Hello,

After having spent a couple hundred hours in the game and witnessed its most recent evolutions, I thought I would drop a few lines on what I consider the main assets of the game and how to build upon them, as the Fabius Maximus and End conditions have been important changes in my personal experience.

Granted, HK is not perfect yet (as evidenced by other posts) but it has reached what I would call "skeletal maturity" in the sense that the core mechanics are in place and can provide for a very enjoyable game experience from beginning to end - one that drags me to HK these days over CIV or even PDX games. Which is why I believe they should be expanded upon and not scrapped as they constitute the original DNA of this game.

• The combat system is a jewel. Combat has always been in my view a weak spot for games like EU or CK where ultimately it boiled down to numbers with the tactical aspects reduced to a minimum, when they are the core of any major historical battles where impossible odds have been overturned. On a sidenote I believe discontent with the war-end situation can be fixed quite "easily" by allowing the victor to refuse surrender at the cost of a ticking WS penalty.

• I was a bit unsettled by the diplomacy system but have to admit that William Dyce's recent article shed some light on the design intention behind it. You tend to appreciate art better if one gives you the intention of the artist as you watch the piece :)  I do like the "organic" emergence of situations and there are two ways in which this could be brought to another level; 
  • (1) by adding more motives for interactions / grievances (they are still a bit repetitive) 
  • (2) by deepening the diplomatic interplay at 3+ actors, which ties back to (1). In my experience the "surrender to my ally" / "go to war with my enemy" does not really work. It should be possible to interfere more on behalf of a third country, or conversely to target a third country in a "coalition" that would go beyond an alliance (and imply for example and automatic DoW). Perhaps these elaborate schemes could be introduced mid game / as they were historically in Renaissance Italy.
  • (3) Ultimately add a multilateral layer that would gain in importance as the game nears the end

• The culture switch is essential to HK identity and a main driver of replayability. There again, it seems a quick fix to many complaints would be to add a "wrapper" that would provide continuity across the eras and be more immersive than "the blue" or "the pink".

• On the events front the game is on the right track but ; (1) Numbers is king to create replayability. 150 events is nothing statistically if your prompt 50 in a game. OldWorld has 3000, and it's typically something you can outsource to fans/modders. (2) Each choice should be interesting, and they cease to be around the Medieval era. I don't care either for +20 Science or -35 Gold when I'm in the last era :))

Of course this skeleton will greatly benefit from "flesh" added at a later stage (religion, endgame, more cultures, missing units...) but the foundations are sound.

Lastly I would like to point out that HK is one of the few games where I can spend time just scrolling across the map watching the beautiful design and setup of the map - I recently noticed that rioting cities have small flames animations and rioting noises when zoomed in which I think is great.

So to devs : stick to your guns, forge ahead and make us the best 4X the world has seen !

Yeah, alliances require a major rework, their ES2 take on them didn't work that well (though I think that it would fit much better in HK, considering that in ES2 world regularly turned into two - rarely more - blocks warring against each other), but the weird tangle of very personal unions we have in HK doesn't really work. It turns into weird chains of allied people, with some being angry at each other, but they don't really do anything about it, because everyone shares an ally. Proper, multi-nation alliances should return as a tech unlock, but a voting system within them should be introduced - heck, if you want to be fancy, you may even introduce different versions of alliances, one with votes reflecting the strength of every empire, one where every member gets a single vote, period, and one where there's a single leader and their puppets, as an evolution to vassalage system, that also needs a rework - I'd love to be able to evolve relationships with my vassal, rather than being forced to release them and start it from scratch.

As for events, I would like many, many more random events that happen to our persona - like the one with the gifted horse - and ideally make them involve other empire's personas as well, because the game solely lacks this for roleplay purposes. The other empires in carousel of changing cultures are just colours, when the leader is sitting there, just do more with them rather than make them a surprise talking head in diplomatic screen. I want to feel something about Agamemnon when his 'blue people' were being a thorn in my side since neolithic, but I barely recognize him as being source of my complaints. I want to feel silly for thinking I can befriend some lines of code that Lucy is, but instead I discover 'green guys' surrounded on other continent, we start trading and eventually ally each other, cooperating at times. And when I open diplomacy screen because their technology advanced and I can finally buy some of their resources, Lucy says 'hello, whoever you are' and the feeling is mutual. I don't get it why more isn't done with them, why the random messages that other leaders would send you in ES2 are gone and I fret that now that we got 'twitch personas', who are actual, living, breathing people, they'll be wary of introducing any more interaction, due to similar, albeit less extreme, hopefully, reasons that made CDPR ask players/modders to stop trying to do things with Keanu.

