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.

Yeah this seem to be favour wargamers.Shame as the 4x should be multifaceted. 

First of all, thank you all for checking out the update beta, especially in multiplayer! As you can imagine, our multiplayer tests for in-progress builds have to be made against people at Amplitude, who already know each other very well in multiplayer contextes. As a result, we are not able to test the full range of human behavior or game situations that may arise in the wider playerbase. 

The fact that @ThePrettycool and other brave people took the time to test it and the feedback provided is very helpful and is exactly the reason why we have betas!

Now to acknowledge the issue at hand: while it is a stated design goal of the change that human players may always refuse a surrender proposal, I agree the consequences for doing so are too weak or too dependent on City Stability (which players can build huge surpluses of). The WS penalty on the "winning" player also seem unfair in that context since they have made at least an offer to end the war, so they shouldn't be punished for that. 

At the very least it should enable the player with the upper hand to maintain the status quo long enough for the consequences to start being quickly untenable for the side with no war support!

I am less fond of making the behavior switch be optional, as it is not a straight "on/off" thing, like disabling the congress or pollution.

So what we'll do is that we'll start looking for starker consequences for refusing a surrender before we ship the update as default. We are obviously open to suggestions, especially things that could "stick" in multiplayer settings!

I am very glad to see that the developers have paid attention to the players' requests. Thank you!

It will be interesting to see the new proposed mechanics that will be applied in case of refusal to surrender.

I can also describe another point that we identified in the multiplayer game. Since war score is now given for the number of captured territories, this makes it possible for one trick. Usually in multiplayer you always understand that a city will be asaulted soon. So my opponent simply detached all the areas from the city one turn before the assualt, and when I captured the city, I received only 25 military points for it. 

I understand that on the one hand, he spent influence on this. On the other hand, this made the capturing the city itself practically meaningless cause you'll get only 25 war score for a lot of efforts :) This is a cheat that a lot of people will use in multiplayer, which will make the capture of cities less significant. Outposts are now practically invulnerable during the war. A detached outpost cannot be captured in any way so it is impossible to receive any military points for it. But this is not as critical as the ability to instantly detach territories from the city. 

Perhaps it is worth adding a restriction under which it will not be possible to detach an outpost during a war if there is an enemy army present in this territory. By the way, this will make the mechanics of storming cities more interesting and deep, since it will require encirclement and control of adjacent territories by secondary armies. You can think about this idea, and in the meantime we will continue testing the new patch :)

Thank you!

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:
So what we'll do is that we'll start looking for starker consequences for refusing a surrender before we ship the update as default.

Hit them right in their FIDSI. That'll teach them.

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:

Great that you are open to the feedback.

I don't have great ideas but some tweaks that accentuate the existing direction:

1. If you stick with a stability penalty, the initial hit could be harder. For instance, we get a -50% instant one when rejecting a civics event. So a -50% across the board instant hit wouldn't be inconsistent and lead to consequences sooner.

2. The other element is whether stability should approach its equilibrium point faster (eg 10, 15, 20 percentage points per turn), either just in times of war or generally. Could also be an area where civics could influence how exactly it works. The gradual changes seemed like a nice change at first but over time I wondered whether that didnt just end up undermining stability as an impactful concept.

3. As others mentioned, a direct penalty to FIMS yields, without the detour via stability.

Just as important will be the changes to "winning" side. I'd advocate for an increasing penalty (stability or otherwise) for each turn that the winner could enforce a peace deal but chooses not to, ie doesn't do anything. There may be reasons for that, eg being close to capturing another city. But for those situations, a trade-off via a penalty seems appropriate.

Thirdly, the formula for the increasing stability penalties probably needs to be looked at. Or maybe the max values capped. There are some pretty extreme values reported on the Steam forums.

Lastly, I've also seen a strategy reported of decoupling territories of a city that is about to fall. That seems like a cheap cheat and needs to be addressed somehow. Maybe the role of outposts and administrative centres in war score could be revisited? Make it easier to forcefully demand specific parts of a city or grab territory without necessarily conquering the city outright?

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komodowaran wrote:

“In multiplayer, I don't think a 10% hit will stop the winning player from razing every city to the ground before accepting a surrender.

But this fine is applied not for winning player but for losing side so that it won't be possible to postpone surrunder infinetly. And if you can raze any city on the map in multiplayer then congrats, you won the game :) But when you play against a strong opponent it is challenging to capture even one city.

Many thanks to devs for their response to community feedback. I find new changes much more balanced and will try them in MP soon.

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:
I've seen the "jettison territories" behavior being mentioned here and there, but at the moment I don't see how this would prevent you from razing the admin center and claiming it as your own without bothering with War Score, bagging all contained districts as well. Maybe my playstyle enables this but not everyone's?

Actually it is not so drastic problem. Detaching territories from a city to decrease total WS of the opponent for capturing it can be abused in some situations. But at the same time it can be easily blocked by razing attached outposts to prevent them from being detached. This way it involves more tactical moves with light cavalary or smth like that.

here's the real question. is ps5s version going to get some sort of patch to fix late game perma crashes?

