Humankind Game by Amplitude

One of the first things I thought of after reading the article was thinking back to the Witch Trial event laid out in the PAX panel. That was a dark moment in history. The event is triggered by a bad condition in a city, and unless you have sufficient Science, the available choices either keep it the same or have a chance of making it worse.
 
Braze yourself for the Nazi-"Civ" :)

These (negative) things will probably be heavily scripted which diminishes the replay value, but I guess is the best way for them to implement it.
 
Braze yourself for the Nazi-"Civ" :)

These (negative) things will probably be heavily scripted which diminishes the replay value, but I guess is the best way for them to implement it.

The fact that they can have 3 different versions of Germany and don't seem to have leaders means that the Industrial Age Germany can have psuedo-fascist themes without affecting all the Germanys or directly invoking nazis or Hitler.
 
What else to call them? Wolfensteins? Is "Fascism" a civ? Seems strange as well.

We'll see :) (I'll stop procrastinating now).

I think it's just Germany. The Medieval version seems to be the Teutonic Order and the Renaissance version might be the Holy Roman Empire. Germany wasn't even an entity until the 1800s anyway.
 
Moderator Action: Can we please not go down the Nazi/Hitler road. They did not stand the test of time and have no place in a game about Civilization.
 
From what I read, those events creating your 'civilization storyline' are really a capitalisation of the existing flow for ES and EL. Which is rather logical. It worked OK o' both games. You reacting to an event and this event triggering a follow up event later. I wonder if they will keep the concept of quests as well.
 
I thought this part was really encouraging, too:

"Clearly we don't want to say, 'Hey, slavery, really efficient, gets that industry cap up,' that's not what you want to do," says Spock. "But sadly that's why it existed. How do you balance that? How do you make that choice? What gameplay social consequences vs industrial political consequences do you try to build in?

Setting aside this particular topic and the considerations that come with it, the idea that the game may try to marry positive consequences now with negative consequences later suggests the potential for interesting choices. We saw something similar with one of their events, too, where choices made could have future consequences.

Maybe instead of just a raw, singular 'Industry cap', maybe there should be variants. Slavery works for some light construction or agriculture, but industry itself? It's rather sub-par there, isn't it?

And let's not forget the social effects of Slavery. Peasants and Serfs get the short end of the stick, ripped out of economic opportunities. In Rome they became the Coloni for Proto-Manors and Proto-Nobility; tied to the estates and working it just for some safeguard of bread and security. Further on you can have abolitionist movements arise...stuff like that.
 
Actually, Germany fits right in with the Humankind system, because it was a Cultural/Linquistic entity centuries before it became a political entity. There was a recognizable collection of "Germans" in the Classical Era, but you have to dig deep (in Roman accents) to find any mention of a German political leader other than Arminius/Hermannus, and he was only leader of a single minority and temporary tribal confederation.
That means it should be relatively easy to get successive 'German' Civs that have little or no connection politically while maintaining a slowly evolving cultural unity, without degenerating into Semi-Fantasy.

As for 'Modern' Germany when it began to add political to the cultural unity, you have several candidates:
1. The "First Reich" - the Holy Roman Empire, which, although the Austrian Hapsburgs kept a vice-like grip on the Throne, was composed largely of German states.
2. The major German regional states from roughly 17th to early 19th centuries: Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony. The second was probably the most influential overall, but Bavaria and Saxony both developed distinctively separate cultural (and in Bavaria, linguistic and religious) differences.
3. The "Second Reich" - the German Empire under the Hohenzollerns, which only lasted about 47 years, but absorbed and magnified all the influences from the previous political entities and cultural trends.
4. The 'Weimar' Republic which, however much German nationalists and traditionalists despised it at the time, lasted longer than Hitler's "Third Reich" and was a more rational continuation of the Social Democratic movement pioneered under the Hohenzollerns - which also outlasted the Hitlerian Foolishness right down to the present day.

So, even regarding the National Socialist Party as a 'blip' Germany provides a lot of potential variety no matter what they want to emphasize.
 
Maybe instead of just a raw, singular 'Industry cap', maybe there should be variants. Slavery works for some light construction or agriculture, but industry itself? It's rather sub-par there, isn't it? .

Speer and the Nazis did make a lot of use of industrial Slave Labor towards the end of WWII - see Tooze's Wages of Destruction book on the German economy under Hitler, but it also emphasized the negative aspects of slavery: the wastage was huge, efficiency per person was abysmal, and they had to constantly keep adding more Slaves because the workers died by the thousands - one of the reasons why Speer spent 20 years in prison after the war.
Slavery is really 'efficient' only in Special Circumstances: work that is so dangerous no one will voluntarily do it, like in the poisonous silver mines of Laurion in Greece or the underground factories of WWII Germany, or in malarial areas of Central and South America where white European workers died faster than they could be shipped in in early Colonial times. The 'cotton slavery' of the American South worked temporarily because it had a labor-intensive crop (cotton) which was a money crop as long as textile factories would take any amount you could raise and pay well for it, but it came with major security costs (the white South was already an armed camp before the Civil War) and, like slavery in Classical Era, depressed innovation since 'labor saving' was not an issue and nobody in charge of the work force had any vested interest in changing work conditions to make them more efficient.

