Going to Mars in 76 turns!

[EscapedGoat]

Congrats @EscapedGoat!

I wonder with how much fame you ended. I don't think the AI can/should necessary compete with going to Mars in 80 turns (as this would certainly annoy slower players like me), but I think it should compete in terms of fame even around that time frame. So, I'm curious if your fame lead was a decisive one or if it could have been a lost game if the AI would have just collected 1000 more fame somewhere.

tx i checked it again now, fame was 8449 at the end of the game. It was a similar level 8000-ish in my last fast run also. Not sure if that’s good or bad, but poor AI - the one with most had only around 3000 fame… granted, i boxed in 2 of the AI pretty bad so they had no chance to expand, but 2 of the AI should have Been able to become much bigger, but they just kinda sat there… I guess they could benefit from being a bit more aggressive when boxed in, as my defense was a token defense for most of the game.

agree that a game with equal start would be fun to play, fast times are heavily skewed by fantastic starts of course.

 

[NombreyApellido]

not to take anything away from your run, but ai idling could be it lost it aggression over reloading

im currently on turn 50ish and yellow makeda having left in neo and lost its first city is now on decent shape after going olmecs to mauryans. no reloading but same seed i've been testing on

 

[Siptah]

Title says it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HumankindT...mankind_science_speed_run_turn_58_win_normal/

 

[NombreyApellido]

cool. dyes and silk rule

agree on most of his assessments

but i feel instant cities and armies needing
no food could use a re thought

 

[EscapedGoat]

That’s insane. He’s basically doing an ICS strategy, utilizing settlers (with «free» infrastructure) to spam settle the map with 1-territory cities, ignoring the negative modifiers to influence and stability. Again abusing land raiser and collective minds as also the 76-turn strategy does. These abilities need a tweak, it is too powerful to be able to convert one yield to another with no penalties. It’s also crazy that you can just ignore the penalties from being 30(!) cities over the cap

 

[Siptah]

You can still ignore the penalty from having so many cities over the cap in the new patch, if you are fast enough as it seems. The stab penalty should be quadratic now, so it shouldn‘t be that easy to live with negative influence - But if they just finished that fast…

 

[fortydayweekend]

I don't think they need to specifically crack down on these strategies. They all rely on an extremely strong start which takes a lot of rerolling, and few players have the inclination to do that. Specifically I don't think there should be any increased penalties for low gold, it's great that you can mortgage yourself with reparations when you lose a war but have the ability to come back from it. As soon as you add negative CS or rapidly increasing stability problems you're basically forcing players to quit as soon as they're losing.

I'd be more concerned about things that are game-breaking in normal play, e.g. OP EQs.

 

[EscapedGoat]

I don't think they need to specifically crack down on these strategies. They all rely on an extremely strong start which takes a lot of rerolling, and few players have the inclination to do that

I think there is a difference here though. The 76-turn win is still somewhat within the constraints of the game (though land raiser and collective minds are bonkers). The turn 58 win IMO breaks the game in ways not intended by the devs.

I agree that the game should be balanced for the majority, but having a city on every single territory clearly goes against the design-philosophy of the game - why even build a big city or bother having the mechanism for attaching territories or even have influence in the game as a resource?

ICS has been the scourge of the CIV-like games and various mechanics have been introduced to combat it. Looking to humankind, the fact that there are so many ridiculous bonuses from luxuries on a “per city” basis, any strategy that lets you build unlimited cities and to add to that get the infrastructure for free (settlers with the techs) needs to be dealt with ASAP for the health of the game at all levels IMO (only reason to build “tall” cities is to get economies of scale in infrastructure).

I think the best way to deal with it is direct ramping yield penalties for negative influence, or rework how stability works so that you can’t just counter it with a ton of luxuries. If you run an empire without any power/influence, it should not be very productive. The guy ended the game with -2million influence, that just ain’t right

 

[fortydayweekend]

I think there is a difference here though. The 76-turn win is still somewhat within the constraints of the game (though land raiser and collective minds are bonkers). The turn 58 win IMO breaks the game in ways not intended by the devs.

