The OpenDev/Preview Thread

[CivLuvah]

So I was able to play half of the 150 turn limit for this OpenDev. I had to pause last night because I was going to have one of my wisdom teeth removed as of the time of writing. But here are my initial thoughts.

I said this before and I'll say it again, this already feels like a complete game at this point. I'm glad they added some intuitive UI (I will get to them in detail in a later post). The Neolithic era was great, and it really gives you an impression that you're exploring a young world. I like how the AI are actually reactive based on actual circumstances. In my game everyone in my continent decided to settle in the south, so it was crowded. The Harappans to the east were annoyed that I gotten a territory they thought they deserved to own. I like that, compared with an AI that feels too passive (*ahem*).

I had a worry for this OpenDev that I might get era stars and increase my fame score a bit too fast like the Stadia one, but it seems that's not the case. I had difficulty catching up with my fame even though I completed my era stars. I struggle with production though but I think it's due to me putting a lot of outposts without attatching them to my main city. I was aiming for that litter of city-states (I was the Phoenicians), but I wanted to wait until I have enough administrators to maintain stability. Unfortunately once I transitioned to the Classical Era I was already lagging behind.

Still, I can't wait to play some more after my rest!

 

[Atlas627]

The avatars have names, so I'm betting they just haven't implemented the names to show up in-game yet.

The regions had names in Endless Legend, which would help for the Outposts needing identifying characteristics. I think they're trying to avoid giving them names because it sorta contradicts the flavor of the different cultures naming things as they appear, but I agree they need something.

I think ships founding outposts is a great idea! And I bet they will make the AI know to not get lost at sea, so auto-explore will know how to not get lost at sea.

One of the Avatars has the trait "Stubborn", which means they will never change culture. In my game, that one also picked Babylonians to start. I quite like that, because it is exactly the type of thing a player would do.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

Yea I had the Stubborn AI play as Babylonians as well perhaps he prefers that choice? He actually did really well and had the most fame at the end. I'm quite excited at being able to make my own avatars for the AI to use in the full game you could easily make an entire cast of stubborn AI's if you wanted ancient cultures only game!

 

[8housesofelixir]

- There seemed to be way fewer independent people around than in the last open dev. But the ones that did, spawned right the turn my unit reached the place to put an outpost down... So I had to kill them - and then another player (the above La Venta) put one down. Angering, but again: good storytelling.

If the landmass have been filled up by major cultures, there will be groups of "no territory" Independent People spawn on the map, usually in the fog of war. You can give one of your outposts to them as a present and therefore let them control a territory.

I had a worry for this OpenDev that I might get era stars and increase my fame score a bit too fast like the Stadia one, but it seems that's not the case. I had difficulty catching up with my fame even though I completed my era stars.

I feel the same way, the pacing of Fame stars feels alright. But still, I'd like to raise two problems about pacing here:

1. It is easier to gather Fame for some culture affinities than other cultures. As I mentioned in a previous post, early Merchant and Expansionist will have a hard time gathering Fame - they need gold and territories, two things that are far from plentiful in early game - but for early Builders they only need to spam EQ and other quarters.

2. Although the pacing of Fame feels alright, there is a pacing problem on the yield/output part of the game. Currently, food, industry, gold, and stability are heavily inflated beginning from Medieval Era; science, influence, and faith are a bit better unless you are playing Scientist or Aesthetic, which can still make them heavily inflated.

In my full Merchant playthough, I was able to one turn hard build everything and one turn population before turn 100, as I was playing Builder and Agrarian together. People on Reddit and G2G also created monstrosities like this and this, because there is literally no cap or limits to stop you from quarter spamming.



IMHO, I hope Amplitude devs could address the pacing problem in the full release, e.g., double the spending of these yields. For example if the current money-buying cost of everything doubles from Medieval Era it would scale much better. Moreover, the number of quarters one can build would better be tied to that city's population - for example, if you have 5 pop you can build 5 quarters, but if you have already build 4 quarters and spend 1 pop into military, you cannot build more quarters for the time being.

On the other hand, I have also heard that Amplitude games were known for their exponential scaling and snowballing. One can only hope...

 

[FinalDoomsday]

I was surprised there was no cap to districts, Endless Legend only let you build one every two population for most factions.

Visually the ratio of urban areas and rural feels off, these vast cities supported by a thin strip of fields but thats a fairly minor thing and I'm not really sure how you'd improve it.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I suspect that someone at Amplitude read a treatise on the growth of the Megalopolis-type Urban Concentrations in the modern era, and decided "That would be neat in a game!"

