SpikedWallMan wrote:

For me it's like the game is burying you in battle rulebooks.  Want to understand unit strengths/weaknesses?  There's a rulebook for that.  Terrain advantages?  That's another rulebook.  Fortifications?  Have another rulebook.  Reinforcements?  Read the rulebook.  And so on.  To make matters worse, the game hasn't done that great of a job in explaining what all of these rules are in a single place and sort of expects you to figure it out as you go.  At one point they did add tooltips that tried to explain unit advantages, but I didn't find them particularly useful at the time so it was back to auto-resolve for me.

Maybe my opinion is a little biased since I struggled through this since the first round of OpenDev, and maybe things have changed since the last time I bothered with manual battles (which was not too long ago).  However, what I can say for certain is that for whatever reason I do OK with Endless Legend's battle system but am completely confused by Humankind's system.

I'm not sure why you think that battles having complex rules is a bad thing...but I totally disagree. I want to wrap my head around new ways of playing when I'm playing a strategy game and do/consider different things. Besides the fact that there are any number of guides on battles you could read or watch I don't know what to tell you.

el-Fakir wrote:

So far, I couldn't see a single objective criticism that I can agree with.

I invite you to speak to Mac players, people who want to play multiplayer online, or even people on Stadia.

The two most common gameplay issues I've noticed come up over and over are (it may also be my own bias too since I agree with them):

1. Culture swapping makes it very confusing to keep track of who is in the game, plus disconnects immersion in the "story telling". This is simply a marketing gimmick that doesn't work well for a lot of people.

2. The surrender mechanic. The enemy should NOT be the one to dictate when a war ends when they surrender. This is just ridiculous, and has no basis in reality. Wars end when the winner says it's ended. Better to have penalties for not accepting the surrender offer, than to just force it down the player's throat. It is a crazy design decision to stop the player from pursuing wars of annihilation.

For these two reasons, a lot of players have experienced frustration and left the game over. And these are not personal preferences, these are deliberate design decisions. One for marketing, the other to remove strategic choices (a massive no-no in strategy games which are about giving the player strategic choices).

After pre-ordering the game then buying the African DLC, I nearly gave up on this game. It's not even just the (numerous) bugs which need fixing, but even basic core mechanics are broken all to hell. I wouldn't even bother posting this if it were not for the INTENSE irony of this being their "magnum opus" and the "Civ Killer" puuuuhhhhlllleeeeaaaase. HK has alot of great ideas, they're just really lacking any sort of cohesion to bring them all together into the great game that it could be. I enjoy many of the game's mechanics, I just wouldn't go touting this as the queen of 4X without significant effort being taken on part of the devs, which I don't see happening any time soon based on the current update schedule. I was incredibly underwhelmed by the Africa DLC, having been really been excited to play as the Bantu and Nigerians(who I am descended from). Bantu need a slight buff I feel, and the Swahili(also the Norsemen) should have an actual Emblematic Unit. The embark unit replacement they currently have should be given as a culture ability, maybe. Or perhaps they could toy with the idea of cultures having multiple Emblematic districts or units. I see many complaints about copy cultures, Huns>Mongols for example, or an entire slew of Indian/Southeast Asian ElephantBuilder cultures. America...is a disgrace. The entire culture needs to be reworked. Forced surrenders by the AI....enough has been said on that point. Religion should play at least a slightly larger role in the game than just modifiers. Also, for the love of all that is holy please insert better voice work. Hearing the same wokey musings over and over(in one game I was advised a dozen times about how I should treat independent people kindly. Screw them, I came to conquer) when in comparison "some other 4X title" gives historical qoutes worthy of repeating outside of the game....

It's not all trash though, as some have said. I think the game has great moments, and I really do appreciate that HK has highlighted many cultures which you normally won't see represented in a historical 4X. The devs really just need to respond to their gamer base before they lose them.

Dale_K wrote:

el-Fakir wrote:

So far, I couldn't see a single objective criticism that I can agree with.

I invite you to speak to Mac players, people who want to play multiplayer online, or even people on Stadia.

The two most common gameplay issues I've noticed come up over and over are (it may also be my own bias too since I agree with them):

1. Culture swapping makes it very confusing to keep track of who is in the game, plus disconnects immersion in the "story telling". This is simply a marketing gimmick that doesn't work well for a lot of people.

