Humankind Game by Amplitude

Also, the majority of what we call "Italian Renaissance" is actually within the medieval era (for example Dante Alighieri, Boccacio and Brunelleschi were 14th century).

One could argue that the boundaries between the medieval and early modern in historiography are often very murky (and you could even argue the same with the one between early modern and industrial). For many scholars of the early modern period, the Italian Renaissance is still considered a break from the medieval, and therefore belongs to the early modern period, because you have the birth of intellectual and artistic traditions that continue on past the supposed time period when the Italian Renaissance occurred, and into when we would strictly define as early modern.

There's no strict beginning and end to the early modern period; periodization is a very arbitrary concept.
 
Scientific Medieval Italians sounds very cool, you know, get that Renaissance going early. :) I guess we will have to wait for Humankind 2 to fix those few strange seeming choices (also Modern Sweden and Industrial Russia f.e.) and maybe even add another era in between classical and medieval. Though my guess would be for that game to have fewer culture changes, not more. The development is nice, but six times is a lot.
 
For many scholars of the early modern period, the Italian Renaissance is still considered a break from the medieval, and therefore belongs to the early modern period, because you have the birth of intellectual and artistic traditions that continue on past the supposed time period when the Italian Renaissance occurred, and into when we would strictly define as early modern.
You won't find many modern scholars who believe that. It's been pretty well demonstrated by now that those intellectual and artistic traditions all have roots going back to the Middle Ages or earlier. If anything defines a break with the Middle Ages and the start of the modern era, it's the Protestant Reformation--but even that has roots in the Middle Ages with the modern devotion, the rise of the universities, and heretical movements like the Waldensians, Lollards, and Hussites. The general mood in modern historical scholarship is that continuity outweighs discontinuity, whether between Antiquity and the Middle Ages or the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. The Industrial Revolution was something different, though; it radically changed people's lives in an astonishingly short period of time, which caused radical upheavals in society. If you want to point to a striking instance of discontinuity anywhere in history, it's the Industrial Revolution.

Scientific Medieval Italians sounds very cool, you know, get that Renaissance going early. :)
*cries in French*
 
*cries in French*

Je voudrais faire référence au smiley que j'ai mis a la fin de ma phrase.

Can't I be a bit light? Slotting civs into categories is hard and I don't get the human need to do it constantly, it's the same with affinities - I'm of the strong opinion that you can give every affinity to every culture. I'll find you a reason if you need it. ;-) The scientific here is more for the gameplay effect of being able to research one era further (which I never used in the OpenDevs as I was constantly behind research-wise). Or did you just refer to the fact that I should have called it rinascimento instead of renaissance?
 
Je voudrais faire référence au smiley que j'ai mis a la fin de ma phrase.

Can't I be a bit light? Slotting civs into categories is hard and I don't get the human need to do it constantly, it's the same with affinities - I'm of the strong opinion that you can give every affinity to every culture. I'll find you a reason if you need it. ;-) The scientific here is more for the gameplay effect of being able to research one era further (which I never used in the OpenDevs as I was constantly behind research-wise). Or did you just refer to the fact that I should have called it rinascimento instead of renaissance?

Not only is ratholing Civs into categories hard, it's usually very temporary and artificial, which is my beef with the whole Era/Age concept in 4x gaming: the transitions are artificially abrupt, the differences exaggerated, and the cultures that never went through a given Era/Age IRL are nevertheless dragged through them willing or no. At least in Humankind you can Transition, but it's a poor compensation.

The other compensation is that into the new Age you carry with you some of the attributes of the Culture/Faction you picked previously, so that in fact you are not playing precisely the same Faction in every game unless you make precisely the same choices in every Age: your current choice is always modified by what you had before, and that variation gets greater in every succeeding Age.

This is something I've wanted for the Civilizations in Civ for a looooong time: the ability to modify the Uniques (at least, a fraction of them) based on what you need in a specific game situation, instead of playing a Standardized England, Egypt, Mongolia or Holy Slobbovian Empire with attributes/Uniques of dubious relationship to the in-game situation.
 
Je voudrais faire référence au smiley que j'ai mis a la fin de ma phrase.

Can't I be a bit light? Slotting civs into categories is hard and I don't get the human need to do it constantly, it's the same with affinities - I'm of the strong opinion that you can give every affinity to every culture. I'll find you a reason if you need it. ;-) The scientific here is more for the gameplay effect of being able to research one era further (which I never used in the OpenDevs as I was constantly behind research-wise). Or did you just refer to the fact that I should have called it rinascimento instead of renaissance?
No, no, I was just referencing that the renaissance started in France--well, Francia--a few centuries before it spread to Italy in the sixteenth century. :p Sorry if you misunderstood; I assumed most people were familiar with the "*cries in X*" meme.
 
