Closed Beta Feedback Thread

Bug report: Not sure how or why, but this has happened in every OpenDev as well, but the Combat Preview Overlay that you get on hover can sometimes get stuck permanently on.

Edit: Closing the game and reloading the save got rid of it this time, whereas it didn't in previous OpenDevs.

Feedback: I like that closing the game opens a feedback window, so that you don't necessarily need to *complete* a full game just to offer feedback.

Edit: more bug reports

Bug report: Stability tooltip in City screen says "Assigning people here will increase Stability" but you can't assign people there anymore.

Bug report: Reloading a save assigns the Streamer skins over the AI Avatars, even if the standard Avatars were chosen during game creation.

Edit: even more bug reports

Bug report: Population would grow in outpost but it's at cap. Notification says "population fell to -1 due to lack of food" or something similar.

Edit: Nevermind, the issue isn't the notification, it's that the population cap isn't a cap at all. Once the population goes past the cap, it kills my food generation and I lose a pop the turn afterward. I assume this is purposely implemented this way?

Edit: moar bug reportssssss

"Bug" report: Strained stability tooltip in City screen says "Positive and negative events equally likely [to] occur". The "to" is missing.
 
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I've played the first 60 turns so far and saw some interesting changes:
-Civics now also have an influence cost so this makes your choices with influence more important
-On this point, it costs influence to expand your territories with extractors and harbors instead of turns now, which I like a lot
-Looks like they added the "emblematic" wreath around your culture's quarter too, which helps with visibility for it like the unit
-Also the Huns really are AWESOME to play, just FYI

More feedback/noticing stuff after more turns
 
Feedback: When going to Cancel construction, it says "Are you sure you want to cancel it?" and the options are "Cancel" and "Ok". "Cancel" cancels the cancellation, bringing you back to the city screen. "Ok" goes through with the cancellation.

This...well. I think you can see the problem here.
 
Decreasing the number of autosave files in the game options doesn't seem to work.
 
Unfortunately, cannot give feedback. When I go to startup the closed beta I get an error message saying I should go to https://support.codefusion.technology/hk_80a92q3/?e=88500006&l=english. This website says "Currently your game purchase cannot be re-validated successfully, please wait 24 hours and try again". Could you please help us? This was also posted by others in games2gether.
 
Feedback: Seems the AI is far more competent now! They may also have been given bigger boosts too, since I am playing on max difficulty and I am quite shocked at how quickly they progress...

However, they do still seem to not know the difference between fighting to kill units and fighting to force a retreat. Given that this is a difficult distinction I don't have high expectations, so no complaints here.
 
I had a very strange battle, possibly a bug: my one spearman (20 strength) fought an enemy scout (15 strength). Every round I was dealing more damage and I expected a victory after the third round, but instead I got defeat message as soon as the third round attack ended. I could not believe it and reloaded the turn. Again a manual battle, rng was even more favourable to me, but again I got defeat message, although my spearman had more health left than the max possible damage he could receive. Another reload, this time I chose auto resolve and this time it was a convincing victory, as expected.

Another possible bug: I wasn’t offered to pick the Neolithic bonus despite getting all three stars.

Also, when exiting the game, Steam shows that the game is still running, I have to close Steam to terminate the session.
 
I had a very strange battle, possibly a bug: my one spearman (20 strength) fought an enemy scout (15 strength). Every round I was dealing more damage and I expected a victory after the third round, but instead I got defeat message as soon as the third round attack ended. I could not believe it and reloaded the turn. Again a manual battle, rng was even more favourable to me, but again I got defeat message, although my spearman had more health left than the max possible damage he could receive. Another reload, this time I chose auto resolve and this time it was a convincing victory, as expected.
Did you actually kill the Scout in the manual battles? If you were the attacker then you needed to either kill the enemy or capture their Flag to achieve Victory.

Another possible bug: I wasn’t offered to pick the Neolithic bonus despite getting all three stars.
Was just about to report this one.