Unfortunately, while it is interesting to create what actually looks like one of Isaac Asimov's World Cities from his Foundation trilogy, they do result in massive runaway totals of almost everything in the middle and late game.

- And earlier. In my last Lucy run this morning, I had almost filled my original (capital city's) region with Quarters and EQs before the end of the Classical Era, but the population of the city was only 6 (Assyrian neighbors - had to put a lot of population into defensive Units) - about enough to 'populate' less than half of the city's Quarters. That doesn't seem right, IMHO.
On the other hand, that city was pumping out Units and new Quarters every 1 - 5 turns, because it was already in triple digit Industry Points and Abundant Food. Big Cities Rock! - but they have to be balanced a little better.

Which is probably one major reason for this OpenDev

 

[TreVor_ish]

I suspect that someone at Amplitude read a treatise on the growth of the Megalopolis-type Urban Concentrations in the modern era, and decided "That would be neat in a game!"

Unfortunately, while it is interesting to create what actually looks like one of Isaac Asimov's World Cities from his Foundation trilogy, they do result in massive runaway totals of almost everything in the middle and late game.

- And earlier. In my last Lucy run this morning, I had almost filled my original (capital city's) region with Quarters and EQs before the end of the Classical Era, but the population of the city was only 6 (Assyrian neighbors - had to put a lot of population into defensive Units) - about enough to 'populate' less than half of the city's Quarters. That doesn't seem right, IMHO.
On the other hand, that city was pumping out Units and new Quarters every 1 - 5 turns, because it was already in triple digit Industry Points and Abundant Food. Big Cities Rock! - but they have to be balanced a little better.

Which is probably one major reason for this OpenDev

Yeah, tried the harappans and by classical with 3 annexed regions, Capitol was not only popping new districts like crazy, it also could overflow any other culture with units. Crazy fun, quite unbalanced. (Rome classical - gg others on my continent)

 

[Atlas627]

Population do not work tiles, districts do. So think of population as Civ's specialists, or as "extra" population, beyond those that are assigned to work the land or the quarters.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Population do not work tiles, districts do. So think of population as Civ's specialists, or as "extra" population, beyond those that are assigned to work the land or the quarters.

The problem, which is being discussed in other Forums as well as this one, is that without any kind of 'cap' on the Quarters, you have essentially run-away city growth very early in the game rising to ridiculous levels in the middle game.
As you posted, the solution does not lie in equating Quarters with Population, since they don't really mean the same thing in the game, and 'population' can fluctuate as you pull out points to build units, whereas Quarters should Stay Put once they are built.

Historically, the limits on city size have always been technological: early cities could not be supplied with food because of limits on transportation and storage of perishables. Until Sanitation and Germ Theory in the 19th century, periodic epidemics would wipe out a city's population growth (Rome in the mid to late Empire averaged a major disease outbreak every 25 - 30 years, or about 1 per turn in Civ VI terms, which is why Plague is not a separate thing in the early game, it's a Constant Limitation on population growth)

There were also practical considerations: when the majority of a city's population gets from place to place on foot, as in the Ancient to Renaissance Eras, a city more than a day's walk wide becomes simply unmanageable - you have to provide separate "wholesale markets" just to get food and other goods to the neighborhoods where people live. You can walk most of the way around the line of the ancient city wall of Athens, that is, the boundary of the city, in one afternoon (been there, done that) whereas the modern city sprawls to the horizon in all directions - courtesy of powered mass transit and the private automobile. Even before the steam and internal combustion engines were applied, better paved roads and better carts and carriages allowed Boston in the USA to expand its area by 400% in the Industrial Era (prior to 1870 and the introduction of 'street railways'). That means, historically, City Size should expand in the Industrial Era, then expand again in the Modern (automobile) Era, but before that be normally very limited.

Somewhere in there should be a simple 'limiting factor' that would keep cities from exploding too early in the game, but still allow the rare Classical/Renaissance Mega-City: the Rome, Babylon, Alexandria, Chang-An, Constantinople that reach 500,000 - 1,000,000 people by dent of major effort: sea/river transport to bring in food, being the capital to concentrate the government's attention on it, exceptional (for the time) attention to sewer and water supply (Babylon had a city sewer system several centuries before Rome's Cloaca Maxima) to keep the population from dying off faster than immigrants could arrive from the countryside.

 

[8housesofelixir]

As you posted, the solution does not lie in equating Quarters with Population, since they don't really mean the same thing in the game, and 'population' can fluctuate as you pull out points to build units, whereas Quarters should Stay Put once they are built.