Well, I guess the discussion on where, when and how the Renaissance is would rather belong into another forum on this site. I‘m not convinced you can link the Carolingian Renaissance as easily to the Italian one. But then again, I would love to make a football joke now, but unfortunately, Italy just plays Spain right now and I‘d have to make a reference to something nobody expects instead.

And no, I hadn‘t seen the „cries in X“ meme in written form like that before :)

And I second everything Boris wrote above to add something of substance to this post.
 
I‘m not convinced you can link the Carolingian Renaissance as easily to the Italian one.
No, not directly, but you can directly link the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century to the Carolingian Renaissance, and the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century was also more or less centered in France (and to a lesser extent the HRE). And basically everything between the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and the Italian Renaissance was a straightforward linear progression; like I said in another thread, very few modern historians would support the Victorian idea that the Italian Renaissance popped out of nowhere and transformed history. It was the logical continuation of the Late Medieval trends before it.
 
You won't find many modern scholars who believe that. It's been pretty well demonstrated by now that those intellectual and artistic traditions all have roots going back to the Middle Ages or earlier. If anything defines a break with the Middle Ages and the start of the modern era, it's the Protestant Reformation--but even that has roots in the Middle Ages with the modern devotion, the rise of the universities, and heretical movements like the Waldensians, Lollards, and Hussites. The general mood in modern historical scholarship is that continuity outweighs discontinuity, whether between Antiquity and the Middle Ages or the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. The Industrial Revolution was something different, though; it radically changed people's lives in an astonishingly short period of time, which caused radical upheavals in society. If you want to point to a striking instance of discontinuity anywhere in history, it's the Industrial Revolution.

I mean, you're right, of course. When I typed that I was thinking of the humanist tradition that, while it definitely had its foundation in the high middle ages, with the rediscovery of many of the classical texts outside of natural (science) and human philosophies it took on a different "tone" from the scholastic tradition that was common during the high middle ages.

I don't know, if we are strict in defining early modern in-game as 1500 to 1750, then even if Venice declined in the 1600s, its height could be said to still be within that period. By point of comparison, defining the industrial era in game as 1750 to 1920, Germany as one country had its height by the late 1800s, and China started its height in the late 1990s to early 2000s.

I guess what they're aiming for is that Venice "defined" the early modern period the same way Germany defined the industrial, or China defines the modern era. Not many people associate the medieval era with Venice or Florence (but even then, those associations are based on historiographical cliches as mentioned already).
 
When and What started the "Renaissance" is a good example of the essential putty-like malleability of the Eras or Ages IRL:
1000 CE: The 'Translation Movement' in Toledo and Cordoba started making classical texts and Arabic commentaries and elaborations on the classical texts available in European languages (chiefly Latin). By the early and mid-12th century, Walcher of Malvern and Hildegarde of Bingen are both commenting on their findings in natural philosophy/science, astronomy, mathematics, etc.
- And the old shibboleth that it was refugees from the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 that started access to Aristotle and other classics in Italy has been staked down for some time now, given that, among other things, Robert Grosseteste at Oxford was writing on Aristotlean Logic before 1235 CE - and also producing works on color theory, mathematics, astronomy, controlled experimentation and even a Medieval (i.e., semi-religious) version of the Big Bang Theory.
And right after that (before 1300) Cenni di Pepo ("Cimabue") and Giotto are experimenting with non-Byzantine, "naturalistic" art styles, foreshadowing the 'Renaissance' art by about a century.

There are very few Historical Singularity-like abrupt transitions, just a set of long processes: the abruptness comes when people (and historians!) haven't been paying attention to everything going on until they trip over it, whereupon people tend to think it happened All At Once.

But, for Game Purposes, both Humankind and Civ are welded to the Singular Era/Age transition, so that's what we are going to be playing with . . .
 
But, for Game Purposes, both Humankind and Civ are welded to the Singular Era/Age transition, so that's what we are going to be playing with . . .

Hey, Humankind is naming the era after the middle ages "early modern" which is like a million times better than the utter abomination of civ's insistence of naming it "renaissance" which
1) Doesn't make any sense for non - European cultures
2) Doesn't even make sense for European cultures in - universe, because they don't experience "disconnection from foundational Roman - Greek culture"
3) Is terribly imprecise, seeing how the first wave of Italian Renaissance began in 13th century and the last ended by early 17th, while even in civ "that era" is supposed to mimic 16th to 18th centuries.
 
Hey, Humankind is naming the era after the middle ages "early modern" which is like a million times better than the utter abomination of civ's insistence of naming it "renaissance" which
1) Doesn't make any sense for non - European cultures
2) Doesn't even make sense for European cultures in - universe, because they don't experience "disconnection from foundational Roman - Greek culture"
3) Is terribly imprecise, seeing how the first wave of Italian Renaissance began in 13th century and the last ended by early 17th, while even in civ "that era" is supposed to mimic 16th to 18th centuries.

