I am a huge fan of a lot of the design changes that are being implemented to this game and that I feel may make it better than its competitors, but one feature that has left me incredibly skeptical and that I worry a bit about is the Cultural Mix-Matching. It sounded like the Devs said we could choose to continue as a single culture throughout the rest of the game (but would be disadvantaged in doing so), but despite the claims of 1 million different cultural combinations, this game does not seem to me like it will actually offer that diverse of a cultural arrangement for players who want to monoculture. If you decide you want to play only 1 culture for the whole game? You literally can ONLY pick from the 10 starting cultures.

This may not immediately sound bad, but lets say I really want to play China, but China is not listed as one of the starting cultures for the first 10 ages. I am now completely unable to play a monoculture China because even if I pick up China later down the line, I am still stuck having at least half of my culture be whatever I was forced to pick at the beginning. And that sucks. Ideally and hopefully China is a civilization you can pick right from the very beginning, but if you want to play the Mongols and are forced to have to pick China in the beginning if you want to feel "Close enough" it still sucks that you can't monoculture the Mongols. 

I think a lot of people who hear about the cultural mix matching thought of the game as featuring a Rhys and Fall esque cultural evolution mechanic, where you start out with an Asian peoples and can evolve into Early China, then from Early China can evolve into Vietnam, Middle China, Korea, and even later into Japan. These kind of cultural mixes while a little iffy can make sense. But the idea of being limited to a selection of only 10 civilizations unless you want to make arbitrary and potentially extremely historically inaccurate culture to approximate the group you are interested sounds terrible for history buff roleplayers, and this game can not fill the history buff niche that games like EU and Civ do if the mechanics are actually this limiting. It would be just as fantasy as Endless Legends when looking at the developed end results of natural cultural progression.

So while I don't want the design team to radically change their design if this was completely their intention when creating the game. I just won't buy it. But if there is something I am misunderstanding about the mechanics and what the development team is actually wanting to accomplish in regards to how cultures are used and portrayed in this game (Or if the development team feels like they are straying too far from what was perhaps their goal) then I would love to be informed or updated in the future about this games development.

Thanks
~Xefjord

As I respect your opinion, I always found historically inaccurated Assyrians throwing nukes at USA in Civ. Understand you want to play as nation-state, but maintaining a nation-state through all history is not as realistic as cultures evolving.

If you have time I reccomend reading Alexandre Deulofeu's theories.

One reason i like Civ is cazy, mixed history. I don't have problem with Assyrians throwing nukes on USA.

Same reason here. If you wan't something accurate it will hardly be a 4X.

if you see the screenshot with bronze age cultures, you’ll see that tbe Harapans are an option. which means that rather than just simply have “india” we may have different options such from “Vedic India” to “Republic of India”. similarly the chinese may be broken into smaller protions. 

Ani_Taneen wrote:

if you see the screenshot with bronze age cultures, you’ll see that tbe Harapans are an option. which means that rather than just simply have “india” we may have different options such from “Vedic India” to “Republic of India”. similarly the chinese may be broken into smaller protions. 

I've heard there's art of both the Ming and Han Chinese dynasties, too, and the Gauls or Franks may be in, who became France.

Well, it must be said that this multicultural system is a bit bizzare.

There is no civilization that has gone from the Mayas, to the Japanese, then to the Zulus !

Historically, brutal cultural changes are related to invasions. For example, the Mayans are forcibly become Hispanic, with the Spanish invasion.

Cultural changes related to a revolution have existed. For example France monarchist and Catholics before 1789, passed fairly quickly to a republican and secular France (and still it is discussed).

But it did not become Russian France, for example.

So it's a pretty unrealistic element that makes me tick. But that's how it is. And hey, I understand that Amplitude has to make design choices to stand out.

Jojo_Fr wrote:

Well, it must be said that this multicultural system is a bit bizzare.

There is no civilization that has gone from the Mayas, to the Japanese, then to the Zulus !

Historically, brutal cultural changes are related to invasions. For example, the Mayans are forcibly become Hispanic, with the Spanish invasion.

Cultural changes related to a revolution have existed. For example France monarchist and Catholics before 1789, passed fairly quickly to a republican and secular France (and still it is discussed).

But it did not become Russian France, for example.

So it's a pretty unrealistic element that makes me tick. But that's how it is. And hey, I understand that Amplitude has to make design choices to stand out.

Yeah, I find this weird too. Wonder how it will be presented. I also wanna know what your civ will be referred to throughout the game.

