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.