I haven't said much about it lately, because both Civ and Humankind, as stated above, seem to be firmly basing many of their game mechanics on an 'Era/Age' system, but I detest the concept of arbitrary Ages. IF the game must embrace the idea of an abrupt 'singularity' in Human progress, make it triggered by In-Game Events, not some arbitrary semi-historical or unhistorical interpretation.

And far better, IMHO, would be to reflect changes with actual effects of Civics, Social Policies and Technologies in the game you are playing, if necessary including graphic changes on the Map, Infrastructure and Units showing your progress instead of magically swapping out everything when some arbitrary 'Era' changes.
 
I haven't said much about it lately, because both Civ and Humankind, as stated above, seem to be firmly basing many of their game mechanics on an 'Era/Age' system, but I detest the concept of arbitrary Ages. IF the game must embrace the idea of an abrupt 'singularity' in Human progress, make it triggered by In-Game Events, not some arbitrary semi-historical or unhistorical interpretation.

And far better, IMHO, would be to reflect changes with actual effects of Civics, Social Policies and Technologies in the game you are playing, if necessary including graphic changes on the Map, Infrastructure and Units showing your progress instead of magically swapping out everything when some arbitrary 'Era' changes.

That would be interesting, but could be simply too complicated to implement in games already considered very complex. Although I'd love to see super hardcore "Dwarf Fortress" style historical 4x game, with insane level of detail, freedom, difficulty, and with the very survival of civilization being an achievement in itself ;)

It's like the idea I and many other people had, that different eras should require additional methods to unlock technologies. So for example
*in the ancient era you gain tech just by "doing stuff" (you trade by sea -> you unlock ships etc)
*in the classical era you also need to employ great thinkers to invent stuff
*in the medieval you also need to build universities
*in the EM you also need to foster a culture of freethinking and innovation
*in the industrial era you also need a capital investments in new inventions
*in the modern era you also need specialized science infrastructure

But the more I thought of that, the more problems I saw with this vision, such as many AI factions inevitably failing to develop later ages (realistic but terrible for gameplay balance).

In the end a game like this needs to push all players on the path of linear progression and competition, without too insane imbalance, that's why we get such simplified model. Without tight era restrictions you'd probably end with insane exploitable AI rivals such as "has computers but not gunpowder so I can easily conquer him lol" or with cheesy strategies such as "beeline only land military tech
 
That would be interesting, but could be simply too complicated to implement in games already considered very complex. Although I'd love to see super hardcore "Dwarf Fortress" style historical 4x game, with insane level of detail, freedom, difficulty, and with the very survival of civilization being an achievement in itself ;)

It's like the idea I and many other people had, that different eras should require additional methods to unlock technologies. So for example
*in the ancient era you gain tech just by "doing stuff" (you trade by sea -> you unlock ships etc)
*in the classical era you also need to employ great thinkers to invent stuff
*in the medieval you also need to build universities
*in the EM you also need to foster a culture of freethinking and innovation
*in the industrial era you also need a capital investments in new inventions
*in the modern era you also need specialized science infrastructure

But the more I thought of that, the more problems I saw with this vision, such as many AI factions inevitably failing to develop later ages (realistic but terrible for gameplay balance).

In the end a game like this needs to push all players on the path of linear progression and competition, without too insane imbalance, that's why we get such simplified model. Without tight era restrictions you'd probably end with insane exploitable AI rivals such as "has computers but not gunpowder so I can easily conquer him lol" or with cheesy strategies such as "beeline only land military tech

The answer to most of those problems, IMHO, is a vastly improved Tech Progression and integration of Technologies with the implementation of those Technologies.
Simple example, the Longbow was well-known to everyone in Europe by the 15th century, yet only England adopted it, because to get Longbowmen required a Social change to provide for thousands of hours of training and practice time by thousands of men. That kind of change was much harder than teaching craftsmen how to make a longer bow stave.
Later, everybody in the world knew what technologies were required to build Battleships by 1916, but only a handful of countries in the world built any. The ships simply required too massive an investment in dockyards, cannon, engine, hull, and other specific heavy industrial construction infrastructures, and heavy investment in naval technologies and infrastructure to maintain those Capital Ships. Case in point: Brazil's Minas Gerais was built in Britain, her sister ship rusted away at dock for lack of repair capability, and the Minas was upgraded and rebuilt in Philadelphis. Brazil had no industrial capability to either build or maintain even a single Battleship at the time.

This kind of integration of Social and Civic requirements and Infrastructure requirements to Tech (and a 'diffusion' mechanism for Technology spreading to neighbors, like the spoked wheel chariot spread to China from the 'Northern Barbarians') would make it much more difficult for anyone to either run away in technology without a long climb to a take off point, or try to advance in only one sphere without having to research or acquire other requirements in both technology and civics/social policies.

