I know there is already a thread for this, but I wanted to create my own take on it, made in a more strict format, and as you will see: goddamn this definitely shouldn't be a message in somebody else's thread.
Humankind has many admirable qualities, I definitely more believe in my ability to enjoy this game than I have ever believed in civ6 which has annoyed me on every level, from the smallest details through almost every major mechanic to the broadest concepts of its apparent design philosophy. Besides, I have witnessed rise of many strategy games from Various States of Difficult Launch to glory and acclaim, and I believe Humankind can reach this point as well. Probably more than civ6 ever could, with its very fundamental systems being conductive to enormous micromanagement and complete inability of AI to play them (I still believe that it is technologically impossible at this point to create AI that is both capable of managing this kind of combat system and do it with very short turn processing times).
Still, it has a long way to go, with an enormous balance issue of skyrocketing yields, and a variety of other problems. Devs at https://www.games2gether.com/amplit...humankind-gameplay-2gether?page=4#post-329063 have created a thread to directly write down suggestions on how to improve it. And goddamn did I try to deliver a constructive overview here.
The greatest problem of a game, skyrocketing yields/yield superinflation/snowballing/singularity, I have already founded a separate thread about, and it's largely the same as my post in the aforementioned thread. But I wanted to copy here also a content of another post I made here, of Various Suggestions and Issues. Many of whom were inspired by this very subforum.
INTERFACE ISSUES
1) A lot of people complain on the fact, that cultural rotation of opponent players is very disorientating. You have no idea who Zulus were before, and where are they. To counter this massive UI issue I suggest two things:
a) You could make it easily available to see total "cultural progression" of all players, at any point of the game - for example by hovering over one of their icons on the main screen. It would be so useful.
b) More radical proposal. I think it would make the clarity so much better, but if you have mixed feelings about it, it could be an optional toggle. Make cultures have hybrid names, which would clearly indicate what was the past culture of a present culture. Such as:
Egyptians, then
Greek - Egyptians, then
Franco - Greeks, then
Dutch - Franks, then
Mexican - Dutch, then
Swedish - Mexican
I don't think it would be hard to program and it would massively help solving this huge UI issue.
c) An alternate idea would be to name players consistently after the AI Avatar, but personally I have mixed feelings about it (it could be optional too...)
d) By the way, fame score of each player should be instantly visible under main screen icons already, without the need to hover over the Fame banner.
2) Another UI issue: diplomatic state of the world is extremely unclear, I have no idea who is having what relations with whom.
a) A single Diplomatic Relations screen which displays all cultures relations with each other, and their attitudes to each other, trades etc would be great - civ5 did that.
b) A "diplomatic map mode" - I switch it and I click on cultures and it colors players based on their diplomatic status with a selected culture. EU4 does that.
3) Some sort of ingame statistics comparing players would not only be very fun to many players (I love statistics in games...), but very useful as well, because otherwise you have no idea in what areas of the game you are inferior when compared with other players and how much. I don't know if I have bad or great yield in a given category in the early game, until I reach the Singularity and they skyrocket to infinity by the medieval era, but that's a separate issue I have described in the previous post.
4) Cities need to indicate when there's a food shortage without requiring the player to enter the city in order to uncover this information
5) It would be great if there was some sort of button, available at any point of the game, which heavily highlights borders of either a chosen territory, or all territories.
6) It would be great if peace interface allowed picking cities from a map itself, not just from a list. Additionally, it would be great if there was an indication 'this outpost territory belongs to that city', without having to go out and into the map to check that.
7) Please give a preview of what the yield change would be for a certain infrastructures
8) Please make districts more visible, either in general or by introducing some toggle coloring them (automatically switching on when you wanna build a new one)
9) It would be great if Total Science Output was visible on the main screen, without needing to go into the tech screen, so at every point of the game you may know how significant your changes to science yields are.
10) Minor factions: a separate map mode highlighting them and showing who is dominant over them, as well as a separate list containing all of them and your relations with them.
11) Mid level zoom is terrible. The graphics of Humankind are so beautiful, the world looks so great, and then you zoom out just a bit and it transforms into very ugly and very uninformative grey fog. It should either remain in the 'normal graphics mode' longer, or the entire mid level zoom view should be redesigned into something prettier and more useful.
12) Ingame encyclopedia and tooltips are missing a ton of vital explanations regarding a ton of game mechanics, for example what is a 'victorious city' for the Roman Triumphal Arch, how do you exactly achieve Mars Colony victory, what is exactly Sphere of Influence and what it does etc.
13) It is very unclear in combat when certain units have high ground over others, there should be some system of colors of icons to show that.
14) Similarly, line of sight and range are very unclear.
