Here's the latest example of this behaviour : https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=128113
Little bit of backstory : I read something the other day (in this report : https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=13887) about undo features being "part of [BGA] guidelines for most premium games" now, and thought about how this might be implemented on Ark Nova.
For the most part, undoing in Ark Nova is fairly straightforward. You can undo everything you do until new information is uncovered, for instance by drawing a card from the deck or refilling the river after digging. At that point, the game asks for confirmation and if you proceed, you cannot go back.
However, there is one specific case where the 1st part of an action is conditional on the latter part being legal : the 1 reputation you gain from the upgraded Animals action at power 5 can only be gained if you can play an animal after that.
Usually this doesn't create an issue : you can start the action, gain the reputation, and if you don't have the money to play an animal, if you lack some adjacency or if you simply change your mind, you have to backtrack and choose another action.
This leads us to the bug. If the reputation you gain with Animals II is the 10th or the 13th on the track, you get a card draw, and this card can be drawn from the deck, which cannot be undone. So before drawing the card, the game checks if you have money to play an animal later (since you won't be able to undo the card draw). Usually it does it well, and if you have no playable animal in hand (from lack of money, enclosure or any other reason), you get a "server error" and cannot go further.
However, there is one fringe case where the game is overly careful and prevents a legal action. If you play on commercial harbor and need 3 more money to play your animal, the game won't let you draw a card from the deck, even though you could sell it for 3 money no matter what you draw. Of course you could draw from reputation range, and then it works fine, but in theory you should be able to draw from the deck as well, so it's definitely a bug.
Now for the meta-commentary. This is a very specific scenario that I don't expect to be fixed with high priority. I had to create a custom hot-seat game to create the necessary situation, because I had an intuition that the game wouldn't handle this fringe case well. However, it is very frustrating to get answers like this from developers :
Little bit of backstory : I read something the other day (in this report : https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=13887) about undo features being "part of [BGA] guidelines for most premium games" now, and thought about how this might be implemented on Ark Nova.
For the most part, undoing in Ark Nova is fairly straightforward. You can undo everything you do until new information is uncovered, for instance by drawing a card from the deck or refilling the river after digging. At that point, the game asks for confirmation and if you proceed, you cannot go back.
However, there is one specific case where the 1st part of an action is conditional on the latter part being legal : the 1 reputation you gain from the upgraded Animals action at power 5 can only be gained if you can play an animal after that.
Usually this doesn't create an issue : you can start the action, gain the reputation, and if you don't have the money to play an animal, if you lack some adjacency or if you simply change your mind, you have to backtrack and choose another action.
This leads us to the bug. If the reputation you gain with Animals II is the 10th or the 13th on the track, you get a card draw, and this card can be drawn from the deck, which cannot be undone. So before drawing the card, the game checks if you have money to play an animal later (since you won't be able to undo the card draw). Usually it does it well, and if you have no playable animal in hand (from lack of money, enclosure or any other reason), you get a "server error" and cannot go further.
However, there is one fringe case where the game is overly careful and prevents a legal action. If you play on commercial harbor and need 3 more money to play your animal, the game won't let you draw a card from the deck, even though you could sell it for 3 money no matter what you draw. Of course you could draw from reputation range, and then it works fine, but in theory you should be able to draw from the deck as well, so it's definitely a bug.
Now for the meta-commentary. This is a very specific scenario that I don't expect to be fixed with high priority. I had to create a custom hot-seat game to create the necessary situation, because I had an intuition that the game wouldn't handle this fringe case well. However, it is very frustrating to get answers like this from developers :
This is such a definitve and arrogant answer from a sub 200 Elo player who probably doesn't know the exact rules of the game, and it feels like every bug I file gets the same kind of answer from developers (when they do actually answer). I don't mind explaining and giving more detail about a bug, and I understand that no one can be an expert in every game, but they always start so confrontational and ignorant that it doesn't feel worth it.That's just a generic error code and has nothing to do with undoable actions. Also, you could instead take a card from reputation range.
