One of my pet peeves about Endless Legend is the fact that the map is split into known regions. 

I can accept that since the lore is more or less the planet had seen civilizations rise and fall thus the regions, the bases for watchtowers, and the minor races.
And I know it's basically another implementation of node-based map seen in Endless Space/Endless Space 2. Replace solar systems/anomalies with regions and you get the meaning.

But in a civilization kind of game, where you basically start from the youth of humanity, the region split map basically makes no sense since there won't be any previous civs that make those regions. There got to be a strong lore to justify it. 

No one is going back to cities everywhere. It was never a part of EL as you said and it makes the whole game sloppy and confuses the AI. It is not worth it.

You will be able to have cities span across regions in Humankind. Where Endless Legend had hard region borders, Humankind's will be "soft". For an analogy, this is the difference between the city limits in the last SimCity and those in Cities Skylines.

I'm pretty happy about the way this is turning out and hopefully we can show you more soon!

Well, can't wait to see the implementations.
Hopefully the regions won't also be...weird, as in an icy region in south region can have a part of it falls norther than a neighbouring green verdant region mostly on its north, like in Endless Legend. Is the borrough leveling up system also implemented here?

You'll find out soon enough when we show more about cities!

I hope we will see some gameplay very soon.

Frogsquadron wrote:

You will be able to have cities span across regions in Humankind. Where Endless Legend had hard region borders, Humankind's will be "soft". For an analogy, this is the difference between the city limits in the last SimCity and those in Cities Skylines.

I'm pretty happy about the way this is turning out and hopefully we can show you more soon!

+1 souns like the best of both worlds

There is a German Interview with Wrinting Bull:

YouTube™-Video: Humankind | Writing Bulls Best Of Gamescom 2019 [Deutsch] 

Aufrufe: 5,067

Live von der Gamescom: Ein erster Eindruck vom Gameplay von Humankind! Studiogast bei Writing Bulls Best of Gamescom: Community Manager Stefan Kaiser von Amplitude Studios.

At around the 10 Minute mark they discuss how cities and regions will work. Basically it is the system from Endless Legend. The map is divided in regions and you can found one city per region. Then your city expand with districts, which exploit the tiles around them.

BUT the new thing is, that they added the possibility that you can merge more regions to one bigger region. Like a main city for several regions. So this is the reason why cities seems so big. They are in fact, multiple cities more or less merged. I am curious how exactly this will work game mechanics wise. 

I really hope the AI will be a little smarter with their city building. Always hated how they tended to build cities in small, hard-to-expand areas, or next to mountains with no FIDS on them.

Zentgraf wrote:

I'm a big fan of the region system in Endless Legend. One of the most annoying things I find in Civilization, is city placement. If the cities are too close, they overlap, and you don't get max production. If they're too spread out, then tiles are going to waste. So I'm literally counting out tiles on the screen, trying to figure out a visualized jigsaw puzzle of city placement. Then once you figure it out and have a plan, the AI or another player comes along and settles a city in a bad spot, thus ruining your plan and all the effort you put into drafting it up.

Whith the region system, it removes all of that city placement frustration. Look at a region. Find one spot in that region. Boom, you're done. You know what you're getting. You know what production the city will be geared towards. And you know the region will be balanced.

But in Endless Legend's region-split map system, I often ends up with so many empty tiles, whereas in Civ tile system I can cramp as many cities as I can in a map.

Enemies put cities in non-sensical places? Raze them and build cities where you really want it.

Really like the way this works out with the regions system. At least it sounds good. Something that always bugged me in CIV was the way you place your new cities. You had to keep so many things in mind and look for a good spot.
Here it seems that every region is more or less balanced and therefore you can just look out for a nice spot in that specific region.

I am curious about the scale of these merged regions. Like could you actually play the entire game with just one city? And would this give you special bonuses and handicaps? And how big in general can these cities get. Questions, questions.... :P

I don't like the region system as implemented in Endless Legend and it's a dealbreaker for me if it's identical. I like having to consider the map for city placement and weighing overlap vs terrain and proximity to resources.  The region system is frustrating because it feels artificial and takes away player choice in city placement, which is very important to me and should be part of the strategy of a strategy game. Sometimes the same region will have two good city spots on opposite corners of the map, and I don't like having to either build my city in the middle away from the resources or in the corner and then lose out of district placement. I don't like being told I can only build here, here, and here and not there, there, or there. And speaking of districts, the way early Endless Legend's district bonuses worked encouraged adding districts in a straight line totally killed the building experience for me. 

