) or buy it off the black market at steadily increasing prices.

Is there another way to obtain Uranium that I am missing?

I really hope this isn’t the end of active development on this game. I just found it and bought premium. I’ve really been enjoying it!