I do think you can do a population-based cap setup like this: If you have 5 pop, you can build 5 quarters. If you already have 5 quarters, and spend 1 population to military units, the quarters will not go away. It is just you cannot build new/additional quarters.

I mean, realistic speaking, if you mobilized your population to military, you will not have enough manpower do to other things.

Somewhere in there should be a simple 'limiting factor' that would keep cities from exploding too early in the game, but still allow the rare Classical/Renaissance Mega-City: the Rome, Babylon, Alexandria, Chang-An, Constantinople that reach 500,000 - 1,000,000 people by dent of major effort: sea/river transport to bring in food, being the capital to concentrate the government's attention on it, exceptional (for the time) attention to sewer and water supply (Babylon had a city sewer system several centuries before Rome's Cloaca Maxima) to keep the population from dying off faster than immigrants could arrive from the countryside.

Sadly, these megacities were based on food surplus from other regions, but Humankind currently doesn't have any base mechanic to move the surplus outputs from one city to another.

The Machu Picchu wonder does have an ability to distribute 50% of the food of the city that built it to every other city of the empire. The problem being 1. it is a wonder and only apply to one city 2. are you sure this ability highly related to Machu Picchu?



Also, in related news, it seems AI are doing quarter spammings as well:

Spoiler :

 

[Atlas627]

I do not want the gameplay to be quarter spamming, as the interesting decisions are where to place your city within the region, whether to connect regions and when, and how to make efficient use of the tiles you have (with the fewest quarters). I really hope there is a limiter on how many quarters you can build, and that the limit changes through the game or through particular effort.

I would prefer that the population and quarter systems be kept separate, as 2 different ways of increasing city productivity. Many of the Infrastructures work with population yields, and since those always only need to be built once per city then that changes how useful population is along with how many regions your city covers, which is an interesting relationship. If you also tie that to quarters, then you just have the same system twice, and all the nuance goes out the window.

Quarters are already limited by adjacency, which is a way of simulating the distance concerns Boris posted. Right now, Stability is largely global, since Luxuries, Civics, and Wonders are all empire-wide stability, and Religion can be too. So either this should be more local (and since stability already acts as a quarter limiter, makes quarters and stability linked in the same way population and regions are linked), or there needs to be another system that IS local which affects quarters and population differently, so that I will make different choices for different cities. I think the latter is better since Stability is already linked to quarters, to regions, and to food.

I think said system would be Sanitation, Transportation, and Public Works. Or whatever they want to name it, but those would be the ways to affect it. Courthouse district that can only be placed once per region but gives +1 district cap per adjacent district. Royal Court which can only be placed once per city but gives +2 district cap per region in the city. Aqueduct district which can only be placed once per region and gives +1 district cap for every adjacent River, Mountain, or Lake. Office of Scribes infrastructure which gives +3 district cap if the city is administered. Highway Network, giving +1 district cap per adjacent district. And so on. Big increases that are locked behind tech *and* local development, and in ways that are more/less efficient depending upon the city.

Which tiles do I sacrifice for these districts? When do I build them, since I can extend off of them but I don't need more cap until I reach the cap? Which cities do I bother building more districts in at all? Do I move on to the next era to unlock this *very* important district so that I can utilize the land in my cities a lot more? If some of these are once per city, do I combine these regions to use the particularly rich land on the border or do I have 2 separate cities that I now have to build these twice in?

 

[Siptah]

Aside from a hard limit on quarters, as the quarters are a bit unbalanced:

• Quarter cost could scale a bit more with each quarter per region in my opinion - also per quarter type
• Get rid of quarters getting two-way adjacency bonuses from same quarters (except maybe for farms, but for sure on production quarters)

 

[KrikkitTwo]

A couple things that i think might help.
1.give population more role in production (change the base output of a specialist to 10)
2. make population more expensive to maintain (10 food per pop)
3. significantly increase cost of quarters...
4, possibly make quarters upgrade to get certain benefits, perhaps an era cost?(so Classical quarters wouldn’t benefit from Medieval infrastructure/techs)
5. give stronger benefits for high stability (say 60-90% has some benefits)

 

[mitsho]

It could also just be the difficult level. Maybe higher ones will prevent us from quarter spamming by the natural stability mechanism?

But otherwise yes, I agree there needs to be some sort of preventing these huge megalopolisses. By the industrial era, quarter spamming would be historical, and with a few new quarters coming them (train stations, airports, space ports) you‘d still have places to put them

But the snowballing is just too much.