2. The surrender mechanic. The enemy should NOT be the one to dictate when a war ends when they surrender. This is just ridiculous, and has no basis in reality. Wars end when the winner says it's ended. Better to have penalties for not accepting the surrender offer, than to just force it down the player's throat. It is a crazy design decision to stop the player from pursuing wars of annihilation.

For these two reasons, a lot of players have experienced frustration and left the game over. And these are not personal preferences, these are deliberate design decisions. One for marketing, the other to remove strategic choices (a massive no-no in strategy games which are about giving the player strategic choices).

Re the surrender mechanic: while it could be done better, and initially I was very irritated by the forced surrender mechanic, now I think it's a brilliant concept. The notion of having to build up grievances, real or otherwise, to gain enough war support to start a war is firmly rooted in history (and this century). This adds some usefulness to influence and religion, because they can give you some grievances. If in HK the enemy decides to surrender, it also means that the grievances are resolved in the victor's favour. Again, I think this is not too far from reality: if as leader you take your nation to war over certain demands and the enemy surrenders and you get what you were demanding, it's hard to justify continuing the war. In HK, there is the option of a surprise war, but the mechanics force you to think carefully about whether you can achieve your objectives quickly before your war support runs out. This usually rules out long sieges because the surprise war penalty makes your war score reduce more quickly.

That said, I believe that there are changes coming to the surrender mechanic which will give players a choice of continuing the war with some higher risk. Sorry, I can't find the post/announcement at the moment, and yes, I'm sure it's not coming soon enough for some.

From a game-playing viewpoint, it's quite different from the total annihilation approach that I'm more used to in other games, but that doesn't make it wrong. I think it makes for a more nuanced approach to war. Say I've captured a nice city that wasn't in my list of grievances. At the end of the war, I might not get to keep it. So I decide to ransack it and then set up a new city or new outpost to attach to an existing city. But if I do that, the enemy no longer suffers the occupied city penalty on their war score.

Sometimes I've ransacked an administration centre or harbour just to keep the war going, because doing this gives the enemy war score points (and gives me time to ransack the occupied city). I would agree that this is not particularly realistic, but I can just about see that destroying non-military areas might increase the opponent's resolve to keep fighting. I also agree that the war score allocated for retreats and defeats is too simplistic, but I live with it as a game mechanic: attack that scout to get some points even if it means delaying your assault on the city, and avoid leaving weak armies within striking distance of the enemy if your war score is low.

The war surrender mechanism does slow down the gains from a militaristic approach. I'm OK with that - if the war ends too early, I have to come up with some other approach, and I think a bit more before starting a war.

I'm not being dragging into long discussions on the surrender mechanic. I've already posted long, detailed feedback posts regarding the game during OpenDevs and just after release. Lots of people think forced surrender is great, but lots of people think it's crap. I'm on the side that think it's crap. When pursuing a war of annihilation and it is better to ransack territories/cities and settle your own outpost, than to actually capture and hold, then the design is the issue.

                 as ambitious as the game was it was just too similar to others. if I want to feel like I'm impacting history I just play hoi4 or Europa with a few settings or mods. This would have been supplemented with the idea of creating a whole new culture and seeing it pair against others in a true alternate earth, yet the fact the only visual/gameplay things that call back to my civ's history are fidsi bonuses and landmarks just aren't enough for me to chose it over the previously mentioned games. the 4x community is a niche group whose wants are largely satisfied compared to other genres, making the creation of a new IP hard as hell in terms of success. all this games needs is something totally unique in terms of gameplay, its why I play es2 over Stellaris and civ any day despite the gameplay loop simplifying to the same basics.

Dale_K wrote:
When pursuing a war of annihilation and it is better to ransack territories/cities and settle your own outpost, than to actually capture and hold, then the design is the issue.

I mean, that's kinda how war of annihilation should work, so I don't see this as an issue. The issue is that the game does not acknowledge it, the player should receive major (diplomatic) penalties for doing so and the war system should allow you to rip and tear until it's done, at the cost of your own war support dwindling. Unfortunately, as long as we don't have joint wars and ability to share the spoils of war, diplomatic penalties won't matter much and bigger fish will keep eating smaller one, even if Amplitude tried to prevent this, because currently only way to stop the bigger fish is to be one of roughly equal or greater size.

