I had my first experience playing the game last night with 2 other friends and i must say it was a very mixed experience..

Firstly, we really loved the game... when it worked...

However, we experienced multiple issues.

1. We had troubles getting into multiplayer for 5 mins or so. The error was something like "logging into multiplayer services unavailable"

2. After beginning a game that I hosted, my 2 friends went to a black screen and the were not loaded into the game. Eventually I loaded in to an instant victory because they dropped.

3. In the multiplayer games that did work, in both of these games, one of each of my friends were inconspicuously replaced with an AI at some point in the game. They weren't alerted or anything, they just realised that random buildings were being made without their input, and eventually realised that they couldn't control anything, and an AI was instead controlling everything.

Has this game always been like this? Would really love to play it, but at the moment these issues make it unplayable.