Sublustris wrote:

He's no longer Lead Designer for HK, you can celebrate now.

Really?  When did this happen?  Must have missed that announcement.

I don't think that it's fair to point at any one person for the state of the game right now.  To be honest, there have been so many odd design decisions (the abandonment of the Endless universe for a historical Civ competitor, the limited-time event that could be straight out of a mobile game, an ongoing focus on lame rewards from mostly apathetic Twitch streamers, etc.) that I am wondering if part of what we're seeing is corporate interference from Sega.  I could envision an entourage of Sega suits showing up at Amplitude HQ and saying "we want you to make a Civ clone, and we want you to add some FOMO events like Fortnite and one of those of those new-fangled Twitches that are all the rage with kids these days" without really understanding the target audience.  So really, it's anyone's guess, but pointing the finger probably doesn't matter that much in the long-run - the focus should be on how to proceed from this point.

I see all of the pessimism here, but the recent roadmap says that Amplitude is going to address some of the issues that people have been complaining about.  It seems like they're trying to polish the game and make improvements.

Dale_K wrote:

Not listening to your audience is the fastest way to have your long term goodwill destroyed. If customers don't believe their feedback is listened to, they won't support you.

Also, squashing all criticism so that there is only one view represented is the most unhealthy type of community. Echo chamber feedback loops. Again, a Paradox forum thus become.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.” ~ Mark Twain

It's also a moment when you yourself can pause, step back and look at the size of the audience. Only every 3rd person doesn't like the game, overall. That's a lot, but there are at least twice as much of those that did! (I now see Suis3i made same observation) All of them liked and disliked it for various reasons. Few common complains from both sides can be tracked, and those are what devs are focusing on. You'll find there's a very little pool of users that have exactly same complains as you do (or anyone else, not you personally). Doesn't mean they are valid or not, constructive or empty, it simply isn't an indicator of wether Amplitude are listening. Maybe for you, but not for community as a whole. You just can't blame devs of that, you just don't. No one tells to squash all criticism, but some forms of it should be ignored. It doesn't have to be doom and gloom all the time to give a proper picture.

And before comparing G2G to Paradox forums, or whatever other place there is, and say it is suddenly failing, you have to spend more time here. I'm almost 7 years actively present on G2G , and it is one of the most accepting and pleasent places I've see in years.

Sublustris wrote:

Dale_K wrote:

Not listening to your audience is the fastest way to have your long term goodwill destroyed. If customers don't believe their feedback is listened to, they won't support you.

Also, squashing all criticism so that there is only one view represented is the most unhealthy type of community. Echo chamber feedback loops. Again, a Paradox forum thus become.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.” ~ Mark Twain

It's also a moment when you yourself can pause, step back and look at the size of the audience. Only every 3rd person doesn't like the game, overall. That's a lot, but there are at least twice as much of those that did!

That is the overall audience review, however most were made before decisions and controversies like the dlc happened, no longer reflecting the current state of the game, take a look at the recent reviews and the division is much more apparent.

Reicha wrote:
War score is not a bad idea, but when your war comes to a sudden end and it's nothing you can at all control or alter, don't be surprised people tend to dislike this game mechanic. Nothing to do with Civ 7, just with desing choices not playing out for paying customers.

Thank you for your comment.

As for the quoted part, I'll admit I have issue with this common complaint as I'm one of the "weird" players that actually like this mechanic. See, it *is* a problem with how Civilization set expectations for the gaming community and most doesn't look at what the game actually is and tries to do; they'll just notice the game is not behaving the way they expect and see that discrepency as a fundamental flaw in the design and a massive blunder. But that expectation wasn't set by the game, the dev, the hype... it was set by Civ and other wargames.

What if the point of a war is NOT exterminating the opponent? It rarely was in real life history, after all. Wars in this game are (usually) triggered by the wish to enforce a demand, generally after gaining enough popular support from your own people. So, one would reasonably expect that once those demands are enforced (aka you have the minimal war score to get them in a peace negociation), negociation would start with only the defender left willing to fight to try to take back the losses (or give in and cut their losses) OR the attacker might be even more angry than at the start of the war (maybe a city was raze and now "vengence" is involved). But when you reach the max score for a war, it usually mean that peace was long overdue and you can't expect to gain anything any longer; you were expected to sue for peace long before this point afterall. And, again, you almost never see one state fully annexing a large empire in one war in real history. While it does happen, you'll also notice said empire tend to collapse rather quickly (stability problem, this is "modeled" in the game too!) so it might not even be desirable to even attempt (also why vassalization is an interesting options if you actually can't afford to annex everything your war score allows).

