The OpenDev/Preview Thread

I guess I'm gonna stay away until or if I get in, I'd prefer to play it unspoiled.

 

I refreshed everything too - email, Games2Gether, Steam, still nothing for today. Hope I get an email tomorrow

 

I myself am going to still watch the live streams while waiting to get in, if ever, because personally if I'm dealing with something new with a lot of new parts, I get too overwhelmed unless I know what I'm dealing with.

 

Heh, for me it's the other way, the biggest joy is to discover what each part does, and play it over and over. I think I have like 200 hours in the Early Access of Old World, and one of the reasons was discovering new things and try it again in a different way.

Anyway, I'm kinda disappointed, was really eager to play the scenario, but oh well, bad luck I guess. A pity they made it so closed.

@Catoninetales_Amplitude : Can you confirm that if I don't have it on the rewards tab in my G2G account I'm definitely not in? I'm feeling a bit of a fool refreshing my mail all day.

 

Found the key in my email's promotion box. For anyone who hasn't have a key check all folders.

Just finished playing it. The good news that it is already fun to play, the military units based expansion is brilliant in forcing a peaceful builder like me to actual build up some forces when in pretty much all other 4x titles I avoid it until forced too. The music and art is amazing.

The bad news is that I still have the same unease in building quarters that I did in Endless Legend. I always feel like I'm bulldozing the yield from the terrain when placing quarters next to each other, blobs instead of a snake like line.

But the other 2 major problems I had with Endless Legend are fixed: The combat was actually fun and not a confusing affair. The other problem is that depiste the amazing world building, I just can't really get into fantasy (but never had a problem with the Sci Fi in Endless Space 2, a all time classic in my eyes). So maybe this time I'll figure out how to place quarters.

Oh no I forgot to mention that in the suvery! Also the intro and outro video was very charming.

 

I did check the promotions, the spam, and my usual inbox, and nothing came up. Guess I either have to wait tomorrow or next week.

By the way what time did you receive the email? At 10 am when they officially announced OpenDev was starting?

 

Played the scenario through again, did a lot better this time (figured out a few little tricks).

I'm getting more and more confident that this will be the civ killer I hoped it would be. It definitely needs some pretty major balance changes (eg I find myself almost exclusively building maker's quarters as my extensions at the moment. They just seem much more powerful than any others. Luckily, it's still in pre-alpha and this whole OpenDev process should facilitate that) but at its core, this is a very fun, rewarding, well-imagined 4x game. It looks great, feels great to play and feels far more realistic and immersive.

Something that's always really irked me about Civ 5/6 and Endless Legend is the way cities work in those games. You just plop them down and that one single urban area is meant to be responsible for all the land around. You can end up being a powerful, game-winning empire that literally contains no more than 3 or 4 urban areas. It's just... eurgh... for me it completely destroys immersion, being nothing comparable to real-world nations. A feeling I'm really getting from Humankind is that this trend is now completely broken - "cities" aren't really just "cities" any more - they more represent administrative regions of your empire, with the city representing the main hub of the region, and they'll contain numerous other small towns or settlements. For example, extending to an adjacent region turns your outpost into an "Administrative Centre" district, which you can build out from. Even building luxury or strategic resource extractors far away from your city allows you to build extensions next to them. I believe the final game will have other ways of doing this too.

This means that you can feel like you really are managing a proper, nice big empire, but without the ICS and endless micro that comes with it.

It's really a breath of fresh air after the overwhelming, suffocating gamey-ness of Civ VI. Can't wait to play more.

