Humankind Game by Amplitude

[Onii-chan]

Real talk, how was this auto-explore exploit not found during the beta testing? It only takes a minute to see that this is basically just maphack lol

Just gonna pretend I didn't see it for now but man they better fix that pretty fast


Also I was thinking about just why Stability feels so poorly balanced in this game and I think this might be the core of the issue

Since you have basically free access to everyone else's luxuries just by spending a bit of money in diplomacy, even if you're mainly just doing it for the yield bonuses it gives to your cities, in the process you also get so many global Stability bonuses that that alone makes up for the Stability costs of districts, and that's not even taking other things that increase it into account yet

Like imagine having free access to every luxury resource on the map in Civ V, how easy it would've been to manage Happiness in that case. That's basically what Humankind is doing here. Something needs to be adjusted

 

[Siptah]

We knew about the auto scout @Onii-chan and also about the excess stability you get from trade if every luxury gives +4 and % modifiers from the manufacturies and the hanging gardens.

 

[CivLuvah]

Can you? I don't see them in the list

I believe it's when you create your avatar. They are presets so they might not exactly look like Gligamesh or Elissa.

The market doesn't reward developers for making strategy games challenging. Make it even a little bit hard and the number of negative reviews you get on Steam is astronomical. People want to be able to crank it up to the hardest setting and win easily even if they aren't very good at these games. :-(

Some gamers are just very fickle people.

I do however consider and agree that there needs to be a balance between "too easy for repeated playing" and "too hard to be unplayable"

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Some gamers are just very fickle people.

I do however consider and agree that there needs to be a balance between "too easy for repeated playing" and "too hard to be unplayable"

It's economics.
I remember a discussion (at the bar, the best place to discuss gaming!) at the GAMA (Gaming Artists and Manufacturers) convention years ago, which turned to the cost of bringing games to market. One man, a professional in the gaming industry, pointed out that a set of miniatures wargaming rules could be developed, printed and distributed by a few people or one person for a few hundred or around a thousand dollars (this was in the early 2000's, so factor in inflation over the past 12 - 15 years). A board game could be produced and distributed for around $10,000 more or less. A computer game even then took well over a million dollars and was already inflating dramatically each year: each type of game was approximately an order of magnitude more expensive to produce.

That means I could play separate commercial sets of WWII miniatures rules with units of battalion, company, platoon, squad or individual man size, each with its own set of 'fanatic' followers, each commercially viable because they didn't need an intercontinental market to break even.
That's not possible for any computer game today: they have to appeal to a mass market, and that means, inevitably, appealing to the Lowest Common Denominator of gamer - not necessarily a bad thing overall, but one that will strongly influence what you get in any commercial game unless the developers are Financially Suicidal. Add in the influence of major commercial firms doing a lot of the financing of the developer companies/groups/teams and a 'niche' or limited appeal game will not get past the design stage.

 

[Zaarin]

Huh, just noticed that outposts are actually named after stars--a reference to Endless Space 2, no doubt. It was Cor Caroli that tipped me off, and since then I've noticed several more star names.

 

[Guynemer]

Had a Proxima Centauri in my last game.

 

[PhilBowles]

Played 100 turns, hitting medieval at exactly turn 100.

The good:

- The game is an almost straight Civ clone; the initial turns are indistinguishable from a Civ game. That scores low points for originality, but it does allow them to iterate on what's already there rather than just produce a historical-themed Endless Legend, which was what I'd feared (as popular as it is and as well-written the narrative events, it was extraordinarily shallow as an actual strategy game - basically an RPG in 4x clothing).

- The city development and outpost system I like a lot. It keeps the EL 'one city a territory' rule (though it's hard to see on the main map where territorial boundaries are) while allowing you to directly access areas you can develop from a central hub - big pile of rocks out of the city radius? Build an outpost to justify building Stonemasons.

- While it makes diplomacy even less relevant than it is in Civ games, I like the less binary nature of conflict - as long as you aren't invading you can attack anyone you want. Borders not being 'hard' as in Civ V/VI but working more like Civ IV and earlier is welcome.

- The warscore system similarly seems an improvement.

The not-so-good:

- It has Amplitude AI, so basically take all the flaws of Civ VI AI and imagine they're about an order of magnitude worse. Hopefully some of this is difficulty-related (I didn't see a difficulty level option so just went with whatever the default is for a first game), but enemies not building armies and attacking larger forces with single units is a consistent pattern in all the Endless games that recurs here, so I expect it to be general. There seems no rhyme or reason to which civ AIs evolve into - the Nubians became the Persians, an expansionist civ, after I'd reduced them to one city and they had nowhere to expand.

