Humankind Dev Diary #2

Now that you mentioned it, the idea of sending an army halfway across the globe without any penalties, always seemed too irrealistic to me, especially when the units are traversing inhospitable regions such as desert, jungle or tundra. There should be some limit to how far your units can go. This limit could depend on the level of development of your civilization or on the type of unit, for instance. Maybe there could be penalties in the unit maintenance or number of hit points. Or maybe there could be a chance of defection that increased as the unit got too far or if it was "pushed too hard".

Back in Civ3 if you kept a unit in a jungle for too long, it would get "sick" and start to loose hit points.

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, everything I've seen so far from this game has been beautifully realised. The culture cards, the UI, the models, the cities, and now I have no concerns about the terrain either. The artists clearly take a lot of pride in their work, evidenced by their ability to mix realism (as shown from the clips of them using reference images to capture detail) with a readable but also elegant art style to create some truly stunning landscapes.

I'm a big defender of Civilization VI's terrain visuals, and still believe Firaxis was able to create a very clean and dynamic world, but I did also understand some people's frustrations that because the game looked more vibrant, some sense of realism had been lost. I think Amplitude however have somehow managed to incorporate the best of both worlds here. The maps still pop and make use of rich colours and stylised elements, but at the same time they don't lack detail or texture either.

 

As soon as I saw it and the central peak was indicated as the only part of the Wonder, I thought: Matterhorn, north or east face, so Alpine.

Another way to make Wastelands more difficult to cross would be to simply have them occupied by very militant Minor Factions so that you have to fight your way through. That would automatically make them easier to cross as the game went on and you become militarily dominant over the smaller fry, but make them extremely difficult to sneak a Scout through early on.
And that wouldn't require any extra rules about attrition, or movement/type of tile than they already have.

And as for naming Landmarks. You do realize that some of us will abuse this feature unmercifully: I can't wait to play with a river called the Vestite (think about what you can call a City on the far side of it) or a large forest named Mirkwood, Sherwood or Bois de Bacon.

The terrain is so good-looking that Humankind runs the risk of suffering from Stop and Awe: the gamer stops playing and just watches the map and its animations, leading to games that take weeks to finish . . .

 

The only "critique" I have of the terrain style is that things look too yellow overall. This is especially evident in the ground color of most of the biomes. I've noticed this ever since they first started putting out screenshots. The game is definitely beautiful regardless though.

 

I like it.
When I start a game of civ, I find it very thriling when I see a tile of wheat or a hill with gold close to my settler.
People like yellow. If they didn't, gold would be worhtless.

Amplitude devs surely know that, so the choice for yellow and warm colours in general, could be on purpose.

 

Wheat and Gold look great in Civ. I didn't say to avoid the color yellow at all costs, so I'm not sure about the point you're making that people like gold so people like yellow-tinted land? But the entire land having a warm yellow haze doesn't look that great to me personally.

Don't get me wrong though - this is a minor comment and the game looks freaking stunning. The art is beautiful.

 

Yea, I couldn't decide between Mt. Everest and Matterhorn.

 

Incontinentia buttocks?

Moderator Action: Please be civil and cease the spam. leif

 

Agree, but the advantage of 'yellow' basic tile is that the forest cover of all kinds shows up much more clearly, and looks to me from all the screenshots that there are a lot more varieties of 'forest' or tree cover in the game. Yellow 'raw' tiles also allow them to show Farmed tiles around the cities in green to make them easy to distinguish.

Non-cultivated prairie or 'grasslands' is very yellow IRL except in the spring rain: at least that's what I've seen across the western and midwestern USA as far north as the Canadian border and as far south as south Texas: it's only in the 'semi-tropical' wetlands of Florida or irrigated fields that you get solid green expanses.

 

I believe it's the other way around. Yellow and shinny stimuli are associated with good feelings: just think of the sun, the fire, and some food. That could make those stimuli hard-wired into the human brain, making everything that looks yellow and shinny very attractive. Like gold.

But of course, at some point everything comes down to personal taste and experience. Personally, I find the yellow haze warm and attractive.

 

From what I saw it didn’t look like there was any rainforest terrain like jungle trees. There was a tropical, but that could just be palm trees and coconuts. Also, can there be a redwood forest landmark?

 

Although the association with the colour of the sun might have been an aspect, its resistance to corrosion, it's exceptionally malleable and ductile, making easy to work, it has a great lustre, are probably more relevant to it's value than just it's colour .

 

The Matterhorn looks vastly different though as it has only a single free standing and very unique peak - the natural wonder here clearly doesn’t, even if only looking at the central tile. Everest is a possibility (that hopefully is called Sagarmatha), it looks very different from the original as it is not so steep in real live and instead much more massive. The difference might come from trying to fit it onto one tile that is higher than all others though.

 

I also posted the same comment over on the games2gether forum. I love everything else about it specially after watching this latest video, but I think if they could make it a little less yellow, it would be perfect.

 

As much as I *still* love playing Civ6, that balance between vibrancy and realism is something that it lacked, and I'm glad that Humankind has that.

 

Those are all interesting suggestions for making deserts harder to cross. I'll pass them along.

There's a forest called Sylvania on this side of the river, and a river ford used by the Franks, so the city would obviously be FrankenFurter.

I think there's one biome on which the fertile grassland features a rich green color, but generally the worked fields do stick out from the unworked grassland.

It's actually four tiles, but space is indeed quite limited.
Would anybody else like to take a guess at which mountain this is?

 

I think this practically confirms the Maya are in the game.

It’s not big enough. Seems like a more generic building, maybe a hippodrome.

 

What if it is a trick question, they said at 2:48 in the video "if you are able to find the highest mountain, longest river or biggest dessert. you will be able to name it." and the name of the mountain would actually depend on who found the mountain. So it could be either Mount Everest or Matterhorn or High mountain just depending on who found it.

 

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Harsher terrains should have some kind of penalty, regardless of flatlands. They were not easy to cross by any means.

 

I like the idea of harsher terrains being harder to cross, Endless Legend made harsh movement penalties during the winter which really did slow you down and encouraged defensive play because of how difficult it was to move armies around. I think regeneration was cut as well.

I'm not sure how to implement this in Humankind in an engaging way though. Crossing a desert for example would presumably be made easier with things like camels or good supply trains? Could that be implemented in the game somehow. Considering armies are stacked up each army could have a supply system similar to what Creative Assembly did with Total War Thrones of Brittania and Three Kingdoms with supplies draining in foreign lands and draining very fast in unpleasant terrain. When a critical level of supplies is reached it leads to attrition from death/desertion.

Technology, policy and military equipment could all affect an armies supply capacity making it possible for players to prepare for long, difficult marches if the situation demands it.