If regions are "soft" in the sense their borders can be modified during the game so city placement isn't completely at the mercy of artificial region borders, that would be the best of both worlds. But if it's only the option to merge smaller regions into megaregions, that still suffers from the problem of regions dictating where to build instead of terrain and resource features.

I much prefer a region system because it goes some way to prevent city spam. I think it makes the map look nicer too with borders that look more like actual nation borders. Games like Civ also seem to end up with alot of empty map that is not worth colonising because the only way to claim land is to build a city nearby. 

MasterofMobius wrote:

I much prefer a region system because it goes some way to prevent city spam. I think it makes the map look nicer too with borders that look more like actual nation borders. Games like Civ also seem to end up with alot of empty map that is not worth colonising because the only way to claim land is to build a city nearby. 

Agreed, and Civ's system currently ensures there's empty land in Civ 6 since most islands are basically useless if it's just one in the ocean, since you can only build a harbor and water park in them, which each take a long time due to an absence of local production (about 40 turns in my current playthrough when started with 1 pop), which means those cities are useless except as healing spots for fleets and for early harrassment of naval invaders. Meanwhile in the HK screenshots, I've seen just such a one-tile island be the home to a harbor district for a city, which likely means it can be "colonized", so to speak, by said city, the center of which is I think around 10 tiles away. That wouldn't be possible without the regional system.

Please look at Civilization IV to see that a region system really isn't needed. I'd strongly dislike this as well, and it'd also ruin things like playing on an Earth map.

From the sounds of it some type of region system is already confirmed, so hopefully that's not a dealbreaker for many people. (I think it's a bit silly to say one feature of a game is a dealbreaker before we've even seen any gameplay, but that's beside the point). I wouldn't mind a region system, but I agree that EL's was much too restrictive. 

The 2 things I would strongly support for regions in HK are region borders based on the geographical features of the map. So region borders along major rivers, mountain ranges, deserts, etc. would make it seem a little more realistic. 

And second, I hope that the regions will be 'soft' and there will be ways to claim land in regions that you do not yet have a city. For example if I have a city in region A, and build an outpost, or do some other action to claim adjacent region B, then I can spill city A over into region B without actually having a city there. Then in the future, if I found a city in region B, perhaps I can merge them.

In the end I think we have to have some suspension of belief when it comes to city placement rules since it is a strategy game after all. Personally if I have to choose complete realism/historical simulation or well-functioning game mechanics, I would choose the latter. 

Frogsquadron wrote:

You will be able to have cities span across regions in Humankind. Where Endless Legend had hard region borders, Humankind's will be "soft". For an analogy, this is the difference between the city limits in the last SimCity and those in Cities Skylines.

I'm pretty happy about the way this is turning out and hopefully we can show you more soon!

@Zugg_zug I think you will like the way devs handled region system in Humankind. :D

For me, the region system will shine if it's paired with indigenous people / minor nations occuping those regions.

One of the major weakness of the Civ series (a series I love) right since the beginning with Civ 1 is the idea of an empty map and you can just wander in and place a city wherever you want.  In the real world, empires expanded by moving into territories occupied by other people and either absorbing them or displacing them.  It wasn't just major empires battling over border lines, it was major empires dealing with (in various ways) a host of other people on their frontiers.  

I don't know how Amplitude will handle this, but I'm hoping for a more elegant and interesting system than Civ's hodge podge of barbarian camps, tribal villages, and city states.  If the world is empty but already divided into regions, that would seem odd.  If you expand your empire by extending influence into the lands of the X, then the region system will feel much more natural.

TravlingCanuck wrote:

For me, the region system will shine if it's paired with indigenous people / minor nations occuping those regions.

One of the major weakness of the Civ series (a series I love) right since the beginning with Civ 1 is the idea of an empty map and you can just wander in and place a city wherever you want.  In the real world, empires expanded by moving into territories occupied by other people and either absorbing them or displacing them.  It wasn't just major empires battling over border lines, it was major empires dealing with (in various ways) a host of other people on their frontiers.  

