Humankind Game by Amplitude

[Jkchart]

I am cautiously but eagerly looking forward to see how this plays out.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

For people worried about the tactical combat on a sectioned-off-map aspect: In Endless Legend you can turn that off and just let the computer calculate the outcomes of two armies clashing. Usually this gives the AI a little buff. I haven't played Endless Space 2, so I don't know if you can turn it off in that.

I've been hoping for years that Amplitude would make a historical game to compete with Civ and wondered what it would look like. For me Endless Legend made some amazing and needed improvements to the 4X formula, and I was happy to see some of them implemented in Civ 6. Now it looks like the competition is fully on!

There is only AI combat in Endless Space, although they have a little video animation where you can watch the combat take place. This game looks closer to Legend in that regard, so it is likely to have the tactical combat function (and the associated auto-calc feature).

 

[Brutus2]

I have always thought Civ should have units move around the map as one "army stack" to reduce the map clutter and blocking of movement but then open up onto a 1 unit per hex battle map "Heroes of Might and Magic style" when you initiate combat, like placing pieces on a chess board and it looks like that is exactly what Humankind has planned. In theory the idea of choosing a new culture in each era could be cool but I'm afraid some choices will become clearly better than others making it so you end up wanting to choose the same ones in every game, sort of like with Pantheons in Civ where there are a few choices that are way better than all the rest.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Hard to buy into hype but if it controls better than Civ 6 and avoids some of the degenerate incentives then it can win. Civ has declined significantly in its strategic consideration and "time spent making meaningful decisions" since Civ 4, so I'm happy to see competition arise. We'll see how well it actually competes.

Whether you do score or multiple victory conditions you still need to address the elephant in the room: dead civs presumably don't score well, and if there's only one civ alive it's hard to make a case any other is the winner.

 

[DWilson]

I might be wrong, but the reports I've heard about the endless games has been that their AI is pretty subpar as well. That doesn't mean they won't have innovative systems, or a better UI, but I would consider this the start of a challenge, rather than an immediate competitor given much of the feedback I see here

 

[TheMeInTeam]

AI sucks in nearly every strategy game I've seen. I'd say "every" but AlphaStar would mop the floor with me and most players in StarCraft 2. Aside from such projects AI is basically still universally trash in these types of games though.

 

[mitsho]

Civ was ripe for a disruption, in its current form, it just takes too many clicks, has too many different systems and requires you to do the same stuff in the modern age you've done since the stone age. So I do think the apparent era system can have its value and bring in big changes in gameplay. When switching from the Egyptians to Khmer to France annoys you, the wonders from other cultures should've probably annoyed you as well in civ6. But yes, it will be a different experience.

The single victory condition is a good thing. It let's you roleplay your civ and pivot from one age to another and it doesn't railroad you into anything. The modern era in civ6 suffers from just clicking til that culture or science bucket is filled. That shouldn't happen here.

I'm not sure about the combat, but am open to it. With autoresolve, it can nevertheless be a quick experience. But I would have hoped for them to try a bit more a complete fresh start. For example, they seem to keep the yields systems with food and industry which just fits best in the start of the game. But later on? The spaced out cities seem like a good idea, civ6 is way to crowded. But I probably need to learn more about the actual gameplay to judge all that.

 

[Stilgar08]

live-Interview from gamescom, cologne.
All in German and not a whole lot of information - major info "we're in pre alpha and know nothing yet" but some Infos were sort of intriguing:
-You start in the neolithic age and have to explore first before being able to build your first city.
-There will be regions like in EL. and you will be able to give orders for this as a whole (city +"outposts" will grow together over time)
-You'll be able to control Combat yourself, not like in EL where you are more or less just a spectator...
-the fame you earn could lead to a diminished civ winning the game because of fame or have earned in the past. (Romans win because of the big impact they had in the past...)
- they stated since its a triple AAA title they'll have much more resources for the development at hand than for previous titles like EL or Endless Space (could be just a marketing statement, but still)
---
Well, personally I didn't warm up to EL and ES very much and therefore am somewhat cautious. But it doesn't look too shabby to me as a first impression.

