Spiff shredded Humankind in his video a month ago.. First going as Olmecs, then the Huns and finally Mongols.. he highlighted just how easy it was to just cake walk the entire game.  I'm wondering what changes if any have been made to make such classic overpowered civs somewhat weaker or costly to use.  It's all good that there's a spread of different civs.. but if one or two can just slaughter everyone.. the entire game becomes pointless.

First, it is the level of difficulty. The release version will soon add higher levels of difficulty for the game against bots.

Second, he played against bots, not humans. Real players will play harder.

And third, most importantly. Lucy OpenDev is an early access that is designed to detect culture imbalances.

I believe there will be another OpenDev where the disadvantages will be less)

Yes, it is early access so the AI scripts are likely far from being done

Only playing single player so only care about AI effectiveness - hope it will be capable

There are numerous ways to game the AI in Lucy yes, but it is hard to tell if this will change

Most important point: Spiff shreds every game. No exceptions. :D

A more serious point: In the latest devstream the developers stated that they saw what crazy things some players have achieved in Lucy OpenDev.

While they want expert players to have a better economy they don't want the difference to be that extreme.

They also stated that this is one of the reasons why the do the OpenDevs; so the game can be broken before it is released :)

So the developers will change something about this. What exactly is not known yet.

Hopefully we will see what they changed in the next OpenDev.

Oh i dunno, his taste in tea sucks, yorkshire tea is bland..

First of all, he completely mispronounces aesthete . . .

But I agree with countcb. Hopefully the devs will study all the different ways he broke the game and make fixes. It's also unclear what difficulty he was playing on . . . . But aside from that, I'm glad he showed some weaknesses before it launched.

I blocked the spiffing Britt quite annoying to take the fun out of life by doing what he does, I am sure some are entertained by his antics but a lot of people don't find it amusing or productive in anyway.  most people don't devote their lives to finding exploits in every single video game so his videos are useless except to a small percentage of people that want to goc at that nonsense. I 

I don't think the Devs or anyone should take him seriously when it comes to game development, its humorous to watch maybe.... maybe. but nothing serious or productive comes out of any of his videos other than what can be achieved by devoting all your energy to exploiting videos games.... and for what reason? pure ego entertainment on his part

Whilst I agree with the viewpoint on exploits, spiff is only showing how broken a game is to get it improved.. I think you should cut him some slack, recently he led a few big fights in planetside 2, involving thousands of players in the events and it was enjoyed by everyone, except, oddly other streamers.. who felt he was stealing their thunder.  Spiff recently released a video to try to embarress youtube into fixing an exploit in it's viewing system, which has now been broken for over a year, he isn't doing it so much for personal gain, but to get changes made.  That said, he is making good money from it.

The only issue I have with the prime streamers is that they don't actually support the gaming industry, they support themselves only. Many of the games they play purely because developers are giving them free keys to promote their games off their supporters and followers and both sides know this.  Which is a shame.  Fortunately I follow several streamers who have made several runs on humankind and I've now seen over a dozen seperate entire games giving me a better understanding of the gameplay.  Gamerzakh, Partyelite and morderdviking being amoung my favourites.

I don't think the Devs or anyone should take him seriously when it comes to game development, its humorous to watch maybe.... maybe. but nothing serious or productive comes out of any of his videos other than what can be achieved by devoting all your energy to exploiting videos games.... and for what reason? pure ego entertainment on his part

Isn't the whole point of his videos to show step by step exploit reproduction and then follow it up with the chaos that comes afterwards? It is useful to have a video showing how to perform an exploit so you could patch it as a developer (though notably the AI was on casual, and most of the other stuff was already reported at the point of the video creation). Also influencers like Spiff promote the game further to wider audiences, even if it is a video showcasing exploits.

Honestly I rather they improve the AI rather than have to increase the difficulty and give the AI artificial bonus to even keep up with a player. Way to many 4x games just feel "give AI more bonus = good AI" which is simply not the case. It's the biggest reason I stopped playing Civ 6 cause the AI is terrible in that game.

Natural_Druid wrote:

Spiff shredded Humankind in his video a month ago.. First going as Olmecs, then the Huns and finally Mongols.. he highlighted just how easy it was to just cake walk the entire game.  I'm wondering what changes if any have been made to make such classic overpowered civs somewhat weaker or costly to use.  It's all good that there's a spread of different civs.. but if one or two can just slaughter everyone.. the entire game becomes pointless.