- It seems very min-max with an optimal path through the game which is basically going to be the same for everyone, and with score victory the only outcome: balanced to maximise the 'stars' acquired through as many routes as possible. I've seen reviews that gush about the fact that if you over-focus on science or whatever you run out of options for stars too soon, interpreting it as a clever balancing mechanism. Except that you can still min-max without maximising a single resource - you're maximising star acquisition - and

3. this game has inherited the rather poor district system of Endless Legend that allows you to pretty much go infinite with buffs of all types with very marginal trade-offs. That latter is further hampered by money being a nearly useless resource for anything other than rush-buying things (and you can rush buy multiples a turn rather than having the production complete the following turn). The outpost system, while I like it as a design, makes this issue even more pronounced - basically you don't have meaningfully limited resources, most resources can be pretty directly substituted for others, and all the caps the game provides can be circumvented (city caps? Just attach lots of outposts - at this point I'm not even fully clear what you want excess cities for. Population? Not actually very important for resource generation with all the buff buildings available), another problem inherited from EL and possibly exacerbated here.

4. It may just be the setup I'm on on my map (a big island with only one rival), but it's hard to get much real sense of an ebb and flow of competing factions on a map as you do with Civ.

5. The UI is pretty rather than functional. Excessive numbers of clicks and box popups are needed to do anything, and it seems more insistent even than Civ VI in pressuring you to take trivial actions just to allow the turn to end. It's still rather opaque to me how faith works, and it isn't given a value on the main UI as other resources are. A lot of things trigger on having X districts of type Y, but so far I haven't found a Civ-style city screen summary of all the buildings and districts I have in a given city to allow planning - basically I just see what my resource needs are at the time (usually food) and click buttons accordingly.

6. Either some tech progression is a bit weird or things aren't explained well enough - for instance you can get harbours, which provide bonuses to emarkation, before you can embark anyone, and I only learned through trial and error that a maritime trade tech allows you to embark (described as allowing the construction of transport ships - a status icon 'units can now embark' a la Civ would have been less flavourful, but more useful.

7. City states are an area where they should have borrowed from EL, or at least Civ VI. This implementation is bewilderingly bad - basically you just gradually pay to buy a city and it gives you ... something? ... in the meantime. Nothing that warrants letting it stay independent, at least.

In all this I haven't mentioned the Civ-switching, which is just a set of mostly additive bonuses (every so often you lose a unit type or building but you've ideally already built all the ones you want). It's closer to Civ V civic selection than anything profoundly new, and there are nice synergies to choose from but generally I suspect what you've already taken will narrow down what you want to two or three options - and perhaps partly due to passive AI but I suspect mostly because functionally they're usually so similar the unique units seem to be an irrelevance.

The big decision is going to be what style you want in that era - Expansionist, Agrarian etc. - and this is one that works well with the system. I started Expansionist only to learn as the game goes on that this is probably better chosen when you can accrue those stars more quickly. The problem cones in that, again, some seem mostly useless, and some civs are a bit too strongly-themed to their mechanic to be of interest. If you conclude, as I have, that money is mostly useless, Merchant is worthless - but all the Merchant civs do basically the same thing, and that's generate money. There should perhaps be more interesting trade-offs: maybe there's an ability I would strongly benefit from but I'd have to weigh that against taking a suboptimal era perk. Instead, it's a bit too much 'rich get richer' for the good options and 'I wasn't going to bother anyway' for the rest. Also, as with every other system most of the advantages to each choice are straight resource buffs - like Endless games before it, it's the most banal form of bucket-filling exercise with minimal elaboration.

All that said I'm enjoying it enough to play straight through to turn 100 in a session, but that's quite common when I start a new 4x. As it stands I don't expect it to have any kind of staying power, and the expansion trajectory of past Endless games doesn't give me confidence that anything more sophisticated is planned - it's old-fashioned in its remorseless '4x as bucket-filling' way, but I expect it to have the same problem that it lacks depth of Amplitude's earlier games.

 

[Taefin]

I think the tutorial is at the easiest difficulty. Sure the game can become less rich later on, but I find my gameplay is much more situation when the AI is set to an appropriate level for me. I find there is zero fun once I am in the lead, but getting there I find very fun.

 

[PhilBowles]

Some gamers are just very fickle people.