 

[Krajzen]

I feel torn.

The last few years have been weird for me. The excitement of the lead up to Civ 6, the anticipation of the teasers and looking forward to the new innovations … followed by the uggh of how Civ 6 actually plays.

Then for the last few months, the dev team comments and speculation about yet another possible expansion to Civ 6, pushing out even further the timing of Civ 7. At first it was no big deal. But lately I've been wondering "would I even buy Civ 7 if it was made by the current Firaxis team?"

Now this, and the possibility of a fresh look at what drives the development of civilizations.

I've no idea if this new game will be any good or not, or if good whether it will appeal to me or not. I'm cautiously looking forward to learning more.

Leaving me feeling somewhat optimistic that I now have something to look forward to over the remainder of 2019 that will hold my interest more than speculation about Civ 6 patches or a new Civ 6 expansion.

And yet I also feel sad. I've been a Civ - fan for so long, I really wish I was looking forward to hearing more about the development of the Civ franchise. And following Humankind is just going to continually remind me of that.

Not sure about you but I really dislike the general design philosophy of civ6:
1) Low difficulty level. This is my greatest pet peeve. There were many indie and non-indie games over last years which were challenging and yet selling very well. Hell, even another Firaxis major franchise, XCOM, is relatively difficult game even without its insane Ironman "no savescummin" mode - and both iterations sold very well. People like to be challenged. People especially like to be challenged in supposedly serious strategy games. Pretty much all strategy games I know are more challenging than civ6 - Paradox games, Amplitude games, Total War games etc - all of them struggle with AI due to modern tech limitations, but they all still manage to achieve adrenaline pumping challenge much more often than civ6. I love difficult games and having to carefully plan my strategies and seeing how my every choice matters. And if we have eight difficulty settings, there really should be some option for players who want to be challenged, especially - without stupid desperate AI resource cheats. I don't give a damn how hard it is to program 1UPT combat AI, if it is impossible then I'd actually support changing entire stacking and combat system just to give AI a fighting chance. Imagine Civ game with optional difficulty level which makes sustaining thousand years of civilizaiton an actual challenge to stand the test of time, where you have to carefully plan development of your people to avoid dangerous bottlenecks, where you are sweating when in danger and raise your fist in the air when you manage to overcome obstacles... resulting not from AI having stupid crazy early bonus resources but from game design enabling our limited AI to be really dangerous.
2) Cartoonish graphics, Pixar leaders, ironic tech quotes, goddamn rock band units and general march away from even bothering to have some resemblance to history
3) Very abstract "board game" mechanics which neglect immersion and historical inspirations in favour of new sets of shiny bonuses to grab (along that shallow dopamine shot in your veins resulting from filling buckets with currencies)
4) Too many mechanics which are too shallow and too overloaded with countless sources of more bonuses, instead of "less but more" - less game mechanics but with more immersion, interconnection, depth and actual difficult strategic dilemmas

And on top of that two big problems with Firaxis community approach
1) Lack of dev diaries or some kind of equivalent, lack of communication with fans, instead silently watching forums from afar and suddenly dropping patches before going silent for months again
2) Very limited mod support (come on, we have civ6 for three years and there are no mods more advanced that "some more units or buildings with their 3d models", where is .dll?)

 

[Duuk]

I might be wrong, but the reports I've heard about the endless games has been that their AI is pretty subpar as well. That doesn't mean they won't have innovative systems, or a better UI, but I would consider this the start of a challenge, rather than an immediate competitor given much of the feedback I see here

Every game forum for every strategy game on the market has threads detailing how bad the AI is and if the devs would only invent SkyNet and a neural-network of learning systems distributed across the world SETI-style the AI could self-teach and learn to be better. Because teaching SkyNet how to ruthlessly play world conquest games is definitely a good idea.

