@valmighty  Hmm I agree that pop is not as important as it should be and that production is the dominant winning strategy but I disagree with your suggestions.  They sound a bit too much like civ 6 and I want to see Humankind do something different and push the 4x franchise forward and not just rehash old mechanics.  I think what I'm hearing from your thoughts though is that you want the other districts to matter and I think that could be a better way to go as oppose to just nerfing production or penalizing the player into making other districts.  I'd rather them buff the other playstyles so that we want to build EVERYTHING but we cant haha and then it's more fun to see what we choose or specialize. 

Production should be a strong playstyle but so should the others.  Production is the strongest in ES2 and I was hoping they wouldn't repeat their mistake.

It would be interesting to see Adjacency substituted (partially or completely) for with District levels, similar to Endless Legend. To make it more interesting each district could have a different level up requirement.

The simplest changes that the devs can do to fix FIDS balancing issues are to make everything you can build or buy more expensive than it is now (in Industry prod or Money), starting at the Medieval era. Then slow down the population growth, starting again in the Medieval era. Science does not appear to have any major balancing issues, at least not in my playthroughs. The devs then don't need to mess with game mechanics and district adjacency, and risk creating new balancing issues. All they would need to do is to increase the initial cost value of items and lower the growth value for population for each era. They do only have four months before final release so wholesale changes should be out of the question. The rapid population growth to me is the main issue, since it leads to spamming military units to lower overpopulation (which can be done easily since units have no maintenance cost besides the initial population cost). Hamlets barely help when I have a city growing by 1 pop every turn while a hamlet increases the population threshold by 4 while taking 4 turns to build. Constantly fighting overpopulation before midgame in a 4X game is definitively odd. 

danisans wrote:

The simplest changes that the devs can do to fix FIDS balancing issues are to make everything you can build or buy more expensive than it is now (in Industry prod or Money), starting at the Medieval era. Then slow down the population growth, starting again in the Medieval era. Science does not appear to have any major balancing issues, at least not in my playthroughs. The devs then don't need to mess with game mechanics and district adjacency, and risk creating new balancing issues. All they would need to do is to increase the initial cost value of items and lower the growth value for population for each era. They do only have four months before final release so wholesale changes should be out of the question. The rapid population growth to me is the main issue, since it leads to spamming military units to lower overpopulation (which can be done easily since units have no maintenance cost besides the initial population cost). Hamlets barely help when I have a city growing by 1 pop every turn while a hamlet increases the population threshold by 4 while taking 4 turns to build. Constantly fighting overpopulation before midgame in a 4X game is definitively odd. 

Generally agree, at this stage of the development, a series of tweaks here and there would be most achievable option, scaling the cost/upkeep should be an adequate way - on the other hand I still believe that the terrain yields and Market Quarter adjacency would better be reexamined, since an upkeep mechanism will not reduce the OP-ness of Makers Quarter nor reduce the weakness of Market Quarter fundamentally.

Speaking of overpopulation, if I remember correctly, in the past Steam/Stadia Opendevs there was a scaling stability penalty on overpopulation - see the table in this post - and I definitely encountered instability caused by overpopulation in Stadia Opendev; however I didn't encounter anything similar in Lucy Opendev. IMHO bring in (or bring back) this mechanism could counter the overpopulation a bit; and if the same mechanism can be applied to quarters, that can probably slow down the quarter spam - which is part of the problem - as well.

I agree that all costs should go up, and increase more exponentially over the course of the game, along with slowing down population gains. Its just too easy to get to the max growth rate of one pop per turn. However I think production quarters do need some specific nerfs even if this happens. If costs are high, you are still building a bunch of production quarters because they are currently the best way of building stuff in the game, regardless of cost, and you really need to build stuff. Lowering pop growth speed does buff farmers quarters, market quarters and numbers on a lot of infrastructure need to be looked at though.

danisans wrote:

The simplest changes that the devs can do to fix FIDS balancing issues are to make everything you can build or buy more expensive than it is now (in Industry prod or Money), starting at the Medieval era. Then slow down the population growth, starting again in the Medieval era. Science does not appear to have any major balancing issues, at least not in my playthroughs. The devs then don't need to mess with game mechanics and district adjacency, and risk creating new balancing issues. All they would need to do is to increase the initial cost value of items and lower the growth value for population for each era. They do only have four months before final release so wholesale changes should be out of the question. The rapid population growth to me is the main issue, since it leads to spamming military units to lower overpopulation (which can be done easily since units have no maintenance cost besides the initial population cost). Hamlets barely help when I have a city growing by 1 pop every turn while a hamlet increases the population threshold by 4 while taking 4 turns to build. Constantly fighting overpopulation before midgame in a 4X game is definitively odd. 