All in all, this mechanics SHOULD push player to modify their behaviour to fit the game, but what I'm seeing is people stubbornly demand the dev change the game instead to suit their civ-driven expectations. For devs sekeing innovation as you said, it must be disheartening to see. I'm not a dev and I'm a bit saddened that peopel don't even try to build their strategy around this fact. I got the pacifist achievement, meaning that I had a big incentive to put an end to any war declared against me ASAP and you can get a nice diplomatic bonus for offering a white peace while ahead in war score.

Only thing I'd add to this warscore mechanic is something I've seen in at least one Paradox game that used a similar system: add war goals mid-war. Maybe the specific act of adding a war goal would cost war score, "artificially" extending the war and potentially leading to the total annexation of the enemy. This way, you keep the majority of the mechanic and make it possible to "control" the duration of the war a bit more. You could even add some specific options, like expansionnist having a special war goal related to territories, maybe another affinity would add a war goal that requires a one-time tribute in population (slaves?) that would be spread in your empire, maybe ideologies put constraints on what you may ask as additional wargoal (maybe some ideology wouldn't like this whole "tribute of slave" stuff). But I honestly would like to keep the forced surrender option (at least to force a defender to accept a peace; it was beyond annoying to have Civ AI fight to the death every single time... which is hat prompted me to use more "sneaky" ways to expand (like culture swapping in Civ4&5) ). [Edit: I haven't played the late eras enough yet (lack of free time), but you could also add "conflict escalation" to the point where if you get to "total war", you basically have to occupy every single enemy city to put an end to the war, and then force a regime change (ideology?). Could also liberate any conquered city ceded in the treaty as it was done in the aftermath of both world wars. On the other hand, maybe have a "cold war" status with new "treaties" associated with it. I'd also change the term "Forced surrender" to "Capitulation" or "Unconditional surrender". If your enemy does an "Unconditional surrender" or "Capitulates", it means you've won as much as you could and the enemy gives up. Sure it is a form of forced surrender, but the player seem put off by the "forced" term. Maybe even add the option to claim more than what your war score allows and put a penalty for it (money, influence, stability, etc potentially depending on ideology/affinity).]

Just my thoughts, but I do think the expectations set by the Civ series and the stubborness of some gamers do contribute to the loads of what I see as unconstructive criticism. War is fun in 4X games, but it should not be the only focus of every game. Sure people tend to talk about combat system a lot and say it's the main draw, but that just tell me that a lot of 4X fans are actually looking for wargames. I get that itch too and enjoyed WH40k Gladius as it feels like a turn-based RTS where there's only permanent war and no diplomacy possible (it is WH40k after all), but *that* game got torpedo'd in the reviews because..... it wasn't civ 7! There was no culture, no faith, no diplomacy. The (almost) same crowd keeps complaining that the AI can't do diplomacy properly but they'll still comlain if a studio tries the "Why not remove this broken part entirely?" route for a change. I've also seen Sid Meier's Starship game get torpedo'd because it wasn't a 4X game and people expected a Civ-like game since there's "Sid Meier" in the title.... forgetting that other titles, which are not 4X nor Civ, also existed long before (Starship is basically Sid Meier's Ace Patrol in Space). I'm sorry if I sound harsh at times against those who provide so-caled "unconstructive criticism" as my patience has been "tested" over the years on this specific topic.

Reicha wrote:

- Which brings me to open dev - probably an overkill in terms of admin and feedback for amplitude. Helped with the hype, was an interesting idea, and certainly fun! But I am not sure that some of the feedback really has been addressed prior to release. Some of the most often reoccuring criticism has already been voiced in these open dev feedback rounds, but seemed to have gone under the radar sadly.

