FabriceCPR wrote:

elsalvadon wrote:

... The trade caravans constantly have to be reassigned...

What you need for Civ is a mod called "Better Trade Screen".

Because they are not even able to create a minimally functioning UI... and this coming from one of those UI modders. ;)

Aristos wrote:

FabriceCPR wrote:

elsalvadon wrote:

... The trade caravans constantly have to be reassigned...

What you need for Civ is a mod called "Better Trade Screen".

Because they are not even able to create a minimally functioning UI... and this coming from one of those UI modders. ;)

As in any game where players are allowed to make improvements. As it will be for HK. ;)

I went back to playing Civ 6. Humankind just has way to many problems with multiplayer, both technical and balance, to be a satisfying game experience. When they fix multiplayer, I suggested in the survey to make a game mode crafted specifically for multiplayer, I'll return. Note that I have over 15K hours in Civ 6 and its almost exclusively multiplayer, and I look forward to the time I can play Humankind in a competitive multiplayer game experience. Playing against the AI, even initially to get the hang of game mechanics, just doesn't cut it for me.

FabriceCPR wrote

I thought that with 3000 hours I had wasted a lot of time...

It's about using the game setting as an arena to compete against others with what is allowed by game mechanics. You play through a discord server, you can discuss the game and smack talk. I played a ton of Civ 4, mostly multiplayer and not so much Civ 5 , which had terrible multiplayer until the community extensively modified it. So, for me playing games is more a social thing.

FabriceCPR wrote:

Aristos wrote:

FabriceCPR wrote:

elsalvadon wrote:

... The trade caravans constantly have to be reassigned...

What you need for Civ is a mod called "Better Trade Screen".

Because they are not even able to create a minimally functioning UI... and this coming from one of those UI modders. ;)

As in any game where players are allowed to make improvements. As it will be for HK. ;)

You cannot seriously compare Firaxis disaster UIs with Amplitude's...

Aristos wrote:

FabriceCPR wrote:

Aristos wrote:

FabriceCPR wrote:

elsalvadon wrote:

... The trade caravans constantly have to be reassigned...

What you need for Civ is a mod called "Better Trade Screen".

Because they are not even able to create a minimally functioning UI... and this coming from one of those UI modders. ;)

As in any game where players are allowed to make improvements. As it will be for HK. ;)

You cannot seriously compare Firaxis disaster UIs with Amplitude's...

If HK is better than Civ, then a lot of us are wrong. So what are we doing here wasting our time? Self-satisfaction ?

That is a good question: what are you doing here if you hate the game so much? Go back to playing with your toddler's toy full of vampires and zombies and no challenge whatsoever.

Ok that needlessly complicated forum does really hates me -_- Spend 30 min to type a reply from my phone that was erased. GOnna summarize it.

I'm mostly a big Civ 4 player, playing the game with mods (mostly rhyes and fall, realism invictus, pie's ancient mediterranean, and sometimes fall from heaven). So I can compare only to it. I played around 100 hours of Civ 5 before dropping it, and at best 10 of civ 6 before uninstalling it forever. So I can compare Humankind to a modded civ 4, which is a bit unfair as the second one got a decade of community love. Thos there is some stuff that I would love Humanking to take from civ.

-Strategic/luxury ressouces matters. In humankind my feel about most ressources is *oh a source of...whatever, just parc an artisan district here and forgot about it*. In Civ 4 access to certain ressources is a big thing. Some buildings can be build only if the empire has an access to the ressource. Some if the city has access to the ressource. Most of wonders are tied to one or two ressources and are faster to build or have more benefits if you have access to them. Having ressources on nearby tiles often defines the city role, a thing that is quite lackluster in Humanking (all my cities become quickly production and food powerhouse, and the only real choice behind that is to specialise them in either money or science)

-Terrain matters: The terrain and terrain features are playing an important role only in the early ages of Humankind. After that unique districts, some wonders and your internal production will produce 99% of what you need. Your artic/desert city will produce only a little bit less food then the floodlands one. I would like the terrain to be a little more impactful, cities in unsuitable location should not be able to bloom as they do now.

-Experience matter: Battles in Humankind are infinitely better then the doomstack chore that it is in civ 4. The only thing I would like borrow from civ 4 is the unit experience system that give you the possibility to specialize your units in certain roles rather then the boring +1 strengh now.