Few more points:
1) I really like the "goody huts" (called "curiosities") in this game. They feel enticing to chase after, without being so beneficial that they feel like a massive priority, as they have been in a lot of recent 4X. I also like that they feel a bit more realistic - rather than being nothing but benevolent tribespeople or ancient ruins, they take a variety of forms, such as old animal bones that give science or random warriors who wish to join your cause. Something else interesting - they spawn continually on the map, rather than being used up once they're taken. I do hope this doesn't lead to a lot of annoying unit micro throughout the game, though.
2) The UI already looks great. There's a couple of suggestions I'd make though - and I'm sure things will get implemented as the game continues development - but still. For one, the science button at the bottom left could show a small icon representing the actual tech being researched, rather than just a beaker. It's nice to know at a quick glance what you're currently researching, especially when you're chaining techs - there's also currently no way to see your empire's total science output, at least not that I could find. There's also not as much clarity as there could be on some tooltips. The tech tree doesn't show industry cost for buildings/units/extensions. Some extension types only exploit the tile they're placed on, while others exploit all around, but it isn't clear on the tooltip which is which. Something like the civilopedia would also be really nice in the finished game.
3) I'm currently unsure what the penalties for rapid expansion are and if they'll be strong enough to prevent city spam. I seem to remember that stability provides penalties for civic acquisition? But if this is all it is, I don't know, I'm not sure it's enough. You can expand very very quickly in this game and it feels very strong to do so.
4) Following on from this, I expect any ancient era culture that has bonuses to money to be VERY powerful. Money seems to be an absolutely key factor in the early game as it's what allows you to build new cities and attach regions to existing ones. Newly founded cities get big yield bonuses and attached regions benefit heavily from a number of early buildings that multiply their bonuses according to how many regions you have (for example, the Pottery Workshop grants +4 industry for every region in the city) as well as exploiting all tiles around the administrative centre.
5) I'm a little concerned that the game has more of randomness or "luck" factor than it needs to. Tile yields seem to vary an unnecessary amount, similar to how they do in Civ VI - some basic industry tiles grant 1 industry while others grant 2. The flooding event provides options that involve spending a significant amount of gold to avoid negative consequences, as well as an option to just chance it - the penalty for chancing it is severe if you get unlucky, but non-existent if you get lucky. I get how this kind of variation might seem cool on the surface but the reality is it just adds too much luck to 4X games. It's one of the main reasons why the Civ NQ community abandoned Civ VI shortly after release.

Spoiler :

 

really sad I didn't get the email, or the promotion in the g2g site ;-( also checked my spam filter... man I SO wanted to be in this... I'll keep my fingers crossed for the other scenarios !

 

Yeah, it was a sad day today.

 

They said that keys would be sent out over 24 hours, but I won’t get my hopes up. I purely play as a city builder and I am not interested in the other scenarios so those are out for me. I hope the wait isn’t too long, civ has gotten stale enough as is and the 4x genre is about as lively as the dead sea. Back to playing Maya on fractal

Oh, and have fun with opendev. The game looks very promising

 

Yeah, I wonder how many people got it, that the spots were so limited we couldn't get in.

 

according to my email 13 hours ago

 

I got in.

And yes, my first play through was fun.

Email says 16 hours ago, so straight after twitter announcement it was open.

 

Thanks for sharing your impressions. Great to see others' perspective of how the game is starting to shore up. On two of your points:

The Devs said in the live stream that stability under 30 is a problem and will cause rebellions. They believed this rebellion feature may be turned off for this scenario, so you may indeed not see the full consequences of overexpansion in this build.

How impactful is the randomness of terrain in your experience? The territories seem pretty big, so it would seem likely that you can find at least some useful spot to put down a city or outpost with decent yields. Not sure how much of an issue it might become later if you need to expand and the territory overall isn't that great. But with quarters being attachable to resource nodes and outposts, there would seem to be a range of options to expand to high-yield tiles.

On the events ... well ... if the choices were inconsequential, then it would just be mindless busywork. So long as the consequences are communicated clearly, it would seem ok to me. Of course, it's a balance issue. If you have such chance-driven events very frequently, it might introduce too much randomness. It would also be good for the scale of consequences to match the era/progress. -50 gold would matter a lot more at turn 10 than at turn 100.

 

If you can't redeem it on G2G, you're not in yet. The initial batch of people is relatively small, but we'll be expanding that number over the course of OpenDev. You still have a chance to get into the first wave, then more chances for the second and third wave.

Glad to hear this feedback. It's something that I've been wanting to show for a long time, but if we want to zoom in close to show off the details of our cities, space is at a premium and we had to use pretty dense cities. And yes, there are other ways: You can use Harbors as a starting point as well, and later on the Hamlet. (I'm don't remember right now whether or not the Castle Quarter works as a nucleus for construction, but if it does that provides another option in the Ancient era.)

If you reach the point where you no longer want to explore manually to pick up curiosities, you can use the auto-explore options. As far as I know, auto-explore will make a point of collecting curiosities.

An Encyclopedia is already in the works. For the other feedback, please make sure to check the G2G forum for the OpenDev subforum (log out and back in again first to refresh your permission), where the production team might reply.