I agree that the game should be balanced for the majority, but having a city on every single territory clearly goes against the design-philosophy of the game - why even build a big city or bother having the mechanism for attaching territories or even have influence in the game as a resource?

ICS has been the scourge of the CIV-like games and various mechanics have been introduced to combat it. Looking to humankind, the fact that there are so many ridiculous bonuses from luxuries on a “per city” basis, any strategy that lets you build unlimited cities and to add to that get the infrastructure for free (settlers with the techs) needs to be dealt with ASAP for the health of the game at all levels IMO (only reason to build “tall” cities is to get economies of scale in infrastructure).

I think the best way to deal with it is direct ramping yield penalties for negative influence, or rework how stability works so that you can’t just counter it with a ton of luxuries. If you run an empire without any power/influence, it should not be very productive. The guy ended the game with -2million influence, that just ain’t right

If you couldn't build a city without influence (either via outpost or settlers) that'd take care of it, right? An empire with negative influence shouldn't be able to expand (and should find itself being taken over culturally) but I don't see any need to add massive stability penalties. Just rethink how settlers work, e.g. massively increasing their industry cost and requiring influence to found a city even with a settler.

I agree on limiting ICS (I remember getting Civ1 BC space wins with a ton of 4-pop cities ) and it seems like the developers are trying to limit it too - pretty sure it'll be top of their list to fix if it looks like a winning strategy. I think some of the infrastructures should be improved too to encourage tall play, not just nerfing settlers.

 

[NombreyApellido]

yeah, how dare this people enjoy their own copy of a game in ways other than mine

devs intended for this thing to make them money and it's working so far

if the goal was different, more time would have been set for tighter implementations and proper qa

 

[EscapedGoat]

If you couldn't build a city without influence (either via outpost or settlers) that'd take care of it, right? An empire with negative influence shouldn't be able to expand (and should find itself being taken over culturally) but I don't see any need to add massive stability penalties. Just rethink how settlers work, e.g. massively increasing their industry cost and requiring influence to found a city even with a settler.

That's a simple and elegant solution! Influence is the resource used for expansion, makes sense that you should not be able to circumvent it. Like it a lot!

yeah, how dare this people enjoy their own copy of a game in ways other than mine

devs intended for this thing to make them money and it's working so far

if the goal was different, more time would have been set for tighter implementations and proper qa

People can enjoy what they want in this game and have their own interpretations of the motivations of the devs my own personal opinion is that this "ICS" strategy was never intended by the devs, given the lengths they have gone to limit city expansion by civics, technologies, the resource called influence etc. - basically a substantial amount of game mechanics are designed around limiting unbound expansion. If they intended city-spam to be viable, they would not have designed the game this way. You may disagree, I find the evidence compelling, and time will tell if they "fix" this or not. I believe they will.

Making money is obviously the goal of any "for profit" company or organization, however, I disagree that this is their only goal. The game was substantially delayed for more polish/development/QA, and clearly there is a pretty coherent vision behind the game. What that vision is I'm certainly NOT an authority on, but I believe it did not involve city spam, again as evidenced by core game mechanics revolving around city limits, influence and curbing rate of expansion. I agree though that the game could have used some more QA and more "hardcore" playtesting, esp. trying out infamous "REX/ICS" strategies from CIV should have been a no-brainer.

 

[NombreyApellido]

there's a notable dissonance between the this breaks the game drama and the zen like it will be fix soon don't worry

i'm glad you feel calmer now

on the subject of development priorities, to me there's no doubt were the focus was and is. this is a product with visuals, audio and the price of a AAA title. everything else is early access level

getting rid of denuvo, a true game breaker, was a good move though

 

[Taefin]

I do kind of feel like the Amplitude team is very passionate about their work, but that passion seems to be more about the story and setting of the game, than about getting to play the most well-balanced possible version of it. I’m glad they are trying consistently to make it better though. It’s worlds away from Monopolies and Corporations which was so patently a money grab.