 

[steveg700]

I might be wrong, but the reports I've heard about the endless games has been that their AI is pretty subpar as well. That doesn't mean they won't have innovative systems, or a better UI, but I would consider this the start of a challenge, rather than an immediate competitor given much of the feedback I see here

Well, the greater question is, what 4X game has an AI that doesn't suck in some way?

Does sucking mean that the AI does not do a good job of competing for victory? Since most 4X games use the MOO2 and Civ notion of "mutliple paths to victory", that means there's an optimal path to victory. Most players would be bored with AI's having no real agendas beyond bee-lining to victory. They want to feel like they're part of an epic space opera full of twists and turns, not a rote, procedural, scripted race, So AI's wind up being too lackadaisical to seriously compete.

Does sucking mean that diplomacy is bad? That has always been an almost tacked-on component. Let's face it, 4X's roots are grounded in building cities into engines of warfare. Every improvement to a city was done so that city would better be able to crank out units capable of conquering territory. Historical 4X is a bad offender because what history books teach is that history is just a series of wars. If you have a century or two of relative peace, write a nice paragraph about how it was a golden age and move on to the next big conflict. Who has ever presented AI diplomacy in a deep way?

Right now, Civ has lowered expectations in a lot of areas. We still have the AI who will try to build a wonder just because it can. We still have an AI who won't use aircraft. We still have an AI that can be locked into a path of positive diplomacy modifiers that override its agendas and grievances. I just yesterday posted a thread about Poundmaker spending a game at only one city because the AI wouldn't use its free settler. In a relative sense, the Endless AI holds up. It just is a far cry from a human brain.

 

[DWilson]

To be clear, my intent was not to say their AI is worse, but rather that it's not particularly better. Given that AI seems to be among the, if not the, highest complaints, my intent is to emphasize that people looking for a competitor for a better AI aren't necessarily going to find that here.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Interestingly enough this idea of different Civs for each era could be a good way to implement a different game style for say Civ VII while still keeping the leaders and adding more Civs to the game.

Say you start out as the Iceni with Boudicca and then by the Medieval Era you turn into the Anglo-Saxons led by Alfred the Great, England by Elizabeth in the Renaissance, Great Britain .United Kingdom by Victoria in the Industrial Age and maybe by the time the modern era comes along you can choose to end the game as one of their colonial powers like America, Australia or Canada.

Then we could finally have Mughals for India and Sassanids for Persia.

 

[Krajzen]

Interestingly enough this idea of different Civs for each era could be a good way to implement a different game style for say Civ VII while still keeping the leaders and adding more Civs to the game.

Say you start out as the Iceni with Boudicca and then by the Medieval Era you turn into the Anglo-Saxons led by Alfred the Great, England by Elizabeth in the Renaissance, Great Britain .United Kingdom by Victoria in the Industrial Age and maybe by the time the modern era comes along you can choose to end the game as one of their colonial powers like America, Australia or Canada.

Then we could finally have Mughals for India and Sassanids for Persia.

Yeah, because every modern country has unbroken and direct continuity connecting every single culture that ever dominated it, all the way to ancient era it's not like pre-Roman Britons were utterly alien to Anglo-Saxons who were then conquered by Normans

Especially in case of India which never had singular 'national' identity before 19th century but was a subcontinent size of Western Europe filled with extremely different civilizations competing with each other for 3000 years

Another problem are all those empires which were very important but episodic and existed 'only' for few centuries...

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Another problem are all those empires which were very important but episodic and existed 'only' for few centuries...

That's precisely why it would be interesting at least to think about it, though I doubt Civ will go in that direction at all. I do agree that it will not work for all and you definitely would be have to be linear with some such as playing through six Chinese dynasties with maybe a Mongolian in between.
I am wondering what kind of approach Humankind will make such as will they have both a Renaissance Elizabethan England and then a Victorian United Kingdom as separate Civs or will they focus one area of their history?