Also, it‘s too easy to buy out independent people in a short amount of turns. Just dump some influences in them and voila, you have a new city on the other side of the globe. Wheres to found your outpost, you have to move a slow land unit there (I repeat: Ships should be able to found outposts along the coast. Also, it should be possible to have two outposts from different players/independents in the same region.

 

[Sostratus]

Somewhere in there should be a simple 'limiting factor' that would keep cities from exploding too early in the game, but still allow the rare Classical/Renaissance Mega-City: the Rome, Babylon, Alexandria, Chang-An, Constantinople that reach 500,000 - 1,000,000 people by dent of major effort:

Well my observation so far has been that it’s specifically the self adjacency that gets things so out of hand. If we look at farm quarters, markets, and maker quarters, farms are somewhat okay - food can only ever get you to abundant status. Markets rarely have good adjacency because they rely on farms, so it’s very similar to Civ6 that way. I rarely want to build markets.
Maker quarters just get way too many darn bonus to that self adjacency - basically 1 point per era.
I think it would be more interesting if that first self adjacency didn’t exist right away - I find the gameplay of hamlets, and the Canal and Egyptian Pyramids really interesting because you just place them for yield exploitation.

It just feels like the urbanization trend is too much focused on the unstoppable carpet of quarters spreading out from city centers, and not enough built on cities growing outward and merging with the smaller communities near them.
I have been trying to make more cities that are 2+ territories, and it really changes things having a city center and an outpost to work from for expansion.

another easy way to slow things down is to just apply gold upkeep to things. Can’t turn half a continent into the endless workshops if you can’t afford the rent.

 

[ost]

I completely agree that the mechanics related to population, unlimited districts, and runaway FIMS growth need to be addressed. This is definitely accentuated by some cultures (Byzantine Hippodromos, Khmer Baray, Teuton Kaiserdom, and Mughal Jama Masjid), which really propel you forward. This takes away from the fun of the game - you don't need to choose between having a maker district, EQ, or harbour - you can make all three in a single turn!

I'm about ten turns from finishing my first game, I went Egyptians -> Egyptians (Transcend) -> Byzantines -> Mughals. While it was very fun, I felt that there is a lot to balance:
- the neolithic era is awesome and super fun, but it needs more limits, you shouldn't be able to get dozens of tribal citizens that turn into dozens of scouts. It is also too easy to bully your neolithic neighbours and keep them in the neolithic age by continually pillaging their outposts and killing their units - without punishment or recourse.
- it is way too easy to get food without needing to invest in any food-related infrastructure, therefore population grows rapidly and without constraint
- it is too easy to maintain high stability, particularly with the Procession ability, which costs a small amount of gold every 10 turns and gives +5 stability per population.
- the game needs to be more difficult over-all, I got fairly close to getting all era-stars in each era, but still managed to advance my culture way before my opponents. I just cracked 15k fame, and my nearest opponent is at ~3k.
- I always had the initiative, I never felt like I needed to change my strategy in response to other players. I wanted more back-and-forth.
- If you obtain all era stars in a particular category, the next era should see the goals substantially increased.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Limitation of some kind on Quarter Spamming ties in with another potential problem: ending the game too early. Several people on several Forums have posted about ending the 4th Era in less than 150 Turns. That implies, unless there is a major change late in the game, that the entire game (8 Eras) can be finished in less than 300 turns. And like Civ VI, Humankind is supposedly designed to last 500 turns, which therefore seems to indicate that a lot of the features of the late game (again, as in Civ VI) will be wasted because you will be barreling through them too fast to bother with them.

Progressive increases in the difficulty of building and maintaining Quarters, therefore, might also slow down your headlong gallop through the Eras and Fame Stars a bit, which would be also be a Good Thing for the game.

 

[8housesofelixir]

That implies, unless there is a major change late in the game, that the entire game (8 Eras) can be finished in less than 300 turns. And like Civ VI, Humankind is supposedly designed to last 500 turns

IIRC devs and vips had confirmed that a game of Humankind will last about 300 turns, shorter than a game of civ.

Still, in Lucy Opendev, many can enter Early Modern Era under 120 turns or even within 100 turns. (The Opendev has a total of 150 playable turns.) That is some major pacing issues.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

Yeah all of Amplitudes previous 4X games went for 300 turns so it makes sense, plus civ VI's 500 turns is overkill the games long decided by then. I've felt less endgame drag in Legend and Space 2

 

[8housesofelixir]

Another interesting observation: If the stability is too low, an established city can be turned into an Independent People-controlled city.

Below is a city initially founded by Hittites, being conquered by Teutons around late Medieval, and then flipped into independence:

Spoiler :

One turn later I dumped all my money into them and assimilated the whole region into my empire.