Beta - Achilles Update

Finally! All my stability stacking has a use!

nice game

So it appears that Humankind will have small updates. Are any expansions planned? 

These changes look great. I like how having 0 war support impacts stability. An elegant solution.

Better late than never, this was among my top grievances with the game. Thanks

awesome

I don't personally think that this was something that needed changing but there have been a lot of threads about it, so there is a certain sense in addressing it.

A stability penalty for refusing a surrender at 0 war support is quite an elegant solution and I can certainly live with that, depending on the implementation. What frustrated me more in the few instances when I experiened it was that I didn't even get a confirmation screen. The terms just happened on me at the next turn.

What I disagree with is a penalty for the victor of continuing the war, IFF they imposed their conditions. Like, I want to end this war and I gave my terms. Why am I being punished if my crushed enemy refuses to yield? It makes no sense. I hope this is just in instanes where the "victor" did not submit an offer.

Interesting move to separate war score from war support. That could actully work well. But in that respect, is there now a separate way of occupying territories, distinct from the cities they are attached to? So far, you can just ransack them, right?

Is Centralised Power a civic choice or technology? I'd prefer the former. And I really like dragora's suggestions around requiring trade-offs in this transition to the new system. There seens quite a wealth of options for defending and attacking, eg more war score for demands/territories held (or lower cost for demanding them at resolution), lower stability penalities for keeping up the fight, maybe amplifying some of the existing war support effects like cultral or religious pressure, gains/losses for killing/losing units.

Also, yay to new historic personas! Keep them coming!

Unfortunately, with these changes it is completely impossible to play in multiplayer against real players. The patch is designed for those who play with AI and it makes AI significantly weaker. Here is an example of how this works in a game with real people. 

I started a war with 80+ war support against 50 for the enemy. I spend a lot of resources on the army and captured the city. Unlike playing against AI, when playing with a real opponent you cannot just go and capture all the cities with one army. Assaulting a city requires a lot of resources, and the captured city must be held, leaving an army in it. After 10 turns, my opponent's war support drops to zero, I still have about 40 military support left. I can put forward my demands to give up territories, but my opponent simply rejects them :)

Yes, he gets a penalty of -10 stability on the first turn, -20 on the next, -30 on the next, etc. At the same time, due to the fact that he has 0 war support, I begin to lose my own war support. -3 on the first turn, -6 on the second, -9 on the third. It's easy to calculate that in 6 turns I will lose 63 war support (whaaat?!). At the same time, my opponent doesn't need to do anything, he just waits. During this time, he will have a penalty of -60 to stability, which doesn't have a significant effect, because stability decreases gradually. My war support drops to 0 and now we both have 0 military support and guess what... I cannot make demands on him anymore! I have an Offer Surrender button available, but in fact I cannot surrender, because my opponent has no war score :D Or we can go with a white peace and I will not receive anything, although I captured the city and I had dominance in war support. At the same time, my opponent can surrender on the terms that are convenient for him. For example, just pay off 1000 gold for the city and three regions around (100 war scores).

So I captured the city and won the war with a 40 war support advantage. And my opponent just needs to wait 5 turns for the war to end on his terms. Otherwise, I will lose stability, just like him. Seriously... Has anyone tried to play with this patch without AI?

I agree that the previous logic also had its drawbacks. But overall it worked well enough and you could play and fight in multiplayer with it. Now the game is completely broken in multiplayer. And to play just with AI even on Humankind difficulty AI is very weak and useless.

There are a lot of ways how it can be fixed. At least the penalty for 0 military support from the enemy should not be so big. Just make it -3 per turn? not growing each turn It is stupid. The penalty for refusing to demand should be harsh. For example growing -5 FIMS and influence in each city per turn in the first era, -10 in the second, etc. This will give you a reserve of 5-10 turns if you have something to make a comeback with. But this will not allow you to just sit and do nothing.

I really like Humankind, its style and concept and my personal opinion is that it is a way more better than Civ 6. Especially in terms of wars and fights. I spent 800+ hours playing it in multiplayer with friends. But this patch is non sense :) If you not gonna change it please at least make it possible to turn it off in the settings and to use the previous logic.

With all my respect and love to Humankind devs <3

Concerning update - the main threat of declaring war against a player with lots of Leverage against you is that you can use diplomatic pressure to end the war sooner. What is the purpose of Placate if you can't use it on someone who has declared war on you? I thought the entire purpose of the war score feature was to give a diplomatic cost to war - that war could only be declared in certain ways and with the right leverage?
Will test this out but worried that it will go like the last poster said. Taking a stability hit to drain my opponent's war score seems like a bad exploit to war. Especialy bad is I'm concerned that you won't get war score for retreating anymore. Will this impac tthe religions that are affected? Again like poster above, mostly concerned with how this works in multiplayer vs humans. 

Mhm, seems like in concern for people calling bullshit on being forced by a pretty transparent War Support system to surrender because they overextended and just romped through enemy territory with little care for logistics or holding it (which isn't exactly a thing in-game, but the penalties for War Support on holding territories under enemy influence simulated well enough), we basically got rid of War Support altogether and now it's just kind of a timer for when Stability penalty for being at war starts ticking.

The fact that you can repel an invasion, drop the sneaky attacker to 0 WS and be forced to get an 'empty' Surrender, because you had no grievances and maybe aren't really interested in now barging in to take their cities completely aside.

As a HUMANKIND console player, just wondering if we are going to receive any of the updates to the game at any point, as we are missing most of the new features. Love the Game, but probably would play more with update.