15) It would be great if there were notification settings allowing me to choose between "Don't even display this to me as those small notifications", "Keep it default" and even "Display it to me as a popup in the middle of a screen"
16) It would be great if there was a toggle allowing me to automatically refuse AI offers for some time, or from some leader, or at the very specific subject.
17) A notification "A player X conquered player Z's city" would be useful, as it is a massive event.
18) Another great map mode would be a Trade map mode, allowing you to browse trade routes between players and what do they exactly bring.
19) It would be great if there was a notification "you can claim wonders" and "another player has claimed a wonder". Also, the button for wonder claiming should be more indicative of "yes this is what are you looking for frantically, this is where you can claim wonder, this is the picture of a pyramid".
20) I forgot about that regarding combat: some indication what units can still shoot/can't shoot anymore but can still move would be very useful.
21) I have no idea where can I see my total faith output, but the entire religion system is so opaque and weird that it wouldn't help me anyway, as I wouldn't know what does it mean to have 500 faith and how does it relate to anything.
22) One of desperately needed UI toggles is "instant army movement", or "fast/very fast army movement". I don't mean the battle map, I mean the campaign map, which is traversed by troops annoyingly slowly when there is a lot of them.
POSSIBLE IMMERSION ENHANCEMENTS
1) I shall include ingame statistics here again, because I want to know how other players are doing and compare them with myself
2) Also, I'd like to know what others achieved - their Deeds, their Wonders, them getting... I'd go even further in this proposal: there should be a way to specifically check what stars did exactly every other player achieve (hover mouse tooltip or separate screen), so I can check their progress!
3) It's extremely minor thing, but 'Hipster' personality trait of AI avatars (choose unpopular civics) is kind of immersion breaking and weird, it should be renamed to something like Rebel, Contrarian, Heretic or whatever, but not a freakin 21st century coffee hipster, this really collides with the grandiosity of the game.
4) Religion names are very non - immersive; it is really strange how they are all named after (mostly) dead ancient cultures through thousands of years, and that they are all just polytheism and shamanism. Excuse me, where is monotheism for example, or whatever Buddhism is? In general I think Certain Other Game's Approach is much more relatable, where religions are named after real life major religions. The entire religion system will get an inevitable expansion anyway, but until that happens just renaming religions would be great to make it feel more real.
5) City names. It is really weird (and boring!) how ancient city names are preserved through millenia, seeing how radically they changed through real history. Of course human player can rename them, but he/she's still stuck in a world when in 21st century all major capitals are named as if he/she was stuck in the ancient Middle East.
In my opinion the system should be randomized, so every time a culture switches there is a chance city names change to a new city name list as well.
6) I'm not sure if it is done already, and to what degree, but it would be great if cultures themselves also influenced the personality of AI avatars, so you can have the feeling of 'god damn my neighbor is Huns, they will ruin me'.
7) In fact, just a little bit of flavor given to cultures would be great. Just a little bit, as there are sixty of them total. Especially some unique diplomatic quotes for their leaders. It would be just a text, but it would make them more characteristic.
8) It's great that we have this dedicated cinematic and screen at the end of the game. They could be more: for example, a replay of a map showing what cultures grabben what territory when. More graphs and charts. An interactive table of deeds and wonders and who achieved them and when.
9) The "IRL" calendar in game is extremely out of sync with how the game actually progresses through next eras, I forgot to note it down but I recall it's literally millenias behind appropriate historical periods. Of course that problem is heavily tied to infinitely bigger balance problem of players approaching technological singularity and blazing through eras very quickly at some point.
10) There are very few and repeating rewards you get from Curiosities. More variety of yields and rewards would be great - such as free units happening more often and being more varied, bonus production for the nearest city, combinations of yields, permanent buffs to units discovering them (such as bonus traits, speed, strength) etc.
11) "Army camp and flag" equivalent makes no sense for naval battles, when it is just some arbitrary part of water.
12) This one may be unfortunately completely impossible to solve at this point, but the downside of very few actual cities on the map (the upside being so much less micromanagement) is that the map feels way smaller than in the other 4x games like this... No idea how to deal with that. Maybe if administrative centres were more visible I'd feel more of an 'ah yes my empire has many cities, with few major capitals' instead of 'my empire has five cities and farms in between'
GENERAL ISSUES WITH GAME MECHANICS (excluding the Great Problem of Yields)
1) Neolithic age is slightly too fast and too luck based. I really like its base concept, and I have no idea how to push it more towards 'strategic choices' area, but it would be great. I had some attempts when AI was getting out of it after like seven turns and I had simply no way to do it until like turn twenty, despite my best efforts. I even had a situation where I couldn't find any influence in curiosities for like thirty turns (while otherwise I'd find it in half of them), and I was greatly delayed in my first outposts.