Problem here is that it's very hard to simulate how (this portion of) a real world war would work without artificially hampering the player, because you can't really simulate all the intricacies that led in the past to whole countries burning down just for a couple of castles to change hands in the end. And not all players like being hampered, especially in the genre in which eating your enemies whole became a staple. As much as I know that people are against hard caps, I do wonder if HK could use a (global) total war cap that could be tapped in to become a major empire at the cost of becoming a total pariah in case you lose, or even if you don't. Unfortunately, this is all musings worth of a mod, not something that can be now sneaked in through backdoor to a released and, let's say, feature-complete game.

I'm just waiting for things which have been complained about for a while now to be addressed. The Africa DLC was fun. But every game still has an annoying Hun/Mongol swarms that slows down the game/plays out the same way. When every game feels the same it's not a good feeling. Balance is out of whack in many cases...

I'd like to posit the opposite theory to what many have expressed in that they 'd like to be able to paint the map more by taking more territories from warscore. Having played lots of grand strategy games with similar mechanics I think the opposite is true, that the warscore should let you take a lot less territory, with penalties for fighting in non contested regions. The rewards of war are too great to be counteracted by other priorities. I've found beating the game on Humankind difficulty or v other humans to be trivial if you're a fighter.

Also, As I play each game the little nuisance bugs just stand out a bit more and more, working in software I subscribe to the just fix it mentality, and it kindda bothers me that the amplitude workflow seems to be taking so long, with what looks like minor releases being the only output. The awful thing is I know that leaving this kind of feedback and those steam reviews will be analysed, that's cat'o9's job afterall, which will prompt the business to usher the devs into a retrospective mode where they likely have to spend time figuring out what went/is going wrong, ... delaying fixing the issues, or in my most pessimistic reading, deciding if it's worth fixing them at all. Thus the holding pattern we're in right now.

That's why I bought the Africa DLC because I know our continued support, despite the issues, is the only way the game will continue to be backed up by the business, the game designers have difficult and (very) conflicting diagnoses from the playerbase, who often don't really know what they actually want, to try and interpret and navigate. I don't envy them.

Hello everybody,

Thought we’d step in! First of all, we are happy to see so much passionate discussion about the game and want you to know that we are reading all of your feedback.  

Secondly, we know that there are many areas our dedicated players would like to see improved. We want you to know that we're committed to addressing these and that we're confident that the game will continue to steadily get better.

We have been, and will continue to, provide free updates. We understand that some players feel we have not been providing these updates fast enough. That's why we released the "What's Next" announcement, to let you know what we are working on at the moment. This includes some of the aspects that are more frustrating for the players, like war support and surrender, as well as the confusion and lack of immersion caused by the frequently changing empire names. Our next update will be the Vitruvian update in April. We hope you will like it (and the next ones even more).

We love this game. It will have a long-life cycle. In fact, there is currently a team of 35 people working on the game, and we intend to continue adding more. Please give them all the love you can, and they will do wonders for that game we all love so much!

So please do keep giving us your feedback, and we will endeavor to give you more insight into what is going on behind the scenes.  We hope to reward all of your patience by going above and beyond your expectations.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Hello everybody,

Thought we’d step in! First of all, we are happy to see so much passionate discussion about the game and want you to know that we are reading all of your feedback.  

Secondly, we know that there are many areas our dedicated players would like to see improved. We want you to know that we're committed to addressing these and that we're confident that the game will continue to steadily get better.

We have been, and will continue to, provide free updates. We understand that some players feel we have not been providing these updates fast enough. That's why we released the "What's Next" announcement, to let you know what we are working on at the moment. This includes some of the aspects that are more frustrating for the players, like war support and surrender, as well as the confusion and lack of immersion caused by the frequently changing empire names. Our next update will be the Vitruvian update in April. We hope you will like it (and the next ones even more).

We love this game. It will have a long-life cycle. In fact, there is currently a team of 35 people working on the game, and we intend to continue adding more. Please give them all the love you can, and they will do wonders for that game we all love so much!

So please do keep giving us your feedback, and we will endeavor to give you more insight into what is going on behind the scenes.  We hope to reward all of your patience by going above and beyond your expectations.

We have no doubts that you will make us happy :)

I think it was very clear at launch that this is a long investment, and I hope to see at least two expansions before the game support ends. Apart from what it is missing this is still a great product and goes beyond many other vanilla experiences like CiV in my opinion. I personally will continue to complain about things but I would still rate this a fantastic game. 

