During Amplified, we shared a brief glimpse of the improvements planned for Humankind in the next few months. Today, we want to take a closer look at that glimpse to provide some additional context and details for some of the items on the list.
The first months after release were focused on addressing some of the biggest issues raised by our community and affecting many players. In addition to fixing many bugs reported by our players, including many causes of multiplayer desyncs and pending turns, we’ve improved map generation to ensure there are always enough strategic resources on the map, rebalanced pollution values so it no longer ends games prematurely (your industries were far more powerful than we anticipated!) and added options to customize the game’s end conditions and turn off the turn limit. We’ve also been constantly working on the AI, have done a first balancing pass on military units and a few cultures, and released a beta of the mod tools so you can experiment with adding your own content.
Of course, balancing, AI improvements, bugfixes, and game stability both in single and multiplayer are subjects we are always working on, but there are some improvements coming in the next few months that we want to highlight:
- War Support: Many players have expressed frustration with wars coming to a sudden and sometimes premature end, often denying them the gain they were aiming for. However, some people have also spoken out in support of the war resolution system. So, while we will maintain the war resolution and surrender system, we want to implement an option that allows the winner to continue pressing the war at a certain cost or risk.
- Multiplayer hotjoin: While we are constantly working to fix any causes of multiplayer desyncs we identify, there may always be cases when a game desyncs or a player disconnects. To help you get back into your games with your friends as quickly and easily as possible, we are implementing a hotjoin system.
- Immersive Empire Names: Another common point of feedback from our players was that they have trouble identifying with their own empire and keeping track of their opponents, which pulls them out of the experience. We are working on a new way to refer to empires in game that should help players immerse themselves in their games.
- Affinity Balancing: While balancing is an ongoing process, we find that the strong power imbalance between the different affinities (Builders and Scientists coming up particularly often) skews the feedback we get not only about the power of culture, but also about the game pace and many other aspects, so we will focus on rebalancing affinities first.
- Sieges and sorties: Sieges often come up in criticism of the battle system. While we have received much feedback on how the AI handles them and are working to improve that, we have also seen people raise the issue that halfway through the game, you lose access to siege equipment built on site by your sieging forces, denying you one of your options in those cases when you need or want to destroy enemy fortifications. We’re looking into ways to close this “siege gap.
We hope these improvements will make the game more fun for you, and look forward to hearing from you what you think about them.
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