The irony here is that the front and center topic of this article is diplomacy, but HK doesn't really have any. The biggest obstacle to this game doing well is the designers who refuse to listen to players telling them over and over their diplomacy and war system is a non-intuitive, stupid, broken mess. That, and the bugs they refuse to fix.

As the article says, the primary goal of the diplomacy system (and by extension war support and surrender) is to facilitate emerging stories, by rooting diplomatic interactions and wars in the world. Your wars are meant to be about something more than just the player's own desire to conquer their neighbors. However, we do not by any means believe is our system is perfect, and we intend to improve it in the future. However, we can't simply remove the diplomacy system as it is now and put in a diplomacy system as used in other games. As one of the core systems of the game, we cannot simply turn it off without an exceedingly long line of knock-on effects. We know that the current system limits player expression and thus the stories they tell in ways that hamper the emergence of interesting stories, and we are not happy with that, but fixing that will take time.

The same is true for identifying empires. We have been looking at options to give empires consistent names across the whole game, but even that is not solved easily and quickly as we need to ensure it displays properly in all relevant parts of the game.

I think the "restricting the Great Grey Blob" play is good, but diplomacy should not be the primary way to do it.   The problem is "blobbing" lets you ignore diplomacy, and so if you can do it before you become dependent on others for trade (ancient classical expansion) then it becomes the best strategy.  If Empires are going to stay small they need to collapse if they get too big.  Now normally that is a bad idea in a 4X because you win based on how far you are along one of the "Measures of bigness" [playing tall is sometimes worthwhile but only as a niche strategy]   However, with Humankind's fame mechanic, you could have both good strategy AND good fun with empire collapse... because you don't lose fame.   So If big empires fell apart after some time, then you could blob out as the Romans, get a massive empire and milk it for fame before the inevitable collapse in the next era or 2 as Byzantines (and then work for another round of fame milking in a later era).

If expand-collapse cycles were a strategically good way to gain fame that would make a "anti-Blobbing" mechanic be ok.

Ideally balanced with a moderate minimal expansion development focus, but expand-collapse should be slightly better rather than slightly worse because it is more interesting.

I do not think that would work either, the way the cities are designed, they become your pets, you carefully place all the districts, find nice places for them - both mechanically and aesthetically - so losing them to some arbitrary 'oops, now you collapsed and fell apart' wouldn't feel good. Spending an era hunting down rebels? Well, not everyone will be in for a military gameplay, even if it's arguably best part of the HK.

As in the other thread, I still do not feel like the way the wars work is flawed at its core, it needs some tweaking, but at this point I'm not even sure it would need a lot of it, the main goal it sets out to achieve is achieved and I do enjoy the fact that it requires you to think beforehand what you want to achieve with this war and how much can you gain. From medieval times on, and even earlier, it wasn't uncommon for half of country/kingdom/whatever nomenclature is appropriate to be set on fire and a land equivalent of single HK territory would change hands as a result, so I really don't buy 'it didn't work like that in history', when counterargument always seem to be the same total war spanning across continents - something I still think should be implemented through special rules, i.e. have all the pretenders to the victory try to take the first place down (if they're already aggressively inclined towards them, of course, after all, diplomacy matters), to liven up the late game.

My main issue is that I don't have opponents, I can wage a lengthy war that I enjoyed and then be surprised when during the peace deal it's Gilgamesh throwing petty insults at me. Oh, so you were the guy I was fighting all the time? Cat mentions that's something they're working on that and I hope that's the case, because this is the thing the whole roleplay part of the game requires, you need to feel you're playing against characters and their empires, rather than colours and a rarely appearing talking heads attached to them.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

As the article says, the primary goal of the diplomacy system (and by extension war support and surrender) is to facilitate emerging stories, by rooting diplomatic interactions and wars in the world. Your wars are meant to be about something more than just the player's own desire to conquer their neighbors. However, we do not by any means believe is our system is perfect, and we intend to improve it in the future. However, we can't simply remove the diplomacy system as it is now and put in a diplomacy system as used in other games. As one of the core systems of the game, we cannot simply turn it off without an exceedingly long line of knock-on effects. We know that the current system limits player expression and thus the stories they tell in ways that hamper the emergence of interesting stories, and we are not happy with that, but fixing that will take time.

