The OpenDev/Preview Thread

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I also like the "lost at sea" mechanic for coastal ships, which lets them attempt to brave high seas and maybe find an interesting set of islands or another continent, but if you don't return to coast the next turn they die. I feel like this is much better than a static "no ocean for you without telescopes" mechanic.

This is straight out of Civ 1. There were a lot of great mechanics in that original game. You sail out, looking for new land. If you don't see any, you either play it safe and sail back to the shore you started at, or you sail further out and either find land or are never heard from again ...

 

[Jkchart]

This is straight out of Civ 1. There were a lot of great mechanics in that original game. You sail out, looking for new land. If you don't see any, you either play it safe and sail back to the shore you started at, or you sail further out and either find land or are never heard from again ...

I started with Civ III but IIRC they had something similar too...based on random chance at least

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

This is straight out of Civ 1. There were a lot of great mechanics in that original game. You sail out, looking for new land. If you don't see any, you either play it safe and sail back to the shore you started at, or you sail further out and either find land or are never heard from again ...

It was a great mechanic, but as the numbers of cities and units dropped with each successive iteration of Civ any chance of 'random loss' of a unit was also dropped. Shame.

 

[mitsho]

It is a great mechanic in that it is realistic and is in a kind anti-gameplay (because of random chance). It shows that they are willing to do gritty stuff.

In my perfect game, I however would design Ships more like Airplanes. Think about it: on land you can have a constant line of communication to your army, messengers running back and forth. On sea, you can‘t have someone in a small boat paddle over to them. Rather, you send the ship on a mission and when they return back or pull into another port, you can give them another mission. That is, until Radio is invented of course. So for me, every ship would have a home port and you give it a mission „explore along the coast“, „find another continent“, „defend this region“, „defend this trade route“, „attack that region“. Because of the region system, that could work smoothly in Humankind. There‘d be less micromanagement and you can have that „lost-at-sea“ kind of events as well. For gameplay reasons, you‘d still see where your units are moving though.

(I know, this ain‘t gonna happen, but I‘d just wanted to state that I would find that smoother than the current lost-at-sea thingy).

It leads me to a question though that I‘m quite curious about: HOW will they implement air units? It has seldomly been done satisfactorily in a 4X-game and I want to know what their solution will be.

 

[Elhoim]

(I know, this ain‘t gonna happen, but I‘d just wanted to state that I would find that smoother than the current lost-at-sea thingy).

I like that concept as well, so you are not alone. Maybe one day...

 

[Siptah]

It is a great mechanic in that it is realistic and is in a kind anti-gameplay (because of random chance). It shows that they are willing to do gritty stuff.

In my perfect game, I however would design Ships more like Airplanes. Think about it: on land you can have a constant line of communication to your army, messengers running back and forth. On sea, you can‘t have someone in a small boat paddle over to them. Rather, you send the ship on a mission and when they return back or pull into another port, you can give them another mission. That is, until Radio is invented of course. So for me, every ship would have a home port and you give it a mission „explore along the coast“, „find another continent“, „defend this region“, „defend this trade route“, „attack that region“. Because of the region system, that could work smoothly in Humankind. There‘d be less micromanagement and you can have that „lost-at-sea“ kind of events as well. For gameplay reasons, you‘d still see where your units are moving though.

(I know, this ain‘t gonna happen, but I‘d just wanted to state that I would find that smoother than the current lost-at-sea thingy).

It leads me to a question though that I‘m quite curious about: HOW will they implement air units? It has seldomly been done satisfactorily in a 4X-game and I want to know what their solution will be.

Exploration in EU4 works somewhat like this. You assign ships to a mission with the goal to explore the sea in a certain region, or to explore along coasts already discovered in previous missions. You cannot be more precise than that and the mission takes a few months. However, you can always tell them to stop and come back home, and as long as they have an Explorer on board, the ships don‘t sink, because they know when they would go too far away to go back home and stay within that range.