GCX wrote:

• On the events front the game is on the right track but ; (1) Numbers is king to create replayability. 150 events is nothing statistically if your prompt 50 in a game. OldWorld has 3000, and it's typically something you can outsource to fans/modders. (2) Each choice should be interesting, and they cease to be around the Medieval era. I don't care either for +20 Science or -35 Gold when I'm in the last era :))

Of course this skeleton will greatly benefit from "flesh" added at a later stage (religion, endgame, more cultures, missing units...) but the foundations are sound.

Lastly I would like to point out that HK is one of the few games where I can spend time just scrolling across the map watching the beautiful design and setup of the map - I recently noticed that rioting cities have small flames animations and rioting noises when zoomed in which I think is great.

So to devs : stick to your guns, forge ahead and make us the best 4X the world has seen !

 

Pretty much agree with everything you've wrote as I still really enjoy playing it.

Just wanted to highlight about the events. I have raised this issue so many times - both here and in CK3. Events are necessary for replayability and Old World just knocks it out of the park. I'm so impressed with how many events they have and that they keep adding new events. Don't just make a few events and then forget about it. Keep adding more and more. i don't want to always go through the same events every game.

I agree, I think events should be a lot more, a lot more varied and more impactful. My ideal scenario would be procedurally generated events that depended on what the players are doing, but since this might be very difficult to code I think adding tons of events until they cover almost any imaginable situation in game might be more feasible. As everyone else said, Old World does this very well.

GCX wrote:

• The combat system is a jewel. Combat has always been in my view a weak spot for games like EU or CK where ultimately it boiled down to numbers with the tactical aspects reduced to a minimum, when they are the core of any major historical battles where impossible odds have been overturned. On a sidenote I believe discontent with the war-end situation can be fixed quite "easily" by allowing the victor to refuse surrender at the cost of a ticking WS penalty.

This. Fully agreed.

And I was very critical about them since the first iterations of EL. What a journey they have accomplished. I always thought that such tactical layer would never fit well in a 4x game, polluting to much the pace and the strategic layer. It still slows things a bit, but apart from that it is a jewel. Congrats to the dev to make me wrong! :)

To OP : I would also add the entier diplomatic/war support system to the jewel list. It is consistent, it is organic, it is readable, it is dynamic.. really really good, I love it.

GCX wrote:

- encourage for "Global deeds" or shared wonders where the fame reward would be shared among participants

Possibilities are... endless.

Following this line, I would love it if they incorporated competitive deeds to host the Olympic games, Universal Expositions or important fairs. It would add things to do in the final third of the game, which usually becomes monotonous and could use more opportunities to gain fame so the players behind can catch up and it is not as obvious who the winner will be.

GCX wrote:

Kruos wrote:

To OP : I would also add the entier diplomatic/war support system to the jewel list. It is consistent, it is organic, it is readable, it is dynamic.. really really good, I love it.

Indeed, a strong and original asset that I would not want Amplitude to toss away in favor of a more common "Fabricate Claim" model. 

I respectfully, completely disagree. Diplomacy/war support/forced surrender are the absolute worst parts of this broken game.

Agree to disagree, wars very rarely were an all or nothing affair, but I doubt that anytime soon there will be a strategy game that will simulate all the layers of leading a political entity to the point that it will give players reasons to reflect it. So I don't mind Humankind just trying to emulate the effects. As for diplomacy in general I'd inch more toward agreeing, it doesn't feel right to be limited only to country-country interactions, especially as the eras go by and - formal and informal - blocks should start emerging.

DNLH wrote:

As for diplomacy in general I'd inch more toward agreeing, it doesn't feel right to be limited only to country-country interactions, especially as the eras go by and - formal and informal - blocks should start emerging.

Pretty sure the system could be further developped, and will be! This kind of developpement would fit perfectly in an ONU congress focused expansion. ;)

The game tried to slow down conquest, but it's quite easy to cheat with that:

Each time you get a city, or even an administrative center, just ransack it.

At the end of the war, you get the few other places from the enemy.

Build outpost and AC on what you ransacked... it's done! 

In a single war you can have all the stuff, no matter what do the all "war support" and conquest system.

Even, when you have tech like "colony" or the like, the city you rebuild have more infrastructure than the one that had the opponent before.

+ you can buy stuff with influence when in outpost state.

Only thing you loose is city pop, who care about that ?

The city restart with zero food consomption, so it will be quick to have a good pop again.