The same is true for identifying empires. We have been looking at options to give empires consistent names across the whole game, but even that is not solved easily and quickly as we need to ensure it displays properly in all relevant parts of the game.

I do understand that is the INTENTION of the diplomatic model. To deal with the age-old issue of blobbing in these games. Over the years we've seen anti ICS strategies, stability, city caps, corruption, minimum city distancing, dog piling and many others.

My main issue I suppose, is that here is an article where the lead designer is going on about how the HK diplomatic model helps tell these "frothy" stories, when in point-blankedness fact, the diplomatic model does the complete opposite. It heavily restricts the player and destroys any possibility of a "frothy" story.

Humankind doesn't even need diplomacy to restrict the player's ability to blob. HK already employs stability, influence, dog piling and city caps. Diplomacy can be such an enormously enjoyable part of the game, but the way it's restricted so much now, completely makes diplomacy pointless. Why don't you dial back the restrictions on diplomacy, and instead crank up the other anti-blobbing metres. Make it harder to go over the city cap. Give other nations a malice against the blobbing player to promote dog piling. Increase instability.

Let the player tell stories through diplomacy, and thus blobbing through diplomacy. But dial up the anti-blobbing in the areas that actually counter blobbing. The game will be infinitely more fun that way. At the moment, it just sucks and why you've lost 95% of your players.

Krikkitone wrote:

I think the "restricting the Great Grey Blob" play is good, but diplomacy should not be the primary way to do it.   The problem is "blobbing" lets you ignore diplomacy, and so if you can do it before you become dependent on others for trade (ancient classical expansion) then it becomes the best strategy.  If Empires are going to stay small they need to collapse if they get too big.  Now normally that is a bad idea in a 4X because you win based on how far you are along one of the "Measures of bigness" [playing tall is sometimes worthwhile but only as a niche strategy]   However, with Humankind's fame mechanic, you could have both good strategy AND good fun with empire collapse... because you don't lose fame.   So If big empires fell apart after some time, then you could blob out as the Romans, get a massive empire and milk it for fame before the inevitable collapse in the next era or 2 as Byzantines (and then work for another round of fame milking in a later era).

If expand-collapse cycles were a strategically good way to gain fame that would make a "anti-Blobbing" mechanic be ok.

Ideally balanced with a moderate minimal expansion development focus, but expand-collapse should be slightly better rather than slightly worse because it is more interesting.

So what you're proposing is for a player to work hard at growing an Empire, feeling proud of what they've achieved, and then at some point the game go "NOPE!" and collapse your Empire.

Holy cow, that's got to be the worst idea I've heard to deal with blobbing. That's worse than Civ3 corruption.

There is no point putting all that time into an Empire for the game to come along at some point and collapse you. Even more people would stop playing the game.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
The same is true for identifying empires. We have been looking at options to give empires consistent names across the whole game, but even that is not solved easily and quickly as we need to ensure it displays properly in all relevant parts of the game.

Sweet Jesus.

I don't understand what's complicated here ? especially the "displays properly in all relevant parts of the game". Ah! wait! nah, sorry, just forgot you didn't have any solid tests procedures ( ie: the space victory not working on release)

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

As the article says, the primary goal of the diplomacy system (and by extension war support and surrender) is to facilitate emerging stories, by rooting diplomatic interactions and wars in the world. Your wars are meant to be about something more than just the player's own desire to conquer their neighbors. However, we do not by any means believe is our system is perfect, and we intend to improve it in the future. However, we can't simply remove the diplomacy system as it is now and put in a diplomacy system as used in other games. As one of the core systems of the game, we cannot simply turn it off without an exceedingly long line of knock-on effects. We know that the current system limits player expression and thus the stories they tell in ways that hamper the emergence of interesting stories, and we are not happy with that, but fixing that will take time.

The same is true for identifying empires. We have been looking at options to give empires consistent names across the whole game, but even that is not solved easily and quickly as we need to ensure it displays properly in all relevant parts of the game.

Did you folks actually release the game too early? Would it have benefitted from time for the whole game to be in early access? There seems to be a lot of things that you didn't consider or think through and now have to change. Much more so than I remember Endless Space 2 having.