2) Also, am I the only one who finds animal hunting to be completely unviable strategy in general? It is too dangerous and brings too little.
3) Battle spoils, and especially ransack spoils and city captures spoils should be MUCH greater (do they even exist for city capture?). It is especially jarring in later eras, when as I have mentioned in the previous post, I have 300,000 gold and get like two hundred from a ransack. It should scale with eras.
4) All event rewards, and I mean all of them, should be extremely higher in later eras, because it's really absurd when I have that proverbial 300,000 gold and a dramatic event offers me like five hundred more pieces; it really ruins the narrative.
5) AI should be very willing to exploit me having no armies (if it is even slightly warlike). Currently I was able to spend entire ages with basically no military at all, nobody exploited that fact.
6) AI should also always maintain some significant army if it has a decent empire that can sustain it, it does it sometimes but not consistently - I have steamrolled #2 empire on the map expecting an epic war and getting almost no armed resistance. Otherwise, it should quickly mobilize all its resources to create army as necessary - that too didn't happen.
7) Our opinions may vary on this subject, but I think AI is not agressive and reactive enough in general (Empire difficulty) - it is always an excitement in games like this to face this militarist AI empire which is performing truly massive, relentless conquests against all other players. So far I have encountered many AI - AI wars, but they don't result in anything more than one city sometimes changing hands.
8) City cap should be more lenient in the first two eras of a game, to allow you other strategic approaches beyond 'I have two cities and a lot of territories' - for example going wide and especially an ability to actually conquer some enemy cities in those ages.
9) Stability is very easy to achieve and very predictable, thanks to super easy and powerful luxury resource trade deals. It should be much harder to maintain, especially if you are
10) One thing that would help against runaways would be great (and I mean GREAT not some meager +50% fame) benefits and incentives for smaller players to compete against stronger players in any way.
11) Balance issues (other than Yield Hyperinflation and Technological Singularity): there are many 'dilemmas' in the game which are very unbalanced towards one option.
- There are some cultures which are really weak (especially all Aestethes in the later half of the game, as there is nothing to spend influence on) (India especially breaks my heart because not only it boosts useless yield in the last era, it also boosts religion which is irrelevant by that time).
- Then there are extremely overpowered ones such as: Khmer's Baray (that was the beginning of my own Yield Hyperinflation), Mughal's production trait (instant doubled production in the capital for no effort is crazy in comparision to other Early Modern traits), Turkish Public School (isn't that actually some sort of bug or one zero too much?) etc.
- Many events could use a balance check, as they present fairly obvious 'dilemmas'.
- Some infrastructures are incredibly overpowered in comparision to others at the same cost (my favourite is, unlocked roughly at the same time, "get cumulative +60 production from river tiles" vs for the same cost "+3 gold on city plaza").
- I have said it like three times but I have to repeat it: luxury trade deals are infinitesimely cheap, basically free, for how enormous benefits they offer. They should be both harder to get and less influential.
- People started posting screnshots of early modern? ship Man o War defeating modern submarines, so here's that.
12) Tech tree has way not enough interdependencies, which allows for extreme beeling of techs, allowing on many immersive absurdities (advanced tech without very basic medieval level science) as well as making the balance issues even worse. What am I trying to say, it would be much better if you couldn't go very far into next era without researching almost all techs from the previous era. Although people's opinion may vary here.
13) There is a massive problem with a game, which is not a 'bug' but an unfortunate result of combat system, namely that sieges can go forever - and AI is often indeed stuck in them forever, never retreating. Even when its losing its empire in the same time, and its besieging army is really needed. Nope, let's be stuck in this siege for 100 turns. This is especially problematic because any third party units caught in the siege area can't move, which disabled part of my army forever. Solution: please either AI break sieges after x amount of turns, or make sieges themselves end after like 10 turns because of "starving defenders" or whatever.
14) I have somehow managed to finish the game while unlocking only like 20% of civics dilemmas in the civic tree... This stuff really shouldn't be so random if it's so cool and so important for both mechanics and narrative. In my opinion following civic dilemmas should be unlocked by appropriate technologies, eras, some clear conditions how to always unlock them and when, not a random chance.
15) The game lacks a constant irregular military threat from barbarians, nomads, pirates or whoever raiding major faction territories. Yes I know that minor factions perform that role in theory, but they don't do that in practice, they never come to my games to pillage my stuff. Maybe that occasionally happens, but in this case it is too occasional - imho there should be no point in the game when an empire is allowed to have zero military and prosper, just like in real life.