Bug report: Wild Companions event seemed to trigger off of another player doing something. The camera focused on some unexplored part of the map, and I certainly didn't fight any beast like the event claims. Also, both event choices have identical text and name, yet different effects.
 
Did you actually kill the Scout in the manual battles? If you were the attacker then you needed to either kill the enemy or capture their Flag to achieve Victory.
Both times the scout retreated to sit on their flag, never counterattacking, which was sensible, otherwise it would just suicide faster, and after the third round battle I was expecting either victory or hold on until the next turn, but the fighting animation did not even complete, units faded, and defeat message showed up, claiming my 100% loss with the scout probably surviving? Not very possible, the ground was flat without any obstacles, and half health spearman attacked a scout that was barely alive.

Bug report: Wild Companions event seemed to trigger off of another player doing something. The camera focused on some unexplored part of the map, and I certainly didn't fight any beast like the event claims. Also, both event choices have identical text and name, yet different effects.
I had this as well.
 
Feedback: It is very frustrating to have popups occur at the beginning of the turn, when I am rushing to move my units before my opponents do...
 
Ok so, finished my first full 200 turns. In addition to the feedback above:
-Era transitions vs tech pacing are still wonky. Especially RE: some goals like Militarist. My current run was Zhou -> Huns -> Mongols -> Ming -> Persians. I could easily fulfill all of the militarist stars (for example) within a turn or two because of how massive battles can get even rather early. Of course, you can't really get expansionist stars as the Mongols or Huns since you can't attach outposts to cities, so perhaps by design that's how it is intended for them BUT I always felt like I could never generate enough research. I was in the industrial age and had just researched Feudalism. Unless you play a Scientist culture at least once, it feels like your tech progression is doomed for a bit.
-Large battles can be hugely important. Winning two big battles in a single turn not only smacks your opponent with a whopping -16 war support, but mopping up scattered single units/forcing retreats can easily cut enemy war support in half in just a turn or two. I do feel this is realistic, because if your largest armies are crushed in the opening of the war your people are going to lose morale fast. I still feel that the War Support system is one of Humankind's greatest achievements.
-I vassalized an empire with vassals, and those empires became my vassals, but those vassals I could still attack and ransack. Why is that? I feel like that's a bug.
-Ransacking seems to take way too long still on some tiles. But the sweet yields are worth it.
-Huns->Mongols are amazing. Their units are pretty OP, but I really felt like an expanding nomadic empire, constantly razing other outposts and putting more in their place and having endlessly expanding hordes. Also, their range 1 ranged attack counts as close combat so they just destroy enemy armies, especially if they have high quantities of ranged units.
-The cultures all feel interesting to choose between for each era. I usually don't enjoy conquest and pillaging vs empire building but HK has done a bang-up job of helping me enjoy both.
-Speaking of conquests, vassalization should be a lot harder. Before 170 turns, I had three vassals and Mexico had two vassals. There was only one other independent empire (my allies). It should either be harder to vassalize, or easier for a vassal empire to be able to contest their status.
-The amount of time in the game vs how much infrastructure and districts there are to offer is a mixed blessing. While this allows appropriate specialization, it is absolutely overwhelming and I feel like I never have enough time or money or population to buy everything I feel like i want and need.
-It seems like the AI is very reactive in diplomacy regarding crises. If I made a demand they didn't like, they would make one right back, especially to stay ahead in gaining war support by having more active demands. That was a really nice touch to feel like diplomacy was actually happening. (I do hope more expansions will eventually allow for more players).
-The amount of choice offered is great, but sometimes it is overwhelming.
-Yields seem more balanced and less crazy this go-around. Influence is definitely more important, but eventually it still got to the place that I stockpiled a bunch of it.
-Religion seems slower than before. Maybe that's because I couldn't found cities for two eras though.

All in all, still happy, going to play more and look for more feedback I can give.
 
Early game is a little brutal now, playing Civilization difficulty you need a classical-tech army fast for when the mongols come!

I would say that vassalization is a little too easy, since you can fend off an attack until war support falls and take 2 territories and take tribute without taking any of their land. Perhaps having a leverage score from taking territory or a lower limit on war support without being occupied would help.
 