I find it no more odd than leading a single uninterrupted nation state from 5000 BC to 2050 AD. The way Humankind handles it sounds very good it means we will see equal representation of civs throughout history rather than Civ which has a large amount of modern nations obviously to appeal to people of those nations and sell copies/dlc's.

I just hope that whatever they do it actually has impactful and interesting gameplay changes. Endless Space was cool about culture in the sense that, while you picked a generally homogenous nation at the start, over time your population became diluted with all of these other races that you had to take account for, and often your play style might have been changed to account for their desires. I mean, that, or you could just be Space Hitler and "remove" the races you didn't want.

While it's obviously a lot harder to get away with something like that when dealing with real world ethnic cultures and races, as opposed to sci-fi aliens, I still expect amplitude to present something of substance to us. I've seen a couple of discussions from those who watched "demos," and on their word alone this is starting to just sound like Civilization VI v2, with way too much emphasis on this "melting pot" thing. which is weird in and of itself, because if we're being honest here, 4x games are literally all about "my tribe is better than yours."

But yeah, I agree with what OP is saying. I won't argue the validity of historical accuracy in a 4x strategy game, but I genuinely see nothing wrong with him wanting the option to build his own homogenous culture in a manner that it's viable towards gameplay. Just like how I want to have my Egyptian-Roman Legions.

ErwinRommelish wrote:

But yeah, I agree with what OP is saying. I won't argue the validity of historical accuracy in a 4x strategy game, but I genuinely see nothing wrong with him wanting the option to build his own homogenous culture in a manner that it's viable towards gameplay.

Well, it's not gonna be that game. Simple as.

The one thing I'm really curious about is the HOW. Will there be any "story" presented or you're just gonna have to pick the next civilization because it's time. I mean, In ES2 it was quite straightforward, for one reason or another, different populations ended up being part of your empire. I wonder if in Humankind these new civs you'll pick will feel like out of the blue (say if I'm roleplaying in my head). It will feel weird if from next turn we're gonna be the British empire but I have no notion where these Brits came from.

make your own empire feature was really good in EL i think culture mixing must be on board.

I too was curious on how the mixing of cultures would work. It would certainly look really weird if you just had a hard line between different cultures as you grew, but it seems like they're aware of that based on their reply. Ideally the additional cultures aren't so much a flat "now you are this" as they are an amalgamation of everything you've chosen so far, right?

What I like about this system is, that it provides us with a flexibility while playing and not force us into a specific strategy.

If we take CIV 5 for example choosing the Germans would mean a military rush as soon as they get the tanks, because this is their signature unit and it is stronger than the other tanks. We were basically forced to use it as soon as we choose this nation or we would loose this benefit. The strategy was set at the beginning of the game. Same for the Romans, they would be at their strongest during the classical time with legionaries building roads and forts.

That the addition of new cultures can come abprubt is not a problem for me. Overall games has to abstract certain aspects of their design.

The mixing of different cultures which wouldn't make sense from our histroy perspective, for example native americans adopting romans as a culture and later on china, is just a power fantasy and a big What If scenario. Like in all the CIV games before. (What if the roman republic had survived and ruled the world?) This is a good thing for a civilization like game. Other games tend to focus on one specific time period and try to simulate this as detailed as possible. (Paradox games like Victoria 2, Crusader Kings) But a game about the whole human civilization should in my opinion be as open as possible because of the What If scenario. And this game mechanic serves it nicely.

Personally I think that the best way to implement this concept in a way that would make everyone happy and only produce net-positives would be to either "imagine" cultures, or simply take ideas/strategies that were specific to a culture, and simply remove all mention of it's ethnic origin.

I.E., when it comes time to pick a new culture, instead of choosing Romans vs. Greeks, you'd instead pick something like "Testudo" vs. "Phalanx".

In this sense, you're combining cultures from all across the world in order to make your own unique nation come end-game, but now without the constant tinge in the back of your mind that "this doesn't make sense" or what-have-you.

The other way I saw it happening, and I'd really like to see it happen, would be through natural progression of gameplay in the way Endless Space 2 did it, once again, where even though you pick a starting point, your politics and demographics can DRASTICALLY change by end-game, with or without your input, and it always results in different scenarios each time you play.

MezzoMax wrote:

The mixing of different cultures which wouldn't make sense from our histroy perspective, for example native americans adopting romans as a culture and later on china, is just a power fantasy and a big What If scenario. 

Humankind is indeed all about the "What if?", and the more we'll show of it, the clearer the picture is going to get.