Or maybe you make the huns/ mongols a verry instable civ (districts,pop and each territory costs extra stability). just like the mongol empire, which had big problems with their stability, and later on even with rheir economy, leading to it collapsing after a short amount of time. So in the end if you expand to fast your empire revolves.

Well, Spiff's video only showed what most of us who played Lucy OpenDev already knew — the build we played was not anywhere close to anything that can be considered "balance". I am actually quite worried, because if that was the state of the game in December, I don't see how the devs will be able to deliver an enjoyable game by the end of April. Food, basic economy, expansion, politics — all these things were very far to where you want a game to be four months  before the release. 

Natural_Druid wrote:

Oh i dunno, his taste in tea sucks, yorkshire tea is bland..

What? Are ya coffee lover or what?

mobster_san wrote:

Well, Spiff's video only showed what most of us who played Lucy OpenDev already knew — the build we played was not anywhere close to anything that can be considered "balance". I am actually quite worried, because if that was the state of the game in December, I don't see how the devs will be able to deliver an enjoyable game by the end of April. Food, basic economy, expansion, politics — all these things were very far to where you want a game to be four months  before the release. 

Well I mean they had a few months before release since the OpenDev, so in theory depending on the team size and the amount of testing they could gather all the feedback needed to make adjustments and deliver a balance game on release. It would be unreasonable to expect it to be perfect on release for most games never are.

mobster_san wrote:

David12596 wrote:

mobster_san wrote:

Well, Spiff's video only showed what most of us who played Lucy OpenDev already knew — the build we played was not anywhere close to anything that can be considered "balance". I am actually quite worried, because if that was the state of the game in December, I don't see how the devs will be able to deliver an enjoyable game by the end of April. Food, basic economy, expansion, politics — all these things were very far to where you want a game to be four months  before the release. 

Well I mean they had a few months before release since the OpenDev, so in theory depending on the team size and the amount of testing they could gather all the feedback needed to make adjustments and deliver a balance game on release. It would be unreasonable to expect it to be perfect on release for most games never are.

The reason that I am worried is that I didn't see any noteworthy core changes between the first OpenDev and Lucy OpenDev — and a couple of months have passed between them. The broken science mode is still there, food production is still trivialized etc. The pessimistic explanation is that it's just how the team wants the game to be. Nobody expects a perfect game on release, but I'd like to see a playable and enjoyable one. I understand that tastes differ, but I personally didn't find Lucy OpenDev that enjoyable — it was just too volatile and too exploitable. And I am not sure that it can be fixed just by tweaking some numbers, the problem lies in the fundamental game mechanics. 

Of course, another possible explanation is that Lucy OpenDev was deliberately unbalanced to elicit some specific type of feedback from players. That would be odd, but possible. 

Science mode has been changed to not take food production and therefore stagnate the city (also define "broken"), food production has also seen a change since then, as well as other things like quarter system, units cost pop, etc. It is all going through different iterations and the system has changed drastically in comparison to the babylon scenario.

And of course some things can be reigned back in.

Science mode has been changed to not take food production and therefore stagnate the city (also define "broken")

"Broken" in the sense that it allows you to research an entire era worth of technology with very little downside (5 turns of production/city development loss is negligible in contrast). Of course, the real issue in Lucy was production scaling. Even my wife, who is a beginner-level Civ player, managed to have hundreds production in her city on her first playground, by basically randomly plopping down quarters. 

It is a bit difficult for me to clearly put my worries in words as I haven't spend too much time on accurate analysis, but I would summarize it by "volatile gameplay". Situation in the game can change extremely quickly. It can take  one turn to double the city's production (e.g. by attaching territories or building upgrades). Same goes for territories changing hands. I don't think these kind of massive, rapid changes are a good thing to have in a grand strategy game. And while they can be balanced and limited (e.g. by capping production output by population), the problem I see with Humankind is that this kind of volatility is part of the base rules — which would need to be changed significantly. And I just don't think it can be done  in the brief period of time left. 

mobster_san wrote:
It is a bit difficult for me to clearly put my worries in words as I haven't spend too much time on accurate analysis, but I would summarize it by "volatile gameplay". Situation in the game can change extremely quickly. It can take  one turn to double the city's production (e.g. by attaching territories or building upgrades). Same goes for territories changing hands. I don't think these kind of massive, rapid changes are a good thing to have in a grand strategy game. And while they can be balanced and limited (e.g. by capping production output by population), the problem I see with Humankind is that this kind of volatility is part of the base rules — which would need to be changed significantly. And I just don't think it can be done  in the brief period of time left.