Not saying that would not be a lot of work, but it also has the potential to allow Asymmetric tech progression, like the Chinese vast superiority in iron casting, high-temperature kilns, and gunpowder over Europe for over 1000 years which nevertheless did not provide any lasting advantage to her, even with her immediate neighbors.
 
The answer to most of those problems, IMHO, is a vastly improved Tech Progression and integration of Technologies with the implementation of those Technologies.

Yes, I believe the best way is to make few basic "techs", that get unlocked by global events and that all players get (some a bit earlier than others by being part of those events), and then what is classically the "tech tree" is the implementation and development of said technologies.
 
While I personally prefer not having eras at all, another option would be to have them defined by technology benchmarks instead of the usual arbitrary labels like Medieval or Renaissance, something like Stone Age, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Steel Age, Steam Age, Combustion Age, Atomic Age, and maybe Robotic Age.
 
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While I personally prefer not having eras at all, another option would be to have them defined by technology benchmarks instead of the usual arbitrary labels like Medieval or Renaissance, something like Stone Age, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Steel Age, Steam Age, Combustion Age, Atomic Age, and maybe Robotic Age.

Technology is one obvious way to show Singuarity-type changes, but not by any means the only one. One major change, which coincidentally comes near the beginning of the "Classical Era" in Civ terms, would be the start of the Axial Age or Armstrong's "Great Transformation" when trans- and supra-cultural religious and philosophical movements like Buddhism, Judaic Monotheism, Confucianism, Greek Natural Philosophy, all got started - a major source of cultural/social/Civic change for humanity.
Changes related to technology indirectly could include:
1. The rise of Absolute Monarchy as a preferred government form in 15th - 17th century Europe, which was an indirect result of the availability of Bombards that made all the castles obsolete, making opposition to the central Monarchy fatal for the local nobility.
2. The advent of trans-national social/economic movements like Socialism and Communism - and later, Fascism - as an indirect result of the Industrialization of the work force and collapse of the traditional worker/peasant - nobility/political leadership relationships.
3. Internationalism in the Modern period, an indirect result of the rise of international NGOs and abject failure of the Nation-State in the World Wars.
 
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New blogpost on g2g.

https://www.games2gether.com/amplit...s-report-mac-version-postponed-1-month?page=1

What we’ve been working on:


  • Balancing and pacing – We got lots of great feedback from the Closed Beta on how we could improve the games balancing and have been testing and implementing many changes since then
    • Rebalanced research cost and era star thresholds to bring both in line with the desired game duration
    • Rebalancing of many cultures
    • New Religion tenets with more conditional effects instead of always desirable blanket bonuses
    • Changes to some Civics and Ideologies to allow engaging with the system without losing the main source of stability
    • Added new unit abilities to offer a different combat experience for gunpowder warfare
  • New system: Pollution – We’ve added a pollution system to the game which begins towards the end of Era 5
  • Diplomacy – This was another of the big areas we wanted to tackle following the Closed Beta. We've improved and added more depth, including new treaties and clearer UI.
  • Quality of life improvements – Things like better descriptions of the Civics and their effects, plus the addition of video tutorials to help new players. There is also now a fixed map for the two “Tutorial” options when you first start the game.
  • AI – We’ve improved the way AI deals with the economies and armies' missions. Levels of difficulty have also been balanced.
 
New blogpost on g2g.

https://www.games2gether.com/amplit...s-report-mac-version-postponed-1-month?page=1

What we’ve been working on:


  • Balancing and pacing – We got lots of great feedback from the Closed Beta on how we could improve the games balancing and have been testing and implementing many changes since then
    • Rebalanced research cost and era star thresholds to bring both in line with the desired game duration
    • Rebalancing of many cultures
    • New Religion tenets with more conditional effects instead of always desirable blanket bonuses
    • Changes to some Civics and Ideologies to allow engaging with the system without losing the main source of stability
    • Added new unit abilities to offer a different combat experience for gunpowder warfare
  • New system: Pollution – We’ve added a pollution system to the game which begins towards the end of Era 5
  • Diplomacy – This was another of the big areas we wanted to tackle following the Closed Beta. We've improved and added more depth, including new treaties and clearer UI.
  • Quality of life improvements – Things like better descriptions of the Civics and their effects, plus the addition of video tutorials to help new players. There is also now a fixed map for the two “Tutorial” options when you first start the game.
  • AI – We’ve improved the way AI deals with the economies and armies' missions. Levels of difficulty have also been balanced.

LIke I said, a lot of the problems visible in the Open Devs and Open Betas were related to balance and costs, and those are changes in numerical values that are really easy for computers.

Want to bet they are flogging their "VIP" crowd to test all those balance changes between now and the X day when things have to be finalized for Release?
 
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