no, seriously.

it's too hard to get the culture i want to play as, and humankind's world generally feels empty and boring. all the independent peoples seemingly do is either attack the player, or exist to get assimilated by a major faction, with zero in between.

getting to the contemporary era is. well. for starters, i literally play on endless speed, and i NEVER get to the late techs in the contemporary era. plus, the game feels like a slog to go through because of this. it always feels like i'm shuffling between eras doing absolutely nothing because i prioritize peace and choose nice AI personas, and i often build cities and have barely enough influence to even get the EARLY civics.

this gets even more annoying because several AI personas seem to get swapped with victor or edgar allen poe or whoever regardless of what i do. playing as a peaceful country is utterly and completely boring, and more often than not feels boring. i had issues with the minor factions in endless space 2 being there solely to get assimilated and/or conquered, but this is just amplified with the independent peoples in humankind, who more often than not don't feel like they do anything independently of the major factions, and seem to only exist in relation to major factions.

TL;DR: this game is boring to me due to peaceful playthroughs being completely uninteresting, the AIs being buggy and swapping the personas out for another persona entirely, independent peoples doing absolutely nothing of consequence that isn't related to major factions despite literally being called independent peoples, and the contemporary era being effectively bait, with the "bait" being the techs that i can never research, even on easier and longer games of humankind.

Well, it sure is less vibrant and full of life and stuff than, say, an Endless Legend game. Red, blue, green, curiosities, magic, independent peoples, quests, music, etc. I still can believe Humankind was supposed to be the "magnum opus" and yet barely live to pretend to be a successor of the previous games of the studio.

true.

also, some of the culture choices make no sense to me. this is especially bad in the industrial era, where the majority of cultures are european. i can literally only count exactly three cultures that didn't originate in europe in any way out of the 10 cultures available in it, and there are no cultures that are from anywhere in the african continent in the early modern era. also, for some reason oceania just. gets nothing until the contemporary era, where you get to play as the culture of a settler-colonial state (australia) and otherwise never have any options in oceania ever in the game.

i came into this game expecting it to at least be a fun time-killer, and didn't go into it with particularly high expectations. however, the more i played it, the more i got bored and bored until i just stopped playing entirely because wanting to beg the RNG to give me copper or iron in a decent location was getting too annoying. the fact that the "day one mod" still has not been released when it is currently approximately many days from one, having to unlock features such as "ai persona" in a time-limited event, and that you can't do something as basic as making AI personas to play against that aren't made by other people, doesn't help either.

like for the day one mod i would be fine if they like. actually explained what was going on, and provided a timeframe for updates and its release. the day one thing isn't too important to me. but amplitude isn't providing any updates on what's going on with the mod, and this just makes the entire thing feel pointless since. what exactly were people voting for if it isn't going to come out?

also i do have my criticisms of the endless games, but since this is a humankind post, i'm not gonna mention them.

tl;dr: the game became a boring slog over time as i played, with the charm of the game quickly wearing out. not only that, the game suffers from this ailment historical strategy games seem to nearly always get where europe becomes a vacuum that is somehow more "important" than every other continent, and is featured the most. in addition, the lack of the ability to do something as basic as "make your own ai personas to fight against that you don't have to get from some other user" and the completely unexplained absence of the day one mod and the "you can only unlock this ai persona if you do this challenge" thing just makes this game.. boring and confusing.

Yes, as a Magnum Opus for Amplitude, the game feels polished in its arts and presentations but still rather empty in term of contents. At least it has working naval units from the start and and useful naval warfare now. The science progresss and era balance is still laughable. The AI factions are powered by cheats but then their agressions are somewhat nerfed after industrial era onward. The war mechanic is good, but can result in awkward situations regarding realms, loyalties, etc.

No wonder that you get bored when playing peacefully on ENDLESS speed. I'm not going to argue that the game is amazing, but you should at least try playing on normal speed. I would also recommend a little bit of war to spice things up.

dzony8 wrote:

No wonder that you get bored when playing peacefully on ENDLESS speed. I'm not going to argue that the game is amazing, but you should at least try playing on normal speed. I would also recommend a little bit of war to spice things up.

Agreed. I find Normal to be much more interesting, try a faster game if you're bored.

I agree that the turn limit is too low, but I just found it is possible to disable it in the Settings.

New here. I have been pretty fascinated and excited by the game thus far. In many ways a significant step up from the primary competition. I am still at a low level learning the game so...

I very much like the much more dynamic combat system and limited unit stacking plus reinforcements - except for total loss to the loser.

I like the New World even if it is more beneficial to the human. The barbs hit as a real shock in my current game until reinforcements arrived and I slowly gained the upper hand.

War has seemed needed to beat the AI - especially in my current game where I got boxed in a bit by aggressive opponents. But, I enjoy fighting the wars...

The defensible city district concept and expanding cities and walls is cool, as are the many build choices.

The ability to build outposts is nice - don't need a city everywhere.

Like most 4X games if you get a snowball going then you have to decide to declare yourself victor (or loser!) and move on or play it out even though not much will happen. Improvements can and should be made to the game - like infrastructure showing its current benefit when you go to choose it - but going back to the main competitor now is pretty old school.

Gen Dad.

It's kind of tough if I play at fast speed the game's pretty compelling but the 'late game' stuff in Industrial and Contemporary seems unbuildable or sometimes untenable. Slower speeds are supposed to be more rewarding but you definitely spend a lot of time hitting ' end turn '.

https://www.gameshub.com/news/features/humankind-lead-designer-talks-the-burden-of-civilization-4441/

Sublustris wrote:

transfem-god-tamer wrote:
..the one time i tried to play on normal speed, the game was over in the industrial era.

I feel like civ players don't understand what game speed does. It doesn't inherently give you more or less turns to do more or less things in given time, it simply slows down or speeds up researches and constructions. That's it. It is simply for scaling purposes of how much time one game takes.

Yes, but the AI in Humankind seems to struggle a lot with slower game speeds I don't know why. Winning a game in Humankind difficulty on slow or endless seems noticeably less challenging.

The AI does not seem to be that good at building up their cities. They mostly live from their bonuses which alleviate that inefficient city building problem, but that bonus gets reduced on slow and endless, while increased in fast and blitz.

Ningauble wrote:

https://www.gameshub.com/news/features/humankind-lead-designer-talks-the-burden-of-civilization-4441/

I don't get your point. They knew EXACTLY what they were getting into when they started Humankind. They knew from before day 1 that the game would constantly be compared to Civ.

roger212 wrote:
Yes, but the AI in Humankind seems to struggle a lot with slower game speeds I don't know why. Winning a game in Humankind difficulty on slow or endless seems noticeably less challenging.

Hm, maybe player just benefits from extra turns to perform better planning and micro-management, which leads to relatevily earlier snowball over AI.

transfem-god-tamer wrote:
..are you trying to imply i play civ or something and just like. insulting me on that basis?

I'm saying, that just like in all Endless Games, HK is balanced around Normal speed, and all other speed settings and simply scaling from there.