My first 'won' session in Humankind, or alarming account of how extreme snowballing is in this game

[Krajzen]

Game has a big potential to be great but at this moment is all about production. All you need is production focused civics, everything else like science, gold and other will just happen. And important tip: in neolitic era put your tribes on auto survey and split them when they grow. AI seems to know where to scout for bonuses and what is more important: it knows if/when they will respawn.

Yeah, production as a whole needs not even a nerf but a complete redesign, it's insane how easily you can build everything from the medieval era onwards. Production modifiers and multiplicators need to be brutally slaughtered.

The craziest thing is how you have those meaningless infrastrucutres like +3 gold total and then you have cheap infrastructure like "oh you get +2 production per every tile in every territory at once, which means like +60 production for a building you spawn in three turns with no additional cost". So one infrastructure is thirty times better than other for the same cost, balanced

The ability to very easily extract all yields from all territories at onc eneeds to be nerfed very hard, OR made much harder to do, OR have some terrible downsides.

I retroactively officially delete all my comments about Civ games being snowballing and unbalanced, in none of them I casually (without bothering, trying, microing, optimizing and hell even without much conquest) had fourteen times the income of average AI opponent by the end.

 

[fortydayweekend]

Slightly different experience in my second game, on Civilization (second highest) difficulty. I'm still snowballing but so are the BabylEngliSaunees under Midas, and in Fame I'm only 10% ahead of 2nd place Arjuna's Mongols.

The main difference (other than difficulty level) was that I spent most of the Classical & Medieval eras at war with the MycenaeHuns. I went Persia as a counter but their Hordes with combat bonuses were stronger than Immortals 1:1 and in some terrain (narrow mountains) the hit-and-run tactics absolutely destroyed me. It took a lot of spamming units and figuring out which way the AI was pathing so I could lay ambushes on wide open plains that I was finally able to win the war. In the meantime it crippled my city growth, and I could only annex 2 territories as a result.

That meant Medieval Era was rebuilding and I only started to take off in Early Modern. I haven't picked any Stability cultures (Egypt/Persia/Khmer/Japanese) and stability is something I have to think about at least - I'm having to place Commons Quarters, which makes the district placement game a lot more interesting (which adjacency bonuses do you forgo to add stability bonuses, is 15 stability worth a 7F8I river tile? etc).

Maybe stability needs to be made harder at lower difficulty levels, it definitely wasn't an issue on Nation, but it's made Civilization interesting but not difficult.

Snowballing is delayed if you're losing units/pop in wars, so aggressive neighbours (either AI or maybe more powerful & aggressive Indys) would make the game more interesting.

Overall though the game is a lot of fun to play. The Huns felt like a real threat and I had to respond in the same way a real-life larger but out-gunned city state would have - by drafting loads of population and winning through numbers and hopefully better tactics. At the same time it always felt like I would prevail eventually as long as I had enough food to keep those units coming - it was just a matter of "how much to cripple the economy to win" instead of quit and restart after seeing an unbeatable doomstack arrive in Civ4.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

@Krajzen That's disappointing. I haven't been able to play recent balance-change builds very much over the past couple of months, but it sure looks like the dev team may have overshot on their concerns about the game being too hard for new players. There are a lot of mechanics to make snowballing more difficult, so not sure what has changed recently. I'm looking forward to being home early next week and being able to try out the release build.

I can tell you that earlier this year, being able to beat the AI at higher difficulty levels was a real struggle and I lost more often than I won. I'm not sure when or why it turned into a cakewalk. Maybe there's now a hole in the AI's behaviour starting mid-game or maybe the stability nerfs (stability used to be way harder to maintain) has made mid-game expansion too easy for the human. Hopefully with feedback and more data, the dev team can balance things so the game is both accessible for new players and a challenge at higher difficulties.

Sorry to hear this has been your experience. I know you were looking forward to HK. I hope coming patches improve the experience for you.

 

[AntSou]

@Krajzen Have you tried playing with a map size below the recommended for the number of cultures? E.g. 10 Players on a Large map, or 8 players on a normal map.

I'm struggling at Empire. Some AIs really snowballed and I can't keep up, struggling to get the necessary stars. I've enemies on all fronts and nowhere to expand.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

@Krajzen Have you tried playing with a map size below the recommended for the number of cultures? E.g. 10 Players on a Large map, or 8 players on a normal map.

Hmmm. I wonder if map generation has changed? On a normal map with 6 players, 2 to 3 territories was the max I could ever get on the higher difficulty levels before I was surrounded by rapidly expanding AI. I couldn't even imagine trying it with 8 players on that same size map.

There's a set up option to add more land tiles to the map; I've never tried it, but I intended to in order to give a little more time for exploration and fighting over outposts before borders ossify. I'm curious to hear you suggest that going the opposite way may be better.

 

[8housesofelixir]

The Production and Science outputs can make too big a jump in later eras and contribute to the snowballing effect.

However, I'll add an interesting comment here: Anyone tried a game being entirely isolationist, with no trading at all, and put your Stability and Money entirely dependent on districts/ideologies?

A large portion of Stability and Gold comes from trading luxuries and strategics, which is not something that the player has full control of. I do agree that trading scales too much, and it is very easy for AI to accept your trade deals; On the other hand, being surrounded by hostile AIs will result in a collapse of Stability and Money, and in an MP game a human player can exploit the situation by cutting off your trade routes.

(For the suggestion, I'd say maybe tone down the yield of Wondrous Manufactory a bit. +5% FIMS per Lux can be too much, and many "Yield Snowballing" situations people are complaining about are in fact created by Manufactory effects instead of other mechanics.)

 

[AntSou]

There's a set up option to add more land tiles to the map;

There is? How does it work, by reducing the size of territories?

I'm curious to hear you suggest that going the opposite way may be better.

Well, it will be down to preference. In my present game I'm being beaten by two empires who seem to want the same territory, and I enjoy that.

Wouldn't more territories make the AI fight less over them, since there's more for everybody?

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

There is? How does it work, by reducing the size of territories?



Well, it will be down to preference. In my present game I'm being beaten by two empires who seem to want the same territory, and I enjoy that.

Wouldn't more territories make the AI fight less over them, since there's more for everybody?

No change to the number of territories, but with more land tiles and fewer water tiles, there are more land territories to explore, claim and fight over.

More land territories doesn't necessarily lead to less fighting, but it extends the period of time during which you're jockeying for territories that are either unclaimed or have an outpost only. I personally love the fighting over outposts period. My comment about increasing the amount of land tiles was based on my finding this period of the game ended too quickly on higher difficulty levels. But I was also finding higher difficulty level AI to be almost impossible to keep up with, so if that has changed, then increasing the amount of land territories wouldn't make sense and increasing the number of empires might.