Hoping the game will not force simultaneous turns

[FinalDoomsday]

It was far less of a problem in Endless Space 2 because there is no terrain just star jumping from one system to another. Nothing could interfere with your ships mid transit.

Siptah is correct that the majority of the time you will not notice it and the tactical battles will still be fully turn based. (Each unit in Endless Legend moved according to its initiative value but we dont know if thats the case in Humankind yet)

 

[Siptah]

I can see simultaneous turns being strange with units that have a very large amount of movement points, like air units and late Game ships might turn out to have for example.

it might be my non-high end computer that‘s responsible for me not disliking simultaneous turns: in my games, the AI moves tile by tile and often pauses on a tile for half a second. The worst thing possible is a settler settling a region before you in the same turn because you clicked too late. But the AI taking a sweet spot for a city with me missing one movement point happened in civ VI much more than in EL...

 

[shaglio]

It was far less of a problem in Endless Space 2 because there is no terrain just star jumping from one system to another. Nothing could interfere with your ships mid transit.

Siptah is correct that the majority of the time you will not notice it and the tactical battles will still be fully turn based. (Each unit in Endless Legend moved according to its initiative value but we dont know if thats the case in Humankind yet)

I was just getting flashbacks to watching my friend play Warcraft/Starcraft-type games. I could never get into those because stuff was just constantly happening all around and it was hard for me to remember all the troop deployments I made.

Part of the appeal of the Civ franchise (and TBS games in general) is that I can play while watching TV. I can take a few turns during a commercial break or during a whistle/huddle if I'm watching hockey/football (baseball is slow enough between pitches that it isn't a problem), or go run upstairs and put my daughter back in bed when she gets up for some ridiculous reason. I can even get up and walk away from the computer to get a snack or take a bathroom break without fear of coming back to find I'm dead like in WoW.

But, like you said, I should probably wait to see some actual game-play footage before I start slamming my fist down on the panic button.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

@shaglio

Thats fair, I do enjoy the odd RTS but I often find it's more about who's fastest on the keyboard rather than who is the best strategist.

You can definitly enjoy simultaneous turns in the same way you enjoy regular turn based games Boris is right that it's often just best to let the opponents move and then counter them as if you have the last turn which does hold some advantages.

Everything is still limited by the turn you are on so things really cant go that pear shaped without you noticing.

 

[Nerevatar]

Playing endless space 2 I didnt notice that it was simultaneous turns until like 50 hours in. I really like the system because there is virtually no wait time, and it still very much feel like a sequential turn based game.

 

[shaglio]

I've never played any of these Endless games myself, so I have nothing to draw off of. But if Humankind has everyone going simultaneously on a turn, but you still need to hit "Next Turn" or whatever at the end, I can certainly live with that. IIRC, attacking is going to open to a mini zoomed-in screen where the actual maneuvering and combat will take place, so my fears of having troops wiped out while I'm not paying attention should be unsubstantiated.

 

[Catoninetales_Amplitude]

I've never played any of these Endless games myself, so I have nothing to draw off of. But if Humankind has everyone going simultaneously on a turn, but you still need to hit "Next Turn" or whatever at the end, I can certainly live with that. IIRC, attacking is going to open to a mini zoomed-in screen where the actual maneuvering and combat will take place, so my fears of having troops wiped out while I'm not paying attention should be unsubstantiated.

It's less a zoomed-in screen than simply your units spreading out on the strategic map from their stacked Army, with an area of the map being cordoned off to fight the battle in. However, if you get attacked, the battle will not start until you confirm it, so you don't need to worry about your units getting wiped out while you are busy elsewhere.

 

[Elhoim]

It's less a zoomed-in screen than simply your units spreading out on the strategic map from their stacked Army, with an area of the map being cordoned off to fight the battle in. However, if you get attacked, the battle will not start until you confirm it, so you don't need to worry about your units getting wiped out while you are busy elsewhere.

Probably you can't answer, but what about reinforcements? The main issue I had with the simultaneous turns was something like the AI going to attack a city and I rapidly moving an army to reinforce, or move one of my armies away before they could "attack" it. In any case, as many said, you can play it like you are going "last" so to give the AI a small edge as well.