After several playthroughs, and discussions with many other players (who are much better than me) on official Discord, I summarized a couple of feedbacks - or more likely criticisms - for the Close Beta build. It is a long post so I collapsed a lot of texts in the spoiler tags.

1. Unable to build Districts from Harbors, a.k.a. unable to use Harbos as an anchor point for Districts.
Spoiler :
An old criticism I have been posted on G2G many times, and I know a couple of VIPs share the same criticism as well.

Basically, unable to build off from Harbors will make coastal land tiles undeveloped till the late game, which highly discourages the player to build a navy - a player will have nothing on the coast that needs a navy to protect, and other players have nothing on the coast that requires a navy to attack.

In addition, unable to build off from Harbor will also make island territories much harder to develop - without build-off-able Harbors, it is nearly impossible for a city in an island territory to develop from one island to another (you can do it using Hamlets but it is really expensive while being 1 per territory). Once again the Harbor limitations discourage coastal developments and the basis of a naval play.

2. The Great Fishmarket infrastructure has been nerfed, therefore Harbors receive little to no Money from exploitation.
Spoiler :
The Great Fishmarket infrastructures used to give +1 Money on every coastal water tile, but now it's been removed. Coastal water tiles in Humankind are already suboptimal compared to land tiles due to only yielding Food as a base yield, and now even Money has been removed from coastal waters.

Without the Money yield, there is no point in building Harbors unless you have a couple of naval trade routes - and even that Money income is not directly tied to the Harbors, making Harbor just a stepstone - which once again highly discourages the naval play part of the game.

3. Hamlets now being just one per territory.
Spoiler :
Hamlets are already really expensive in terms of Industry cost in Victor, and now it receives another level of limitation. With the number limitation, and that nearly no Infrastructure can increase the yields of Hamlets in the late game, building Hamlets now become very much not worth the cost. In fact, many good players on Discord directly choose to not build them.

4. City yield breakdown is much more simplified, to the point which being unhelpful.
Spoiler :
Before in Lucy and Victor builds, hovering the mouse over a yield in the city view would give the player a messy but highly detailed breakdown. It is messy, for sure, but without a detailed breakdown, the player community would never know where did the yields come from, which Districts/Territories are costing the most stability, which Infrastructures they need the most, and how could they improve their build orders the next time.

Now the yield breakdown is just showing less than 4 entries, which unhelpful categories such as "Districts" and no breakdown of the categories whatsoever. Sure, "Districts" are providing 100 money to this city, and where exactly does this number come from? From Market Quarters? From Food Market Infrasture? From Gemstone luxury bonus? The player would never know and can only guess what made a playthrough successful.

5. The high Industry costs of late-game Infrastructures and Units force the players to do Makers Quarter spam, despite the devs' efforts to limit the spam.
Spoiler :
District spamming is unfun, and the devs had made many efforts to limit the spamming.

However, when every Industrial Era Infrastructures cost over 3800 Industry - which is far more expensive than an Ironclad, 2500+ Industry - the player will be forced to spam Makers Quarters in order to have a high Industry output and build these Infrastructures in a reasonable time.

Moreover, very few Early Modern and Industrial Era Infrastructures can actually help with Industry - a High Furance is even worse than a Charcoal Kiln due to unable to scale with a resource - which means the only reliable way to have a high Industry output is to, well, spam the Makers.

6. If the Industry cost is too much, then the Money cost for Buyout is outright astronomical.
Spoiler :
I'm not even joking: Sometimes you need 1 million Money to recruit a man with a firearm. See the "1M" figure in the link.

Many had argued for Money Buyout being OP (which I disagree with anyways, the Victor 2 Money = 1 Industry conversion rate is in a good spot), and the devs responded to the feedback by scaling the Buyout cost much more.

As a result, a Flood Irrigation (240 Industry) cost over 800 Money - who would have over 800 Money in stockpile in the Ancient Era? In addition, this Money cost would scale with the era, so in the Early Modern Era, this still 240 Industry Infrastructure would cost over 2000 Money in your new cities.

