Help me out, because I'm a fan of Amplitude's work. I enjoy their Endless Legend and Endless Space take on 4x strategy. I think they have typically done 4x gameplay better than Firaxis (with little tweaks and interesting takes on game mechanics). So what is going to make Humankind significantly better than just owning and playing Civilization 6 (or whatever next iteration Firaxis comes out with)? I've been trying to figure this out. Their marketing is not making this clear to me. It just seems to be Amplitude's Sid Meier's Civilization game.

If the idea is, hey, there's room in the 4x strategy market for people to be burned out on playing Civilization 6 and move on to the next historical strategy game to be released, fine, but that doesn't sell me. Surely there is more to how they plan to differintiate themselves than :

• Create your own avatar that continues on with you
• Fate as a sole victory condition
• Your civ amalgamates over time
• Tactical combat improvements?

Well...

Before I comment on the subject, I have to establish some structure. In rare moments, strategy games become accepted by a wide audience. They all (like you said) have this one or two hooks for a wide audience to remember them as. What civ series have? Constant content dropping on you in every few turns. Effecting the terrain. Familiar "historical" setting. Now, this has been perfected by many other games, such as Endless Legends.

Total war has its thing, Paradox, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc... all these has its thing. The market remembers their hooks, and they spice each game with different themes or mechanics but in the end, they offer the same hook.

What's the Amplitude's hook?

Well anyone can offer thoughts but I believe it's the storytelling. It's not mainly writing but it's the visual storytelling, quests, deep lore. 

So, when you aim for the people who don't want to deal with deep lore, want some familiar theme so he/she can set up small goals within the game.

If I were to pitch a game idea about ambitious goal Amplitude set themself to; I would say have said something like this:

Stick to your guns! Storytelling is the one thing the Civ series lacks. Yes, the people want more different historical/familiar gameplay mechanics. Religion, corporation, diplomacy,etc.. But what about the people in a historical setting? Civ series only offer these as a nameplate for generic specialists. 

What if Humankind offers these historical people, events, cities as mini/big-quests thought time. Give players fame as achievements for conquering lands and completing the Alexander fame achievement or make them search for the Seven Cities of Gold or race others for obtaining the Einstein with a series of quests. Tens If not a hundred iconic quests throughout the game with beautiful art and gameplay.

I would have said that would be a hook for Civ players. New gameplay gimics on the same formula? Civ players are already getting fed by it from Civ and Firaxis knows this. It was inevitable for them just to throw some small DLC's and try to keep their core players intact while new promising 4X titles are about to come in a year. 

...but currently, from what we know the hook is the culture-shifting. But the marketing didn't kick in yet. So when the time is right I suppose they will show more interesting things. I agree with you the core thing isn't clear for the players, maybe they announced the features too soon? I don't know. 

There really isn't enough released information to answer that, other than current ratings of Civ VI versus ratings of prior Amplitude games. Civ VI has had pretty positive reviews from most players and critics, but some hardcore strategy enthusiasts don't like V or VI. Civ VI is well recieved by people who want immersive experience in empire management but not too complicated. So far Amplitude's games have been targeted at the more niche audience, and been very well recieved among them. I assume that Humankind will be like the Endless series in terms of the amount of reading, complexity of mechanics, build and research options, and how much of an impact mix-maxing has. It has much more of all of those than the recent Civ games. For now only the Devs and VIPs have access to the game, so hopefully more of them can give you their opinion on what they think so far.

I mean Civ6 was free on epic store, even I 'bought' it. I guess in terms of being free it had an advantage.
Then I played couple turns and decided to uninstall it cause it added close to zero value over 5 and 5 was already mostly a bummer.

I hate civs with passion. ^_^ I think ES2 does right everything CIVs do wrong.

koxsos wrote:

I mean Civ6 was free on epic store, even I 'bought' it. I guess in terms of being free it had an advantage.
Then I played couple turns and decided to uninstall it cause it added close to zero value over 5 and 5 was already mostly a bummer.

Raider_JT wrote:

Because of Civ 6 sucks (but I bought all DLC xD)... Civ 5 is much better than Civ 6.

And, ES2 is great IMO, so I'd like to try Humankind.

I hear you, but you are in the minority by about 80:1 just looking at steamdb.info over the past several years. Civ 5 and 6 are running about 80k in concurrent users combined. Endless Legend and Space 2 are doing around 1.5k combined. That's us disregarding players on Epic who got Civ6 for free, and easily could have picked up the Platinum edition for $20-30 bucks with coupon during the ongoing sale.

