Recent content by PhilBowles

Very true ... but this is the player's goal. The victory star system makes this more overt than it needs to be, but it's a structural issue with the game rather than just something that can be fixed by tweaking the victory conditions. The entire structure of the gameplay is based around building...

Some of this may be keyed to difficulty level, as I've only played an 'intro game' and have been told that's at Town difficulty (still can't find difficulty level in settings), but my impressions are certainly not favourable. On the plus side, the mistakes it makes tend to be mistakes Civ AIs...

Indeed, that's a problem I had with Civ VI and was vocal about when still on that forum. Humankind seems to be in very much the same mould, but with even fewer constraints limiting your ability to do whatever you want. At least mechanically - I can't speak authoritatively about how difficulty...

Pathing in this game seems truly miserable in general. I've lost count of the number of 'lost at sea' warnings (and occasional losses) I had because a unit that was supposed to be marching overland decided to go for a swim - since 'lost at sea' is an early era only thing, it seems the AI isn't...

Yes, that's one issue I have with it. The game is very transparently just bucket-filling - Civ 6 fell into the same trap for at least its early development. From what I know of the update history of past Amplitude games, this is not likely to change with expansions as this sort of barebones...

Thanks. I specifically tried looking for the difficulty when I carried on the session and still couldn't see it. I think I want to finish this as a first playthrough rather than starting again on a higher difficulty, but it will definitely be welcome if systems like combat actually play more of...

As a combatant? I've hit early modern and am just starting to see actual AI armies - one of which I've lost to twice as a pair of horse archer stacks that sit so close to one another on the coast that I can't deploy fully to take advantage of my more advanced units. The AI placement there is...

This is where it falls, to me. As I've said elsewhere, and below, there's a spectrum between strategic depth ("How will what I do improve/hamper my chances of success?") and sandbox ("What options do I have that let me play the way I want and still be successful?") and people often conflate the...

No one could ever have accused Amplitude of making games too hard to be playable. A big thing happened after the early 2000s that gave the lie to this perspective: XCOM. A game that actively sought to try and capture the difficulty of its predecessors (the first of which was a game so...

Played 100 turns, hitting medieval at exactly turn 100. The good: - The game is an almost straight Civ clone; the initial turns are indistinguishable from a Civ game. That scores low points for originality, but it does allow them to iterate on what's already there rather than just produce a...

The civs were entirely random - perhaps there are just too many European civs in the game? Maybe having Macedon and Greece as separate civs wasn't a great plan?

Weird game. Seemed to cause a bug - the settler moved back and forth but the warriors seemed unable to, even to protect the settler. Something similar must have been going on elsewhere on the map - two players died on the same turn a few turns in (Pericles being one of them when I grabbed his...

Ah the joys of TSL on a huge Earth map.

I've never played them but RPS routinely mentions them in their best games of all time and did a few articles on Six Ages after it released. The latter seems to be quite the achievement - not often a sequel comes along years later to a much-loved (if cult) classic widely hailed as one of the...

Haven't played any of the optional game modes other than a brief trial of randomised techs, but barbarians and the monopolies mode in the last update sound very much the sort of thing I'd want from game modes - added ways to explore the main game rather than the previous scenario-like gimmicks...