For some reason when i goto the circus and its the right place at the right time there appears to be no one at the tent and the circus has moved on. Is this a bug or am i doing something wrong? < I went to ironfist castle got nicolai and he leaves then i try to goto the circus and the circus is never there or the other places either >

These have always worked for me - Bootleg Bay seems to be the easiest to access.
[Circus dates]: (They stay for only a month)
April - Blackshire
December - Bootleg Bay
August - Mire of the Damned
(the circus is where prince Nicolai can be found after he skips out)

Where and when are you looking, exactly?
I can't remember how exactly it happens, and I can't find anything useful on the internet, but there is a bug with the circus that can prevent you from entering the tents even if the circus is at that location. I think this typically happens when the circus is in Bootleg Bay for the first time. If you can't enter the tents at any of the three locations, try waiting until it moves on, then visit again at its new location.
Are you playing with Greyface's patch? It claims to fix the circus bug (though it fixes a lot of other issues, as well). I don't know if it works properly for a game in progress, though.

There is no circus bug I am aware of for the 1.2 or GoG versions. Lou's post gives the scheduled times, so you should find Nicolai at the correct time and place for the next visit of the circus.

I encountered said bug, but Greyface's patch did indeed fix it, id didn't matter I had a game in progress.

I experinced the bug even with the Greyface patch. What I had to do was wait for the circus to come to Bootleg Bay, that was the only place they would show up.

I can confirm that even with Greyface's patch, the circus is not present at Bootleg bay in the first December with the Prince Nicolai quest active, as I am there at this moment, fighting respawned cannibals. Which leads me to wonder if the bug is connected with the respawning of creatures in some way. Whatever the reason, there is no circus in Bootleg Bay this month. I remember having this bug in my first play of the game and being quite maddened by it. I don't know why some people would experience it and others not, but them's the breaks. I will pop into Blackshire in April and see if the circus shows up there. Otherwise it will be a matter of waiting a year for the circus to return. I hope Nicolai is having fun.

Addendum: In April, the circus was open in Blackshire and Nicolai was there. I'm wondering if you need to "lose" the Prince before December in order for the circus to show
up at Bootleg Bay the first time. I may try that with my next party.

-- Mal

Doesn't the GOG version of M&M VI include the Greyface patches anyway?

I can confirm that the circus bug is present in the vanilla Gog.com version, even without having talked to Prince Nicholai and starting the quest to find him.

The circus is not present in Bootleg Bay on the first December of the game. It doesn't say "The circus has moved on; no one is here." It says "Nothing here" when you click on the tents. That means that it *is* there, but for some reason the game won't register it as anything but "Nothing here", as though the tent wasn't even an interactable object.

I don't use the Grayface patch because it won't loop my game music.

you can loop the music with the grayface patch. In the file where you see a lot of things = 1 or 0, there is one for looping mp3, which if set to 0 makes it loop infinitely.

For some reason Circus was active in April at Bootleg Bay
(even if all sources I saw said it should be active at December - March)

My solution was:
Placing Lloyd's Beacons at each Circus location and check those each month.