A lot happened today. Here's my attempt to summarize the important stuff. Click the bolded title to take you to the subject if you'd rather watch/read that.

The Humankind Delay Announcement

In short:

Humankind has been delayed back to August 17th, 2021, because while Humankind is a great game, Amplitude wishes to make Humankind the greatest game it can be.

In recompense, two new sets of Avatars, similar to the ones of Victor Hugo and Boudica, have been added for those who have pre-ordered, one of everyone's favorite character Lucy, and my main man Edgar "It was an orangutan all along" Allan "The Turk isn't real and controlled by little person" Poe.

They got your feedback and they are working on it, particular in concerns to pacing and balancing.

Of particular note!

They reverted the pop growth system back to being based on surplus food

Making the Neolithic not as crazy

Limiting the number of Emblematic Quarters players can have to one per territory of the current culture.

Removing administrators and adding a soft cap for the number of cities and armies a player can have.

Cleaning up the UI and making it easier to learn who does what and when.

Among other things. I highly recommend giving the announcement a read, especially the Lucy OpenDev numbers.

The Post-Delay Announcement Stream

The Stream was everyone's favorite characters Rogan (Social Media Specialist) and Stephanie (Community Manager/The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales here on the forms) joined by Romain (Chief Creative Officer) for the first bit.

They apologized for the delay and announced that around April 22nd, the day of the previous release, they plan to have another OpenDev. The 22nd is not set in stone, but they would like to have it around that time.

The OpenDev would focus around the same timeframe as the Lucy OpenDev, and contain many of the adjustments and changes they've made since, to judge player feedback and the like.

Future OpenDevs will likely focus on parts of the game unseen by the normals. Presumably post Early Modern Era stuff.

Most of the changes being made are mentioned in the Delay Announcement above, however some elaborations were made in some cases. Here are a few.

There was a mistake with the difficulty selection, this has been fixed and even so the AI should be improved across the board.

UI has been cleaned up for battles so it won't take up a lot of the screen. City UI has also been improved but won't all be in by the time the OpenDev occurs.

There was a request to mention the things you liked a lot next time.

One of the biggest pieces of Lucy Feedback was the pacing was way off. While Lucy was supposed to be a little fast, the Devs agree it was probably too fast.

Emblematic Quarters are being limited to one per territory, as in if you're the Babylonians, you can only build one Astronomy House in a territory, and then next era as the Romans, you can build one Triumphal Arch, and so on. This was done to make certain EQs not "replace" regular quarters, like the Hippodrome did for the Market Quarter. Additionally it allows them to buff weaker EQs to be in same same ballpark as the more overpowered EQs. Some replacement EQs may not be subject to this particular change, like those that actually do replace quarters.

Scrolling notifications are being made easier to understand and less vague.

You can now detach territories after attaching them.

The flow of the avatar's voice lines to each other has been improved so they don't sound as stilted.

An Era Star progress bar now appears on the left side of the screen when you are close to gaining a specific Era Star.

Among other things.

Why not have a beta or early access? It's not optimal. Adjusting things with the flow leads to issues, OpenDevs allow for bursts of content and the ability to react specifically to the specific content of that burst. 

No new news about the Modding Program.

Contemporary Culture Reveals are going to start on April 13th, and continue as they used to. They'll apparently look a little different than we are used to, whatever that means.

You can watch the stream in the link above or read my summary here for more info.

The GamesRadar Future Games Spring Showcase Segment - The Power of Diplomacy

That will never not be a mouthful.

This appears to basically be the Feature Focus for Diplomacy, so I'm sure it'll get reuploaded to the Humankind channel in a few days time.

We learned about diplomacy. Not much that we didn't already know, however.

We did spot, however, an airplane on the ways that you can send goods to one another when selecting trade routes.

The Franks have been changed to an Aesthete Culture and the Franci Milites has gotten their art updated, with a new spear, the fleur-de-lis removed from the shield, and blue instead of red accents. Kind of a big deal since the Medieval did not actually have an Aesthete culture, meaning that it's possible now that the Industrial, also bereft of a specific culture affinity, Merchant, may receive one as well. Maybe.

And that's seems to be a "brief" sort of summary of the events of the day.