DIPLOMACY
1) There is no peaceful vassalization proposal/demand, just forced through war, which is kind of strange in a game which actually does have this wonderful mechanic (unlike certain other 4x games). This should definitely be an option when for example
- one empire is *much stronger* than another, which is more afraid of it rather than hateful or whatever (or just loves the larger empire that much to allow it)
- that weaker empire is very afraid of another empire, and seeks protection to ensure its survival
2) There also should be an option to buy off empire Z to declare war against empire Y, a really important tool of rich but 'peaceful' factions.
3) And a demand to force overlord empire to release its vassal or liberate some cities (which are very grateful and love releasing empire, likely to be vassalized)
4) And a way to gift other players with gold, either to hopefully boost them or to sway their opinion slightly, or to sweeten the deal.
5) And a demand for one empire to end war with another empire, or break a relationship, or embargo it.
6) You know, it's more of an expansion idea, but it would be great if there was a mechanic of "League of Nations" or whatever, existing since the industrial era onwards, making the entire international community meet together in one place in one big voting, threatening each other with embargoes, doing international projects etc. I vaguely recall some indie obscure 4x franchise doing stuff like this in one game very well, and then ruining it in its sequel due to flying away from reality, but I'm sure Amplitude studios could do that very well, as long as you try to keep it somewhat realistic!
7) Alliances currently merely allow for allied people to demand each other to join each other's war (and AI often doesn't do that at all). Either alliances should immediately call all its members to war, under the risk of breaking alliance and Traitor badge in case of decline, or AI should actually demand that stuff if the war seems difficult to win otherwise. As it works now, I have crushed rival empire without fighting its two allies, and without it breaking the alliance with them or demanding anything from them.
MINOR FACTIONS
1) Unless I have misunderstood something, there is no way to make another player pack his bags and go away from *my* minor faction - both in terms of direct military agression and rivaling influence. This results in a weird state of limbo lockdown, when there are many minors with maxed influence of several majors, none of them thus being capable of changing the status quo and actually integrating the minor.
2) It would be great if minor factions had some very basic personality depending on their distinctive tiny culture - you know, a small graphic, an icon, a very short musical tune when you click on them...
3) It would be great if minor factions had offered some bonuses as they exist, so you'd actually have a dilemma 'should I assimilate them or keep them alive for their bonuses'. It would be especially great if those bonuses varied - for example few categories of minor factions with their own bonuses.
4) Cost of influencing and assimilating them is infinitesimally small in the second half of the game, they are basically free snack for my 300,000 gold behemoth.
5) It would be cool if minor factions had some actual active interactions such as requests, events, diplomatic incidents, them going to war and small expansion as well etc.
WAR AND PEACE DEALS (OH BOY) (YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY)
Oh boy, is this topic controversial. I don't think the idea to introduce war goals, restricted peace deals etc to 4x genre is a bad one, but I do think the way it is implemented is too strict and hard imposed.
1) It is possible to begin late era war and end it within 5 turns due to quickly overwhelming some enemy cities with units and his war support dropping to zero - even if enemy empire still has a lot of enemy cities and armed forces. This shouldn't be possible, or at least not always enforced by design - did Soviet Union surrender in december 1941? It also increases the balance issues of runaway players completely dominating the game - poor AIs can't resist human blitzkrieg not even because of military inferiority, but sheer speed and exploiting how fast you can collapse their war support.
2) In general, I think it is really bad idea to completely untie war support from the comparative strenght of nation's military, as it leads to absurdities such as above. It should be tied in some way to the remaining military power and industrial capacity etc.
3) In general, I still think the way game artifically limits player from conquering many lands at once is too harsh. It is good for balance that it is not that easy to completely eliminate other player, but it bends into the opposite problem, where it is absurdly hard both from realist and gameplay fun perspective. After all, didn't Persian Empire quickly overwhelm rival empires? What about Alexander, Mongols, world wars, Spanish conquest of Americas, rise of Islam? Wars weren't always carefully negotiated terms, sometimes mass conquest did happen.
4) Ironically, those restrictions made probably for balance reasons... Strike the balance from the opposite direction! As the game has a great problem with runaway empires in general, that can't be matched by anyone else ever once they hit Yield Singularity, it is impossible to quickly rise from shadows and for example do a spectacular comeback, to chase the leader via the conquest of other players. So an idea that (probably) was made to restrict snowballing also makes resisting snowballing much harder. There is this empire that is expontentially snowballing towards superpower, and I cannot do anything to quickly caught up to it, or disable it.
If you are alive after witnessing this Great Wall of Rants, feel free to tear them to shreds and introduce your own!
