About your title and this :

Enchanteur wrote:
I feel like even the developer can't really anticipate how the game will turn out, and how it should be balanced, because there are so many parameters to take into account.

Make me want to be philosophical and say that, such is life.

Léon Blum wrote: Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’Affaire [Dreyfus], Paris, Gallimard, 1935, IV, p. 75-76.
« J’étais jeune, et il y avait quelque chose que l’expérience ne m’avait encore enseigné, c’est que la plus fallacieuse des opérations de l’esprit est de calculer d’avance les réactions d’un homme, ou d’une femme, vis-à-vis d’une épreuve réellement imprévue. On se trompe presque à coup sûr quand on prétend résoudre ce calcul par l’application des données psychologiques déjà acquises, par une sorte de prolongement logique du caractère connu et de la vie passée. Toute épreuve est nouvelle et toute épreuve trouve un homme nouveau. »
[in english, I did my best for the traduction]
« I was young, and their was something that experience had yet to teach me, it's that the most fallacious of the mind operations is to compute in advance the reactions of a man, or a women, toward an unforseen hardship [event with a negative spin]. One is wrong most of the time when he try to solve this calculus with the application of psychological data already on hand, as to prolong logicaly the past character and life. Every trial is new and every trial find a new man, »

Anyway, my mind wander, but it's not the point.

-----------------------------------

I've been playing a good amount of ES 2 and even some Endless Dungeon (which is still a very solid game btw), and it made me wonder, wander, and ponder.

Enchanteur wrote:
- Industry dominates everything! Yes, only at the end of the game or in specific situations you will need something else. Industry allows you to get everything you lack.

In ES 2 and ED, industry rule all too, when you think about it. Or does it ?

In ES 2, your pop and space is capped by the planets you have in your system, so you cannot spam districts to fix all your problems. The thing is that, you need industry, yes, a lot ! Especialy to replace your ships. But, in the end, one industrial power house can do the job if your ships are better than those the mean people and do not get destroyed to fast. Dust (money) can also help to mediate a lack of industry.

In ED, you need industry for modules, and a bit for commerce. But, past a certain point, you begin to starve for... well, everything else. You can't just rely on your heroes to clean out the rooms, because the Dust (money) is ever scarcer to light the rooms. That bring very interesting choices. If you managed okay before hand, you should not be starved to much and have some room to manoeuvre. Before dying like an idiot on floor 6, or 12, again, because you were never that good in the first place. (Or is that just me ?)

My first point here is the following : in ES 2 and ED, industry was always counter balanced by the value you could get of other choices. Industry is nice, but if you have no science, you feel like an idiot when the next tier of ship arrive, or when you have no efficient counter measure for those Hissho missiles on cocaïne. (Why did it kept happening ?) Your choices mattered. The funny thing is, for some reason, in Humankind, your are faced with a choice every 30 or so turns (on average I guess). This choice matter a lot, but not because you can choose a route that feel like I can have it's own rewards, but because you feel that the solution is always in industry.

You should starve. For food, science, money, everything. Most importantly : luxuries that give a bonus to stability is a nice touch and grounded, but I somewhat feel that the formula of districts in Endless Legend was more reasonnable. Your maximum number of extension of the city is, in fact, your pop divided by two, with taken into account the happiness of your population, which depend on city placement (curios that give happiness), management (governor and so on), wine access, more wine, did I talked about wine and getting your people drunk to help them trough their suffering existence ?

As a humble history student, allow me to be pedantic here : to sum up the story of Humankind, there is not only janky thing about cultural mixes. Humanity as a whole can indeed be considered as a complex adaptative system, but before anything else, pushed by basic insticts (e.i. 1) (e.i. 2 and all that regards belief : the brain of how the brain work explain much about us...), The need for social connection (which is a book I recommend) amongst other things, sleep, food, and what have you. Cultures are, I think, a byproduct of our primal selves. We now live in abundance (in some countries, and for some parts of the population) and, due to those facts, we are faced with chronic overweight in the developped parts of our population because we evolve so much around need, and in some form, starvation, that we have problems regulating ourselves.

The solution to industry, I am starting to think is "starvation", limitations. Districts should be limited to the population of a given city, and or lose in efficiency as population is getting scarcer, or even get ruined. As the eras advance, some techs and infrastructures should allow you to have a higher density, and thus, your cities would be between a rock and a hard place : overpopulation is bad. Like, really bad : more deseases, not enough room to shelter everyone, it piss everyone off. But, of course, losing population would be bad too, because you people would be streeched to thinly over too vast an infrastrure to be able to use it fully, and even, maintain it.

