Humankind Feature Focus video #3

So, predefined regions, but some flexibility. Not entirely clear to me how it works, but it seems that regions can be combined to form larger cities. Can the boundaries of regions be changed?

Also, as has been noted before, outposts can claim land, but the claim can be contested militarily. Not clear if an outpost in a region claims the whole region?

Multiple cities can contribute to the building of a wonder. I wonder if this will be simply being able to contribute the production of more than one city to the same wonder, or a bit more complicated. (I seem to recall caravans in civ II could contribute to wonder building in another city, but you had to build the caravan in the helping city and move it to the city building the wonder.)
 
I was a bit late to get this posted, but here's the blog to go along with this. Hopefully this will make it clearer for your guys.

Also, as has been noted before, outposts can claim land, but the claim can be contested militarily. Not clear if an outpost in a region claims the whole region?

The whole Territory. Control is always determined at a Territory level, never less than that. (Side note: When we say "territory" it is the indivisible, pre-defined area, while a "region" can have multiple Territories.)


Multiple cities can contribute to the building of a wonder. I wonder if this will be simply being able to contribute the production of more than one city to the same wonder, or a bit more complicated. (I seem to recall caravans in civ II could contribute to wonder building in another city, but you had to build the caravan in the helping city and move it to the city building the wonder.)

Probably nothing more complicated than that, at least for now.
 
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Very interesting video and devblog. Joining territories aside, it is however as expected. And that wonders can/need to be built with the help of multiple cities - let's hope wonders are really wonderful in their effect then!

Thanks for confirming the Romans.

There's so many things in this video and the screenshots. Might be a fruitful analysis, alas I don't have that much time right now.
Just this one screenshot here for now showing regular quarters city improvements (and some of them can be seen on the map in the video I think).
Granary - Fishmarket - Mill - Quarry
Walls - Aqueduct - [?] (Scribe/Tax Collector/Steward) - [?] (Indonesian temple dancers)
Spoiler :

Bildschirmfoto 2020-03-13 um 16.49.07.jpg

 
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Those are not the quarters, those are the infrastructures. I didn't talk about those in the blog (mostly for lack of visuals), but they are more like the "City Improvements" of Endless Legend or the buildings in Civilization than they are Quarters. These beuildings give benefits to the qhole city and its quarters. (e.g. The wall being, well, a wall in case you get attacked...)
 
Those are not the quarters, those are the infrastructures. I didn't talk about those in the blog (mostly for lack of visuals), but they are more like the "City Improvements" of Endless Legend or the buildings in Civilization than they are Quarters. These beuildings give benefits to the qhole city and its quarters. (e.g. The wall being, well, a wall in case you get attacked...)
Thanks for the clarification! I was under the impressions that all these infrastructures are called quarters as soon as they appear on the map and take up a tile - like the quarry that we see in a screenshot (or is that not the quarry in the "multiple types of quarters" screenshot).
 
"Infrastructure" is a separate gameplay term from "Quarter." That quarry in this art is not the same as that mine you see in the screenshot with several types of Quarters. (Anybody care to guess the Culture in that shot? :D )

I will provide a more detailed explanation of Infrastructures, possibly with examples, when we take another dive into resources.
 
"Infrastructure" is a separate gameplay term from "Quarter." That quarry in this art is not the same as that mine you see in the screenshot with several types of Quarters. (Anybody care to guess the Culture in that shot? :D )

I will provide a more detailed explanation of Infrastructures, possibly with examples, when we take another dive into resources.
Can we get a breakdown of the standard types of districts soon? Obviously not Emblematic ones yet since you are slowly revealing those by culture, but it would be nice to have kind of a high level overview soon enough. I'm really looking forward to seeing how you expanded on the districts concept from EL.
 
Great video. Found it interesting you mention cities having unique layouts made me wonder if you still have district levels from Endless Legend? In EL I only really used two city layouts because I found the benefits of levelling up districts more important than snaking out for resources.
 
Anybody care to guess the Culture in that shot? :D
I would guess Persia, the building with the flags to the left being the city center. If the ziggurat-like building in the center is the city center, I don't know. I would have guessed that is a wonder.
That one below is Harappa, featuring the canal network.

Here's a partial list of generic Quarters, but keep in mind that all these names are working titles, so they may still be subject to change:

  • Farmers Quarter
  • Trades Quarter
  • Market Quarter
  • Research Quarter
  • Commons Quarter
  • Defense Quarter
  • Harbour
  • and a few others we are not ready to tell you about yet.
I would really be surprised if one of these others isn't a religious quarter...
The split between trade and market is interesting and lets me hope for a trade mechanic that is central to the game.
Also, as the roman city in the video (triumphal arch EQ?) suggests, even the "specialized" quarters can be built multiple times in a city. Looking forward to see how this all works when the time comes.
 
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Here's a partial list of generic Quarters, but keep in mind that all these names are working titles, so they may still be subject to change:

  • Farmers Quarter
  • Trades Quarter
  • Market Quarter
  • Research Quarter
  • Commons Quarter
  • Defense Quarter
  • Harbour
  • and a few others we are not ready to tell you about yet.
So is trades quarter a collection of workshops and artisans to increase industry by chance? You have a market quarter so I think that would be the big economic quarter, if I'm not wrong.
 
So is trades quarter a collection of workshops and artisans to increase industry by chance? You have a market quarter so I think that would be the big economic quarter, if I'm not wrong.
That was my assumption. The Market quarter is for selling wares, while the Trades quarter is where the crafters are (blacksmith, farrier, cooper, etc.)
 