There will be rebellions in individual cities, or even empire-wide revolution. Furthermore, cities need to be administered to work at full efficiency, and Administrators are limited resource. That said, outposts themselves do not impact stability. Instead their cost scales up, and they are very fragile (A decently sized early game army can burn an outpost down in a single turn, if I recall correctly.)

Another bit of feedback you should take to the G2G forum. We think that a degree of randomness will increase the replayability, but perhaps a "no events" gameplay option could be considered... The problem with that would be that it would make the ideologies much less dynamic.

 

Thanks for getting back to me! In future I'll be sure to bring any more feedback direct to the G2G forums as you've said.

To be clear, my concern wasn't with the event system in itself - I like the prospect of events occurring that provide meaningful choices, even if it's random as to which events take place. I fully agree that it adds an element of replayability and works well with ideologies. What I meant, specifically, was the result of the "Gamble" choice in the flooding event. I picked this option twice across my two playthroughs, wanting to preserve my gold - the first time I was punished quite severely for it, and the second time it had no consequences at all. I felt a bit iffy about this. In a more competitive setting, eg multiplayer or high-difficulty single player, I can imagine myself finding this kind of randomness frustrating. I think it would be better if, by choosing not to spend the gold, you are consistently punished with the effects of the flood, rather than it being a "gamble".

In general, I think the events system will be a lot more fun and enjoyable if it's implemented in a way that prioritises fairness heavily. For example, both "positive" and "negative" events could occur, but in a way that's allocated such that either there's some consistency with player actions (for example, setting on a river always provides the flood event - this may already be how it works as I've seen this event both playthroughs), or that the game ensures the player is hit with an even mix of the two, or both. It would be a shame to just have to play with the events switched off to avoid this problem.

On the terrain randomness - I definitely noticed some regions being a lot more enticing to settle than others.

This came down largely to two big factors:
- one, the fact that, as said, tile yields vary heavily. If you're lucky, you'll find a spot with a mix of good base terrain and terrain features that will dwarf the output of the best spot in another region.
- luxury and strategic resources. Something I noticed is that, while it's generally beneficial to look for these resources anyway just to acquire the resources, you can build extensions next to the extractors. These extensions are EXTREMELY powerful due to the fact that they're exploiting 6 hexes of terrain that aren't exploited by any other extension. I was able to get (if I'm remembering this right) about 17 industry from a single maker's quarter by doing this.

Again, not necessarily a bad thing in itself, provided that there's enough of an even distribution that makes it feel fair to all players and between playthroughs, but I think more likely than not this won't be how it works out. It's one of the reasons why Civ VI felt so horrible to play to me; basic flat grassland is completely useless compared to hilled forest/jungle, and seeing an open plain surrounding your capital honestly makes you want to reroll the game altogether. Civ V, on the other hand, consistently provides 2 base yield on most tiles; doesn't matter whether there's a forest, hill, river, the base tile generally provides the same amount of food and industry, just mixed differently, but terrain stays interesting because those terrain types provide other types of less pronounced bonuses that have more interaction with gameplay and decision-making (eg +food on river tiles from Civil Service tech). It keeps the game interesting while feeling a lot fairer and personally, I think this is a better design.

In Humankind, there are tiles that provide a base 1 industry and others that provide 2 industry and 1 food, for example. I'm ok with there being some disparity but this feels like a bit too much. Rivers already benefit from certain building types so they don't need to be made mega powerful at a base level as well imo.

 

The events mostly have quite specific triggers, e.g. having a minimum number of river tiles within the exploited tiles of your city for the Flooding Event, but there are of course also systems to prevent you from being flooded with a load of events in a single turn, so even if the conditions are met an event may not always trigger.

 

Thanks for the answer, and I'm sorry for the bitterness. I think you know how eager I was to play it, and hurts a bit to see everyone having fun with it while I'm stuck waiting. Anyway, will check back on the specific game mechanics discussions once I'm able to try them myself and give proper feedback.

 

I didn't feel you were coming across as bitter, just understandably frustrated. I would have replied much sooner, but yesterday was a wild ride.

 

OMG ! I just received the email !!!at 9:29 am EST... So more than half a day after the initial send out time I remember... KEEP faith everyone, it might still happen !

Man, now I REALLY don't want to go through my work day. This is going to be long ;-)