Humankind has many admirable qualities, I definitely more believe in my ability to enjoy this game than I have ever believed in civ6 which has annoyed me on every level, from the smallest details through almost every major mechanic to the broadest concepts of its apparent design philosophy. Besides, I have witnessed rise of many strategy games from Various States of Difficult Launch to glory and acclaim, and I believe Humankind can reach this point as well. Probably more than civ6 ever could, with its very fundamental systems being conductive to enormous micromanagement and complete inability of AI to play them (I still believe that it is technologically impossible at this point to create AI that is both capable of managing this kind of combat system and do it with very short turn processing times).
Still, it has a long way to go, with an enormous balance issue of skyrocketing yields, and a variety of other problems. Devs at https://www.games2gether.com/amplit...humankind-gameplay-2gether?page=4#post-329063 have created a thread to directly write down suggestions on how to improve it. And goddamn did I try to deliver a constructive overview here.
The greatest problem of a game, skyrocketing yields/yield superinflation/snowballing/singularity, I have already founded a separate thread about, and it's largely the same as my post in the aforementioned thread. But I wanted to copy here also a content of another post I made here, of Various Suggestions and Issues. Many of whom were inspired by this very subforum.
INTERFACE ISSUES
1) A lot of people complain on the fact, that cultural rotation of opponent players is very disorientating. You have no idea who Zulus were before, and where are they. To counter this massive UI issue I suggest two things:
a) You could make it easily available to see total "cultural progression" of all players, at any point of the game - for example by hovering over one of their icons on the main screen. It would be so useful.
b) More radical proposal. I think it would make the clarity so much better, but if you have mixed feelings about it, it could be an optional toggle. Make cultures have hybrid names, which would clearly indicate what was the past culture of a present culture. Such as:
Egyptians, then
Greek - Egyptians, then
Franco - Greeks, then
Dutch - Franks, then
Mexican - Dutch, then
Swedish - Mexican
I don't think it would be hard to program and it would massively help solving this huge UI issue.
c) An alternate idea would be to name players consistently after the AI Avatar, but personally I have mixed feelings about it (it could be optional too...)
d) By the way, fame score of each player should be instantly visible under main screen icons already, without the need to hover over the Fame banner.
2) Another UI issue: diplomatic state of the world is extremely unclear, I have no idea who is having what relations with whom.
a) A single Diplomatic Relations screen which displays all cultures relations with each other, and their attitudes to each other, trades etc would be great - civ5 did that.
b) A "diplomatic map mode" - I switch it and I click on cultures and it colors players based on their diplomatic status with a selected culture. EU4 does that.
3) Some sort of ingame statistics comparing players would not only be very fun to many players (I love statistics in games...), but very useful as well, because otherwise you have no idea in what areas of the game you are inferior when compared with other players and how much. I don't know if I have bad or great yield in a given category in the early game, until I reach the Singularity and they skyrocket to infinity by the medieval era, but that's a separate issue I have described in the previous post.
4) Cities need to indicate when there's a food shortage without requiring the player to enter the city in order to uncover this information
5) It would be great if there was some sort of button, available at any point of the game, which heavily highlights borders of either a chosen territory, or all territories.
6) It would be great if peace interface allowed picking cities from a map itself, not just from a list. Additionally, it would be great if there was an indication 'this outpost territory belongs to that city', without having to go out and into the map to check that.
7) Please give a preview of what the yield change would be for a certain infrastructures
8) Please make districts more visible, either in general or by introducing some toggle coloring them (automatically switching on when you wanna build a new one)
9) It would be great if Total Science Output was visible on the main screen, without needing to go into the tech screen, so at every point of the game you may know how significant your changes to science yields are.
10) Minor factions: a separate map mode highlighting them and showing who is dominant over them, as well as a separate list containing all of them and your relations with them.
11) Mid level zoom is terrible. The graphics of Humankind are so beautiful, the world looks so great, and then you zoom out just a bit and it transforms into very ugly and very uninformative grey fog. It should either remain in the 'normal graphics mode' longer, or the entire mid level zoom view should be redesigned into something prettier and more useful.
12) Ingame encyclopedia and tooltips are missing a ton of vital explanations regarding a ton of game mechanics, for example what is a 'victorious city' for the Roman Triumphal Arch, how do you exactly achieve Mars Colony victory, what is exactly Sphere of Influence and what it does etc.
13) It is very unclear in combat when certain units have high ground over others, there should be some system of colors of icons to show that.
14) Similarly, line of sight and range are very unclear.
15) It would be great if there were notification settings allowing me to choose between "Don't even display this to me as those small notifications", "Keep it default" and even "Display it to me as a popup in the middle of a screen"
16) It would be great if there was a toggle allowing me to automatically refuse AI offers for some time, or from some leader, or at the very specific subject.