I would safely say this is in the realm of over-nerfing. If everything easily costs 20 times your Money per turn, there is no need to use Money as your main yield anymore. Something simply like 3:1 for the Money to Industry ratio should be enough already.

In addition, with things like Harbor nerfs discussed above, it is now much harder to make a decent Money income via Infrastructure alone. In order to be good in Money, you are forced to pick Merchant cultures or Achaemenid Persians, which is rather railroaded in a way.

7. Stability numbers drop from always high to always low, which is not bad on its own, but mismatches a lot of other mechanics such as Industry cost.
Spoiler :
Stability numbers being at a high plateau is one of the most common complaints from Victor, and myself is a critic of that as well. The devs responded by decrease the Luxury Stability to 3 each, and the Common Quarter adjacency to 2 Stability per adjacent District.

The problem being Commons Quarters only have 2 Stability per adj District is a step too far. With 2 per adj, a Commons fully surrounded by other Districts - which would cost thousands of Industries - only give you 12 Stability. And all these Districts cost you -60 Stability in total, and -70 Stability can mean from 100 Stability to revolution. Totally not worth it.

Moreover, as stated above, high Industry costs force the player to do District spam anyways. As a result, Stability numbers quickly drop into an all-time low situation. Some players tried to spam Garrisons, which actually provides 10 Stability - the nerf gets rid of the Commons spam, and leads to the Garrison spam instead.

The high stability penalty also leads to another side effect - Civic and Event choices. Due to the Commons nerf, 80% of the Stability of a city comes from centrism Ideologies. If the player picked a "radical" Civic or Event choice, they can easily all these Stability and their cities began to rebel.

This design is interesting on paper, but in practice, since Ideology being the main source of Stability, the player will be forced to stay in the middle of the Ideological Axis, instead of picking interesting Event choices that can "tell your own stories of the Humankind", which is the point of the game according to the devs.

Overall, I think the issue being: There are too few options for stability. In the past, the players spam Commons Quarters, and the devs responded by nerfing it; however, players spam Commons not because it is an easy way but they don't have other options for a quick solution for stability. If there can be stability infrastructures in every era, that would be a solution. In addition, the Commons nerf is maybe too much; if Commons quarters don't have self-adjacency - that is, Commons won't gain stability from Commons next to it, it must be put next to other quarters - it can solve the issue as well.

8. The Pacing.
Spoiler :
A common complaint also on G2G. Basically, there is a huge mismatch between the Technology progression and the Era progression. It is not rare to see players with an Industrial Era culture still researching late Medieval Era techs. As for AI, it is also very common to see them being in the Industrial Era with Classical Era units hanging around.

The issue is two-folded. First, some categories of Era Stars - Influence, Builder, and Militarist, for instance - are rather easy, making the 7 Star requirement being fulfilled much faster; and the AI always trying to advance into the next Era as soon as possible, which is not helping.

Meanwhile, there is now a huge jump in Science costs in the Classical Era - Ancient techs just cost 200 Science, but in the Classical Era, techs start at 400 Science cost and end in 2000 Science cost. If the player is not fully prepared, their technology progression will suddenly be stagnated in the Classical Era, and drag down all the tech progression in all the later Eras.

If anything, I guess the research curve of the Classical Era can be smoother instead of a sudden jump; the tech progression of the Victor build is actually fine in my opinion.

9. The naval trade nodes are still not being implemented.
Spoiler :
I remember Cat and a couple of VIPs said this being a thing, although I'm yet to see them in the Close Beta. Hope in the full release these trade nodes can eventually show up - they would really spice up the naval gameplay.


In general, the Close Beta build has many nice features - I absolutely love how population gives Influence and the new ability for Aesthetes and Merchants - but all the numbers feel like are all over the place. The numbers in the Victor build actually feel much smoother, to be honest, especially for Science and Money costs.

Hope the developers can eventually deliver the full game with much more reasonable numbers (at least not 1 million Money again) after two months.
 
