Suggestions for improvement (and non-bug related nuisances)

[Elhoim]

I think the current stability mechanics could be kept with a "builder mode" similar to the "peace mode."

That's an excellent idea. I think that they could eventually have a more challenging balance, and adding extra stability as an option for "builders" (kinda like there's a peaceful mode).

 

[Xaviarlol]

A little one, but I wish they turn on that District coloring toggle when you are placing a new district.

 

[Taefin]

I’d love an option to disable infrastructure options on a city-by-city basis. If a city has no trees, I’m never going to get limberyard, but every time I need to build something in that city, I have to scan through the infrastructure to see what might be a good idea.

Or just implement the feature lots of us were asking for in Beta, give a preview of what the yield change would be for a certain infrastructure.

 

[Guynemer]

Right now, this game has good bones, but obviously needs more work. The biggest problem at the moment (other than the strategic resources not spawning bug) is that FIMS is far too abundant, which makes it far too trivial to grow, produce, buy, and research. There needs to be a serious balance pass either decrease the amount of FIMS multipliers/bonuses, or increase the cost of growth/buildings/research, or both.

Secondly, and this is admittedly a minor complaint compared to the above, but the minor civ mechanic is seriously underbaked. This is not only far less interesting than the equivalent mechanic in Civ 5 and Civ 6, it is far less interesting than the equivalent mechanic in Endless Legend! Seeing Amplitude take a step backwards here is discouraging.

 

[Taefin]

There needs to be a serious balance pass either decrease the amount of FIMS multipliers/bonuses, or increase the cost of growth/buildings/research, or both.

I’m a fan of making district cost increase faster, and everything else increasing slower. So that you end up with the same amount of units and infrastructure but have fewer districts. I’d rather see cities or 10-15 at late game (i.e. 4-6 EQ 2-3 FQ and MQ and 4-7 of what the cutie specializes in). As it is now, the end game is entirely fighting inside cities, even though all the LoS/entrench mechanics seem intended for more open spaces. I’m curious to see if increasing the size of regions by 4-9x (so 2-3x in each dimension) would make a more engaging game by create more open space. It might also help the current rate of district growth feel less extreme.

To this end, I’d like to see stability work like food, where the stability cost grows geometrically/exponentially with city size. So you can generally cover small-medium cities with luxuries but need serious CQ, garrisons, etc for larger cities, which would quickly drive up district cost faster than then the FIMS that come with them. Also would mosey affect more experienced players without punishing newer players.

Secondly, and this is admittedly a minor complaint compared to the above, but the minor civ mechanic is seriously underbaked.

I’d like to see them give some bonus to your empire, like CS in Civ6 or luxuries/patrons in HK. Most of the time this would make it so that it was better to keep them around and protect them than conquer them. Negative influence should also impact stability (and perhaps there is 1-2 too many city admin cap increases) so that conquering one for a single small city would truly become a disadvantage. Currently the only thing discouraging capturing them is that you don’t get the free infrastructure that start with new cities after settlers.

 

[Krajzen]

Secondly, and this is admittedly a minor complaint compared to the above, but the minor civ mechanic is seriously underbaked. This is not only far less interesting than the equivalent mechanic in Civ 5 and Civ 6, it is far less interesting than the equivalent mechanic in Endless Legend! Seeing Amplitude take a step backwards here is discouraging.

Ah, yes indeed it is.

I really like the fact they appear on the map and disappear dynamically, but that's about the only think I respect about them.
1) They are completely faceless, indistinguishable from one another. The difference is massive when compared with civ6, but even civ5 city states had several types of bonuses and a freaking little music tune after clicking on them, culturally specific.
2) They are extremely easy and cheap to integrate past the classical era.
3) There are no interesting ways to interact with them at all, you just throw the money and influence at them (which is the exact same problem civ5 city states had at launch, IIRC only later we got a lot of creative missions and ways to gain their influence and use them for your goals).

 

[Lightjolly]

You guys should be posting this on the games2gether forums as well where it will be seen

 

[AntSou]

@Lightjolly I post there occasionally. I've seen Gedemon, pokiehl and Narcisse just the in the last couple of days. Probably others are posting as well.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

You guys should be posting this on the games2gether forums as well where it will be seen

The Amplitude team still pays close attention to the CivFanatics Forums as well as the G2G: after all, they recruited a large percentage of their Beta Testers out of this group!

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Ah, yes indeed it is.

I really like the fact they appear on the map and disappear dynamically, but that's about the only think I respect about them.
1) They are completely faceless, indistinguishable from one another. The difference is massive when compared with civ6, but even civ5 city states had several types of bonuses and a freaking little music tune after clicking on them, culturally specific.
2) They are extremely easy and cheap to integrate past the classical era.
3) There are no interesting ways to interact with them at all, you just throw the money and influence at them (which is the exact same problem civ5 city states had at launch, IIRC only later we got a lot of creative missions and ways to gain their influence and use them for your goals).

Being able to hire some of their armies as mercenaries is quite well done, I think, but otherwise I agree with you. That said:

1) The IPs do have individual traits that are intended to make them play differently, but they're generally ineffective at this purpose as things stand now. The individual traits for the IPs are there, they just don't do enough.
2) Agreed, way too easy to integrate and the process of doing so is too simplistic.
3) Implementation is failing the dev team's vision here. There are interesting interactions between you and the IP, but they're too subtle and/or buried. For example, your influence and your similarity to them on the ideology tracks affect your patronage of each IP. Also you have the ability to trade with certain IPs and not with others based on your patronage level.

[EDIT: forgot to mention that the patronage and absorption of IPs are also a source of grievances, so seem to be intended to be a big part of the diplomacy game between the larger empires. There might be more done that could be done here, however, to make these grievances stand out from the crowd of other grievances a little more.]