 

[conorbebe]

I'm yet to play a strategy game with simultaneous turns (although I'm planning on trying Endless Legend soon), but the concept doesn't sound too bad to me. As others have stated, so long as I'm not losing units due to slow reflexes or them being off-screen, I don't really see much of a problem. Simultaneous turns sounds more realistic and dynamic, and less biased towards any one player. Plus, not having to wait for other players or the AI to make their moves sounds fantastic!

My only concern would be related to potential performance issues. Calculating what every AI player is going to do at the same time in an environment that might change on the fly sounds incredibly taxing. Does anyone know if Endless Legend suffered because of this?

 

[Elhoim]

Does anyone know if Endless Legend suffered because of this?

Not exactly sure if related to this, but performance in EL got worse the longer I played.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

Yes Elhoim is right larger games on Endless Legend could get slow and chuggy as it progressed as more and more armies were pathing across the map. Minor factions also could spawn lots of units that just roamed around and just added to the slowdown.

Don't want to hold this against Humankind though as I'm sure there will be more technical improvements.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Yes Elhoim is right larger games on Endless Legend could get slow and chuggy as it progressed as more and more armies were pathing across the map. Minor factions also could spawn lots of units that just roamed around and just added to the slowdown.

Don't want to hold this against Humankind though as I'm sure there will be more technical improvements.

To be completely fair, Civ VI also slows down dramatically late in the game. In fact, before I upgraded my computer last year, I could not play the game on a Huge Map at all: it slowed to glacial speed after the Industrial Era and became simply unplayable. This is going to be a problem with any game that has as much animation in the units and map as Civ and, apparently, Humankind.
One indicator of how bad the problem potentially is in Humankind is how big the largest map size provided in the base game will be. As I remember, Endless Legend only allowed a maximum of about 10 factions on their largest map. Given that Humankind is providing initially only 10 Factions per Era, it sounds like they are aiming for maps of about the same size as EL as a maximum available upon release.

Which is less than I'd like, but may indicate that they are already addressing the potential GPU/CPU Limitations in their basic game design for map size and Faction numbers.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

It's just eight factions max in Endless Legend, Endless Space 2 allows up to 12 I think though.

The thing with Civ 6 though is that your end turn times get longer but your own turns still peform more or less the same on decent hardware. In Endless Legend all that computation thats happening between turns in Civ 6 is happening as your trying to play your turn so it can lead to more stutter and performance slowdown that can personally become a nuisance. In civ 6 your fps jolts up and down during the AI turns but it doesnt matter because you're not trying to do anything.

If it is still an issue in Humankind I can just keep to smaller map sizes as I'm sure everyone has different tolerances to this stuff.

 

[Siptah]

I play on a MacBook. Despite high specs for such a device, it is suboptimal for gaming.

civ VI late game turn times are up to two minutes. Sadly, I don‘t even do much besides clicking next turn, so it is super tedious.

In EL, I sometimes have stuttering in the late game but it takes less than 10 seconds from clicking next turn to that turn starting. And the stuttering isn‘t that bad anyway.

For me personally, it is quite clear what I prefer.

 

[Catoninetales_Amplitude]

I am not a technical expert on this, so please do not take my word as gospel, but as far as I understand the late-game slowdown is not an issue of visuals, but rather of the very nature of growth in 4x games: Just as you as the player are faced with more and more to manage as the game continues, so is the AI, but the human player is far better at abstracting and categorizing this information. The "simulation" (i.e. the math behind the scenes) also has to take more and more components into account.

As a point of comparison, see the devblog Stellaris recently posted about performance improvements, where a refactor of the underlying systems (without touching the graphics at all) resulted in a notable increase in speed.

 

[Atlas627]

I've found that simultaneous turns are great for multiplayer, and come out in a wash for singleplayer. If you can never act first because you are slow or have a bad computer, then it is no different than you being given the last turn in a consecutive-turn game. If you sometimes can act first, then those times where you don't manage to, you have the advantage of being able to react to your opponent, and then maybe go first next turn.

It can be a bit frustrating if you let yourself get frustrated by it, but so can losing a wonder race because both players finished on the "same turn" but oh too bad, player 1 is always going to win that tiebreaker.

You notice many of the situations where you wish you went first, but situations exist where I'm happy I went second. I've had enemies move into my sight range, and then my army was able to close the gap and wipe them out. If I had tried to go first and advance, they would've been able to run away forever.