You should have far more Industry just by spamming Maker's. Overpopulation should NOT be an issue. I disagree with the scaling costs up, as stuff already scales incredibly fast in this game. Rather everything should be scaled down. The game needs far more than just number changes, there are fundamental issues with certain things, such as the adjacencies.

FlamingKetchup wrote: 

You should have far more Industry just by spamming Maker's. Overpopulation should NOT be an issue. I disagree with the scaling costs up, as stuff already scales incredibly fast in this game. Rather everything should be scaled down. The game needs far more than just number changes, there are fundamental issues with certain things, such as the adjacencies.

Building costs do scale sort of quickly, but my production goes up faster that the scaling on costs. That's the problem. The one thing that feels alright is tech, but even then it's pretty fast if amplitude intends for games to be around the same speed as EL (300 turn limit.) This might be because it's an open dev and costs are low so we can experience everything, but I do feel like I am blitzing though the eras, getting to early modern by turn 70 without making too much effort

Valmighty wrote:

The problem with Humankind is that pop bonus is very little compared to the exploitation. In other 4x, pop is needed to exploit whatever tile we need to use. Humankind doesn't behave that way and that's okay. But it become such huge problem when Humankind belittle the usage of pop. Pop only produce miniscule of resource compared to exploitation. This makes people:

1. Focus on production carpet
2. Worker is negligible

This only encourage one playstyle, that is do the production as much as you can, as early as you can. Everything else can follow. There will be no specialized cities, there won't be need to grow pop, no need to balance science and food, and even money is pretty much useless early on because there's no upkeep and you will shower in money in late game because everything is cheap when you have tons of production.

I actually disagree, the population is very important and in later stages 1 pop worth quite a lot and due to luxuries and infrastructure. As for exploitation it's far easier to simply build a few hamlets than multiple maker quarters.

But I do agree that since there is no maintenance there is no reason not to build/buy something.

And FYI the best game that I had is actually the one where I almost did not use any maker's quarter at all. Phoenician->Dutch.

There are just too many ways to get huge amount of resources since AI does not provide adequate opposition.    

danisans wrote:

. Science does not appear to have any major balancing issues, at least not in my playthroughs. 

Probably because you did not focus on science, you can easily get 1000+ science by the beginning of the last era, without even trying to focus on science.

MumbaUmba wrote:

And FYI the best game that I had is actually the one where I almost did not use any maker's quarter at all. Phoenician->Dutch.

There are just too many ways to get huge amount of resources since AI does not provide adequate opposition.    

TBF the VOC warehouse is busted and its own problem. Really strong infrastructure, quarters, LTs, etc are fun and all, and are one of the things that make amplitude games unique, costs just need to reflect the fact that these things are in the game.

While I can agree that makers quarter spamming is undesirable, I have to point out 2 things.

1. Self-Adjacency is not the cause of this problem

I can confidently tell you that the only difference between makers quarters with self-adjacency and ones without is the way you put them on tiles. Terrain adjacency, exploitation-focused approaches, more labor intensive economy, you name it. The result has always been spamming makers quarters unless there's a serious exploit on legacy traits or emblematic quarters. At least self-adjacency doesn't make you look around the map to find the best spot for industry-rich tiles (or terrain adjacency) every time you want to put a new one, since you can just put one next to an existing industrial cluster.

2. Players spam makers quarters to delay the decision and save up for the future

It's not like players deciding not to build farmers, markets, or research quarters even though these things are very paying. They spam makers quarters because they are given some industry to spend and all the other options are just plain bad or insignificant. Food is too easy to get and hit super growth. Money is always nice to have but markets quarters don't produce much money because devs wanted to emphasize trade routes. Science is at least bit hard to get but research quarters aren't really paying and you run out of things to research very soon. It's not makers quarters are so good that eating up all the surplus resources. It's the game progressing so fast and stopping at the end of the EM era, making all but industry useless.

PARAdoxiBLE wrote:

While I can agree that makers quarter spamming is undesirable, I have to point out 2 things.

1. Self-Adjacency is not the cause of this problem

I can confidently tell you that the only difference between makers quarters with self-adjacency and ones without is the way you put them on tiles. Terrain adjacency, exploitation-focused approaches, more labor intensive economy, you name it. The result has always been spamming makers quarters unless there's a serious exploit on legacy traits or emblematic quarters. At least self-adjacency doesn't make you look around the map to find the best spot for industry-rich tiles (or terrain adjacency) every time you want to put a new one, since you can just put one next to an existing industrial cluster.

