First, this game is getting better every openDev, and hats off to devs for not releasing early. Very pretty game, and I hope a lot of these nuisances will be an easy fix, particularly since these features are already in Endless Legend. 

Until fixed, though, I feel that I cannot buy the game as it would be an awful multiplayer experience so long as someone (like me) is aware of mechanical shortcomings of the game and uses it against opponents in a frankly gamey way that really detracts from the overall experience. These are not primarily a list of suggestions for balance, there are plenty of those. Instead it’s a list of changes that I think are essential to avoid it being a disaster, at least for multiplayer.

But here's what's buggin’ me, going era by era :)

Neolithic

Beauty vs Clarity - make grid view do more. Amplitude has always been great at making its games visually stunning. Humankind is the first time I get confused on terrain despite repeated play, however. I think a few enhancements to terrain grid could do wonders. People who don't want it can simply turn the grid terrain off, or there could be advanced options to add each of these:

1. Cliffs are hard to spot - have a red edge to indicate cliffs
2. I can't distinguish forest from woodland at a glance, have an inner green outline for forests which will take up 2 movement instead of 1
3. Rivers are sometimes tricky to spot - maybe have a blue line across the hexagon to indicate a river tile that will take up all 4 movement.
4. There's some coastal water that appears like sand. Maybe when a land unit is selected, just make all water terrain dark blue. 

Unintentional food splitting - So you got 15 food on a dude and you hunt a deer. You win and...you have 17 food. Some other dude close by took 2 of it and instead of having an extra guy, you have lost 1 food and this two by two is totally useless. Can get more egregious with mammoths and bears. Simple fix - just give all food to the army that did the hunt

Clarity on remaining movement - Overall a pretty minor issue, and could just be a tutorial tip. But nonetheless it's the difference between me having 20 scouts by turn 11 and a newer player who is already very familiar with civ having 10. The biggest rookie "mistake" is not realizing that when a pop is produced by stepping on food, it has 4 movement. Then and there, you should split it off. In this scenario, at the end of turn 3, you can have a 0/4 movement group of 2 where one guy actually has 4 more movement. When you have 3 scouts total, that's the start of the snowball that noobies could be frustrated with.

Secondarily, any remaining food on an army always stays with the idle group, and not what is split off, so make sure to move the food carrier last. Not a bug, but another tutorial tip that could be used to help noobies.

Outpost relocation - It's awesome that a preview comes up when you are about to build an outpost for the first time. It's less awesome that it won't come up when you need to relocate it. Instead of having manually needing to count resources, just have it appear again on relocation, rather than just show the single tile. Easy fix :)

Outpost cost - Most people know that in neolithic, outposts cost 5, 20, 60, 120, and therefore build 3 outposts before going ancient, because costs will reset to 30 if adjacent to a city. But did you know that there's no adjacency limit in neolithic? Took a while for me to figure this out by trial and error, but it’s optimal to NOT settle in your starting area oftentimes, and spread out and claim the juiciest regions if you can. Another mechanic to include in the tutorial as a noob will think I’m everywhere in ancient when really I just picked a central city, and two frontier outposts and am slowly filling in the gaps.

Ancient Era / Combat

Alrighty, so if you’re the optimal player, you’ve lingered in Neolithic until turn 12, 13, 14, or even 15. Those suckers who want tier 1 civ picks like harappans or Nubians or Egyptians went up right away probably turn 5 or 6 and have 5 or 6 units. You have closer to 30. Oh and they have no influence. You have three outposts and enough influence to make 3 to 5 more. Sure they had their city founded and probably are done with their first quarter, but you have POP. They are jelly so they’re gonna fight you probably. And here we get into the real kickers (fair warning, my frustration will come out):

Reinforcement bug still persists – You’re at war. There’s a 3-tile gap wide pathway to the enemy city, and so you start moving your armies that direction. Let’s say you have four armies. One of them chances upon… a scout! Naturally, you’ll just attack them with one of your armies. If he retreats, you exhaust all your movement. If he stands ground you also exhaust all your movement. Not just on the attacking army, but all “reinforcements” nearby. Devs PLEASE give us back the Endless Legend system where you have a check box so you can CHOOSE whether you want 4 armies or 1 to chase off a single scout. This is single-handedly the most frustrating part of the game for me – skipping the tech because I know it’s bugged/more trouble than it’s worth until it become vital like when I need a ram to actually lay siege when I don’t have ranged units. #1 issue with game is how one unit can stall out armies repeatedly. With my 20+ Neolithic scouts I could literally stop an army for multiple eras just by NOT researching the tech, stacking them across my map, and retreating from battles one at a time in staggered fashion. That’s just game-breakingly bad as a mechanic.

Sieges/Battles take up the actual map – So again, I have 4 armies, and I see that the first city is lightly defended, so I lay siege to it. Now order of operations will screw me up potentially. Because you see, that siege rectangle also happens to block out any path PAST this city. If I’m not thinking, I may stupidly siege first and then fail to move the other armies after, rather than move armies past the city first and then siege after. You can reload the turn in single player. This is game-breakingly frustrating in multiplayer. There’s no reason a siege involving one of your armies should block all passage from either side for all other armies. Just let the battle be independent from map movement.