 

[EscapedGoat]

I do kind of feel like the Amplitude team is very passionate about their work, but that passion seems to be more about the story and setting of the game, than about getting to play the most well-balanced possible version of it. I’m glad they are trying consistently to make it better though. It’s worlds away from Monopolies and Corporations which was so patently a money grab.

Yeah. You can definitely tell there is passion and love put into the game. I think as a sandbox for having some fun through the ages, at a "casual" level the game is great and sufficiently balanced. At the more "optimized" levels of play, it breaks down a bit due to all these mechanics that are not really working that well (ref turn 58 science win and -350K influence a turn with no consequences...) and all the stacking and snowballing mechanics that make it too easy to "break" the game. I hope they care enough about that admittedly smaller segment of players to do some balancing and fixing some stupid bugs like the free city exploit, rebalance collective minds ability (which you could argue is bugged since it get's multipliers first from production and then from science, which iskinda crazy).

Until a major balance patch, I must admit my interest in the game is waning a bit and I haven't played it in like a week - was hoping the game would retain my interest a bit longer than that

 

[Taefin]

Until a major balance patch, I must admit my interest in the game is waning a bit and I haven't played it in like a week - was hoping the game would retain my interest a bit longer than that

The initial addiction does certainly wane after you are away for a week and realize a new game wouldn’t go anywhere a past game hadn’t, and break down somewhere along the way in terms of the AI getting irreparably behind. It stopped being as exciting for me when there was no longer ever a threat/promise of exciting early modern warfare. That always felt like an exciting transition that made it feel worthwhile building up an empire to go through it with. Knowing that I’ll end the game before that makes early investment in anything but production and military feel empty.

 

[Cherenkov]

Yea sadly my games are over when I mostly mopping up with Line Infantry, maybe some anti-air guns. Don't ever get a chance to enjoy stuff like tanks, pmvs and such.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I think there is a difference here though. The 76-turn win is still somewhat within the constraints of the game (though land raiser and collective minds are bonkers). The turn 58 win IMO breaks the game in ways not intended by the devs.

I agree that the game should be balanced for the majority, but having a city on every single territory clearly goes against the design-philosophy of the game - why even build a big city or bother having the mechanism for attaching territories or even have influence in the game as a resource?

ICS has been the scourge of the CIV-like games and various mechanics have been introduced to combat it. Looking to humankind, the fact that there are so many ridiculous bonuses from luxuries on a “per city” basis, any strategy that lets you build unlimited cities and to add to that get the infrastructure for free (settlers with the techs) needs to be dealt with ASAP for the health of the game at all levels IMO (only reason to build “tall” cities is to get economies of scale in infrastructure).

I think the best way to deal with it is direct ramping yield penalties for negative influence, or rework how stability works so that you can’t just counter it with a ton of luxuries. If you run an empire without any power/influence, it should not be very productive. The guy ended the game with -2million influence, that just ain’t right

The thing is the guy only ended a game with ICS & -2million influence as a Temporary solution. if they went ~30 turns with that, then their empire Would fall apart.

 

[NombreyApellido]

i don't usually argue against emergent gameplay, but this is just a result of a poor choice of an ending for the game or at least a flip flop on the whole idea of not having a single objective but then adding all these firafix style objectives

the strategy should be taken for what it is and nothing more: a clever exploit that has the player playing an anti-game not for the joy of it but for the fake internet points

 

[Taefin]

i don't usually argue against emergent gameplay, but this is just a result of a poor choice of an ending for the game or at least a flip flop on the whole idea of not having a single objective but then adding all these firafix style objectives

the strategy should be taken for what it is and nothing more: a clever exploit that has the player playing an anti-game not for the joy of it but for the fake internet points

Well said, the dynamic of ending the game when you are in a fame lead really falls flat, especially with the very easy end conditions like Mars mission. The best use of these speed runs is to highlight what’s wrong with the game. (Also here, have some of my fake internet points )

 

[NombreyApellido]

just wanted to remind myself that we all enjoy playing different ways and it was unfair to say he wasn't enjoying it on its own

we should value his commitment to a playstyle many of us won't find interesting and how it helps the continued improvement of the game

i'm trying to be a slightly less toxic fan