17) A notification "A player X conquered player Z's city" would be useful, as it is a massive event.
18) Another great map mode would be a Trade map mode, allowing you to browse trade routes between players and what do they exactly bring.
19) It would be great if there was a notification "you can claim wonders" and "another player has claimed a wonder". Also, the button for wonder claiming should be more indicative of "yes this is what are you looking for frantically, this is where you can claim wonder, this is the picture of a pyramid".
20) I forgot about that regarding combat: some indication what units can still shoot/can't shoot anymore but can still move would be very useful.
21) I have no idea where can I see my total faith output, but the entire religion system is so opaque and weird that it wouldn't help me anyway, as I wouldn't know what does it mean to have 500 faith and how does it relate to anything.
22) One of desperately needed UI toggles is "instant army movement", or "fast/very fast army movement". I don't mean the battle map, I mean the campaign map, which is traversed by troops annoyingly slowly when there is a lot of them.
POSSIBLE IMMERSION ENHANCEMENTS
1) I shall include ingame statistics here again, because I want to know how other players are doing and compare them with myself
2) Also, I'd like to know what others achieved - their Deeds, their Wonders, them getting... I'd go even further in this proposal: there should be a way to specifically check what stars did exactly every other player achieve (hover mouse tooltip or separate screen), so I can check their progress!
3) It's extremely minor thing, but 'Hipster' personality trait of AI avatars (choose unpopular civics) is kind of immersion breaking and weird, it should be renamed to something like Rebel, Contrarian, Heretic or whatever, but not a freakin 21st century coffee hipster, this really collides with the grandiosity of the game.
4) Religion names are very non - immersive; it is really strange how they are all named after (mostly) dead ancient cultures through thousands of years, and that they are all just polytheism and shamanism. Excuse me, where is monotheism for example, or whatever Buddhism is? In general I think Certain Other Game's Approach is much more relatable, where religions are named after real life major religions. The entire religion system will get an inevitable expansion anyway, but until that happens just renaming religions would be great to make it feel more real.
5) City names. It is really weird (and boring!) how ancient city names are preserved through millenia, seeing how radically they changed through real history. Of course human player can rename them, but he/she's still stuck in a world when in 21st century all major capitals are named as if he/she was stuck in the ancient Middle East.
In my opinion the system should be randomized, so every time a culture switches there is a chance city names change to a new city name list as well.
6) I'm not sure if it is done already, and to what degree, but it would be great if cultures themselves also influenced the personality of AI avatars, so you can have the feeling of 'god damn my neighbor is Huns, they will ruin me'.
7) In fact, just a little bit of flavor given to cultures would be great. Just a little bit, as there are sixty of them total. Especially some unique diplomatic quotes for their leaders. It would be just a text, but it would make them more characteristic.
8) It's great that we have this dedicated cinematic and screen at the end of the game. They could be more: for example, a replay of a map showing what cultures grabben what territory when. More graphs and charts. An interactive table of deeds and wonders and who achieved them and when.
9) The "IRL" calendar in game is extremely out of sync with how the game actually progresses through next eras, I forgot to note it down but I recall it's literally millenias behind appropriate historical periods. Of course that problem is heavily tied to infinitely bigger balance problem of players approaching technological singularity and blazing through eras very quickly at some point.
10) There are very few and repeating rewards you get from Curiosities. More variety of yields and rewards would be great - such as free units happening more often and being more varied, bonus production for the nearest city, combinations of yields, permanent buffs to units discovering them (such as bonus traits, speed, strength) etc.
11) "Army camp and flag" equivalent makes no sense for naval battles, when it is just some arbitrary part of water.
12) This one may be unfortunately completely impossible to solve at this point, but the downside of very few actual cities on the map (the upside being so much less micromanagement) is that the map feels way smaller than in the other 4x games like this... No idea how to deal with that. Maybe if administrative centres were more visible I'd feel more of an 'ah yes my empire has many cities, with few major capitals' instead of 'my empire has five cities and farms in between'
GENERAL ISSUES WITH GAME MECHANICS (excluding the Great Problem of Yields)
1) Neolithic age is slightly too fast and too luck based. I really like its base concept, and I have no idea how to push it more towards 'strategic choices' area, but it would be great. I had some attempts when AI was getting out of it after like seven turns and I had simply no way to do it until like turn twenty, despite my best efforts. I even had a situation where I couldn't find any influence in curiosities for like thirty turns (while otherwise I'd find it in half of them), and I was greatly delayed in my first outposts.
2) Also, am I the only one who finds animal hunting to be completely unviable strategy in general? It is too dangerous and brings too little.