And let's not forget the social effects of Slavery. Peasants and Serfs get the short end of the stick, ripped out of economic opportunities. In Rome they became the Coloni for Proto-Manors and Proto-Nobility; tied to the estates and working it just for some safeguard of bread and security. Further on you can have abolitionist movements arise...stuff like that.

Sooner or later, ALL slaves Revolt, from Spartacus to Nat Turner. The Social Aspects of Slavery are actually Cultural and Innovative Negatives, because society and innovation (science) are both depressed by slave or slave-like conditions. If we are going to have Slavery in a game, and if the game is really going to be based on History and not Fantasy it's pretty near unavoidable, then you have to do it Right: show the negative aspects with the positive, and the fact that the negative aspects get more and more dangerous as the game goes on. Eventually the 'slave society' winds up like the Confederacy, with lots of slaves, lots of cotton, but only one cannon foundry, a couple of iron works and not a single manufactory to even make uniforms for their troops - who have to put down several rebellions against the slave owners even while they are trying to fight off a massively better equipped opponent.
 
It's interesting that they seem to be attempting to solve the late game malaise issue by sort of having you 'restart' as a different empire every era - and having the sum of those points be your final score.

It's a novel approach for a 4x - maybe inspired a bit by something like the board game Small World and the like - and I'm interested in how it will play out.
 
Speer and the Nazis did make a lot of use of industrial Slave Labor towards the end of WWII - see Tooze's Wages of Destruction book on the German economy under Hitler, but it also emphasized the negative aspects of slavery: the wastage was huge, efficiency per person was abysmal, and they had to constantly keep adding more Slaves because the workers died by the thousands - one of the reasons why Speer spent 20 years in prison after the war.
Slavery is really 'efficient' only in Special Circumstances: work that is so dangerous no one will voluntarily do it, like in the poisonous silver mines of Laurion in Greece or the underground factories of WWII Germany, or in malarial areas of Central and South America where white European workers died faster than they could be shipped in in early Colonial times. The 'cotton slavery' of the American South worked temporarily because it had a labor-intensive crop (cotton) which was a money crop as long as textile factories would take any amount you could raise and pay well for it, but it came with major security costs (the white South was already an armed camp before the Civil War) and, like slavery in Classical Era, depressed innovation since 'labor saving' was not an issue and nobody in charge of the work force had any vested interest in changing work conditions to make them more efficient.



Sooner or later, ALL slaves Revolt, from Spartacus to Nat Turner. The Social Aspects of Slavery are actually Cultural and Innovative Negatives, because society and innovation (science) are both depressed by slave or slave-like conditions. If we are going to have Slavery in a game, and if the game is really going to be based on History and not Fantasy it's pretty near unavoidable, then you have to do it Right: show the negative aspects with the positive, and the fact that the negative aspects get more and more dangerous as the game goes on. Eventually the 'slave society' winds up like the Confederacy, with lots of slaves, lots of cotton, but only one cannon foundry, a couple of iron works and not a single manufactory to even make uniforms for their troops - who have to put down several rebellions against the slave owners even while they are trying to fight off a massively better equipped opponent.


And the slave rebellions shouldn't be like in IV where it's just an event. Have pops killed. Have units spawn up, porpotionate to the revolt. So on and so on.
 
Slavery is more complex than free whips - very aptly put above by Boris - so it's a good thing the developers are dealing with it by side quests and story inputs. Meaning manually created rather than an in-game reaction of X to y happening. Sui generis after all. My quip regarding that other topic was more curiosity of how they will handle it rather than wanting to bring it up and discuss it in here. I guess, I'm just starving for some news here :)
 

Instead, it keeps score via “fame” — a marker that’s hidden throughout the game, and one that the developers said “might surprise you” when you win.

This concerns me a bit. Fame sort of sounds like the era score in Civ 6. But I don't know about 'hiding' it. So you don't know how the ways to get fame? Or it might change every game? I get it if they were just doing a 'play as a sandbox' approach, but if that's the win condition, I think people are going to want to know the different ways of getting it.

A conceptual example Amplitude gave me was how the Mongols had the largest contiguous land empire in human history, conquering most of settled Eurasia except for the peninsulas of Indochina, India, Arabia, and Western Europe. That sort of “fame” could get the Mongols closer to victory, even if their empire didn’t last for long beyond that era.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it almost sounds like they are taking a page from Civ 4 Rhyse and Fall and civ specific historical fame points? That would be awesome.

Another point of concern to me is the screenshot of the initial civ selection, with the little symbols on them indicating the strengths. I hope the civs 'uniques' aren't just Egypt +10% production, Babylon +10% science and are a little more unique/bespoke. I'd assume so, as that's been Amplitude's strengths in Endless Legend at least.
 
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