Dale_K wrote:

At the moment, it just sucks and why you've lost 95% of your players.

That is by far not the (only) reason, and not a valid assessment of the player feedback.

If they add an option to continue the war a couple more turns after 0% war score, with a penalty, I think the biggest problem is solved.

As for myself, I like the demand and grievances system. It makes sense. If they remove it, they take away a part of the game I enjoy. It needs tweaking only.

sapsling wrote:

Dale_K wrote:

At the moment, it just sucks and why you've lost 95% of your players.

That is by far not the (only) reason, and not a valid assessment of the player feedback.

If they add an option to continue the war a couple more turns after 0% war score, with a penalty, I think the biggest problem is solved.

As for myself, I like the demand and grievances system. It makes sense. If they remove it, they take away a part of the game I enjoy. It needs tweaking only.

The sentence before what you quoted, indicates that I'm talking about the game as a whole.

The demand and grievance system is fine. But the restrictions in the treaty agreements, and especially the war surrender and resolution, are the problem. As I highlighted in the OP, the Lead Designer states their goal was to recreate WW1 and WW2 through the diplomacy system in HK. Which fails in many places, but none more so than USSR in 1941. If reality reflected the game, then USSR war support hit zero in late 1941 when the Germans were parked outside Moscow. They had lost most of their productive lands and major cities to the Germans. USSR would then force surrender and Germany would have to hand everything back except for Kiev and the Pripet Marsh. Obviously this is not what happened in reality.

So the Lead Designer failed in their primary goal for diplomacy, and made a system so restrictive on the player that war of conquest is impossible. As I've said, remove the anti-blobbing parts of diplomacy, and dial up the other anti-blobbing parts of the game. The fact they put anti-blobbing in diplomacy shows me the designer doesn't really have any idea about 4x games. As Cat explains above, they realise they stuffed up, but it's too hard to fix. So for me, this game is dead in the water.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

The same is true for identifying empires. We have been looking at options to give empires consistent names across the whole game, but even that is not solved easily and quickly as we need to ensure it displays properly in all relevant parts of the game.

You do realise that a single modder, in his spare free time, without getting any monetary assistance in return, is actually making good progress in this? As far as I know he will even add stuffs like "English Kingdom" titles and such, based on your civics choices on top of the player's name. If a single modder can do it in this amount of time with the limited modding capabilities that you've given to the community, sorry for saying this but I find it hard to believe that for you, the devs, it's such an enormous challenge to tackle...

Maybe I'm toxic right now, and if so, then sorry, but why would you name your game something as prestigious, as grand, as universal as "Humankind", call it your "Magnum Opus", then release something half-completed as this?! There are mechanics that are inherently flawed and in need for a complete rethinking, redesigning, but I'd rather not go into this now...

Dale_K wrote:

sapsling wrote:

Dale_K wrote:

At the moment, it just sucks and why you've lost 95% of your players.

That is by far not the (only) reason, and not a valid assessment of the player feedback.

If they add an option to continue the war a couple more turns after 0% war score, with a penalty, I think the biggest problem is solved.

As for myself, I like the demand and grievances system. It makes sense. If they remove it, they take away a part of the game I enjoy. It needs tweaking only.

The sentence before what you quoted, indicates that I'm talking about the game as a whole.

Ah I see. Thank you for clarifying in a respectful way. 

Dalenn wrote:

Maybe I'm toxic right now, and if so, then sorry, but why would you name your game something as prestigious, as grand, as universal as "Humankind", call it your "Magnum Opus", then release something half-completed as this?! There are mechanics that are inherently flawed and in need for a complete rethinking, redesigning, but I'd rather not go into this now...

Magnum Opus speaks of ambition, and HK certainly matches that with its scope. But I agree they should have released Early Access and then let the players decide on the epithet. It wouldn't have been great all of sudden but the reviews would have certainly been less angry & frustrated.  

DragonGaming wrote:

While I'm sure this is beating a dead horse at this point, The war system feels like it pulled the war support of Stellaris and the claim system of EU4, both grand strategy games and poorly combined the 2 together and tried to shove them into a turn based 4x game. 

They didn't pull in enough of the Paradox model.

