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.