Most 4xes and grand strategy games are painfully slow, and I like that Humankind is faster, but your examples aren't true. Just attaching territory doesn't do to much, certainly won't double the cities production, unless it was already incredibly low to begin with. Territory changing hands only happens through someone accepting a grievance demand, or during a peace deal.

FlamingKetchup wrote:

mobster_san wrote:
It is a bit difficult for me to clearly put my worries in words as I haven't spend too much time on accurate analysis, but I would summarize it by "volatile gameplay". Situation in the game can change extremely quickly. It can take  one turn to double the city's production (e.g. by attaching territories or building upgrades). Same goes for territories changing hands. I don't think these kind of massive, rapid changes are a good thing to have in a grand strategy game. And while they can be balanced and limited (e.g. by capping production output by population), the problem I see with Humankind is that this kind of volatility is part of the base rules — which would need to be changed significantly. And I just don't think it can be done  in the brief period of time left.

Most 4xes and grand strategy games are painfully slow, and I like that Humankind is faster, but your examples aren't true. Just attaching territory doesn't do to much, certainly won't double the cities production, unless it was already incredibly low to begin with. Territory changing hands only happens through someone accepting a grievance demand, or during a peace deal.

Did we play a different game? Outposts exploit tiles, attaching outposts adds all the exploited resources to th city. If you have some upgrades in the city, attaching an outpost with resources can easily give you +40 production in the early game. As to grievances, they just happen naturally if you have any noteworthy influence output at all. 

mobster_san wrote:
Did we play a different game? Outposts exploit tiles, attaching outposts adds all the exploited resources to th city. If you have some upgrades in the city, attaching an outpost with resources can easily give you +40 production in the early game.

40 Industry from 7 tiles is rather high, even with infrastructures, 20 would be a more accurate number, for an outpost placed to prioritize Industry. Even so, if you have already built some infrastructures in the city, either the city is developed past the point where it has 20 Industry, or it is a new city where you have bought out Infrastructures but no quarters. Besides, territory is the one resource that is hard-capped in this game, there is only a certain amount of land on the map. The culture flipping does need to be rebalanced, but as most the AI was glitched to "Easy," that was most likely why.

mobster_san wrote:

Science mode has been changed to not take food production and therefore stagnate the city (also define "broken")

"Broken" in the sense that it allows you to research an entire era worth of technology with very little downside (5 turns of production/city development loss is negligible in contrast). Of course, the real issue in Lucy was production scaling. Even my wife, who is a beginner-level Civ player, managed to have hundreds production in her city on her first playground, by basically randomly plopping down quarters. 

It is a bit difficult for me to clearly put my worries in words as I haven't spend too much time on accurate analysis, but I would summarize it by "volatile gameplay". Situation in the game can change extremely quickly. It can take  one turn to double the city's production (e.g. by attaching territories or building upgrades). Same goes for territories changing hands. I don't think these kind of massive, rapid changes are a good thing to have in a grand strategy game. And while they can be balanced and limited (e.g. by capping production output by population), the problem I see with Humankind is that this kind of volatility is part of the base rules — which would need to be changed significantly. And I just don't think it can be done  in the brief period of time left. 

I just came from the video and relogged into my account for the first time in 2 years to see what the reaction was... But I think you're spot on. Its the mechanics that give rise to the problem. The numbers are too high. In comparison to any other 4x game I would say the early bonuses are obscene. The model of the game though has you essentially playing several different civs simultaneously, and that appears to have exactly the outcome you'd expect. A game where everything is dialed up by that multiple. Spiff plays 3 cultures, wins 3 times as fast. It's jarring when compared to the other endless games. Especially Legend which it looks most alike. 

consilio wrote:

I just came from the video and relogged into my account for the first time in 2 years to see what the reaction was... But I think you're spot on. Its the mechanics that give rise to the problem. The numbers are too high. In comparison to any other 4x game I would say the early bonuses are obscene. The model of the game though has you essentially playing several different civs simultaneously, and that appears to have exactly the outcome you'd expect. A game where everything is dialed up by that multiple. Spiff plays 3 cultures, wins 3 times as fast. It's jarring when compared to the other endless games. Especially Legend which it looks most alike. 