I think there's plenty of truth here. While I think everyone agrees that HK came out couple of months too early another thing is that Amplitude just didn't have the manpower/time to iterate over feedback given in OpenDevs. So this made for an even harder fall in regards to the game coming out too early because people can look at issues from OpenDevs still not addressed in full release.

Reicha wrote:

- I personally find it laughable if any sort of criticism is always put into the category that people looked for civ 7. That's simply not true, especially when you read reviews of folks who spend 200 hours plus on the game, and have had more exposure to the civ series. The theme is not to look for Civ 7 but that the atmosphere / engagement with what you are building there does not come across.

I've never been able to feel engaged/immersed in historical 4X games due to the obvious fact that playing set cultures with set leaders just doesn't make sense. It's a game mechanic and you have to take a nice, deep dive in suspension of belief to get immersed and that's a dive I've never been able to do when playing Catherine of the Russians in 4000 BC meeting Tokugawa of the Japanese. While immersion wasn't there there was a very strong point: familiarity and identifiability. I know who Catherine was historically and in my game I can refer to the Russians as Catherine for the entire game. They never change, I know who they are, no confusion.

Meanwhile before HK made AI be called their culture with colour-coding it was pretty unclear who I am referring to. It was a very necessary change and I welcome it, heck, one of the things I'd recommend Amplitude to include in HK is the ability to view other player's progress through the ages (the menu that shows you earned stars and picked cultures). Maybe it'd be wise to actually call AIs by their persona names with culture in brackets colour-coded, like: [icon] Horatio (Goths) instead of current [icon] Goths.

The persona system, as many things with HK is amazing and the implementation players would like to see is just a smidge away from us. We see it, but it's not here and that makes it hurt a lot more than if the system was a lot more basic/different. Obviously I am talking about not being able to design multiple personas that you can choose to play against,  currently you have to rely on other player's personas. Such a potent system that lacks this groundbreaking single-player feature!
With this, you could play against familiar and identifiable leaders. Their culture changes would be less jarring because you can always understand who is undergoing them. If you meet a new player from another continent, you can retrace their steps in culture evolution. Suddenly, everything makes sense. People that Catherine represents have gone through sea-oriented Phoenicians to war-like Goths, then trade-oriented Ghanaians and finally you meet them as the Poles.

Of course if people thought that the cultures will have a more lasting impact than Legacy Traits, leftover Emblematic Units and Emblematic Quarters then I understand their disappointment. There's a huge problem though: they've never had any more of a lasting impact that this. This has been known for the entire development of the game. It was there out in the open to read. To watch. To hear about. Entire demo to play through. So if you expected Goths + Poles to result in special Gothic Winged Hussars, well, you had an unrealistic expectation. You can't critique a game for not delivering on your unrealistic expectation that it never set out to realise. But then there's a combination that'll give you better Winged Hussars - Hun Winged Hussars, due to their LT giving +2 CS, heck, there's a civic that'll give you another +1 CS, so Aristocratic Poles that once were Huns now have +3 CS Winged Hussars.
Maybe I approach Humankind too much as a card game where you gather bonuses and such. Maybe I had realistic expectations of the game due to following gameplays, playing the game itself and so on. But you know what's great? That due to modding tools we can imagine those unrealistic expectations be met in the future. Humankind gives us designs and mechanics to support that. Civilization on the other hand, does not (yet).

Reicha wrote:

- This brings me to the second last point - as a paying customer for any product you are unhappy about, why wouldn't you even have a right to moan about the quality of that product? I don't find moaning about a paid DLC as the first thing instead of fixing core basics particularily helpful for the further development of that game, but I can cetainly sympathise with the many folks who don't find that sort of conduct appropriate.

Absolutely, moan about the product. Moan about what it is, not about what you unrealistically expected it to be. Civilization V started without religions. While I might say that it is sad, I can't say the game is bad because of this lack. Criticize what is already here, not what is lacking *unless* it is lacking things that were promised. If some mechanic is lackluster at the moment - point this out, talk about how you want it to improve, where you want it to go. Moan that DLC came out before game was mostly fixed just realise that in the current world this DLC was probably in the works before HK was even shipped. That it was planned and part of the deal that it has to come out by X date.