Just curious what the business strategy is. I'm not seeing it. Firaxis is going to continue releasing content through March of next year, including free content updates. I wager they are going to release some improved modding tools/access as well.

Ok so, I spent some time going through the Dev Blogs more carefully, and reading the comments and responses, and I think there are some clever design choices that Amplitude is making. There are some things that are really perceptive - they've spent time identifying what is clunky, unsatisying, or lacking in their competition, and I think they are going for excellence in those. Although, I still think the marketing choices are really not serving them well. I'm not beating up on anybody, but that reveal trailer and official trailer does not identify their strength, it just makes them look like Civ wannabe - they're not - they've showed that with their talent in EL and ES2.

Story: While not in a Dev Post, there are indications they are going to weave narrative into HK. I think it would be really smart for them to do it. With good writing, and interesting options and outcomes, they could give the game more personality and grounding than Civ has ever remotely accomplished. From the website: "Every moral choice you make...will build your fame" and "Face real historical events". It's more engaging to have storylines or quest lines that present themselves, than just unlock some next feature because a player accumulated enough of X resource to trigger it.

Expansion: Frankly, I'm not clear about what they are doing with claiming territory, but I'm getting the idea that they want to make the experience less frustrating by giving the player more opportunity to make a vested hold or vie it away from another (via outposts). There appears to be a level of interaction before a region/territory gets immutably settled. That can definitely be a frustration in 4x games. I think its smart to target that aspect of gameplay. Something similiar is at work with Wonders construction per Cat "Yes, you claim it, and then you can build it without anybody else being able to "steal" the construction by building it faster. We're not ready to talk about the details of how they are claimed yet".

Scoring: This era system is sounding better as I take another look. You have 7 categories where you can earn up to three stars (leading to Fame) per Era. Its much more freeing and dynamic, while not adding complexity. I'm not juggling 7 balls up to 3 times; I'm taking a quick glance at my situation and seeing that a couple of these make good sense right now and running with it. That might feel really good in practice. And it might also not feel punishing when something goes awry - you can shift to another category. Playing to a turn limit (and having the ability to accelerate the time limit) is really brazen. That might be the most ambitious thing. I love it. It's the kind of thing that might tick a lot of people off in 4x, and then they find out they actually love it. I really hope they stick to their guns on that.

Cultural Transition: As I look at this closer, with the legacy bonuses and all that comes with it, it reminds me a lot of a popular board game called Small World where you choose to keep with a faction or force them into decline (with its lingering pros and cons) and have the choice between when to do that or not. In that game, powerful combos are kept in line because the other players will single you out if you are dominating. It's organically kept in check. But in HK, I have questions... I can see this being a mess. Nevertheless, its smart. It's a more authentic representation of civilization building.

City Development: The use of quarters (known as districts in Civ?) is going to be interesting. I think Civ 6 failed to implement this smoothly, and while it improved upon the mindlessness in Civ 5's city management, it's not particularly fun. Maybe Amplitude has an idea how to remove the irritations of that system while retaining its appeal.

Artwork: At first glance, and I blame the marketing again, this game looks like a variation on Sid Meier's Civilization, but instead they've got something more grounded while maintaining the colorfulness of its competition. It a bit more alive/animated too. But my favorite artwork is what is on the website: https://humankind.game/ . This stuff is distinct. It looks like Amplitude. I can't believe they didnt put more of this in their trailers.

Anyway, there are some other thoughts, but one last thing. I kind of hope they go aggresive in their marketing. I hope they boldly reach out to Civ players, embracing their time in Civ, but saying look, we are Refiners. We take what you love and we polish. We're Craftsman. That's what Amplitude is good at. 4x Refined.

Civ 6 is a terrible game with really good production values and overpriced expansions. It's meant to appeal to a new crowd and it shows. It's slick but it's also really dumb (why an Italian noblewoman who never reigned and is notorious for the massacre of Protestants as the leader for France?) and the AI is brain dead. 

Hi all. New here, though I'm a very regular poster on CivFanatics forum.

I've played both Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 and enjoyed them a lot. But mainly I'm a CIv player. And since I'm no longer young, I have to admit to the fact of having played countless hours on CIV 2, CIV 5 AND CIV 6.