This would also fix the two following :

Enchanteur wrote:

- Food is not useful, even if you can be handicapped by a lack of food at the end of the game. The number of population per FIMS to work in the city is caped. So having more population does not mean having more people to work the industry. This makes the Egyptians superior to the Harappeans. Which leads to the following observation...

- District construction has a higher return than population slots. I haven't done the math, but I'm just noticing by playing. The two game mechanics should be in constant conflict, but they are not. Infrastructure improving districts is explosive while infrastructure improving population yields is linear. Having more population is not useful. Play Egyptians, you can do without population. You just put it into food and science, that's enough. It's an unnecessary surplus, you could do without it, and you do it when you need units urgently.

Which is weird when you think about it btw, because at some point in the end game, I build more and more districts to shelter my evergrowing population. This kind of thing should be present during all game. Humankind is not the deed of one sole ruler, it is of, well, Humankind. A huge mess of people, that do not understand how and what they think, most the time, but that sometimes want to have it badly. Making babies and the cravings for sugar and fats is a stellar example of that.

"Cravings" and "starvations". It's funny to have made a game about Humankind and not to have thought that much about what a human is. I mean, we are violent, sure, the narrator say that a lot. Nature too by the way. In the time I needed to write this piece, how many animals, insects, plants, and anything died of thurst, starvation, got killed because it was prey, or due to an infection because of a clumsy fall and pure "hasard". But that is beside the point I really want to push forward.

Form 0:40 to 1:00.

Now, in my own way I might seem pedantic, cold, angry, what have you, I don't know. But I am going to ask a question. Did the fine people on screen really mastered what a 4X is ? What it is ? What Humankind is ? Did they even understood what made their previous games great ? Easy to get into, but oh so hard to master ? (To me at least. But I don't feel like I am the only one.)

You would seem that something has inevitable as hunger and conflict, which is the FIMS system, disctricts and population, would have been understood in depth, that there would have been a great mastery of it. But here is the thing... Humankind is not the previous games. And this is were my Blum quote and your title come in full force. How to balance proceduraly generated factions ? Vodyani ? Yay, some try and fail. A lot in fact. Nerf the Arks, once, twice, thrice. The pop too.

The Khmer and other can be fixed along the way, they are just values on a spreadsheet, somewhat. Which is perhaps the problem, because the deeper mechanics are questionable :

Enchanteur wrote:

- Collective Mind: Can run the whole production in science indefinitely. At least make it last 5 turns max, as a very basic balancing. Civilization traits need to be balanced. For now, this trait make science useless. Play Industry, then turn the Industry into science at the right time. Game over. There is no other strategy to look for.

- Industry dominates everything! Yes, only at the end of the game or in specific situations you will need something else. Industry allows you to get everything you lack.

This being said, I will be critical again. In a constructive manner, I hope. I do not want to be abrasive. Never. (Except toward the Huns : they geniunly made me rage quite one time, although I now laugh at the memory. What a bunch of jerks. Be the only other dude to spawn on my continent, not once, not twice, but thrice in a row ? Get lost !)

Even when you take the subject of curiosities, they feel more in depth and interesting in Endless Legend, Endless Space than in Humankind. How to fix it ? Well. Do what is done in Endless Space 2. The curiosities are the ressources. Sometimes you can figure out what it is from the get go, sometimes you don't. Sometimes, the curiosities are just... curiosities. Sometimes, they could be YAY big, such as, I dunno... natural marvels ? Or wonder ? Sites ? You now. Mountains or blushing lakes. That you could get to name if you found them first. You would have the real name as a suggestion, but it would be it.

What went on with this game ? Why boast about past experience and making a Magnum Opus, when the basic mechanics, such as exploration and ressources, do not work in a satisfying manner ? This have some trickling down consequences by the way. For example, the exploration AI that want to grab the magic stuff that pop on the map magicaly, instead of being the result of, I don't know, player actions of some natural event. (For player actions : wrecks would be... well, lost ships at sea. I know, I had a hard time figuring that out. Battles could have a chance to leave some stuff behind, especialy in the contemporary era. I mean, in France, in some places, the battelfields of WW1 are... well. Visible. And it was a "narrative event" in so many sense for the governements of the times about the memory and narratives of the period, but also the unexploded ammo, what to do with the holes in the ground. Keep them as is ? Or not ? Some ancient soldiers want them still there, because they wanted people to remember, but some farmers want to go back to farming on their farms, which have wholes and unexploded ammo erverywhere. Some didn't even bothered. For "nature's" "actions" : a volcano I awakening for example. A forest is dying. Another is growing. Did... did these animals not change since older days ? Why did we got sick since we domesticated the cows ? BTW, those wolfs could be named by some the best friend of a man. And so on. Nature and humanity can also be intertwined, because, spoiler alert, man is an animal. It aggravate me when people think of man as a special thing. We are bigger and bulkier than ants, do not make us more sophisticated. Ask the Cravers of ES 2 if you think that. They are no bullies. So were the Huns : size and modus operandi do not determine the subtulty of the society.)