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:

First of all, thank you all for checking out the update beta, especially in multiplayer! As you can imagine, our multiplayer tests for in-progress builds have to be made against people at Amplitude, who already know each other very well in multiplayer contextes. As a result, we are not able to test the full range of human behavior or game situations that may arise in the wider playerbase. 

The fact that @ThePrettycool and other brave people took the time to test it and the feedback provided is very helpful and is exactly the reason why we have betas!

Now to acknowledge the issue at hand: while it is a stated design goal of the change that human players may always refuse a surrender proposal, I agree the consequences for doing so are too weak or too dependent on City Stability (which players can build huge surpluses of). The WS penalty on the "winning" player also seem unfair in that context since they have made at least an offer to end the war, so they shouldn't be punished for that. 

At the very least it should enable the player with the upper hand to maintain the status quo long enough for the consequences to start being quickly untenable for the side with no war support!

I am less fond of making the behavior switch be optional, as it is not a straight "on/off" thing, like disabling the congress or pollution.

So what we'll do is that we'll start looking for starker consequences for refusing a surrender before we ship the update as default. We are obviously open to suggestions, especially things that could "stick" in multiplayer settings!

Thank you for this beautiful work.

I think a severe and consistent consequence would be a gradual loss of population, fleeing the war and mobilization.

Consistent and dissuasive.

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CaptainAdHoc wrote:

First and foremost, I wanted to thank you again for the feedback on the beta! We are about to update the Achilles Beta branch with some updates based on what you've told us.

We have tried to make changes that preserve what players liked from the change while addressing the two most extreme behaviors reported: Weaponizing your already low War Support to bring other players down with you, and spamming legit surrender proposals with no consequence.

These are the concrete changes and their underlying design rationale:

• Reduced the "My Opponent is at 0 War Support" War support penalty scale to a maximum of -5/turn
  • This decrease exists to incentivize belligerents with positive war support to send a Surrender proposal before they lose their advantage, however its scale made it a bit too surprising (as a reminder it climbed to -15/turns in 5 turns) and ended up being too easily weaponizable by belligerents with already low War Support.
• Reinstated a one-time +10 War Support bump whenever an opponent that is at 0 War Support refuses a Surrender offer.
  • This is meant to combine with the above change to enable some defense against the dropping War Support, without being a full re-up. As a reminder players are now limited to one proposal per turn, surrender proposals are soft-limited by the "influence cooldown" and the WS bump applies on the next turn.
• Added a -10% Food, Industry, Money and Science War Weariness penalty on all Settlements for each refused Surrender while at 0 War Support.
  • To paraphrase @Sublustris, this is the "Hit them right in the FIMS" bit. This is more an indictment of Stability lacking the oomph to have any meaningful effects once you are deep in the red; Ideally the FIMS hit would be related from the lack of stability, but there was no clear way of implementing this. We believe that tying this penalty to refusing surrender offers when you really shouldn't is clear enough.

I also want to address the other things you reported but that we haven't touched so far.

I've seen the "jettison territories" behavior being mentioned here and there, but at the moment I don't see how this would prevent you from razing the admin center and claiming it as your own without bothering with War Score, bagging all contained districts as well. Maybe my playstyle enables this but not everyone's?

I've also read the woes about the placate action no longer being a "get out of war free" card anymore. I get that for those players against the AI this was ok, but this is a behavior that causes much grief when you're on its receiving end. I'd much rather see players its use as a dissuadant during peace time.

All this to say that while we chose not to act on those feedbacks in this Beta update, this does not mean that we won't keep monitoring those (and other) topics, and enact changes if they become too problematic.

With all this said, I hope the changes put forth improve your Achilles Beta experiences!

Thank you for taking the fan feedback into account. These are great improvements on the previous beta changes and should work well overall.

Just a few further reflections:

- Would it make sense to give "Placate" some furhter functionality, to compensate for it not being available during war anymore? For instance, its effect could be larger outside of wars or maybe it could do something different during a war, idk like hitting their stability directly or interfering with any deals that can try to impose?

- Does the new FIMS penalty formula account for situations where yields might turn negative if 11 consecutive offers are rejected (-10% x 11 = -110%). Not that I'd consider it likely but if a human player is particularly resistant or there is some other bug stopping the AI from surrendering, one wouldn't want this to break the game.

- Some players reported that if you win a defensive war without occupying cities or having initial demands, you get nothing. In some ways, I can see the thematic sense but gameplay-wise that seems frustrating. Maybe there should be some base, era-linked gold compensation, independent of any other spoils from war score. Or, at least more damage on the losing side in that the yield penalty lasts for a few turns after the surrender proposal has been accepted, so that, if I don't get anything, at least the losing aggressor suffers for a while. Or gets a stability buff-debuff "we won/lost a war", which I think I have seen in some previous sessions.

Otherwise, keep up the good work. I hope to see more updates, maybe more on the immersion and story-telling aspects of it. Mechanically, the game seems in a good state now. (Not that I minded the previous war conclusion mechanic. But I appreciate many players disliked it.)