My point about people treating HK as Civ 7 / dream game / game in a genre they thought it wasn't is that they levy criticism that is not applicable to the game.
HK's thing is not Catherine of the Russians. HK's thing is change. Is change too confusing right now? Yeah, refer to what I've written above. Is changing from Akkadians to Greeks wrong? Absolutely not. Is it immersion-breaking? Maybe but Civilization has Australians in 4000 BC and if you can feel immersed there, you can feel immersed with Akkadians changing into Greeks. Criticising culture changes on merits of immersion doesn't make much sense. Criticising culture changes for being unreadable by players - absolutely. But people talking about how "Akkadians turning into Greeks makes no sense in my video game" are just... off the mark.
Fame system is not a score system from Civilization games. Those who can't understand have no leg to stand on when they criticize it.
This game has plenty of strengths over its competitors but in those strengths plenty of small weaknesses/lack of polish makes those strengths look painfully wrong/bad.

Take for example war:
An amazing attempt at making wars less of total wars from the get-go and rationalizing gains/losses which fails to deliver because of obtuse systems and unpredictable behaviour from player's point of view - like being forced to make peace for lump sum of gold because the enemy lost enough battles. Sure, sometimes this might be what you've been looking for. But sometimes you have to travel through the ocean to get to your enemy and not being able to take cities because the war is already done before you land on the shores makes for a bitter experience.

Civics are another example:
WHY THE TRIGGERS FOR THEM HIDDEN? WHY ARE THE BENEFITS HIDDEN? It's great for first playthrough, maybe, but for next ones I want to plan around those. I want to check out civics that I've missed out on! While it is currently possible to view what other players have chosen I believe some separate screen would help a lot, especially given how civics and ideologies influence diplomacy and osmosis events.

And so on and so on. Let's criticize what we have, let's talk about what we want to have in Humankind but let's not entertain talking about what Humankind should be if it were my dream game or if it were Civilization 7. Let's take what there is and push it into the direction of our dream game. Let's not compare it to the dream game but compare it to what it could be based on what it is and what it set out to be. To me, HK has absolutely blown other 4Xs out of the water thanks to combat system and the culture change mechanic. If someone doesn't want cultures to change in-game, then they aren't interested in HK. I won't criticize Civilization for not having culture changes. I will criticize systems present in the game and I will signal as a fan that I want to see culture changes.

Tryford wrote:

Only thing I'd add to this warscore mechanic is something I've seen in at least one Paradox game that used a similar system: add war goals mid-war. Maybe the specific act of adding a war goal would cost war score, "artificially" extending the war and potentially leading to the total annexation of the enemy. This way, you keep the majority of the mechanic and make it possible to "control" the duration of the war a bit more. You could even add some specific options, like expansionnist having a special war goal related to territories, maybe another affinity would add a war goal that requires a one-time tribute in population (slaves?) that would be spread in your empire, maybe ideologies put constraints on what you may ask as additional wargoal (maybe some ideology wouldn't like this whole "tribute of slave" stuff). But I honestly would like to keep the forced surrender option (at least to force a defender to accept a peace; it was beyond annoying to have Civ AI fight to the death every single time... which is hat prompted me to use more "sneaky" ways to expand (like culture swapping in Civ4&5) ). [Edit: I haven't played the late eras enough yet (lack of free time), but you could also add "conflict escalation" to the point where if you get to "total war", you basically have to occupy every single enemy city to put an end to the war, and then force a regime change (ideology?). Could also liberate any conquered city ceded in the treaty as it was done in the aftermath of both world wars. On the other hand, maybe have a "cold war" status with new "treaties" associated with it. I'd also change the term "Forced surrender" to "Capitulation" or "Unconditional surrender". If your enemy does an "Unconditional surrender" or "Capitulates", it means you've won as much as you could and the enemy gives up. Sure it is a form of forced surrender, but the player seem put off by the "forced" term. Maybe even add the option to claim more than what your war score allows and put a penalty for it (money, influence, stability, etc potentially depending on ideology/affinity).]

Very thoughtful post and this is criticism that I, as a player and fan, am interested in. You see a mechanic, see the criticism around it and try to figure out a way to keep it original and to make it more interesting, more complex and more accommodating to different playstyles/game states and to top it all off: be intertwined with other mechanics that are present. Chapeaux bas, Tryford.