 

[CivLuvah]

As for Humankind specifically, I’m not super excited about choosing sort of “generic” factions, and then every 25 turns mashing them up with another “faction”’s set of abilities. That doesn't actually feel any more historical to me than what Civ does. Overall, I think Civ VI’s approach of playing a specific Civ and taking that Civ forward is a stronger design, because you start with a clearer sense of who your faction “is” and are so more invested in that faction (although, yeah, it gets a bit weird when you’re playing Amercia or Australia in the ancient era for example). [1

Yeah, because every modern country has unbroken and direct continuity connecting every single culture that ever dominated it, all the way to ancient era it's not like pre-Roman Britons were utterly alien to Anglo-Saxons who were then conquered by Normans

Especially in case of India which never had singular 'national' identity before 19th century but was a subcontinent size of Western Europe filled with extremely different civilizations competing with each other for 3000 years

Another problem are all those empires which were very important but episodic and existed 'only' for few centuries...

The more I think about the evolving cultural traits approach that this game takes the more I find it a bit... iffy. It feels more abstract to just pick and mix cultures, when there were cultures that just disappeared off the map, or have been superseded by another culture to the point that traces of it are very hard to find, or cultures that might have been "resurrected" but are in actuality far off from the "original" that it purports to be a continuation of.

Lack of dev diaries or some kind of equivalent, lack of communication with fans, instead silently watching forums from afar and suddenly dropping patches before going silent for months again

I actually prefer this approach honestly. Paradox is, of course, a good example of a dev that takes the approach of development diaries. But ultimately, personally, in my busy schedule, do I even have the time to read every weekly dev diary to catch up on new mechanics when I have other stuff to do?

 

[Ivan Hunger]

We have been inundated with sooooooooo many space 4X games over the last five years or so, and nobody has really made any effort to do historical 4X, which Firaxis has provden (and made) the most popular flavor of 4X.

Just mind-boggling it took so long.

I blame Alpha Centauri nostalgia.

Twenty years later and people are still trying to create a proper successor to that game.

 

[blackcatatonic]

A civilization that you build yourself as you play through the game rather than decide upon at the beginning

I am late to the party but yes, this please, shut up and take my money Amplitude! I have been wanting something like this in Civ for years now. And I'm more than happy to cheat on my favourite 4X series to get it

 

[Solomonic Wisdom]

I think I like the idea of a focus on strategy rather than tactics and micromanagement for some change. (Of course it does depend on how it is actually done.)

 

[Medopu]

The more I think about the evolving cultural traits approach that this game takes the more I find it a bit... iffy. It feels more abstract to just pick and mix cultures, when there were cultures that just disappeared off the map, or have been superseded by another culture to the point that traces of it are very hard to find, or cultures that might have been "resurrected" but are in actuality far off from the "original" that it purports to be laa continuation of.

Could you elaborate on that? Because we both share concerns about evolving cultural traits, i just dont get why you would find cultures dying or being superceeded in a game design like this as impossible to portray. When a culture in real life disappears, it's always due to an outside event like conflicts or disasters, which in games like humankind and civ is portrayed by "player losing their last city". Therefore, culture is gone.

My concerns of this game design are as follows;
First of all, this might be an awkward question but are leaders (as in ghandi) even confirmed for this game? It would be strange to play against a leader who stays the same but leads completely different civs throughout the game. Would be extremely confusing. If anything it's actually the leaders and their UA's that should be constantly and frequently changing (like in paradox games).
I'm guessing this game will probably not even include leaders (i might be wrong here). Which is both sad but somehow more immersive at least for me, who has trouble imagining a real world scenario, where one immortal being like genghis khan is able to survive and lead a whole nation for 6000 years straight.

As for cultural evolution, i also dislike the idea of having free hands to pick just any civ you want for a particular era. Yes, culture change a lot but always in particular contexts, that would be too hard for any game made today to replicate in a meaningful manner.

We'll have to wait and see how this pans out.