2. Players spam makers quarters to delay the decision and save up for the future

It's not like players deciding not to build farmers, markets, or research quarters even though these things are very paying. They spam makers quarters because they are given some industry to spend and all the other options are just plain bad or insignificant. Food is too easy to get and hit super growth. Money is always nice to have but markets quarters don't produce much money because devs wanted to emphasize trade routes. Science is at least bit hard to get but research quarters aren't really paying and you run out of things to research very soon. It's not makers quarters are so good that eating up all the surplus resources. It's the game progressing so fast and stopping at the end of the EM era, making all but industry useless.

Self-adjacency certainly doesn't help, and discouraging the player from using any other adjacency for Maker's is a problem in of itself. The player should be looking around the map for a good place to place Maker's, instead of just using self-adjacency. I definitely agree with the second point, the other yields/basic quarters should be better investments. I say Growth should be based around turns per pop. The current system, with exponential pop growth, may be more realistic, but it doesn't make sense gameplay-wise. Instead of food being no growth, growth, and super growth, Food could reduce the number of turns per pop by one for each x amount up to a certain limit (i.e. each 20 food above 10, up to 90, with a base of 6 turns a pop at 10-30). High Stability could also grant a turn per pop reduction. For Market Quarters, there could be a trade route capacity, and Market Quarters grant it (either +1 Trade route capacity base or +1 per adjacent Luxury). Not sure what to do for Research Quarter's, perhaps they could get adjacency from strategic deposits.

FlamingKetchup wrote:
Self-adjacency certainly doesn't help, and discouraging the player from using any other adjacency for Maker's is a problem in of itself. The player should be looking around the map for a good place to place Maker's, instead of just using self-adjacency. I definitely agree with the second point, the other yields/basic quarters should be better investments. I say Growth should be based around turns per pop. The current system, with exponential pop growth, may be more realistic, but it doesn't make sense gameplay-wise. Instead of food being no growth, growth, and super growth, Food could reduce the number of turns per pop by one for each x amount up to a certain limit (i.e. each 20 food above 10, up to 90, with a base of 6 turns a pop at 10-30). High Stability could also grant a turn per pop reduction. For Market Quarters, there could be a trade route capacity, and Market Quarters grant it (either +1 Trade route capacity base or +1 per adjacent Luxury). Not sure what to do for Research Quarter's, perhaps they could get adjacency from strategic deposits.

I won't argue if you personally prefer scattered blobs over massive clusters for aesthetic reasons. But my point is, self-adjacency does not affect the composition of quarters in a city. Besides, I don't want to see complicated quarter puzzles when this game expects me to build at least hundreds of them. I would rather give puzzle elements to emblematic ones to reduce player fatigue.

Regarding how to fix the economy, I'm honestly not sure about that. But I would start with creating shortages in the first place, instead of messing with the way quarters work.

Satchmo333 wrote:

- Influence - I'm assuming this mechanic isn't finished yet but I had little to do with all of my Influence when maximizing it.  I covered the map with influence but I couldn't capture territories or receive any buffs or anything.  Where is the peaceful conversion / culture flip mechanic?  Could we get a migration or enemy FIMS drain % if we cover our enemies in influence?  Can we have something else to spend it on?  Diplomatic schemes? or buyouts at the bare minimum.  This playthrough felt very weak compared to the other FIMS.

I concur about the Influence. I think the Influence and Faith aspects are fairly opaque, and do not seem to have been fully developed at this point

PARAdoxiBLE wrote:

I won't argue if you personally prefer scattered blobs over massive clusters for aesthetic reasons. But my point is, self-adjacency does not affect the composition of quarters in a city. Besides, I don't want to see complicated quarter puzzles when this game expects me to build at least hundreds of them. I would rather give puzzle elements to emblematic ones to reduce player fatigue.

Regarding how to fix the economy, I'm honestly not sure about that. But I would start with creating shortages in the first place, instead of messing with the way quarters work.

Maybe standard self adjacency is ok, and promotes clustering them like a regular city. However, if one production is supposed to be worth one science or one gold (as the science and builder affinity abilities imply)  then makers quarters are still the biggest bang for your buck. 

i do agree that the main issue is that we need more shortages. Currently the costs do not scale fast enough to keep in front of the players exponentially growing economy

A similar issue occurs with the Khmer's ability to build a carpet of river tile districts with their special ability.  There should probably be a diminishing return for being adjacent to another of the Khmer's special districts.