ErwinRommelish wrote:

Personally I think that the best way to implement this concept in a way that would make everyone happy and only produce net-positives would be to either "imagine" cultures, or simply take ideas/strategies that were specific to a culture, and simply remove all mention of it's ethnic origin.

This was considered during the early stages of development, but it was decided to keep culture names instead of just collecting features and traits, as to let players live out their fantasies of playing the Romans, or the Aztecs, etc.

I religiously hope that i get to say "this evolve/etc. mechanic sounded a mess but it all comes along fine in the gameplay good job!"

This design is eighder going to be the most brilliant idea or illogical. As any bold ideas.

I can not find anything illogical about this design concept. We all agree that these games all have in common that they play as a BIG "what if scenario". The Roman Empire ended during the middel age. Germany did not exist in it's present form since 1954!

As far as I am concerned, both design choices are "illogical" - if you want to call it this way - but more than that they are just a what-if scenario that gives you a lot of freedom during the entirety of the game. 

I am very happy for this design choice simply because of the fact that it gives you many choices as the different eras come around. As someone earlier mentioned, if you choose a CIV in Civilization for example, your style of play is somehow set for the rest of the game by the different traits that these nations possess. So for me it is cool to play aggressive early on to expand my empire and the focuss on science and culture. 

If Humankind gives me these choices I think you will have a much better gameplay because of more freedom than in Civilization for example.

At least I am hyped.

tomsonhagen wrote:

for me it is cool to play aggressive early on to expand my empire and the focuss on science and culture. 

This is actually a big problem, because it would encourage you to basically always start aggressive and after you handicap your opponents enough, you can then choose science or whatever and nobody would be able to be dangerous to you anymore because you've made sure they're worse-off early in the game.

This would result in a very linear type of gameplay. Destroy early-on, then wait till you win.

In CIVILIZATION gmaes you were at least encouraged to try NOT to strongarm everyone early-on by your faction bonuses that are not related to warfare. In HK, where you can chose to be romans, you simply will choose romans because that's what will help you to destroy enemies early on so that they don't bother you late-game. This is actually alarming, I hope the developers realize this issue.

The biggest problem for all 4x games, in my opinion, is the linear nature of the development of your empire from Turn 1 to Turn End.  This magnifies the importance of early game decisions and minimizes the importance of late game decisions.   Games are easy if you play well early, either by developing your engine or smacking down the other players or, even worse, stealing someone else's engine and adding it to your own (the easy absorbtion of other civs' cities into your empire is, for me, one of the banes of the Civ series).  The snowballing impact of playing well early makes the mid- to late-games boring, except for role-playing purposes.

I don't know if HK will escape this "trap" (my thinking, some may like the impact of snowballing), but at least there's the potential that changing civs, combined with the Fame system with set points per era, may allow for a sort of game re-set each era.

If each civ enters each new era with with a relatively equal chance to garner Fame that era, that would, for me, be an improvement over what has come before in 4x games.

PARAdoxiBLE wrote:

Catodionwrote:

This is actually a big problem, because it would encourage you to basically always start aggressive and after you handicap your opponents enough, you can then choose science or whatever and nobody would be able to be dangerous to you anymore because you've made sure they're worse-off early in the game.

This would result in a very linear type of gameplay. Destroy early-on, then wait till you win.

In CIVILIZATION gmaes you were at least encouraged to try NOT to strongarm everyone early-on by your faction bonuses that are not related to warfare. In HK, where you can chose to be romans, you simply will choose romans because that's what will help you to destroy enemies early on so that they don't bother you late-game. This is actually alarming, I hope the developers realize this issue.

Yes it should be handled properly. But, the good point is, devs can (and will) adjust cultures era by era. I think Humankind would be a lot easier to adjust the balance than other 4X games that doesn't choose culture era by era.

Plus to that, adapting to your surroundings or neighbors is the crucial point of culture transition system. If your neighbor grabbed Rome faster than you, you can just choose other culture that can counter the Rome.

I think the whole one culture countering another is an interesting take on preventing a overpowered civ/culture or major snowballing. which brings me to a different question, how does AI choose their culture? I would assume it would be if the nation has x situation it would steer towards picking a nation that assists in those conditions. Likewise, i would hope if it has no coastline it would not choose a seafaring culture. We can talk about how WE would choose cultures and if that would be either beneficial or "make sense", but how the AI mixes the cultures will be interesting to see. 

Let's take a look how civilization series dealt with this issue:

"..."

