It seems like the closest thing we have too it at the moment is the Era score from Civ VI. So imagine if there was a victory where the only thing thats brought into account is your Era score.

I imagine its much more fleshed out in Humankind though

ruzen wrote:

how are you guys getting these detailed information about how fame works?

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you may skip culture/nation changes between eras to get more fame in cost of traits / bonuses

The main difference here is that the Civ system has always been a *race*.  And not just any race, but 4 or 5 races at once.  This makes it *incredibly* hard to balance in a game which lasts a dozen hours or more.  What's the average turn for a culture victory?  What's the average turn for a science victory?  If science victories are always around 12-15 turns later than culture victories, then they are simply not feasable.  This is super hard to balance because it's super hard to even gather the data needed to determine if something is not balanced.  Sure, everything *feels* fine to the players in most cases because the fact that one race track is shroter than the others is not something you can easily see.

So instead of building the best civ in history, it often feels like optimizing a very specific racecar.  

The fame/VP point based system is something that can feel like it fits the theme/simulation much better.  The goal stops being 'pick a race track and drive down it hard while mostly ignoring the others' and becomes 'build the best culture in history' where 'best' is measured by points for many different types of actions.

It's also wholy different from the score system in most 4x games, as those are never very transparent.  Why is blue 200 points ahead of red?  Don't know, the game doesnt' tell you.  maybe it's becasue of their wonders?  Or maybe even though red has a lot of cities they don't have a lot of science?  Who knows?

The achivements/VPs/Fame in Humankind will be known quantities.  You'll know what you're trying to do and your optimizing for it.  The score system can't easily be optimized because it's obscured.

Bridger wrote:

The main difference here is that the Civ system has always been a *race*.  And not just any race, but 4 or 5 races at once.  This makes it *incredibly* hard to balance in a game which lasts a dozen hours or more.  What's the average turn for a culture victory?  What's the average turn for a science victory?  If science victories are always around 12-15 turns later than culture victories, then they are simply not feasable.  This is super hard to balance because it's super hard to even gather the data needed to determine if something is not balanced.  Sure, everything *feels* fine to the players in most cases because the fact that one race track is shroter than the others is not something you can easily see.

So instead of building the best civ in history, it often feels like optimizing a very specific racecar.  

Very true. And in almost EVERY case with 4X games the most efficient racecar is military conquest. Why would I spend 1800 production to build a Spaceport for a scientific victory, when I can use the same production to train a bunch of infantry and artillery and take my opponent's Spaceport? Now I've got a Spaceport, and units to defend it!

Why would I spend 20 turns building a wonder when my neighbor can spend 20 turns building units to take it over the moment it finishes? Now I've lost everything, and my opponent has doubled his ROI. So it basically turns into whoever has the largest army snowballs by taking out anyone closeby who went for a more economic build. And all the score, science, culture, gold, etc. from those conquered empires get funneled to the biggest warmongers.

I'm not saying I don't like having war in the game. If done properly, combat can be one of my favorite aspects of strategy games. But I hope the proposed Fame system will balance out the insane benefits of conquering present in most current 4X games. Not transferring the Fame of wonders/cities/achievements made by the conquered empire to the conqueror sounds like a huge step in the right direction. 

That's a very good argument for the Fame system.

The insane benefits of conquering in most 4x games is largely due to the highly unrealistic benefits that conquest provides.  

For my tastes, absorbing other nations into your empire should be much more difficult (and therefore interesting to manage), the amount of conqured territory you can effectively manage and extract benefits from should be limited by your administrative capacities, etc.  

Not to mention that one army shouldn't be capable of conquering the world.  Soldiers get tired of fighting, want to settle, go home, etc.  There was a limit on how long any real army could stay in the field, and 4x games are horribly bad at representing this.

However, I know a lot of players enjoy 4x to "conquer the map" and hate any restrictions on capturing cities or getting benefits from them later.

Will be interesting to see how HK handles the conquest of other empire's cities.

Speaking of conquest, what happens if the player gets conquered? If you're eliminated, that means there are technically 2 victory conditions: fame and conquest. If you aren't eliminated, what happens then? Do you become a governor within the winning civ? Do you have to successfully revolt in order to get back in the game? Do you get a new settler from the survivors and have to run away to create a new home? Does the AI just run the game in the background real fast to see if they built up more fame and then tell you if you won?

TravlingCanuck wrote:

The insane benefits of conquering in most 4x games is largely due to the highly unrealistic benefits that conquest provides.  

For my tastes, absorbing other nations into your empire should be much more difficult (and therefore interesting to manage), the amount of conqured territory you can effectively manage and extract benefits from should be limited by your administrative capacities, etc.  

Not to mention that one army shouldn't be capable of conquering the world.  Soldiers get tired of fighting, want to settle, go home, etc.  There was a limit on how long any real army could stay in the field, and 4x games are horribly bad at representing this.

However, I know a lot of players enjoy 4x to "conquer the map" and hate any restrictions on capturing cities or getting benefits from them later.

Will be interesting to see how HK handles the conquest of other empire's cities.

Any system should make a distinction between conquest and expansion as I found Civ 5 heavily penalised expansion to the point most people never went over 4-5 cities and vast amounts of decent land went untaken well into late game because it simply wasnt worth the investment. 

@TravelingCanuck Insightful points and I agree. I enjoyed civ 5 up to the first expansion as well but the second expansion actually diminished the game for me which has been a awkward opinion to hold because Brave New World seems so loved so I'm glad someone else feels the same!

I think the social policys also encouraged few cities, just picking anything except Tradition as your first policy felt like such a shot in the foot even for a casual player like myself. The other 2 (3?) just felt so weak in comparison to me.