What I fail to see or understand is why people seem to think that were in any kind of either/or situation here. I'm a great lover of CIV 6 and will remain so. Why should that stop me from eagerly awaiting Humankind ? There IS room for more than one game in the 4X business !

I'm also actually playing Old World as pre-release and also having fun with it.

Anyways. I've been following the évolution of Humankind design for quite a while now, as @The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales knows well from civfanatics forum ;-) I say we never have enough great 4X games, bring them on. And I,m very excited by all the potential I see in Humankind.

Hope we all get to enjoy it soon ;-)

dustwhit wrote:

Help me out, because I'm a fan of Amplitude's work. I enjoy their Endless Legend and Endless Space take on 4x strategy. I think they have typically done 4x gameplay better than Firaxis (with little tweaks and interesting takes on game mechanics). So what is going to make Humankind significantly better than just owning and playing Civilization 6 (or whatever next iteration Firaxis comes out with)? I've been trying to figure this out. Their marketing is not making this clear to me. It just seems to be Amplitude's Sid Meier's Civilization game.

If the idea is, hey, there's room in the 4x strategy market for people to be burned out on playing Civilization 6 and move on to the next historical strategy game to be released, fine, but that doesn't sell me. Surely there is more to how they plan to differintiate themselves than :

• Create your own avatar that continues on with you
• Fate as a sole victory condition
• Your civ amalgamates over time
• Tactical combat improvements?

I probably got a lot wrong or misunderstood or outright missed, but what is going to make their game better than just playing Civilization 6 (etc)? This is supposed to be their long time dream project, right? Where's the sale? I'm not seeing how this game stands out? What's the hook?

Dude, do you really want a game where the A.I. withdraw from an alliance treaty from the next turn? Do you really want to see an A.I. where historical political leaders acts through some algorithmic points instead of being politically true to their real past/story? Civ 6 is ONLY artistically stunning, music, arts, etc, but that's it. Civ 6 is a complete fail and I bought the pre-order with all the dlcs so, if you want to waste money you can do it, but I warned you. Plus the dlc's policy is really mandatory if you want to get a full/real immersive experience. The major updates/dlcs are a good way to wipe your wallet since their cost is almost like the base game but you need them for make the base game look more "real"

tedhebert wrote:

I've played both Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 and enjoyed them a lot. But mainly I'm a CIv player. And since I'm no longer young, I have to admit to the fact of having played countless hours on CIV 2, CIV 5 AND CIV 6.

What I fail to see or understand is why people seem to think that were in any kind of either/or situation here. I'm a great lover of CIV 6 and will remain so. Why should that stop me from eagerly awaiting Humankind ? There IS room for more than one game in the 4X business !

Hey ted. Yeah, like you, I've enjoyed the Civ titles as well. Sure, I imagine there is certainly room for ever more 4x games to come. Although, I'd like to see Amplitude distinguish themselves clearly with their take on 4x in a broad human history setting. It's not that the market is saturated, I don't think it is necessarily, but I do think they are going up against a juggernaut since their game will be directly comparable. I'm curious what they consider successful - is it ultimately sufficient to make a bunch of initial sells, regardless if the player base significantly dwindles afterwards? Players can certainly purchase and play multiple 4x titles at once, but in the end, I think folks end up sticking with one that rises to the top for them. Is that still going to be Civilization or is there something about Humankind that will make it preeminent? and if a person has limited disposable income, will they jump ship to Humankind?

For me, the best thing about ES2/EL is the asymmetry. EL (and HUMANKIND by the looks of it) also do a _really_ good job of making use of terrain far better than any Civ. These lead to a steeper learning curve, but ultimately deeper gameplay. Different civs in Civilization 6 are for the most part the same. Venice in Civ 5 was an interesting case of radically different gameplay, but it was a one-off. If Amplitude is able keep that asymmetric gameplay without having major balance problems, I think Humankind has a really good chance to stand out.

Edit: One other thing I'd like to add is the way battles play out. Civ iv and earlier you had stacks of doom. Civ v/vi you had one-unit-per-tile which always felt weird to have your army so spread out. A long time ago, Activision made a game called Call To Power. The combat was automated, but the concept is kind of smiliar in that you have an army with units comprising multiple roles engaged in a single battle. You have ranged, you have flankers, etc. To my mind, EL and Humankind's combat resolution is a natural evolution of CTP's, not Civ's.