Stellaris is a fun game -- if still flawed in singleplayer by poor AI -- because the warfare system gives the player choices. You can choose a type of faction in initial settings that uses the equivalent of a grievance system to play diplomatic games in ending a war. Or, you can choose a type of faction in initial settings that ignores diplomacy completely, and goes all-out for scorched ground warfare. Total extermination or enslavement of the enemy with no pause, no forced peace. The potential for steamrolling is offset by negative factors, like everyone hates you on sight. It's actually harder to expand in the early part of the game with this setup. There have been human societies like this. There is no reason it couldn't be an option in the game for those who like to play that way, as long as it's balanced properly. 

The HK system doesn't even fit WW1 and WW2, if that was the goal. The Allies very specifically went for unconditional surrender by Germany and Japan. Unconditional means we're going to keep going until we occupy your territory to make sure this thing is over. Nothing on heaven or earth will stop us once we get rolling. There are of course many similar examples from earlier eras of human history. 

Changing the warfare system and making civs more identifiable, could bring back many of us who bought the game and are now on the sidelines waiting to see if it can be improved. I'm still cautiously optimistic because the devs seem to be realizing now that there are problems in the design.

Dalenn wrote:

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

The same is true for identifying empires. We have been looking at options to give empires consistent names across the whole game, but even that is not solved easily and quickly as we need to ensure it displays properly in all relevant parts of the game.

You do realise that a single modder, in his spare free time, without getting any monetary assistance in return, is actually making good progress in this? As far as I know he will even add stuffs like "English Kingdom" titles and such, based on your civics choices on top of the player's name. If a single modder can do it in this amount of time with the limited modding capabilities that you've given to the community, sorry for saying this but I find it hard to believe that for you, the devs, it's such an enormous challenge to tackle...

Maybe I'm toxic right now, and if so, then sorry, but why would you name your game something as prestigious, as grand, as universal as "Humankind", call it your "Magnum Opus", then release something half-completed as this?! There are mechanics that are inherently flawed and in need for a complete rethinking, redesigning, but I'd rather not go into this now...

This post doesn't sound toxic to me. The issue is similar to the one that still persists with resource distribution. The fix for the problem players are complaining about is not difficult. There is a mod that deals with it. Yet, after two patches that were supposed to address resource distribution, the un-modded game still provides unsatisfactory resource distribution. Meanwhile, there is a (broken) event released instead of fixes for issues that cause many players to be unhappy. It is really bewildering.

Talking about resource distribution, I launched a game this weekend with my favorite setting: slowest speed, huge map, 1 pangea + 1 new world, 50% land, 10 players, and I set resource to abundant. After 100 turns, I realized the initial pangea only have 1 horse resource and 2 irons. Yes, 1 horse and 2 irons on the starting pangea shared by 10 players with abundant resources! Not to mention that half of that pangea doesn't have any resources !

Whats irritating with this article is when that dude says "With close to 1M players within the first month we've been able to collect an enormous amount of feedback". The question is what have you done with this feedback ? Are you guys still celebrating the 50 Millions revenues ?

I like to imagine a meeting at games2gether:

junior dev: shall we make a review meeting?

lead PM: Nah, we are still celebrating mate ! enjoy !

junior dev: yeah, but we lost 99% of our players database, our retention rate is a disaster.

Lead PM: don't worry, our goal was to make max sells on release, our objectives are reached. We don't have any in-app purchase, so we don't care about the retention rate.

junior dev: yeah, but our game is full of bug, I'm ashamed

Lead PM: don't be! As I said, we are on the celebrating phase. Tomorrow I got another interview where I will have the opportunity to brag about our 1M sales. Anyway, moders are correcting our bugs, and as you said, if we only have 1000 players still playing the game, why would we spent time correcting the bugs? 

A lot of valid criticism, but some seasonal cosmetics that can be gained only through gameplay (even if said challenges are... meh) are hardly comparable with charging ten bucks for blue.

Not that I don't believe that sooner or later Amplitude will charge couple of euros for a purely cosmetic DLC. But I really don't mind them providing occasional challenges for in-game rewards - as long as those happen along with actual support for the game, rather than replacing it to pose as regular updates, which doesn't seem to be the case at least for now. Would be more reassuring if the future events wouldn't require patches themselves, tho.