 

[mitsho]

My argument for that would be that airplanes come in the late game. If you condition the players to understand it already earlier with ships, players will use them more. The only new things then will be that Airplanes work over land the same as over water. And making ships work more like airplanes makes them distinct from the land forces. And I just feel that would play more realistic than the way they do now.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

. . . In my perfect game, I however would design Ships more like Airplanes. Think about it: on land you can have a constant line of communication to your army, messengers running back and forth. On sea, you can‘t have someone in a small boat paddle over to them. Rather, you send the ship on a mission and when they return back or pull into another port, you can give them another mission. That is, until Radio is invented of course. So for me, every ship would have a home port and you give it a mission „explore along the coast“, „find another continent“, „defend this region“, „defend this trade route“, „attack that region“. Because of the region system, that could work smoothly in Humankind. There‘d be less micromanagement and you can have that „lost-at-sea“ kind of events as well. For gameplay reasons, you‘d still see where your units are moving though.

(I know, this ain‘t gonna happen, but I‘d just wanted to state that I would find that smoother than the current lost-at-sea thingy).

Universal Knowledge by the Gamer is a problem in any historical game: Explorers or 'scouts' on land, even entire armies could be out of touch with the Ruler for months unless he accompanied the army, and then he would be largely out of touch with the Kingdom unless special attention was paid to messengers and communications. Ships, of course, were out of touch as soon as they were out of sight of land and even colonies were incommunicado for up to months at a time (witness things like the "lost colony of Roanoke" which disappeared before anybody could get back in touch with them)

There's no really good solution to this, because Events like losing colonies, ships, or scouts that take place Invisibly are going to seem like 'Cheating' to most gamers since, if realistic, there won't be anything they can do about it except send out another ship/fleet, scout, army or bunch of colonists. The frustration factor with the randomness or apparent randomness of it all will kill the game, I'm afraid.

It leads me to a question though that I‘m quite curious about: HOW will they implement air units? It has seldomly been done satisfactorily in a 4X-game and I want to know what their solution will be.

One hint is that Long Range or 'off-map' support in battles has a different mechanic from the Tactical Map used for ordinary ground combat (and, presumably, naval combat, but I don't think there have been any examples of naval anything shown yet except exploration). That implies, to me at least, that air support will be handled like Ultra-Long-Range Artillery and by the same mechanism, whatever that turns out to be. The biggest problem, and it has been a problem in both computer and board games, is how to handle Defensive Air Support or 'on call' air support as developed in WWII by German, British, US and Soviet forces - basically, having an air unit or units immediately responsive to the ground unit for both attack and defense or having Fighter air units able to intercept any enemy air action over a given ground unit or army. Those both usually involve very messy mechanisms and potentially huge potential for gaming the system. As far as I know, these problems connected with late-game combat have not been shown or much discussed in regard to Humankind yet.

 

[8housesofelixir]

Ships and Explorers fall into incommunicado or lost in voyage is realistic, but on the other hand, I don't think devs should make historical facts get in the way of accessible gameplay.
(Imagine Columbus, your explorer, insists that the land he found is Asia, and you are forced to send out different explorers - that costs a LOT of money - to confirm the situation. Or imagine all the missionaries you sent out to the East insist that "China" and "Cathay" are two different countries, so you prepared two different diplomatic missions, only realized there is only one Imperial China 100 years later. Not to say that there were Explorers, when found the new land, claimed themselves as the Kings and cut off all the ties with their patrons instead.)

I expressed a similar opinion in another post: Historically speaking, almost all the pre-modern rulers cannot access the Production Queue of any non-capital cities, since without a professional civil service and an advanced communication system, these rulers cannot control everything.
But fully implement this situation into a 4x game - where as the player can only fully control the Capital, while the rest of his territory are AI's business - will be sincerely frustrating for the majority of players.

Historicity is important, but at the end of day we are still playing a 4x game.

 

[mitsho]

I actually didn‘t want to shed much light on „incommunicado ships“ as an issue. The line of sight is a whole other topic I also agree that historicity doesn‘t trump gameplay. But I want to argue that a different movement system for ships has both advantages for gameplay and for historical realism.