Therefore I propose that HumanKind really should include some gameplay mechanic that prohibits fast growth. I think the money solution from civ4 is the easiest and most intuitive solution for the blobbing.

What do you guys think?

Personally I think the approach Amplitude took in ES2 does an amazing job. It has a certain limit of colonization you can do without a penalty, with the possibility to increase this limit later in the game. This mean you cannot expand too much in the early game, but still have a huge empire later in the game once the limit is increased enough.

I think that hating on blobbing is a silly grand strategy meme, it becomes even sillier when you try to apply it to 4x. The only thing that should stop you from conquering is the strength of the enemy armies. If they are weak and you don't conquer them that's a roleplaying choice that shouldn't be validated through gameplay mechanics, as a matter of fact it should be actively punished, maybe there should be a "complacency" mechanic that reduces your administrative efficiency if you stay in the disgusting state of peace for too long, so your soldiers grow weak and your population decadent. An empire either expands or it dies, there is no other way.

As a former history teacher I feel pretty comfortable chiming in on this. The way Humankind deals with culture mixing is far more realistic than the Civ method. They both can be fun and I like all the Civ games until the mess that's Civ 6, but if you're really examining human history, cultures come and go and mix into other things. In Europe you had a time when it was largely ruled by Rome, then we had the Germanic tribal invasions and Germans and Gauls became France, Germans and Iberian Gauls became Spain, Germans, Picts and Celts became the cultures of Britain. The Latin language became Spanish, French and Italian. Even civilizations that have stood the test of time have been completely different places throughout history. We've always had an Egypt, but the Egypt of the Pharaoh's, the Egypt during Greek rule, and the Egypt that emerged after the Islamic conquests were wildly different places and cultures. Even among the true ancient cultures like Egypt, China, and India that still survive in name, they would be unrecognizable to their citizens today at various points in their history. This is a Civ like game, but I don't want it to be a Civ like clone. If I want to play as one culture I already have that game and I want something new. I think it's a bold choice and far more realistic and I can't wait to see how it pans out. Maybe there's a possibility they add, or already include for all I know, the ability to stay as one culture the entire game with benefits and drawbacks, we'll have to see. I really wish they'd release some more info considering this games release is next year.

Nyarl wrote:

I think that hating on blobbing is a silly grand strategy meme, it becomes even sillier when you try to apply it to 4x. The only thing that should stop you from conquering is the strength of the enemy armies. If they are weak and you don't conquer them that's a roleplaying choice that shouldn't be validated through gameplay mechanics, as a matter of fact it should be actively punished, maybe there should be a "complacency" mechanic that reduces your administrative efficiency if you stay in the disgusting state of peace for too long, so your soldiers grow weak and your population decadent. An empire either expands or it dies, there is no other way.

No, historically it's quite the opposite. Unchecked expansion is often what kills empires while large nations that are more insulated often last far longer. Nations like China and Egypt have survived tens of thousands of years without ever going on some global conquest rampage, while empires like Persia, Rome, Macedonian Greece, the Aztecs, and so on, often stretched themselves too thin, made too many enemies and grew too large to govern effectively and now don't exist or exist in much different and smaller forms than they did. Also, the larger armies always beating the smaller armies has so much proof against it there are simply too many examples to list. Throughout much of history, smaller armies have held off much larger forces from the Spanish reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, to the North Vietnamese defeat of the US military. So much more factors into war than just brute force and the power of the weapons used.

We are not hating on blobbing. The blobbing just has to be realistically (severely) penalized with something like inefficiency, autonomy, corruption, happiness or any other sort of penalty. This mechanism has to be present in long-paced games to restrict uncontrollable spread and make the late-game more interesting.

If blobbing issue isn't considered at all, it becomes the only viable strategy to play as. Then the final outcome of the game becomes decided in the early era, and makes all later missions, events and gameplay mechanics basically pointless, because nobody could be able to accumulate enough fame to outcompete the blobber and pose a challenge in any way. 

So it's not just historic reasons that speak against blobbing, it's also the gameplay perspective and diversity and variations of playstyles that has to be considered as well. For me, it's a no brainer. 

Nyarl wrote:

I think that hating on blobbing is a silly grand strategy meme, it becomes even sillier when you try to apply it to 4x. The only thing that should stop you from conquering is the strength of the enemy armies. If they are weak and you don't conquer them that's a roleplaying choice that shouldn't be validated through gameplay mechanics, as a matter of fact it should be actively punished, maybe there should be a "complacency" mechanic that reduces your administrative efficiency if you stay in the disgusting state of peace for too long, so your soldiers grow weak and your population decadent. An empire either expands or it dies, there is no other way.