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Very fresh few impressions after the first (and only so far) complete game on Civilization difficulty:

The cultural pace seems way too fast compared to the technological pace. On a related note, the year count in BC/AD is total fantasy, completely disjointed from what's on the map. Too drawn out in the beginning, too compressed later.

Buyout prices are a bloody daylight robbery: very soon they become unfeasible and irrelevant. A bit of overcompensation, in comparison with Victor. However, flogging your people to death to get things built seems just way too good. Apart from very temporary and minor depopulation, no other negatives, like a stability hit or anything else revolt like?

Too small a sample to evaluate diplomacy changes, but isn't AI a bit too tame? I had only one early war: I was a defender after being attacked. I feel that AI was kinda sparing me. They burned down one of my luxury improvements just over the border twice, I burned down their harbour, then I defeated a couple of their stragglers, and after a while their war support was 1/100 and mine about 67/100 or so, and they offered a surrender. They had an army at the gates of my border region city which was stronger than my garrison, I think, yet I accepted their 1600 gold in reparations the same turn. At least they did not offer to become vassals, like what happened in Victor. No more wars, I ignored a million grievances. Btw, the final screen showed the war fought not with the culture at the time (Aztec), but with their culture at the end of the game (Zulu).

The reward of curiosities being showed in the acknowledge menu cards is a blessing, big thanks for that! :)

On a general note, I do have some problems in finding some identity in my rivals. Can those emblems be made more, I don't know, relatable, relevant, exciting or something? I mean, a horse head, a bear head, a rose, a ram head... who cares? They are so neutral, random, bland... They mean nothing. Like the avatars and their names. They are just nobodies and their names are not something to take note of. Change of wardrobe doesn't do much.
Also the colours, could they be made customizable for every civ? I have some colour blindness problems, so some colours seem too close to me to be easily told apart.
 
Very good points
I agree with all of this - though I'd add that my game is now practically unplayable because of performance issues, while before it ran smoothly on the highest of settings - except that my proposal would be to make it harder to progress to another culture, not to make science faster. Already, there is a huge amount of infrastructure you'll never get around to building.
 
Too small a sample to evaluate diplomacy changes, but isn't AI a bit too tame? I had only one early war: I was a defender after being attacked. I feel that AI was kinda sparing me. They burned down one of my luxury improvements just over the border twice, I burned down their harbour, then I defeated a couple of their stragglers, and after a while their war support was 1/100 and mine about 67/100 or so, and they offered a surrender. They had an army at the gates of my border region city which was stronger than my garrison, I think, yet I accepted their 1600 gold in reparations the same turn. At least they did not offer to become vassals, like what happened in Victor. No more wars, I ignored a million grievances. Btw, the final screen showed the war fought not with the culture at the time (Aztec), but with their culture at the end of the game (Zulu).
From my experience with diplomacy, conflict was relatively common in border regions without cities, but actual wars were usually declared by me. I actually did have some good surprise wars declared on me which resulted in a vast border conflict and tussle over a single outpost. That war was actually relatively challenging and I certainly wasn't ready. But again, that was an early war. Usually, it's easy enough for the human to run away with power that the AI becomes too hesitant to wage an offensive war.

Your war support example makes sense even realistically, by the way. After all, the German Army was pretty unstoppable and close to Paris in World War I but lack of war support at home and revolution resulted in the prosecution of peace.

BUT, it does mean that a single critical turn can make or break war support though, since each victory no matter how many units are involved results in a whopping -8 war support. If you culturally influence 8 territories of your opponent, for -8 War Support per turn on them, and then win 2 minor engagements, an enemy with 50 war support will drop 24 war support in a single turn. That's kind of excessive if you force two minor battles and the enemy still has dozens of other strong units. It's not unrealistic that a string of losses would sap your population's enthusiasm for conflict, it's just unrealistic how fast and easily you can force it to go down without regard to force proportion and battle size.