@Catoninetales_Amplitude Shaping up great! Some questions, of course:

- What's the benefit of a city "absorbing" a territory vs building another city?
- Is there a limit on the number of territories a city can absorb?
- Can you build resource extractors on outposts? Or it's just "I claimed this place" thing until you build a city?
- Can you merge cities in the late game?

In general, I love how it is. Something that was always bad in Civ was the optimal strategy was to build cities everywhere, in every little space, and you end up with 40 cities to manage, with the late game becoming a drag. I kinda wish this is something like you always have a more or less "constant" number of cities, around 8-10, since as time goes on you can "merge" smaller ones into the bigger ones, and have them all be important.
 
Another of the mesmerizing Videos to watch frame by frame and drool over . . .

Just a few First Look comments:
In the Infrastructure shots, the Mill shows a medieval-style water-powered saw cutting stone. That has to tie the Watermill to Production bonus or increase, and that makes me wonder if such an Infrastructure 'building' isn't tied to the presence of a River for the water power. IF so, we are (almost) back to some of the Civ VI Adjacency requirements, in that there are Terrain factors that might make some Quarters better in some locations than others - assuming, of course, that like in Civ the Infrastructures are tied to specific Quarters, which now that I think about it, no one has actually said.

Earlier it was mentioned in the discussion of the Greek Faction that there was a separate Theatre (in addition to the Greek Emblematic Amphitheater). The "Indonesian" dancing girls might indicate that: a Culture/Entertainment Infrastructure that could vary depending on your Faction: play a Southeast Asian Faction, get dancing girls; play Renaissance England, get a Shakespearean troupe, etc.

At about 2:25 in the video there is a sweep of a city with at least two Quarters with a large and elaborate structure in them with what looks like a pair of minarets. Does that imply Religious-Specific Structures instead of a Religious-Specific Quarter? Or that I need new glasses, which is a given . . .

Anyway, all that aside, the Quarters appear to line up:
Farmers Quarter - Food
Trades - Production
Market - Gold
Research - Science
Commons - ?
Defense - Military
Harbor - Naval/Trade

Which leaves at least two big questions so far: the Commons Quarter and the lack of a Religious Quarter
So, two possibilities:
The Common Quarter is a Religious Quarter with a wierd name
OR
the Commons Quarter is a sort of 'catch-all' for City Center/Main Plaza where Palaces, Cathedrals, Stock Exchanges, Opera Halls or any other type of Centers of Attention in the city can be placed? So, for example, IF you were aiming for a Religous Emphasis you could cram it full of religious structures, but in, say, a Gold oriented Faction it could house Bank, Stock Exchange, Bourse, Treasury, or whatever economic structures you have still hidden in the game.

So many questions, such a small keyboard . . .
 
Upsides of territories instead of free settling of civ series:

1) Very nice looking, organic borders instead of frequen mess in civ ("empire" of cluster of borders separated from each other, forward settling insane cities in the middle of other empires, city's borders expanding in a weird way and including land on the other side of huge mountain range which should clearly belong to another civ etc)
2) Natural tool to balance usefulness of terrain and spread of resources and cities over the map (no problem of large swathes of worthless land in civ, never settled because the game lacks actual "let's claim this wasteland" mechanic from real history). It also solves the eternal problem of realistic deserts, tundra and steppes vs game balance - 2/3 of a given territory may be useless desert, balanced by some content of the remaining 1/3. You can also make strategically important areas full of some endemic resources.
3) Depending how settling works, either smaller or no problem with incredibly stupid and annoying issue of AI forward settling
4) The eternal problem of how to balance cities built near large bodies of water and how to make them as fun to play as real life ones. You can't do that. Sea water is just non drinkable water, it is useless beyond fishing some creatures and very limited pool of resources (pearls, oil etc).
Humankind avoids this problem, beacause there are no such things as useless water heavy cities at all - map is presumably generated in such way as to provide every region with enough land or water resources to sustain a proper city.
5) I am not sure about that, but maybe the lack of infinitely expanding water tiles means you can actually sail around the world with ships, without half of the global ocean being magically locked away if you have no open border treaties...


6) Am I the only one who always found the way civ borders work very strange? In civ games borders work literally like a fungus or other living organism, expanding on their own step by step from higher priority tiles to lower priority tiles. And this happens peacefully, via culture yield. Why the hell does building opera makes territorial control easier? In real life territorial control was always the issue of military and political power and borders were stable, if nobody can contest an empire it claims an entire given region here. This is why it was always impossible to model colonial expansion in civ series, where a powerful military came and had so major advantage that it could very quickly get control over very huge land. I think this is unsolvable issue in free - settling 4X game, as you'd have to somehow model wrestling each tile from other cultures via assimilation, political influence or military force.

Humankind avoids this problem entirely.
 
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I wonder if having a culture that is "Aesthete" relates to them being artistically inclined, and if that affects wonder building in some way.
There seems to be some system where you can claim a wonder such that no one else can start building it, so I wonder if maybe you need to gather
a certain amount of culture to lay claim to a wonder to build it, and perhaps having an Aesthete culture lets you gather that culture faster.
 
Great Bath.png


Pleased to see the Great Bath and the Mohenjo Daro Citadel / Stupa making an appearance as the City Center!

I ESPECIALLY like the added detail of having it placed at a higher elevation than the rest of the city in this screenshot, just as it is in real life!
 
I've updated my features thread with everything from this video and the other social posts

It will be interesting to see if you want large single territories, or a bunch of smaller territories with multiple cities.
 
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