„Ships behaving like airplanes“ means for me that you don‘t control them directly. They don‘t have movement points they can spend to get to a specific tile. Rather, they work in regions and in radiusses. Speaking in Physics, they are waves, not particles. The sea is much like the air in that regard: there are no chokepoints, no cliffs, no forests and no plains. Instead, the ground is literally fluid. If you‘ve ever been sailing, it‘s so much easier to just throw on the motor when trying to park the sailing boat on the quai in the right spot. 4X games tend to suffer to implement this specificity in a way that makes sense and is fun to play. Sure, you could implement currents, windpatterns and storm as terrain features, but not many do. Instead you can just click and the ship moves there. Not realistic

Gameplay wise, making the oceans behave differently from the continents emphasizes those differences and may allow us to depict the special importance the sea had in history with different gameplay. It‘s easier to blockade whole regions, the movement speed can be much faster, and so on. I wanted to write on this opportunity rather than the potential hassles of losing contact with your ship and then your unit and am a bit dissapointed that everyone pounced on that side point. But that‘s life and I agree, no direct control over losing units could be terrible gameplay-wise. I really think however that different movement rules for ships could be interesting (but obviously not for Humankind yet), but I can‘t really say how they should work out in detail yet.

 

[Atlas627]

99% of sea tiles are the same. Having the player control exactly which tile a naval unit occupies is pointless micro.

Having a naval unit occupy a Sea Region would be the same functional gameplay, sufficient control, and perhaps could serve as a bridge between land and air styles of control so that players don't feel air combat is untouchable.

If land embarked units could also just occupy a Sea Region and then choose a tile to disembark on, that would be great. This is also an easy way to have naval units move quickly without having a player need to control so many tiles of movement. Land units can move 1 region per turn, 2 in lategame. Naval units can move 2 regions per turn, 3 in lategame. Voila.

 

[8housesofelixir]

Also, we haven't seen how naval trade route works yet. Naval raiding and blockade would be very important in the late game (that is, if these mechanics are implemented).

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Just to pile on in agreement with the "ships deployed to ocean territories" idea, this is also the mechanic in some of my favourite naval battle games, War at Sea and Victory in the Pacific. It can work really well to capture the function, limitations, and nature of naval combat, much better than a "your ships are in this exact hex(tile)" mechanic.

I really like mitsho's idea of using deployment to a territory to distinguish both naval and air warfare from land battles. I could see that making naval and air war both more fun and less tedious, a win-win proposition.

 

[Shadowhal]

Two late thoughts:

We talked about independent peoples. I thought it would be cool if these could develop into full nations, e.g. if they don't go into decline or if they happen to conquer an outpost or rival IP city, the become a new non-picked culture. It would add a lot of dynamism to the game if factions would appear/disappear throughout. And of course the joy of playing a terra map and finding full-fledged but less advanced players to interact with.

I'm not so sure I'm on board with all resources stacking effects without limits. It's probably too tied into the trade and diplomacy system by now, but one side effect for me was that it reduced the value of terrain. In the Stadia OpenDev scenario, I found it very hard to assess which territory was "better" to add to a city, because they mostly all had decent spots for cities/outposts and some resource. Maybe that's a matter of experience and kicks in more over the long term. But I couldn't get the feeling of a making an important strategic decision here. Which is a shame, because good settlement spots are (traditionally) such a core part of 4Xs. Maybe another mentality to get away from?

I thought there was more, but I can't quite think of it right now.

 

[CivLuvah]

Just bumping his thread in preparation for the Pre-Order OpenDev starting tomorrow!

 

[tedhebert]

Ok I,m downloading right now ;-) Can't wait to play this ;-)

 

[CivLuvah]

I have to wait until I get home to play my first game for this OpenDev

 

[mitsho]

I'll play on ... Sunday? Or after Christmas... How long is it online?

 

[Atlas627]

Almost 2 weeks. I think the 28th is the last day?

Having tons of fun already. Just being able to try strategizing from the beginning is tons of fun alone, plus I can turn the AI up to hard mode =)

 

[tedhebert]

yes until the 28th...