Before anyone gets too excited about dev promises: actually read the roadmap. It basically says "maybe we'll eventually start thinking about dealing with these things that people offered sensible solutions to 6 months ago". Then look at the update blogposts, which are embarrassingly proud about some bare-minimum fixes. If you asked me for the laziest possible affinity fix as a joke, I don't think I could come up with anything better than "limit it to 1 city and 50% uptime".

As for what's hurting the game, it's a funny pileup of issues that people would tolerate individually if the game was good, but they've hit critical mass and there's too much crap to be carried by the good parts. Combat is fantastic but the nuances aren't even poorly explained, they just aren't explained in some cases. Unsure if it's still the case, but I had to go to reddit to figure out how line of sight actually worked mechanically and just trust people's guesses. Ok there's precedent for people tolerating that in other games... except the combat UI is also awful so even once you look up the mechanics it's hard to verify that it's working the way you think it is. 

The wars on the strategic map are brilliant when it works correctly, but any edge case reveals how chaotic and poorly explained those mechanics are as well, and the poor UI is just icing on the cake. War support more or less works in terms of "high number means fight" but try making any decisions that rely on understanding how the war resolution works. It's got something to do with the demands and also cities occupied in the war, but you get no details in tooltips and good luck trying to tease out how it works using names of territories that the game doesn't give you any reasonable way to locate on the map. 

City-building is more of the same: fun on paper but the algorithms the economies run on are utterly deranged and the UI is too poor to make minmaxing fun for its own sake. Throw in costs of nearly everything scaling up with "game context" and forcing strategies like "only take 20% of the civics to keep the cost down", and the economy feels like an exercise in exploiting systems hilariously divorced from anything that could be called immersive. At that point playing to win economically isn't fun because it just feels like cheating a broken game.

And so on and so on. Nothing but individually cool ideas utterly sandbagged by everything supporting them. The mechanics need to be shored up enough that there's actually a compelling core to make someone want to put up with the bullshit. That means massive UI overhauls, much more information given to the player, weird edge cases hammered out, but I don't see any of that happening.

SpacesuitSpiff wrote:

Before anyone gets too excited about dev promises: actually read the roadmap.

Yes. Their roadmap goes to Summer 2022, which basically means it's all going to be in Vitruvius. And we know what's in Vitruvius and it's not what Spiff writes about.

The solutions to concerns seem to be all along the lines of making things impossible to use or more exponential scaling (which is the actual problem). We can't make use of any of the features because they become too expensive to use (chariots OP? make it require horses. sacrifice pop OP? make it cost more than your city has. affinity OP? make it so you can only use it 1 time). This is not the correct way to balance.

Dayvit78 wrote:

SpacesuitSpiff wrote:

Before anyone gets too excited about dev promises: actually read the roadmap.

Yes. Their roadmap goes to Summer 2022, which basically means it's all going to be in Vitruvius.

Not quite. The Vitruvian Update is "Part 1" of what's in that post. The other (and many would say bigger) changes are coming later, but before the end of summer.

el-Fakir wrote:

I sometimes read these threads people post regarding how much and why they are disappointed with Humankind and why they think this game, which I've been thoroughly enjoying and couldn't stop playing since OpenDev, is boring or below average or as some say plain bad, in an effort to see whether there's really an indisputable flaw or fault in Humankind as a 4X strategy game. So far, I couldn't see a single objective criticism that I can agree with. Different people, obviously, seem to have different expectations from a 4X game and where they think Humankind does not perfectly fit the description in their mind they say it's bad or disappointing. Aside from those ridiculous players who left negative reviews in Steam complaining that "AI always wins in this game", people who have genuine criticism all talk about personal preferences.What they enjoy to see in a strategy game need not to be the only way such a game has to be made. I don't know, maybe, too many players just demand Humankind to be another Civ clone and to do everything as Civ does.

SpikedWallMan wrote:
The tedious complexity added to the battle system makes Humankind battles harder to play than Endless Legend and makes me ignore manual battles entirely in favor of auto-resolve.