There is a final thing that got me pretty agravated when the game came out.

Pollution.

The fact that it's not working is not the issue for me. The issue is that the devs said that they didn't want to make any political statement by it. Okay. But why does the narrator say the things he is saying ? You might think they are just facts, but again, I do pull my trump card of history student and tell you that any fact in construed socialy and can have political aspect. Hell, for some reason, nobody tought about studying the history of womens (about 50% of humanity numbers, you might have heard of them) without them getting in the academia in the first place. And please don't debate me on this. Or please do and prove my point : politics are everywhere. (And I just wished the dev accepted it, and ran with it with many, many narratives events and mechanics that let the players explore... many things. Although their is the problem of procedural narration, and the fear of validating ill chosen behavior (slavery, just as an example), but even if, I would have rather seen the dev running with it in depth, detail, and letting and inviting the player to think and muster arguments. Holy moly, this game could have been the Mass Effect of 4X. With a snarcky narrator. How convinient !)

But... slavery is neutered, and never mentionned again, and as mechanic, barely visible. The promises about shapping or reacting to the shappings of the frabic of a society ? Out the window. Two events about the direction your society is taking regarding women/men parts in society, for all I know. Yeah, sure. The status of women did not change between the Middle ages and the Moderne era (I got worse, in my opinion : the rock bottom was arguably the XIXth century). And, again, look at the publicty surrounding the game when it was announced. False adverstising ? I will rather tend to fall for overconfidency and what an other narrator said. I like the devs after all, and I somewhat trust them. Which is something I cannot say for Electronic Arts (yes, the mean people that own and destroy many things (did I mentionned a Bioware franchise ?).

This game, Humankind, is indeed a mad experiment. They wanted to make, from what I understand, dynamic systems that are intertwined and shapes narratives, cultures, form emergent narratives, what have. Explore the realms of the possibles. But, instead of trying to understand history, they recite it. This game might have complex systems, sure. But it's mainly a card deck. You do not shape your culture and the face of your society, with lasting things that you cannot get ride off (for example : fetishistic approach to gold, lasting influence of a given religion even when the state is secular, and half the population state openly to not believe, and those who say they are of from religion, do not even believe in it's good in a very large majority (yes, I am talking about France again)). You picks options, civics that are premade because their is no better way to do it, technology that only goes from left to right, although a good bunch of the writings cultures do it the other way around, with eras that feel to me as being "occidental centric", because the first thing that the history academia in France admit about cutting history in blocks (Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Contemporary), is that it's arbitrary, somewhat bollocks, and of somewhat no use when you go to Asia for instance. (But, it's usefull for buraucratic reasons, and just because we need labels, but we as students and also pro. historians are the first to discuss them and admit their... well, arbitrariness.)

Okay... but is the era system and era stars system that usefull in the first place ? From a ludo-narrative stand-point ? Flat no for me.

For techs ? Yes, sure. I don't like how they work, and I really want someone to try to reiterate what Heart of Iron III did with technical and theorical mastery of a given field, instead of scearching for bubbles, but I digress and I am tired now. Like, a lot.

Humankind, a mad experiment. That's the way to put it. I do hope that their are some people taking good notes, in the letteral sense, and putting into words the experience acquired beforehand. Because with that, the experience of one generation of game can be passed on to the next ! (See what I did their ? Quoting the narrator again ? ^^' )

We all wished it was better. I just hope it turns out to be, in the years to came. In this game or elsewhere. Even if it's very fun, and it's also aggravating a bit because it do not work as you would like, is somewhat obscure, but make you think and learn new things. Again. I ponder on your title. I will get back on everything I ever said on these forums. Humankind might be the best game Ampitude ever put out, because it's so bonkers and not working as it should. Holy moly. It's the magnum opus indeed !

But I do hope they are making internal documents and defining a "doctrine" or "theories" about how to make games, so they can really understand what they are doing. In a sence, I guess I echo what you have concluded your post with :

Enchanteur wrote:
My only advice to the studio Amplitude for now: it is not to work but to play! Yes, play your own game a lot. Play as much as the players. You'll have the same frustrations, whether it's ergonomics or balancing issues. You can figure out what you want to do to fix it.

And thus, do the same thing as the players. Make notes. And around 16 thousands characters documents poorly speel due to overenthousiasm, just for it to be a registry. For later. Their will be other games to develop, and this one to polish (not the culture).

(deleted previous post due to somewhat extensive edit : apologies for the poor british spelling and the way my brain work)

Hoping this was constructive.