Last week, we reviewed some of the improvements already made to Humankind since release and told you about the next patch coming October 28th. Today, we want to take a closer look at the content of this patch, ranging from new game settings to balance changes and mod support.
Reading the initial feedback in the first few days after release, we realized that in many cases, players wanted more control over the conditions of their game. Whether they were discussing strategic resources, the length and end conditions of the game, or even the opponents they face, while players often agreed on the general direction of changes, they almost as often disagreed on the ideal settings. To allow players to customize their experience to their liking, we’re adding new options to the game creation screen.
As some players enjoyed competing (or trading) for scarce resources, while others preferred an abundance of resources to gain direct access to them, we are adding new map settings for resource abundance. You will be able to independently control the amount of luxury and strategic resources placed on the map, making them rarer or more common than in the default settings. This should allow you to customize the level of conflict or cooperation required for success to your liking.
Additionally, we’ve been working on the avatar and persona system. We’ve added a “random persona” option when picking your opponents (with a convenient button to set all of them to random at once), so if you prefer to be surprised during your match, you can now face an unknown enemy. To manage your own persona a little more easily, we’re adding a button on the persona screen to upload it to Games2Gether, or download it if you are playing on a different PC than usual.
Speaking of personalization, have added a color picker to the game settings that allows you to adjust the color of the subtitles and the available empire colors. These come with presets for common forms of color blindness, but we think all players will appreciate the ability to customize this to their own preferences.
When you just want dark mode for Diplomacy
As we mentioned last week, we know that many players are looking for more control over the end conditions of the game, we’ve also been working on additional options to customize these. However, as we want to refine these options a bit more and make sure they are working well, we be releasing these in a follow-up patch to the update. Once this patch releases, likely in the first week of November, you will be able to enable and disable the end conditions of your choice, even allowing you to disable pollution or the turn timer for a pure “Last Player Standing” game.
Pacing and balancing have also been discussed extensively since the game was released, in particular regarding the very early and late game and the relative power of different cultures. We agree that there’s a strong power imbalance between cultures, with a few falling far outside the expected, and that the game as a whole becomes too fast in the latter half of the game, so we want to address some of these problems with this patch.
Many players found it too easy to linger in the neolithic era to collect large amounts of units, population, and influence, which would kickstart their rapid early growth. To reduce the impact of this strategy on the overall pace of the game, we are lowering the amount of food you gain from sanctuaries and making mammoths slightly more dangerous. Additionally, scouts will now have a small upkeep to discourage maintaining a large army of scouts to swarm the map and attack nearby enemies. This should slow down growth in the neolithic and limit the early power spike gained from delaying the Ancient era.
However, much of the momentum responsible for the rapid pace of the late game is rooted in the rapid economic growth of the players’ cities. To address this, we are looking at the costs for technologies and constructions, especially in the latter half of the game, to bring them more in line with the resource yields achieved by our players. Additionally, we are working on the stability impact of districts and wondrous luxury resources to make it more difficult to maintain very high stability in the late game in spite of building numerous synergizing districts.
At the same time, we are rebalancing some cultures, particularly those most often brought up as too strong or too weak. Powerful economic bonuses significantly contribute to the economic power responsible for the fast pace of the late game, so we will focus on these first. For example, we are removing many unconditional “per population” bonuses on Emblematic Quarters, like the Khmer Baray, the French Exhibition Hall, or the Turkish Public School (which has also seen its adjacency bonus drastically reduced.) This will hopefully make these bonuses more situational instead of universally appealing. We will also reexamine the combat strength and costs of units, both emblematic and general, to bring them more in line with player expectations, but this will be part of the follow-up patch as well.
Since the value of different Civics choices was also discussed a lot, we have revised the effects of several civics. For example, choosing Nuclear Disarmament will now not only provide you with a grievance against those who conduct nuclear weapons tests or strikes, but also give you a permanent boost to your fame gains and lower the base war support between you and other empires to encourage peaceful cooperation.
Finally, as “Expansionist” is often regarded as the weakest affinity, we are adjusting the requirements of the Expansionist era stars, while improving their active ability by making it free and usable against empires you are at war with.
We are also moving forward with mod support for the game. We have integrated mod.io in the game now, so you can simply log into your account through the game and let it download any maps and mods you subscribed to on the Humankind mod.io page. The first version of the Humankind mod tools will also soon be available on Steam, allowing you to create your own content for the game. We’ll talk about these tools in greater detail next week.
Of course, we will continue to follow your discussion to understand what you would like to see changed or added to the game. To further improve the quality and quantity of feedback we receive, especially from players dissatisfied with the game, we will soon add a new survey to the game that you will be asked to fill out when you uninstall the game. We hope this will allow us to hear from an even broader section of the player base than before, to help direct future work.
We hope you will enjoy the improvements this update will bring and look forward to hearing your feedback.