There should probably be scaling victory/defeat support depending on the size of the battle, and affected by losses on both sides. If you barely win a battle, you shouldn't get 8 war support and kill the enemy by 8, rather you MIGHT get a small bump, and the enemy might get a debuff but mitigated by the heroic delaying action. If your one scout kills an enemy scout because you had the high ground, it shouldn't be taken as a catastrophic loss that is unrecoverable/a great victory for you. If you kill eight enemy units with six and suffer no casualties, YES you should get a massive buff and they should get a massive debuff! And vice versa. At least that's how i would handle it, because as of now it's all or nothing. I do love the war support system though, it just needs tweaking.
 
"Finished" my first game: Mycenaeans > Greeks > Khmer > Mughal > French.

As others have experienced, Eagles and I quickly divvied up our small world into vassals and broke away from the other 6 players, who became irrelevant except the huge sums of gold they kept sending us. Gunner war elephants made the end of the tech tree feel less relevant, as my units had comparable strength to units from one era ahead. That said, Eagles, apart from fielding a couple of Mexican EU and dragoons mostly just threw an army of spears and horses at me when I stumbled into a war with them while navigating the demands page. As it seemed they were not fielding adequate units to fight my 12 elephants, 3 flintlock, and 12 pikes (not upgraded), I decided to ended the game by entering VI at turn ~165 when I took the fame lead.

The hoplites were not as fun as last game (still pretty fun though) and I found the terrain was much more restrictive in this map than in Victor. Almost no battle played out in an open field, whereas in Victor it was a good mix of cliffs, canyons and fields. This led engagements to feel repetitive, but also made it easier to play my strengths as a player against the AI, who struggled to leverage terrain.

Playing double production focus, following Mycenaean's 25 unit industry discount, I had 7 cities pumping out 200-600 industry each, and was building districts and units in 1-2 turns each. I prefer the new commons, with less dramatic stability buffs that sometimes make you sacrifice an old central district (usually less efficient since you had not been playing for adjacencies at the time, or it was built by AI) for the +20 stability. I used a few garrisons, the games project once, and kept a central ideology except science +10%. I took strategic, river, stability, industry and science focused infrastructure, as they are each more useful than an additional district at the time, and built most in all my cities. It looks like playing builder helps get the relevant infrastructure. No Harbors (didn't even research it). In my game, industry made districts cheap, gold (with Vassals) made it affordable, and forced labor was out of the question once it became 2 pops for a district (I still used it early to get some early food districts up).

After 4 games of Victor I lamented the end of the opendev. After this game, I'm not sure I'll try to sneak another one in or just wait for next time. Following Victor, I recommended adding an option to retreat after a battle began. After the closed beta, I even more strongly feel that the game needs better defensive combat, so that one encounter does not annihilate one side's army and trivialize the rest of the war.

I would recommend one of two things:

- Add this option to retreat during battle. This way, casualties would be sustained in the peak of the battle, when both sides are fighting for an advantage. But it would allow territory and war support victories without dealing one side a killing blow to the opposing army. Then, if you had more units in reserve, you could back up your retreating units. Only when the attacker could pursue a retreating foe would you see the kind of mass casualty battles we have now. I'd then give the option to retreat from a battle that was forced during retreat, but only following 3 rounds of combat (i.e., one game turn). As I said before, this would allow cavalry to assail a rallied foe and deal heavy casualties. It would also end battles right when they stop becoming fun, being careful to avoid casualties while chasing down the last 1-2 enemy units.

- Or, give defeated units a disengage chance to reappear wounded after the battle. The disengaged units would each take a retreat move, likely being scattered. If already-retreating units had 0% disengage during the first three rounds of combat (1 game turn) this would capture the above dynamics.

Either of these changes would fix a major problem with the current game. Namely, you fight your opponent in the field (well, in the cliffs) and then effortlessly take their cities. If most of the army was able to fall back to the city, this would require building up siege weapons to gain an advantage.

