Humankind need's to make a more eventful world

[Lightjolly]

To me, Humankind is at its best when you're at war. For starters the tech tree is pretty heavily militarized and the combat is actually very fun, but eventually even the most warmongering players will want a respite

But it's during times of peace where the game falls into a deep lull, because besides building your cities, you're just hitting the end button to finish that district. It's funny how the devs are failing at this when they already have the perfect blueprint in right Endless Legend. You see Endless Legends greatest strengths wasn't it's combat or city building, but it's eventful world packed full of things to do.

During times of peace you still had so many other things to distract you and keep you engaged besides hitting the end button to finish that infrastructure.

For example:

1: Having a lot of active side quests to complete, like reaching a ruin in 5 turns, killing a roaming army, amass an amount of resource within the turn limit, taking over a specific region before someone else, slaying a roaming kraken in the sea. Heck there was even a quest that wanted you to wage war on someone in 10 turns to be rewarded something etc.

2: Endless legend had a lot of aggressive minor factions to fight or do quests with.

3: Preparing your economy for winter, which was another challenge in itself

4: Having combat objectives on the map like the Urkans, Sea Kraken or Guardians

5: The Dust Eclipses that reactivated all ruins and made you want to go out and reap the rewards.

6: Conquering neutral sea forts to extend your borders and gain luxury resources


Endless Legend felt like an RPG in a 4X world. Right now in Humankind during times of peace, you build your city and.....that's it. There needs to be more objectives, active type quests to keep people entertained when not at war.



Here's somethings that could make the map a bit more dynamic and lively



1: There could be a notice that a big surge of thievery has happened. A bunch of bandits spawn around the map and whoever kills them gets rewarded a good amount of gold
Same could be applied on the sea with Pirates

2: Global challenges like in Endless Space 2; Whoever produces the most Science/industry in 15 turns is rewarded, thus giving you a city building minigame to try and win

3: More Independent people roaming neutral lands and attacking you

4: A weird "relic" spawns in a neutral territory, you must send an army there to ransack it to reap the rewards, but everyone is notified where it is, so it becomes a king of a hill battle for it

Humankind desperately needs to add something else to fill in that void peace entails

 

[fortydayweekend]

Independents need to be buffed a lot, they're far too easy to conquer. That would help.

The pop-up events in general seem a bit rushed, hopefully that's an easily modable feature and we get a load of community-created events.

With the limited conquest system the game could handle a lot more aggression and wars after Medieval - fighting one war per Era would be a good pace. Staying at peace should be possible but difficult, and require either distance, good use of allies, or maintaining a standing army. Civ4 does this well, you can't ignore building units even if you don't plan on fighting at all. In HK I still have 4 stacks of Classical troops in Contemporary because if war does happen I have 30K gold and a ton of production and can produce a huge army in a couple of turns.

The problem with war in HK is that it's currently too easy to beat the AI and take their cities, which leads to even more snowballing, and when you're ahead it gets boring very fast. Allies actually calling you in to war might help with this - you could have some battles to help your allies that don't lead to you conquering any new territory. It seems like there's no mechanic for this yet, allies just immediately forgive you for not being at war with their enemy.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of quests etc - I want more decisions to make, not busywork. Placing districts is a fun mini-game but it's better when it's mixed up with combat. Just those two things are enough - game just needs more fighting in later eras that doesn't lead to runaway growth.

 

[Krajzen]

The game is essentially at the stage of civ5, which had nothing to do but war and building for the sake of building. Unlike civ5, it has actually tried to include some additional systems, but the task proved too ambitious for release date and we have all those weird vestigial skeletons.

Let's hope it can reach BNW level after three years.