There is no "winning" implemented in Lucy, except having the highest fame at the end of the scenario, which is a fixed length.

FlamingKetchup wrote:

consilio wrote:

I just came from the video and relogged into my account for the first time in 2 years to see what the reaction was... But I think you're spot on. Its the mechanics that give rise to the problem. The numbers are too high. In comparison to any other 4x game I would say the early bonuses are obscene. The model of the game though has you essentially playing several different civs simultaneously, and that appears to have exactly the outcome you'd expect. A game where everything is dialed up by that multiple. Spiff plays 3 cultures, wins 3 times as fast. It's jarring when compared to the other endless games. Especially Legend which it looks most alike. 

There is no "winning" implemented in Lucy, except having the highest fame at the end of the scenario, which is a fixed length.

Having the highest Fame at the end of the game IS the "Winning" condition -- and the only winning condition they've announced.

BobWilson wrote:

I blocked the spiffing Britt quite annoying to take the fun out of life by doing what he does, I am sure some are entertained by his antics but a lot of people don't find it amusing or productive in anyway.  most people don't devote their lives to finding exploits in every single video game so his videos are useless except to a small percentage of people that want to goc at that nonsense. 

I don't think the Devs or anyone should take him seriously when it comes to game development, its humorous to watch maybe.... maybe. but nothing serious or productive comes out of any of his videos other than what can be achieved by devoting all your energy to exploiting videos games.... and for what reason? pure ego entertainment on his part

While i disagree on the "annoying" part (we all have different tastes), i agree that the devs should not take SpiffingBrit's video seriously... apart from the fact it may point to glaring issues.

As said above, several of us have managed to soundly beat the AI using the Hun/Mongol combo.

gigaudobaix wrote:

BobWilson wrote:

I blocked the spiffing Britt quite annoying to take the fun out of life by doing what he does, I am sure some are entertained by his antics but a lot of people don't find it amusing or productive in anyway.  most people don't devote their lives to finding exploits in every single video game so his videos are useless except to a small percentage of people that want to goc at that nonsense. 

I don't think the Devs or anyone should take him seriously when it comes to game development, its humorous to watch maybe.... maybe. but nothing serious or productive comes out of any of his videos other than what can be achieved by devoting all your energy to exploiting videos games.... and for what reason? pure ego entertainment on his part

While i disagree on the "annoying" part (we all have different tastes), i agree that the devs should not take SpiffingBrit's video seriously... apart from the fact it may point to glaring issues.

As said above, several of us have managed to soundly beat the AI using the Hun/Mongol combo.

I think the problem is too much synergy. It's far way from 4X Games, but when RWBY: Amity Arena was in development, they had the issue of whether they should or shouldn't add bonuses to making "theme" teams. Huns + Mongols fits a theme very well and it creates a playstyle that plays too well. Whether balance changes made affect the value of their bonuses, the core mechanics of the civs or maybe adding a randomizer/play restriction that prevents you from making certain choices. Like if you created a highly militant society, with low science outputs, you wouldn't be able to advance to a pacifist and/or scientific society. That way, advancing isn't simply gaining a new ability but rather showing the natural progress of your society.

SpaceHoboJoe wrote:
I think the problem is too much synergy. It's far way from 4X Games, but when RWBY: Amity Arena was in development, they had the issue of whether they should or shouldn't add bonuses to making "theme" teams. Huns + Mongols fits a theme very well and it creates a playstyle that plays too well. Whether balance changes made affect the value of their bonuses, the core mechanics of the civs or maybe adding a randomizer/play restriction that prevents you from making certain choices. Like if you created a highly militant society, with low science outputs, you wouldn't be able to advance to a pacifist and/or scientific society. That way, advancing isn't simply gaining a new ability but rather showing the natural progress of your society.

Going that route blocks your civilization from attaching outposts and creating new cities for 2 eras, a major anti-synergy. Huns and Mongols are redundant in many other ways. You will likely have conquered a large chunk of the world already as the Huns, anyways.

I think the main reason to take Mongols after Huns is if you are still far from conquering your own continent, to

1. Ensure your military is still strong enough to continue conquering. Hunnic Hordes can be upgraded into Mongol Hordes if you have the money
2. Prevent your target from taking Mongols. I predict that going Mongols vs. Huns will be very powerful, as the Mongol Hordes can fairly easily beat the Hunnic hordes and rapidly multiply off of them