-Religion stuff: This is my very own personal taste, but I can't understand why HK took the shitty civ 5 religion mechanic. And I have absolutely no idea how the religion works now as it seems that I'm becoming the religion leader of my *ancient civ name* polytheism, despite doing absolutely nothing. I just love the civ 4 simple system - either the reliion is present in the city or it isn't. You can help it to spread, or try to impede it. Rhyes and Invictus further improve that, with old religions progressively fading away, and replaced by new ones that spread more aggressively and have more boni. I think I saw a HK dev saying somewhere that the current system is sorta a place holder, I hope that's the case.

-Political stuff: I quite like civ 4 political tenets that make you organise your governement from pieces. Especially some mod tenets like nomadism from invictus that completely change your civ gameplay as long as you don't switch from them. I also like the slifer from HK, they remind me the Europa Universalis 2 system. However the boni from them are quite negligeable, and I stop care about them quite early in the game, as it's impossible to really influence them. Politics, state and governement is a thing that could be really improved in HK.

-Finally historical stuff: That's the main reason I stopped to play HK and went back to Civ 4 for now. I usually play only on Earth maps with real civ placement, a thing that is impossible in HK. Also the whole Aztec become Chinese, become Brazilians, is hurting my suspension of disbelief way too much. I'm pretty sure that will be adressed by mods (heck I'll do/participate in a mod like that without doubts, already got several ideas from very simple to complicated about how to adress to that whitout changing the core game mechanics). 

FabriceCPR wrote:

Aristos wrote:

That is a good question: what are you doing here if you hate the game so much? Go back to playing with your toddler's toy full of vampires and zombies and no challenge whatsoever.

Yes, you're right. Vampires in Civ suck.
But this is only a Mod.
You are free to play it or not.

But since you flip the trash and i don't want to argue with a fanatic, I'd rather stop there before you get even more aggressive. Goodbye kid!

Good bye toddler!

all these people commenting how good humankind is lmfao, cant tell if you're trolling or bots 

Samir-Al-Haeed wrote:

all these people commenting how good humankind is lmfao, cant tell if you're trolling or bots 

As opposed to the people who apparently hate HK but love spending time on HK message boards telling everyone about it? I don't understand that myself, though I see no need for name-calling either.

I only play single-player and enjoy HK - imperfect though it is - quite a lot more than either Civ 5 or 6. If someone else prefers to play Civ 6, that's fine too.

@Telemachos - Those are all reasonable points. I agree on some more than others... just personal preference and interpretation. My Civ experience matches yours almost exactly.

Resources - I agree that resource differentiation would be interesting. That's hard to do at the moment since you can acquire most any resource through trade. It would be hard to implement differentiation without completely reworking the trade system. Maybe a DLC or extensive mod could do something here eventually. 

Terrain - I think terrain "doesn't matter" only because your cities eventually span multiple territories. So an iceball city can still do fine with good attachments. However, if you merged *all* crappy terrain territories together then there would be a substantial output deficit. Overall, I get what you're saying but feel like the current territory/attachment model has enough other benefits to outweigh it.

Unit Experience - Personally, I'm OK with HK's more generic model. In Civ4 you tended to only use a handful of specializations anyway. But this is another area I can see a DLC addressing. It could be done well and you could also have some kind of Civ-like great person/general system. I wouldn't mind seeing that.

Religion - Disagree here, mostly. I like HK's religion system. It's minimalist and hands-off, but it does matter sometimes. What level are you playing at? I found religion didn't matter much until the highest levels.

Politics/Government - Somewhat agree. This is what Civics are supposed to do. The problem is that too many of the civics don't matter because their bonuses suck. In particular, the aristocracy/monarchy/republic civics are so weak that they're irrelevant. Those should be much more powerful and important than they are. This can be fixed and I hope it will be.

History/Culture - I thought I would have your reaction to culture-switching when I first encountered HK but found it doesn't really bother me. At least it doesn't bother me any more than seeing Abe Lincoln lead the Americans out of the Bronze Age. I can imagine some kind of interesting tree-based system where cultures lead to a subset of other potential cultures. But that would be really, really hard to balance well.

I doubt that HK or any other 4X will ever dethrone Civ4 as my favorite grand strategy game of all time. But I just can't play Civ4 anymore... too many thousands of hours and I'm burned out. But I strongly prefer HK to Civ 5 or 6.

It is possible to dislike a game without an accompanying superiority complex... but it is also rather amusing to see someone posturing so aggressively over a computer game. Especially so when the difficulty of the AI is the metric he's using.