This is where player preferences diverge.  If I want to play a game where I can conquer and keep conquering and keep conquering, I'll play Risk.

In a history of human civilizations, I want warfare to be realistic relative to human history.  I want large empires to be more difficult to manage than small empires.  I want your people to say "enough" and put a halt to endless warfare if, like Alexander, you push your soldiers further than they're willing to go.

And I want the benefit of conquering new territories to be nothing if I can't administer the territory effectively, if the populace opposes my rule, etc.

At this point, we have no idea how HK will handle this.  As Eagle Pursuit noted, under the Fame system, the benefits of conquest may be far different than they are in the Civ series. 

Xefjord wrote:

Most of my fears are ironically about the lack of viable lineup we may have of monocultures/geographically samey peoples (Especially if there is some repeat cultures), but this is only a vanilla concern and if the game is developed beyond launch with new civilizations then I think that concern will dissipate.

 

Well, the problem is that there is no actual monoculture that survived till the modern-day, thus the player that would choose to play that way would by default choose the losing side. All great empires that existed had a mixed culture and usually adapted something from the lands that they conquered.

For example, the reason why Western Culture was and is so dominant in the world was because of the simple reason understood by the Romans - it's often easier to take what others already created and adapt it to your culture than create your own from the get-go.

For example this "From the Qin dynasty until the Qing dynasty, Chinese culture had influenced neighboring and distant countries, while gradually being transformed by outside influences as well. During the Western Han dynasty, the Silk Road trade routes were established and brought Hellenistic Central Asia, Persia under the Parthian Empire, and South Asia into contact with the Chinese empire. "

As you can see it is written that Chinese culture was influenced by outside world as-well thus such thing as a monoculture existed only in small tribes in jungles - like the Sentinelese. And because they have no outside influence on their culture it is stagnant as there is no trade of technology or ideas. 

Frankly I don't think that Humankind's way to making cultures evolve into completely different ones depending just on what the player wants to pick isn't more realistic than being to play as a "civilization" (which can be anything from a modern nation state like the USA to an ancient group of people held together by their material culture and nothing else like the Phoenicians). They both don't make any sense compared to real history. In such games, history is used to define entities depending on how they are perceived today (like how Egyptians are usually wonder builders because we think of the pyramids) so they are fun in a game. But it's basically gimmicks and stereotypes, or at least gross simplifications. I mean, if anyone thinks the Civilization games portray anything historically accurate (or accurately historical?), they better go back to school of something...

Now that I said this, I want to add that Humankind's "multiculturalism" is probably a good way to address a big problem of 4X: that is, in Civilization games, you usually know how it will end depending on what happens in the first turns. Civ players know that well, and will restart the game if they don't get what's needed for a nice start. Civ6 tried to address that recently with the golden/dark ages mechanic. Other 4X have things such as end-game crisis to spice things in the late game. It's not just a problem of blobbing or of snowballing, it's that there's usually no reason to continue playing a game you already won.

But if you're going to play different civs through the game, with maybe different goals, then it's more like starting anew in each era, or in other words: each era can start having its own challenges and ways to get fame. You could have a horrible start in the ancient era, unable to do much because of whatever reasons. But it doesn't mean the next era has to be as horrible.

I'm really looking forward to this, because it has indeed a perfume of "rhye's and fall". However, the main thing about rhye's and fall wasn't the ability to play as different civs: it was that each civ could shine in its own era, and looking at your former civ struggling to survive or sometimes managing to become something else.

I think the interesting part is not that you choose one culture like in civ, but build along as you play. This might be bad for roleplaying nations, but I personally find it very interesting to have the editor for 4x empires integrated in the game itself. It sounds very strategically challenging to me.

I don't know how you're doing eras, so maybe this has no consequence, but Ming wasn't really "Medieval" unless you consider the 1500s and 1600s the medieval era. Even then, there are much better "Medieval" Chinese dynasties like the Song or even Tang.

CK2Benchmarks wrote:

I don't know how you're doing eras, so maybe this has no consequence, but Ming wasn't really "Medieval" unless you consider the 1500s and 1600s the medieval era. Even then, there are much better "Medieval" Chinese dynasties like the Song or even Tang.

Thanks for the heads-up. In fact, that was an error on Meedoc's part--the Ming culture will appear after the Medieval era, just as they did in history. It can be tricky keeping track of all sixty cultures off the top of one's head!