I do however consider and agree that there needs to be a balance between "too easy for repeated playing" and "too hard to be unplayable"

No one could ever have accused Amplitude of making games too hard to be playable.

It's economics.
I remember a discussion (at the bar, the best place to discuss gaming!) at the GAMA (Gaming Artists and Manufacturers) convention years ago, which turned to the cost of bringing games to market. One man, a professional in the gaming industry, pointed out that a set of miniatures wargaming rules could be developed, printed and distributed by a few people or one person for a few hundred or around a thousand dollars (this was in the early 2000's, so factor in inflation over the past 12 - 15 years). A board game could be produced and distributed for around $10,000 more or less. A computer game even then took well over a million dollars and was already inflating dramatically each year: each type of game was approximately an order of magnitude more expensive to produce.

That means I could play separate commercial sets of WWII miniatures rules with units of battalion, company, platoon, squad or individual man size, each with its own set of 'fanatic' followers, each commercially viable because they didn't need an intercontinental market to break even.
That's not possible for any computer game today: they have to appeal to a mass market, and that means, inevitably, appealing to the Lowest Common Denominator of gamer - not necessarily a bad thing overall, but one that will strongly influence what you get in any commercial game unless the developers are Financially Suicidal. Add in the influence of major commercial firms doing a lot of the financing of the developer companies/groups/teams and a 'niche' or limited appeal game will not get past the design stage.

A big thing happened after the early 2000s that gave the lie to this perspective: XCOM. A game that actively sought to try and capture the difficulty of its predecessors (the first of which was a game so difficult that it was famously hard despite a bug that prevented the difficulty levels from working and was set to 'easy'), and was such a phenomenal success it not just revived that brand but created a fairly large genre of XCOMalikes. Similarly, in the world of first-person gaming the original Dark Souls had a reputation for being hard.

What's more that logic doesn't work with games that have difficulty levels.

I think the tutorial is at the easiest difficulty. Sure the game can become less rich later on, but I find my gameplay is much more situation when the AI is set to an appropriate level for me. I find there is zero fun once I am in the lead, but getting there I find very fun.

There were three tutorial options (never played a 4x, played non-Humankind 4x, played Humanlind) - if those have any bearing on difficulty rather than just being different levels of tip dropdown, maybe each is at a different level? I chose option 2.

But the vast majority of the issues I have aren't with difficulty, they're with the underlying design philosophy - one it shares with the Endless games - as well as its rigid victory structure. It's not built around trade-offs, it's built around giving the player mostly free and mostly immediate access to resources without having to make choices that matter about where to specialise their workers, or whether building along one chain will cost time, resources or space that limit future options. Everything's just free goodies - right down to the Diablo school of strategy gaming that keeps respawning random resource drops in the landscape.

Ultimately, it's true, 4xes are about 'bucket filling' - fill the food bucket to get a settler or population point (another missing tradeoff here - outposts/cities cost no resources other than influence, the units are still there and any unit type can build one), fill the production bucket to build things, fill a science bucket to get a tech etc. etc. But most do a bit more to disguise that underlying mechanism than 'here are some buckets. Here are resources to collect. Knock yourself out", or at least give you something to do while bucket-filling. I still recall a review of Civ V that described its systems - unfairly in that case, I thought - as 'the worst kind of bucket-filling'. Endless Humans is almost literally the Civ V buckets with all the veneer and complexity removed - *that* is the worst kind of bucket-filling.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

Still plodding through my first game but here is my London with the British Town Centre on the right next to Notre Dame. The game contines to dazzle me with its graphics. I can waste a lot of time watching tiny cars make their way through the empire!

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

View attachment 606376
Still plodding through my first game but here is my London with the British Town Centre on the right next to Notre Dame. The game contines to dazzle me with its graphics. I can waste a lot of time watching tiny cars make their way through the empire!

For me it's the animals roaming the map, and then the trains once I have my tracks up in the Modern Era - too much temptation to sit and watch instead of playing!

 

[8housesofelixir]

Huh, just noticed that outposts are actually named after stars--a reference to Endless Space 2, no doubt. It was Cor Caroli that tipped me off, and since then I've noticed several more star names.

All the outpost names are in fact the names of territories, so basically every territory is named after a star or a part of a constellation. I'd say it's a nice way to pull off a long list of not-random names (a normal size map easily has 70+ territories) without burning out all your brain cells.