3) Battle spoils, and especially ransack spoils and city captures spoils should be MUCH greater (do they even exist for city capture?). It is especially jarring in later eras, when as I have mentioned in the previous post, I have 300,000 gold and get like two hundred from a ransack. It should scale with eras.
4) All event rewards, and I mean all of them, should be extremely higher in later eras, because it's really absurd when I have that proverbial 300,000 gold and a dramatic event offers me like five hundred more pieces; it really ruins the narrative.
5) AI should be very willing to exploit me having no armies (if it is even slightly warlike). Currently I was able to spend entire ages with basically no military at all, nobody exploited that fact.
6) AI should also always maintain some significant army if it has a decent empire that can sustain it, it does it sometimes but not consistently - I have steamrolled #2 empire on the map expecting an epic war and getting almost no armed resistance. Otherwise, it should quickly mobilize all its resources to create army as necessary - that too didn't happen.
7) Our opinions may vary on this subject, but I think AI is not agressive and reactive enough in general (Empire difficulty) - it is always an excitement in games like this to face this militarist AI empire which is performing truly massive, relentless conquests against all other players. So far I have encountered many AI - AI wars, but they don't result in anything more than one city sometimes changing hands.
8) City cap should be more lenient in the first two eras of a game, to allow you other strategic approaches beyond 'I have two cities and a lot of territories' - for example going wide and especially an ability to actually conquer some enemy cities in those ages.
9) Stability is very easy to achieve and very predictable, thanks to super easy and powerful luxury resource trade deals. It should be much harder to maintain, especially if you are
10) One thing that would help against runaways would be great (and I mean GREAT not some meager +50% fame) benefits and incentives for smaller players to compete against stronger players in any way.
11) Balance issues (other than Yield Hyperinflation and Technological Singularity): there are many 'dilemmas' in the game which are very unbalanced towards one option.
- There are some cultures which are really weak (especially all Aestethes in the later half of the game, as there is nothing to spend influence on) (India especially breaks my heart because not only it boosts useless yield in the last era, it also boosts religion which is irrelevant by that time).
- Then there are extremely overpowered ones such as: Khmer's Baray (that was the beginning of my own Yield Hyperinflation), Mughal's production trait (instant doubled production in the capital for no effort is crazy in comparision to other Early Modern traits), Turkish Public School (isn't that actually some sort of bug or one zero too much?) etc.
- Many events could use a balance check, as they present fairly obvious 'dilemmas'.
- Some infrastructures are incredibly overpowered in comparision to others at the same cost (my favourite is, unlocked roughly at the same time, "get cumulative +60 production from river tiles" vs for the same cost "+3 gold on city plaza").
- I have said it like three times but I have to repeat it: luxury trade deals are infinitesimely cheap, basically free, for how enormous benefits they offer. They should be both harder to get and less influential.
- People started posting screnshots of early modern? ship Man o War defeating modern submarines, so here's that.
12) Tech tree has way not enough interdependencies, which allows for extreme beeling of techs, allowing on many immersive absurdities (advanced tech without very basic medieval level science) as well as making the balance issues even worse. What am I trying to say, it would be much better if you couldn't go very far into next era without researching almost all techs from the previous era. Although people's opinion may vary here.
13) There is a massive problem with a game, which is not a 'bug' but an unfortunate result of combat system, namely that sieges can go forever - and AI is often indeed stuck in them forever, never retreating. Even when its losing its empire in the same time, and its besieging army is really needed. Nope, let's be stuck in this siege for 100 turns. This is especially problematic because any third party units caught in the siege area can't move, which disabled part of my army forever. Solution: please either AI break sieges after x amount of turns, or make sieges themselves end after like 10 turns because of "starving defenders" or whatever.
14) I have somehow managed to finish the game while unlocking only like 20% of civics dilemmas in the civic tree... This stuff really shouldn't be so random if it's so cool and so important for both mechanics and narrative. In my opinion following civic dilemmas should be unlocked by appropriate technologies, eras, some clear conditions how to always unlock them and when, not a random chance.
15) The game lacks a constant irregular military threat from barbarians, nomads, pirates or whoever raiding major faction territories. Yes I know that minor factions perform that role in theory, but they don't do that in practice, they never come to my games to pillage my stuff. Maybe that occasionally happens, but in this case it is too occasional - imho there should be no point in the game when an empire is allowed to have zero military and prosper, just like in real life.
DIPLOMACY
1) There is no peaceful vassalization proposal/demand, just forced through war, which is kind of strange in a game which actually does have this wonderful mechanic (unlike certain other 4x games). This should definitely be an option when for example
- one empire is *much stronger* than another, which is more afraid of it rather than hateful or whatever (or just loves the larger empire that much to allow it)
- that weaker empire is very afraid of another empire, and seeks protection to ensure its survival
2) There also should be an option to buy off empire Z to declare war against empire Y, a really important tool of rich but 'peaceful' factions.