Related battle issue – So if someone sends a scout to ransack you, and you kill it or make it run away, the city still thinks it’s part of a battle for that turn and you cannot finish construction in that area, etc. Should be an easy fix.

Related sortie issue – Siege weapons aren’t constructed if a sortie that takes multiple turns is going on. Here’s what happened – I went at a city with an overwhelming melee force and it takes 3 turns to build each trebuchet. The AI clicks “sortie” and…..just does nothing. 3 turns later, it loses that “battle” and one levy as a consequence of losing. I look and I don’t have a trebuchet. Still going to take 3 turns. Oh, and the AI “sorties” again and repeats this process. Where an AI should be dead in 3 turns, it bought 6 turns of time, and in reality 9 since the trebuchet isn’t building. Simple fix: let siege weapons construct to close this loophole because you can be sure I’ll abuse the hell out of this broken mechanic if it remains in the game.

Attackers are getting first move – This is game-breaking because it’s supposed to be a turn-based game. Imagine you’re playing with friends and end turn. Since some people are still going, you grab a drink and then come back to see that you’re Defender in half a dozen battles. And you die. Because they get first move and shoot down your armies that should have stomped them had YOU stayed in your chair and spam clicked to be the attacker instead. Personally, I feel like defender should ALWAYS get first move in battle since attacker after all gets to decide whether or not to take the engagement in the first place, but as a middle ground, at least make it so that there’s a stance that you can use your movement like “sentry” that guarantees defender first move.

War Enthusiasm mechanic/peace – The overall concept is fine, but the implementation needs work. You can kill a single scout and never fight again, and you will win the war. Alternatively, if the enemy picks off some of your scouts (and you simply “retreat” them), you may have lost so much enthusiasm upon victory that you can’t press enough demands. Also some demands that started the war should NOT be obligatory. I once had a war outcome literally be either get money and reparations or forfeit, because the only other option was vassalization which cost 150, and there were six obligatory demands of 10 each so I’d be 210 out of 200. I fully captured the sole city, so I couldn’t just take territory either. Finally, it’s not at all clear what cities you’re taking, and again while you can reload the save if you took the wrong territory in single player, you can’t do that in multiplayer.

Later eras/mechanical

Disembarking bug – Ok, so you’ve got a unit on a boat. You see land. You want to get back on land. You can’t. Because the game wants you to explore the entire perimeter of the continent before it will let you land. Or you pray that you can force turn complete and auto-land next turn, hoping actually found a landable spot that’s not a cliff a turn before. Please just let us land where we’re supposed to be able to land.

Water zone of control – so if you sail by the coast and accidentally see a land dweller, you lose all your movement. Simple fix – make sea and land zone of control separate. Land units are not medusas vs all things sailing.

Independent people decline – So you’ve invested lots of resources to capture an independent people and you can do so next turn. No one else has invested anything. Next turn….someone else bought them for 50 gold because they turned into “in decline” which reset the investment and makes the first clicker able to buy them out. So much for your investment. Either make invested independent peoples not decline, or have a warning saying how many turns decline will stop. The random sniping will be another source of frustration.

Resource preview – similar to outpost relocation, please show full resource preview for building things like harbors in outposted territories.

So I definitely have more suggestions, but these are the fixes that I consider fairly vital to make the game playable in multiplayer. Otherwise, I promise you, my 30 scouts from Neolithic are going to make you never want to play multiplayer again.

NOTE: I am editing typos/formatting rather than adding content.

I agree with all of these, even the one I don't agree with which is defenders going first has you offering a very good compromise in a "defence stance"

The reason I think attacking should be encouraged is to prevent stalemate situations where neither side wants to engage and that retreating is already a very powerful defensive tool. Amplitude made the right idea giving the defenders an automatic defense action on turn 1 and an easy solution to this would be increasing that bonus on the first turn as well. There is however the issue with the way damage works that means defense is very poor in this version and five attacks no matter what can kill a unit, that should be fixed so defenders don't get completely rolled over.

Also I think they should just remove the ability to instantly buy out a independent faction when in decline altogether. It's too easy and more efficient to wait until decline and buy them then.

I hope the game won't evolve into the same thing that ES2 did, being full money grab and graphisms over actual content and balance.

Also amplitude should really start to know about that "battle initiation" kind of problem, it's been in all in their games and it always posed huge problems when you get into multiplayer setting.

Valmighty wrote:
Agreed. There should be a stance to defend that give some bonus. I think attacker should attack first, hence the name. But the defender can fortify to get combat bonus or something.

You might like our last feature focus about industrial and modern warfare :)

dragonmilk wrote:

Out of curiosity, what has changed in combat mechanics since two years ago? haha

I think there are more, but from the top of my head:

1. Warscore is now better represented by the number of casualties instead of just winning or losing the battle. If you win a battle but your entire army gets massacred, your empire might still become less happy about the war and lower your warscore in result. 
   1. Warscore is also impacted by the amount of influence you have over your enemies and they over you. If you are oppressing their people, they receive more warscore.
2. Some balancing of units
3. Stealth was reworked 
4. Allies can join your battles as reinforcements, they will be controlled by the player who is engaged in combat. The ally thus loses control over their units during the duration of the battle.

Main combat system is still in place.