Since you have basically free access to everyone else's luxuries just by spending a bit of money in diplomacy, even if you're mainly just doing it for the yield bonuses it gives to your cities, in the process you also get so many global Stability bonuses that alone makes up for the Stability costs of districts, and that's not even taking other things that increase it into account yet. Like imagine having free access to every luxury resource on the map in Civ V, how easy it would've been to manage Happiness in that case. That's basically what Humankind is doing here. Something needs to be adjusted.

Note that trading is not something the player can entirely control; unlike Civ you cannot actively sell things. So if you angered a lot of AIs - which will happen from time to time! - and therefore lost that free access, your stability and yield will tank.

I do agree that for 80% of the time is not hard to please the AI by buying and selling resources; on the other hand, that's how trading works for most of the 4x games.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

All the outpost names are in fact the names of territories, so basically every territory is named after a star or a part of a constellation. I'd say it's a nice way to pull off a long list of not-random names (a normal size map easily has 70+ territories) without burning out all your brain cells.

Shuckee Gee, if they'd asked, I have a list of almost 300 tribal names/areas from all over the world from the pre-historic on that could have been used, and would have been a bit more appropriate than star names.

In fact, I wish they'd allow the option of renaming Regional territories to something more appropriate to our Faction: it would make them a lot easier to remember in the End-of-War negotiations . . .

Note that trading is not something the player can entirely control; unlike Civ you cannot actively sell things. So if you angered a lot of AIs - which will happen from time to time! - and therefore lost that free access, your stability and yield will tank.

I do agree that for 80% of the time is not hard to please the AI by buying and selling resources; on the other hand, that's how trading works for most of the 4x games.

Personal example: in one game I was trading with a couple of Factions on another continent in the Early Modern, resulting in my Stability and Money both heavily positive. Then one of them was vassalized by my rival on that continent (we were trading the lead in Fame Stars and had harassed each other's territory earlier) and suddenly trade with him was cut off completely: my average Stability went from 100 to about 35 per city and I had to scramble to keep it from falling further and spawning Rebel Armies everywhere. Taught me to play closer attention to relationships around the world . . .

 

[Zaarin]

All the outpost names are in fact the names of territories, so basically every territory is named after a star or a part of a constellation. I'd say it's a nice way to pull off a long list of not-random names (a normal size map easily has 70+ territories) without burning out all your brain cells.

Huh, didn't realize the territories were prenamed. I assumed the outpost names were randomly generated when founded.

Shuckee Gee, if they'd asked, I have a list of almost 300 tribal names/areas from all over the world from the pre-historic on that could have been used, and would have been a bit more appropriate than star names.

In fact, I wish they'd allow the option of renaming Regional territories to something more appropriate to our Faction: it would make them a lot easier to remember in the End-of-War negotiations . . .

As an astronomy nerd I don't mind the star names for outposts, but I wish they'd take on faction-appropriate names when they were annexed by a city.

 

[Taefin]

It's not built around trade-offs, it's built around giving the player mostly free and mostly immediate access to resources without having to make choices that matter about where to specialise their workers, or whether building along one chain will cost time, resources or space that limit future options.

Here I wonder if a more aggressive curve on quarters cost would help. Currently it seems either linear or mildly geometric/exponential. If your first 10 quarters were easily enough to get, expanding to get more exploitation and/or starting some money/science, but then became sufficiently more expensive to the point that building a few more MQ was not enough to drive the cost back down to 1-2 turns each, then you’d force the player to decide between a high production city with reduxed/delayed money/science output, or a smaller money/science city that stayed lower production.

Currently I don’t think exploitation is the problem, as that only accounts for 100-200 yields for my larger cities compared to 1-2k+ for districts and adjacencies. I think exploitation is mostly useful early game and creates a fun city planning puzzle before you just start paving over forests and rivers for adjacencies. I’d rather exploitation stayed a larger proportion of overall yields through a longer portion of the game. Definitely looking forward to modding opening up possibilities to fine tune the game to different preferences.

 

[CivLuvah]

It has Amplitude AI, so basically take all the flaws of Civ VI AI and imagine they're about an order of magnitude worse. Hopefully some of this is difficulty-related (I didn't see a difficulty level option so just went with whatever the default is for a first game), but enemies not building armies and attacking larger forces with single units is a consistent pattern in all the Endless games that recurs here, so I expect it to be general.

Just a comment, but I remember in one OpenDev people were complaining about the AI being too punishing.

 

[Taefin]

Just a comment, but I remember in one OpenDev people were complaining about the AI being too punishing.