Among all things complained about and criticized regarding Humankind this is by far the most puzzling one for me. Personally I quite love the whole war system and tactical play on battlefield. Battles are so much fun to play that in the very beginnings of each campaign when there is not much of an action to live, the little commander on my shoulder spends his time by impatiently staring at horizon beyond snow-capped mountains and my hands start itching eagerly in anticipation of the first war to be unleashed upon me by my militarist neighbour (generally Mycenaeans) who is always lucky enough to spawn near much of the luxury resources of the continent. Even after I'm finished with all AI empires (diminishing them into single-territory city states) I seek out those innocent independent people to feed my insatiable battle frenzy. Yes, it's this much fun and addictive. :)))

Regarding overall gameplay of Humankind the only nitpicking I could make would be about how lacklustre Industrial and Contemporary Eras become in every game I finish since I can always complete my dominance over the map by Early Modern Era even in hardest difficulty and nothing much else remains to be done afterwards. If AI could challenge the players more to keep competition alive until the last era this also would not be an issue at all. Nevertheless, I'm not sure whether this is a flaw of gameplay design in Humankind or an inevitable consequence of playing a 4X game efficiently.

The concept of the battle system in a vacuum is fine to me, but:

1. it's janky. How the deployment lines and battle limits are drawn is completely nonsensical.

2. the amount of time it takes to fight the stacks of 4 rebel units bum-rushing your city every turn gets old fast. In theory you could auto-battle, but I find that even with a huge strength advantage, auto-battle always manages to inexplicably wipe out half of my force.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Dayvit78 wrote:

SpacesuitSpiff wrote:

Before anyone gets too excited about dev promises: actually read the roadmap.

Yes. Their roadmap goes to Summer 2022, which basically means it's all going to be in Vitruvius.

Not quite. The Vitruvian Update is "Part 1" of what's in that post. The other (and many would say bigger) changes are coming later, but before the end of summer.

Just a suggestion, but in future can you refer to months? For half the world summer 2022 ended on Feb 28.

Scheneighnay wrote:
How the deployment lines and battle limits are drawn is completely nonsensical.

Battle limits are a bit arbitrary rectangle (unless there's a city, then it will also get involved and the shape will become more irregular), limited only by terrain unreachable on foot (so it won't go over cliffs), growing when reinforcement arrive. Deployment zone is pretty straightforward, it's also a roughly rectangular shape unraveling from the tiles on which both your armies stand, providing the units could walk there from those tiles (so again, limited by impassable obstacles like mountains and cliffs). If you look at the hexagon of seven tiles, with one occupied by defending army as its center point, attacking one will get both of its neighbouring tiles (that's why attackers can cut the defenders off on a cliff) and the zones spread from there. Again, it becomes more irregular during siege, because then one side spawns within city and other outside of it.

There are things I love about Humankind. FOr me, the biggest thing I like are the set territories. I HATED the city spam and cities being 2-3 squares/hexes away from each other in Civ, and that if there were 3 worthless tiles left you HAD to found a city there, simply to stop the AI from doing it. Territories solved that. I like the districts, and how you form armies, and the combat. 

I HATE the culture system. It is just insanely weird to me to go from being like Asian to Celtic to German to Ottoman to English to Japanese.... like what? Id MUCH prefer you just pick a culture/race you want to be and then choose Expansionistic/military/economic picks from there without it being linked to a culture. I think that was a big blunder for them. Also, there are some cultures I just don't like, I am older and I grew up knowing the Soviets/Russians were an enemy and so I just will not play as them, no matter how insanely OP they are in game. I guess this is a "my problem" but I assume a lot of people share it, just for different cultures. 

The other big turn off is they won't update the game. Some things, like improving AI is hard, and takes time. Other things, like balancing cultures could be fixed in a few minutes in the editor... but they won't do it. It is a HUGE turn off to me when there is an EASY fix, but a game company just won't do it. We didn't need African DLC, the majority wanted you to fix the cultures we already had. A few new units would be nice too... 1870s ship - 1940s ship and 1800s infantry - WW2 infantry is kinda a HUGE gap tech wise. Also things like new units actually being a DOWNGRADE in ability (Archers- Crossbowmen, Mortars - Howitzers) needs a fix.,,, and despite thread after thread and little work to fix it they just won't do it. How long would it take to small team to balance culture and add a handful of units? Like ww1 Rifleman, Improved bowman, destroyer. Nerf the OP cultures buff the bad weak ones. A little update like that would go a long way.