I've found Humankind to be very easy.  There are definitely areas where the AI can pose a challenge and perform well but once a lead is gained there is no hope for it to catch up, no matter how many freebies and advantages the difficulty level provides it.  The snowballing mechanics that amplitude likes to use are best taken advantage of by a human player, and no AI will ever be able to predict and plan for the points of leverage that are so important to this model of design the way a human player can.   Unless amplitude intends to completely revamp the design of the game in favor of a more gradual and balanced model to development (which I don't think it will) I don't see the AI ever becoming that much of a threat - it will always just be a matter of passing a tipping point at which your development can outpace anything the AI could ever dream of doing.  This is true of most games, and a natural limitation of AI.   

The same is true of civ 6, but in a different way as snowballing is not as exaggerated in those games as it is in Humankind. In Civ6 the limitations of the AI is primarily the complexity of the mechanics present in the game, and it's not likely that the AI would ever become substantially more difficult unless Firaxis stripped back features in favour of a more simplistic design.  Which is why people might find earlier versions of civ more difficult - taking away district placement and allowing for doom stacks would take a lot of burden off the AI, not to mention the many other layers of mechanics present in later versions of civ.

As Humankind continues it's development it's AI risks falling prey to both of these traps simultaneously and might actually pose less and less of a challenge as features are added to the game.

PeaceWeaver wrote:
There are definitely areas where the AI can pose a challenge and perform well but once a lead is gained there is no hope for it to catch up, no matter how many freebies and advantages the difficulty level provides it.

Maybe. I'm not yet convinced that HK's AI is any more deficient in this regard than other recent 4X games I've played, especially if some of the other non-AI balance issues are addressed (nerf the freaking Khmer!). HK AI is relatively decent IMO. I think a Dynamic Difficulty option/mod would help a lot. Playing against a Civ4 Deity AI that starts with multiple settlers/workers on Turn 1 is unfun and immersion-breaking. A well-implemented dynamic difficulty option would let you compete with early neighbors in a reasonable way while possibly making the next tier of neighbors resistant enough to snowballing.

None of this is a new problem in 4X's and I don't find HK's guardrails against snowballing more or less effective than Civ's or those in other games.

I wouldn't characterize the Humankind AI as deficient, it's just a matter of design. 

 Humankind has no guardrails for snowballing - rather, it incorporates snowballing into the design of the game.  That's what has made amplitude's games fresh and exciting but I do question how good of a fit it is for a game like humankind that is based in real-world themes rather than the magic of the endless universe. (even the name 'endless' captures this design philosophy of embracing snowballing)

For example, in Civ6 a city might go from a production of 5 at the start of the game to a production of 100 in the later game.  In Humankind, that city might reach a production of 10,000+ in the later game.   In civ6, a building usually adds a flat amount of yields, or at least is very limited in the other objects it interacts with.  In Humankind a new building will frequently increase the yields of everything already previously built, sometimes even empire-wide.   It's basically the difference between a linear model and a quadratic or exponential one.  These mechanics are fun, and can give an exciting,  volatile, and endless scope to the game.... but it's a design model that provides exaggerated rewards for every little piece of leverage you can find, and that puts the AI at an inherent disadvantage.

Telemachos wrote:

-Terrain matters: The terrain and terrain features are playing an important role only in the early ages of Humankind. After that unique districts, some wonders and your internal production will produce 99% of what you need. Your artic/desert city will produce only a little bit less food then the floodlands one. I would like the terrain to be a little more impactful, cities in unsuitable location should not be able to bloom as they do now.

You make a lot of good points that I agree with. But I just want to comment a bit. I'm highly critical of terrain yields both here and in Civ. Tundra territories should literally be sterile. No tundra territories have or had significant populations. Similarly deserts in both here and Civ, you find plenty of yield tiles - like oases - which give much more than in real life.

Similarly mountains shouldn't be such production centers. The problem is the separation of food and production - and then they have to give mountains production since it's obviously not food. But really, did ancient people get so much production out of mountains? Or did they leave them empty of population until modern times? In reality, there were a few mountains that are productive - silver, gold or salt - and the rest should be sterile.

Anyway, the main thing i want to say is that in these cases, both HK and Civ ruin my immersion so it's a tie from my perspective. But you are right in saying that terrain determines your city in Civ, whereas in HK all cities are the same (check FIMS distribution of a developed city - most of them will have the same relative distribution). I mention Old World which is another game which makes differentiating cities possible. And i think that's realistic and the devs should consider how to bring it to HK.