3) And a demand to force overlord empire to release its vassal or liberate some cities (which are very grateful and love releasing empire, likely to be vassalized)
4) And a way to gift other players with gold, either to hopefully boost them or to sway their opinion slightly, or to sweeten the deal.
5) And a demand for one empire to end war with another empire, or break a relationship, or embargo it.
6) You know, it's more of an expansion idea, but it would be great if there was a mechanic of "League of Nations" or whatever, existing since the industrial era onwards, making the entire international community meet together in one place in one big voting, threatening each other with embargoes, doing international projects etc. I vaguely recall some indie obscure 4x franchise doing stuff like this in one game very well, and then ruining it in its sequel due to flying away from reality, but I'm sure Amplitude studios could do that very well, as long as you try to keep it somewhat realistic!
7) Alliances currently merely allow for allied people to demand each other to join each other's war (and AI often doesn't do that at all). Either alliances should immediately call all its members to war, under the risk of breaking alliance and Traitor badge in case of decline, or AI should actually demand that stuff if the war seems difficult to win otherwise. As it works now, I have crushed rival empire without fighting its two allies, and without it breaking the alliance with them or demanding anything from them.
MINOR FACTIONS
1) Unless I have misunderstood something, there is no way to make another player pack his bags and go away from *my* minor faction - both in terms of direct military agression and rivaling influence. This results in a weird state of limbo lockdown, when there are many minors with maxed influence of several majors, none of them thus being capable of changing the status quo and actually integrating the minor.
2) It would be great if minor factions had some very basic personality depending on their distinctive tiny culture - you know, a small graphic, an icon, a very short musical tune when you click on them...
3) It would be great if minor factions had offered some bonuses as they exist, so you'd actually have a dilemma 'should I assimilate them or keep them alive for their bonuses'. It would be especially great if those bonuses varied - for example few categories of minor factions with their own bonuses.
4) Cost of influencing and assimilating them is infinitesimally small in the second half of the game, they are basically free snack for my 300,000 gold behemoth.
5) It would be cool if minor factions had some actual active interactions such as requests, events, diplomatic incidents, them going to war and small expansion as well etc.
WAR AND PEACE DEALS (OH BOY) (YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY)
Oh boy, is this topic controversial. I don't think the idea to introduce war goals, restricted peace deals etc to 4x genre is a bad one, but I do think the way it is implemented is too strict and hard imposed.
1) It is possible to begin late era war and end it within 5 turns due to quickly overwhelming some enemy cities with units and his war support dropping to zero - even if enemy empire still has a lot of enemy cities and armed forces. This shouldn't be possible, or at least not always enforced by design - did Soviet Union surrender in december 1941? It also increases the balance issues of runaway players completely dominating the game - poor AIs can't resist human blitzkrieg not even because of military inferiority, but sheer speed and exploiting how fast you can collapse their war support.
2) In general, I think it is really bad idea to completely untie war support from the comparative strenght of nation's military, as it leads to absurdities such as above. It should be tied in some way to the remaining military power and industrial capacity etc.
3) In general, I still think the way game artifically limits player from conquering many lands at once is too harsh. It is good for balance that it is not that easy to completely eliminate other player, but it bends into the opposite problem, where it is absurdly hard both from realist and gameplay fun perspective. After all, didn't Persian Empire quickly overwhelm rival empires? What about Alexander, Mongols, world wars, Spanish conquest of Americas, rise of Islam? Wars weren't always carefully negotiated terms, sometimes mass conquest did happen.
4) Ironically, those restrictions made probably for balance reasons... Strike the balance from the opposite direction! As the game has a great problem with runaway empires in general, that can't be matched by anyone else ever once they hit Yield Singularity, it is impossible to quickly rise from shadows and for example do a spectacular comeback, to chase the leader via the conquest of other players. So an idea that (probably) was made to restrict snowballing also makes resisting snowballing much harder. There is this empire that is expontentially snowballing towards superpower, and I cannot do anything to quickly caught up to it, or disable it.
If you are alive after witnessing this Great Wall of Rants, feel free to tear them to shreds and introduce your own!
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With regards to point 1, I was thinking about this earlier. I have come up with an idea which I suspect may not be very popular, but here it goes anyway:
Having no minimap for quick navigation is bad and makes navigating an unnecessary chore...but the absence of a map marking system for planning your own lands (HK only nows markers for foreign territory) is cutting deeply in the fun I have with district puzzling in HK compared to Civ6 