Last points:

- The world feels very small. It feels like the game plays out in a 50x50 mile Lord-of-the-Flie-esque island, rather than as an abstraction for a full world. Perhaps if the world were 4x larger, or perhaps if it were more continental or if naval movement were 8-10 tiles to be faster than land travel. Or perhaps if more of the map was uninhabitable (ocean, desert, mountains, dense jungle) it might feel like exploring. But as it is, every territory feels the same.

- Perhaps prereq techs should lower the cost of subsequent techs. So you could unlock techs having only one of the prereqs, but it would be come easier as you researched more (maybe 25% discount each?). I find that I beeline units and science while neglecting most of the rest, and would like to have some justification to researching the entire tree.
 
I can't comment on the technical stuff too much other than the eras and tech feel too out of sync as others have already said.

I will say please include a feature to let us update the city centres. Every culture has a unique city centre but the vast majority of your most important cities will be Mycene palaces and Olmec pyramids all through the game! I was intentionally stalling development until I got to the next era so I had a chance at seeing the Medieval and Early Modern city centres for my cultures!

Maybe it can be done through a project but I really think it would enchance the roleplay if you could choose if you wanted to keep your city looking the same or update it. I like the idea of my modern cities keeping earlier districts like an 'old quarter' from medieval,early modern era but thats a choice I'd like to have. I understand one of the main objectives was to feel like your previous cultures form part of your legacy but I think keeping your emblematic quarters already does this well.
 
Second game of 200 turns down. This time: Harappans > Mauryans > Khmer > Mughals > Siamese. Additional thoughts for this round.

-I figured out better how to keep up with tech progression: really the game hammers home the fun of the quarters but it means you forget about infrastructure. High pop cities with lots of specialist slots means you need to invest in the infrastructure such as libraries that give science per pop, or ones that boost researcher output. It really shows how overwhelming the game is when it presents you with so many choices but doesn't explain what you need. I am disappointed that I still haven't been able to play with the industrial tools too much since I haven't been able to really do what others have been re: tech.

-This leads me into the point again that...tech progression is still too divorced from cultural era progression. Some of these stars are just too easy to earn, easily making 7 stars. I think if it was more difficult to get the stars, it would slow down the game enough. It is hard to not want to just click "advance" for two reasons: one, it is the obvious choice to press the shiny button, and two, it is not well explained the advantages of staying in an era for longer (i.e. more fame, you want to build your quarter some more before you change cultures, etc.). Especially with the race to get a culture before someone else if you're a real planner. I feel like if they get THIS right, everything else will come into play beautifully.

-I think I like the stability changes. I can build a massive city, but I REALLY need to dedicate the infrastructure to it. At first with this round it was hard and felt punishing since they nerfed the commons quarter from 3 stab/adj district to 2 stab/adj district. I think (since we can replace districts) a good idea is, since those districts around administrative centers and main plazas slowly get surrounded by other districts and yields start getting replaced, or less useful there, maybe add extra stab for a commons quarter adjacent to administrative centers/main plazas? Give those areas actually adjacent to the government center a bit more heft and give those quarters extra stab. It does look silly how many commons quarters I start building next to each other sometimes but eh.

-I also think the hamlet changes make sense. I've seen the criticism of changing Hamlets from an unlimited quarter to one per territory. However, this means you can basically start a second area of your city, and as you attach quarters to it, eventually replace it with say a Commons Quarter and then build another hamlet in the territory later as that "hamlet" has grown into an actual town.

-I finally got to understand how to claim those cultural osmosis events for science etc. I totally did not understand that until clicking by accident, and I feel like that should be a bit more well explained.

-Settlers: it is NOT at all obvious to even an experienced player right now that you can build a bunch of constructions in one turn when you first found the city. This needs to be presented better, because I wasted some time the first couple times i used settlers and colony models. I had to experiment to really understand how it worked.

-Can walls for different cities visually not attach to one another if that city is independent from a second city? It just looks too odd to have two different cities, especially from different civilizations, have their walls merge and create a superwall.

-I think naval unit speed and combat range needs to be increased because it feels way too slow/short ranged at certain points.

I will likely play one final round of this beta, but I am eager for the full 300 or so turns because I feel like there's too much I'm missing out on still!
 
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