Hello, Amplitude! I hope the staff is having a great time and not crunching too hard while making this game.

There a two suggestions/pitches I’d like to make:

• Make the board itself feel alive/living

I’ve been thinking a lot about this after discussing what made the Planet of Sid Meir’s Alpha Centauri great back in August 2019 and I think I've been able to decipher my brain enough to clearly explain this point. 

One of the larger gripes I have with 4X games, besides barebones diplomacy/politics that end up making the games focused on agressive warring, tends to be that the gameboard itself feels a bit static and unimportant to the player outside of choosing where to settle. So, Cultures have been formed around the availability of resources, be it nomadic caravans that travel through deserts, self-sufficient fortress cities built ontop of mountains, or shortlived towns which existed only to exploit a limited resource and thus quickly abandoned when the money well dries up. It would be crazy to see the board itself play a more significant role throughout the game by reacting to the players developmental actions in this game. 

Say a player decides to settle in the vicinity of forest tiles for that sweet, sweet production output for their empire and sets a policy to overexploitation with no sense of preservation; doing so increases the resource yields from those forest tiles for the time being. But come the next era/age/advancement, the overexploitation of those forest tiles in the previous era has led to them experiencing desertification, becoming barren or desert tiles that lose the food and industry bonuses they were providing (which may have been even more of use in this era than the previous), while also now greatly increasing the formation of floods, droughts, even dust storms that in-turn negatively affect the industrialized portions of the empire near those tiles. Counters to when the player’s mistakes start affecting them can be, say, investing in the replanting process to lessen the occurrence of natural disasters(deserts/barren land growing back to a forest tile in the next era), building better infrastructure in the city to handle the cost of overexploitation, or researching better technologies that take advantage of the new resources that appeared in those tiles(Ex. Solar Panels to take advantage of the new deserts).

Accompanying this with rising sea levels and maybe even variable weather that affect normal day to day operations in the portions of the empire effected by them would, at least, be interesting to playthrough and help give another unique flavor to this game as players now have to adapt to the consequences of their actions of deciding how to grow their empire. 

• Make Trade be more than just a means to increase economy/production

By this, I mean, the location of trade routes throughout Earth’s history has not only been a significant means of making or breaking the value of cities and towns to the greater world, but also a catalyst for the spreading/mixing of cultural influences.

Say cities on major trade routes between players, while experiencing a large boon to their economy and giving a trickling of resources the players wouldn’t be able to get without expanding into the other’s territory, start having their population influenced by foreign cultures. Sometimes the cultural influence leads to quickening of research on technologies only one of the players have for the others, sometimes the increase number of immigrants assimilating into the wealthy cities leads to a gradual, but certain, cultural shift that is represented by… man, like, building designs shifting to the cultural influence dominating the area, the political leanings of those cities changing from the cultural pressures, maybe even have stability/happiness penalties from those cities if the host empire goes to war with another empire whose culture managed to seep into those cities and become a dominant influence of?

Anyways, if I were to choose one thing out of these two suggestions for Amplitude have a think over, it’d be the environmental and exploitation effects as I think it’d be really cool to see that in this 4X game. Granted, it took the Civilization series 16+ years to bring back rising sea levels, so I’d understand(albeit still saddened) if it’s too late in the developmental process to begin thinking of how such a complex feature can work in the game. But thanks for reading this either way, and I hope you have a nice day.

Hello and thank you for your kind words! Making a game this ambitious is a lot of pressure, but also very exciting... :D

We can't really disclose details yet, but we can already tell you that trading and cultural influence will be in the game. We are still exploring their final form, but we'll make sure to let you know once we have something we're happy with.

About your first point: I'm personally a huge Alpha Centauri fan. We did explore possibilities of having exploitation drive climate change and we would love to have this at some point but we dont have the details yet of how & when we might implement this sort of thing.

We will however have some ways for armies to interact with the map, and the world map itself will be teeming with a lot of activity, from animals milling about and dynamically interacting based on whether they're prey or predator, to human activity in and around settlements, to weather effects. A lot of this is in early stages and some of it is contingent to features we'll talk about later, but we are doing our best to ensure that the world in Humankind feels vibrant, alive and compelling.

jhell wrote:

About your first point: I'm personally a huge Alpha Centauri fan. 

Glad to hear that! That game had a lot of really cool ideas.