I'm speculating wildly here, but IPs are so bare-bones in their implementation, I wonder if fleshing them out is intended as a future DLC? This area of the game could use more flavour, for sure, though other systems are in greater need of immediate balancing, I think.

 

[Guynemer]

File this under bug, but the land percentage on the random map generator is clearly not working as intended. I've had a few random maps where it was set to 50% and I land covering the entire map, except for bare strips of water at both poles.

 

[Guynemer]

I'd like to see some fine-tuning of the grievances system.

Instead of them all autodeclining after ten turns, some should last longer--cultural and religious influence, for example. And the grievance for grabbing land on my border doesn't distinguish land borders from sea borders, nor borders close to my capital vs. some outpost in the hinterlands. These things should matter.

 

[CoconutTank]

Ah, I missed this thread earlier, my gripes in the other thread may be more suited here.

I have some new gripes though!

1. PLEASE GIVE EACH UNIT A UNIQUE ICON.

Not every unit that has the same icon does the same thing. Archers, XBows and Dhanvī-gaja all have the bow and arrow icon, but they each operate very differently and need to be utilized differently as a result. I can differentiate the elphant units from other units most of the time, but they sometimes blend with the terrain, and honestly the unit icons stand out way more and take up so much visibility, so if the unit icons are going to be that prominent, I would like them to present more definitive information.

Another example of this is with Dragoons and Arquebusiers. They both have a rifle icon, but one can shoot-and-scoot, and the other cannot. These tend to blend in with each other way more than the previous example too.

2. Helis not actually able to fly/hover really grinds my gears. Like sure helis don't fly the same way planes do, but
A) Why can't helis fly over water?
B) Why can't helis fly over or scooch around an obstacle a bit when firing? To be more precise, why are helis blocked by LoS? They clearly can fly over fortifications.

 

[fy00sh]

I feel like Merchant affinity civs should be able to use their investing ability to upgrade foreign strategic resources even when that foreign power doesn't have the necessary tech. A bit ago I got to the end of the game and didn't have enough oil in my own territory to launch the mars colony, so I figured I could just choose China for the contemporary era and buy the rest of the oil i needed... only for the game to tell me "You can't build an extractor here because something else is already built on top of it" or something like that, even though it's in the middle of unimproved terrain. Took me a bit to realize that the game just doesn't have a message like "You can't build an extractor here because the civ that owns this land hasn't researched this resource's tech requirement", which I don't even think is how it should work. Why can't i choose to, as a part of my investing, share with that civ the tech to reveal oil, yknow?

 

[Taefin]

I feel like Merchant affinity civs should be able to use their investing ability to upgrade foreign strategic resources even when that foreign power doesn't have the necessary tech. A bit ago I got to the end of the game and didn't have enough oil in my own territory to launch the mars colony, so I figured I could just choose China for the contemporary era and buy the rest of the oil i needed... only for the game to tell me "You can't build an extractor here because something else is already built on top of it" or something like that, even though it's in the middle of unimproved terrain. Took me a bit to realize that the game just doesn't have a message like "You can't build an extractor here because the civ that owns this land hasn't researched this resource's tech requirement", which I don't even think is how it should work. Why can't i choose to, as a part of my investing, share with that civ the tech to reveal oil, yknow?

Totally agree. Sometimes you can’t wait for your allies when you need gunpowder now! And would be cool to give merchants more to do after all the words luxuries have been bought/sold.

 

[Setis]

I feel like Merchant affinity civs should be able to use their investing ability to upgrade foreign strategic resources even when that foreign power doesn't have the necessary tech. A bit ago I got to the end of the game and didn't have enough oil in my own territory to launch the mars colony, so I figured I could just choose China for the contemporary era and buy the rest of the oil i needed... only for the game to tell me "You can't build an extractor here because something else is already built on top of it" or something like that, even though it's in the middle of unimproved terrain. Took me a bit to realize that the game just doesn't have a message like "You can't build an extractor here because the civ that owns this land hasn't researched this resource's tech requirement", which I don't even think is how it should work. Why can't i choose to, as a part of my investing, share with that civ the tech to reveal oil, yknow?

I don't remember them saying anything about it being fixed, but in the latest beta patch I was able to do this.

 

[fy00sh]

I don't remember them saying anything about it being fixed, but in the latest beta patch I was able to do this.

Oh yeah, I just checked on an old save and sure enough, it's fixed! Awesome! ^_^

 

[Taefin]

Would it break the game if the attacker couldn’t kill units in the first round of combat, like they would fall to 1 HP instead? I feel that too many otherwise even battles are being decided on the first turn when I get to go first. I find the AI is already pretty generous about spreading damage when they get first strike, and it would just force you to return the favor.

 

[Pfeffersack]

Allowing to rename more things would be a benefit for HK. It is nice to have the option for your own cities, armies and your state religion...but I miss the option for outposts/city attached territories for atmospheric and organsiatoric reasons - and if we only could rename foreign religions, I think would be easier to identify them. The current names for religion are not only faily generic, but also hard to distinct (various kinds of Shamanism/Polytheism) and confusing (adjective of the ancient founding religion) - it is already troublesome enough to keep the connection between more catchy religions names and static civs in Civiliaztion, but far worse in HK - up to the point deterring me from getting deeper in this game system: If I constanrly have to look up names and founders when you receive messages about conversion of territories on a big map, I'm tempted to simply give this part of the game up.

 

[Stringer1313]

Please tell me what Demand the AI accepted (or rejected) when they do so, in a pop-up, and also indicate somewhere in the diplomacy UI a history of what demands were accepted or rejected. Right now when an AI accepts a demand, it just happens, and I have no clue which demand was accepted or what just happened.