At Victor I sure got killed a lot, AI used archers like a human and really put the EU to work. Even now I would get leveled by early classical AI if they had the heart to attack the second they got swords out, or the war support to keep our ancient era wars going.

Also just got Harappans for the first time (the AI must have thought I was cheating, but I actually just stumbled on a lot of river food and got 5 pop by T5). Wow! Who’d have through 1 extra combat strength made such a difference in early conquest. I thought their power lay in the AI having +2 str to EU and +2 (I think) on HW. I ended up with a neighbor right next door and since it was so early killed a bunch of their gatherers. Surprise war the second they got a city, they then immediately founded a second city and we ended war one. Built up a real army and came right back for the other. Left a scout alive to go found another city but I guess they have closed borders with the Maya Now I need to decide if I want Celts or Aksumites (or Romans but yuck) to go with Stonehenge, not bad choices for being the last out of Ancient at T53. This is by far my strongest start! I probably won’t play past classical unless one of the leader picks up some steam.

Edit: And this is why I taunt this game so brashly, I picked the game up after dinner, choosing the the Aksumites, and on the very next turn Maya declares war on me and a city is already under siege. Oh they’ve had standing army for a few turns

 

[PhilBowles]

Just a comment, but I remember in one OpenDev people were complaining about the AI being too punishing.

As a combatant? I've hit early modern and am just starting to see actual AI armies - one of which I've lost to twice as a pair of horse archer stacks that sit so close to one another on the coast that I can't deploy fully to take advantage of my more advanced units. The AI placement there is fairly clever, but also very passive - the army made no attempt to cross to the island nearby with my undefended outpost, and as the only practical reason for engaging in warfare is to get kills for militaristic stars you aren't really encouraged to engage in fights you might not win unless you make the mistake I did and declare a war, then forget you'd done so and let war weariness build up because you weren't fighting.

 

[Onii-chan]

There were three tutorial options (never played a 4x, played non-Humankind 4x, played Humanlind) - if those have any bearing on difficulty rather than just being different levels of tip dropdown, maybe each is at a different level? I chose option 2.

You can see the difficulty among other things in the game settings tab. Picking number 2 still only puts it on Town difficulty, which is level 2 out of 7, and described as easy mode. So yes it's just a cakewalk of a tutorial

That said I still agree with the majority of your points after having played a couple games of it now as the experience is similar regardless of difficulty. It's obviously more challenging overall on higher difficulties, however the overall game balance from a mechanical standpoint doesn't seem right. It just feels like you get too much of well, everything sooner or later

Note that trading is not something the player can entirely control; unlike Civ you cannot actively sell things. So if you angered a lot of AIs - which will happen from time to time! - and therefore lost that free access, your stability and yield will tank.

I do agree that for 80% of the time is not hard to please the AI by buying and selling resources; on the other hand, that's how trading works for most of the 4x games.

If it was difficult to stay on friendly terms with AI factions then yes, that would definitely work as a limiter for it, but so far I can't really say that's been the case. It's easier to make allies than enemies even on higher difficulties without really putting much effort into it. Maybe because you can just renounce the million demands you could do from the absolute wildfire that is your religion spreading across the world already seems to put everyone on friendly terms with you (that by itself is another bad balance issue)

 

[PhilBowles]

You can see the difficulty among other things in the game settings tab. Picking number 2 still only puts it on Town difficulty, which is level 2 out of 7, and described as easy mode. So yes it's just a cakewalk of a tutorial

That said I still agree with the majority of your points after having played a couple games of it now as the experience is similar regardless of difficulty. It's obviously more challenging overall on higher difficulties, however the overall game balance from a mechanical standpoint doesn't seem right. It just feels like you get too much of well, everything sooner or later

Thanks. I specifically tried looking for the difficulty when I carried on the session and still couldn't see it. I think I want to finish this as a first playthrough rather than starting again on a higher difficulty, but it will definitely be welcome if systems like combat actually play more of a part in the game at higher difficulties (the exploded-view combat mechanics still seem a bit gimmicky, but at least seem to give the player vaguely more agency than in Endless Legend where they pretty much always just gave the same result as autoresolving).

I'm still not sure how the game really prompts interaction since it's not obvious that you can disrupt opposing era progress or fame scores and wars don't seem to achieve a lot except costing the losing player resources - it's the old Civ issue that everyone's playing solitaire on a common game board, but with fewer ways even than that to disrupt your rivals.