I don't know how Amplitude will handle this, but I'm hoping for a more elegant and interesting system than Civ's hodge podge of barbarian camps, tribal villages, and city states.  If the world is empty but already divided into regions, that would seem odd.  If you expand your empire by extending influence into the lands of the X, then the region system will feel much more natural.

Well, the devs have revealed that the game has no settlers; instead we send an army into the region and they'll set up an outpost, which can either be used to found a new city, or annex the region for an adjacent city. Local populations might be said to be integrated at the outpost, explaining how a new city could arise from an army plopping down a fort that somehow becomes its own city.

TravlingCanuck wrote:

ImperatorTempus42 wrote:

Well, the devs have revealed that the game has no settlers; instead we send an army into the region and they'll set up an outpost, which can either be used to found a new city, or annex the region for an adjacent city. Local populations might be said to be integrated at the outpost, explaining how a new city could arise from an army plopping down a fort that somehow becomes its own city.

I hadn't read that.   I knew (a) that you can establish outposts in regions, and (b) that you can't establish a city in a region with an outpost from another player, but I hadn't heard anything about how you establish new cities.  Having them evolve from outposts makes sense.  Do you remember what article you saw the "no settlers" comment in?  Doesn't matter if you don't.  No doubt we'll be hearing more soon anyway.

Yes, the "outposts become cities" mechanic would lend itself well to integrating local peoples.

I believe the devs said it in one of their Gamescom streams. So it's similar to Age of Wonders: Planetfall's system, but cuts out the settler entirely and lets you start a new city adjacent to another one.

Building outposts was mentioned specifically as an alternative way to claim land, not the only possible way as ImperatorTempus42 suggests.

The only thing we know is that ways to claim it will not include settlers like with civilization series.

I wonder if there are ways to accurately show the difference between, let's say,  a China with lots of people but a medium income versus a United States with medium people (for its size) and lots of income. Or if it's possible to differentiate between France's centralized government versus Germany's decentralized cities.

Wobzter wrote:

I wonder if there are ways to accurately show the difference between, let's say,  a China with lots of people but a medium income versus a United States with medium people (for its size) and lots of income. Or if it's possible to differentiate between France's centralized government versus Germany's decentralized cities.

That level of complexity is unlikely, although we do have ideologies.

Yes that sort of in depth demographics I think would be very difficult to simulate. Playing Total War Three Kingdoms recently and one thing to note was the western provinces of China were much larger thus having fewer settlements as opposed to the eastern coastal parts with smaller provinces making it much more dense which I think does a fairly good job of simulating how those eastern areas were where the majority of the population was located while also making those areas more desirable as having lots of packed togeather settlements is easier to defend.

You could simulate that in this game by having desert/steppe/tundra or any other terrain that is not ideal for human development have larger regions to represent that you cant heavily colonise those areas. 

MasterofMobius wrote:

You could simulate that in this game by having desert/steppe/tundra or any other terrain that is not ideal for human development have larger regions to represent that you cant heavily colonise those areas. 

Perhaps, although that affects every other region on the continent in question. We could have a "desolate wastes" or "barren" sort of tiles that are incapable of food production or much else, but are a good place to put a military district (Assyria's Citadel districts).

Frogsquadron wrote:

You'll find out soon enough when we show more about cities!

Did this reveal ever happen? Everything in this thread sounds pretty neat - a logical step forward from the region system in EL (which I liked a lot)

No, we haven't yet gone into more detail on cities, but we will as part of the new Dev Diaries.

MTGian wrote:

This is just a long way of saying that it absolutely makes sense to have regions.  A region is a city and its hinterland.  Should regions be different sizes based upon productivity of the hinterland?  That is a great question that was brought up earlier in the thread.  I think that is how it did work.  The Netherlands developed early as an urban region, because the land was very productive, but the cities themselves were not enormous.  There were just many of them.  Whether simulating that is important, I know not.  You could have just normal sized regions with enormous cities where land is especially productive and it would be a reasonable approximation.  

I think the fact that regions can be merged could help simulate this. You could have several individual cities each in their own region or you could combine them creating a large city with a large hinterland region.