Hey !

I'd like to start this post by saying i really like the game so far ! But i think there's a huge problem, wich is scaling. The games, throught lot of it mechanics (culture's building, science perk, spec district) allow for a lot, lot of multiplicative scaling.

% gain stack up on top of self-scaling (quarter giving more ressources for each clone around + bonus on that with science perk) and most of the time you'll either skyrocket or die.

Since it's not very noticeable early on, the game start as a very nice experience, but as the turns stack it feels less and less interesting because 1 or 2 player will start snowballi'g, and then snowballing on snowballing and so on until he is about 1 / 1.5 era above everyone else.

Fame being fame, you'll know game is lost at turn 50 as soon as the snowballing start, and you know you can't do anything about it. Very frustrating (specially in multiplayer) - i do like fame as THE wincon, i don't think its a problem - thought victory condition should gives you a huge fame gain for triggering them IMO

Here's my thought on how the game should handle things to make the mid/late game more enjoyable and less snowbally

Let's start with districts. You had a pretty good way to handle them in EL Amplitude, so i just don't get how you could go with Humankind's solution and tell yourself "this is fine".

I DO like district being tied to a ressource, make them feel more unique.

But i hate the fact they work in a way where you must stack the exact same district to get maximum benefit from it.

First, since you gain bonus for each similar market close to each other (and even more bonus throught science stuff and culture's district), they heavily promote snowballing. Stack the same market as much as possible and with the right science perk you'll make them gives you multiplicative value. 

Second, from a gameplay point of view, it's just bad. You don't spam industry district (or any other) because you want to play an "industrial culture". You spam because its mathematically more efficient.

Kills the narrative. 

Solution : Remove the self-scaling ability of district (ie. No more bonus for adjacent similar district) and replace science perk increasing that scaling with flat gain on market. Example : bulding an industry market gives you 3 industry + slot value. That's it, no inner scaling with other industry district.

Game would need some rebalance with industry/science/gold cost (indeed) but it would be less snowbally. 

Then, limit ANY % scaling to culture tenet, legacy trait, religion and event bonus.

Ressources, wonder and science stuff gives you often %scaling, promoting, again, snowball.

Why is that so ? Just replace those with flat bonus, preventing hard snowballing and allowing you to balance things more easily.

From a gameplay POV, lot of tenet and events feels really useless after turn 100.

Oh +5 influence on main plaza for 10 turn ? So.. nice ? No, actually useless. Most event/tenet bonus get useless/not very interesting as game growth and sadly we lose a part of the fun there. Like "Oh an event.. well do i even care of +15 gold for 10 turn or straight up 100 gold when im farming 1k, 2k + each turn ? 

I did care about it - early on - but now ?

Those bonus should be %scaling, so they keep being interesting the whole game.

Same for culture tenet and same for religion.

But not for luxury ressource. Player above others can easily stack them up and so stack huge amount of % bonus on top of their already higher flat - self scaling ressources, and even more throught science perk. Get rid of that, make the bonus flat, less snowballing, more planning.

And then we got damage calculation.

First, please, work the instant resolution so we can get an "in-between manual and instant resolution" solution. Not only the result is sometime(often) weird, it also kills some mechanics (like reinforcement and multiple turn battle) because it totally ignore that and straight up gives a result. Multiplayer can be very ZzZ just cause of war taking years to resolve, but we're forced into resolving things manually due to how weird instant resolution outcome might be (plus it straight up ignore multi-turn and reinforcement mechanics).

But then, even the slightest difference in unit power can destroy a fight.

The way the math are done, a unit with 32 strength will destroy a unit with 30, and so any point is very important.

Result is : more snowballing. Being just a lil bit behind in the unit race can be auto-loose. And this, again, promote snowballing. You can't expect to ever fight someone's who's 1 or 2 unit ahead, or you'll get crushed. Even with an alliance or whatever, the difference is too big.

I DO like the bonus you gain from positionning/match up being THAT big (height, backstab, swarm, anti-X, standing on river..).

Because they push you toward being smart, picking the best conditions to fight, taking advantage of the map, and they are not tied to how much ahead or behind you are. They promote skilled decision

On the other hand, the difference in base stat and the way game calculate things make it very easy to crush someone while playing badly, just because your unit a simply better.

Solution : Less value for each strength point, so 32 vs 30 is less crushing.

New value for positionning/counter bonus so they match their old efficiency

Thnaks for reading 

I think you are identifying the right problem but for the wrong cause basis. The highly multiplicative scaling just needs tuning and refinement to go from feeling like 'way too much' to feeling like a really powerful sense of massive progression across eras. Contemporary Era in particular feels way less polished and refined than the earlier eras, probably because it has seen less testing due to occurring later and having more variation in what can precede it.

It certainly seems the devs have underestimated the amount of resources people will have by the later game. Especially Industry and Science. Building early industry is obviously a good idea, and gives you more of everything else, and the devs apparently underestimated the ridiculous amount of Science this eventually produces, blazing through the tech tree at such a rate that there's little point in even building units that will be obsolete immediately, much less time to have a proper war with them. There is also some tech tree compression at the high end- several other threads point to this problem, like how electricity and nuclear are so close to each other, or discovery of flight and then supersonic stealth fighters being potentially 3 turns separated from each other- it's ridiculous. 

But it's not fundamentally a problem with progression in general. Just tuning the values so it feels right rather than being too fast here, too slow there. Although yes, especially late game 'too fast' is definitely dominant right now. The late game progression is in fact so rapid, both to research things and to build things, that you're advancing technological epochs so rapidly than you cannot actually do anything within that epoch. "Yay I have biplanes!" "Now I have Fighters" "Now I have supersonic stealth fighters" sort of makes the biplane period pointless, and the fighter period even more pointless.

Having districts with adjacency bonuses isn't the problem. Making the tech tree a bit deeper and perhaps slightly tweaking the costs of things should address what you are correctly identifying is a pretty significant cluster of problems with the late game. 

One big difference for Humankind from Civ, is the fact that Fame is an end product, not merely a means to an end. Wonders, for example, don't necessarily have to have an instrumental reason to make them (although it is more interesting if some do). There could be a Wonder, or indeed several Wonders, whose primary or even only function is to give you Fame and win the game. You could intentionally do things that directly disadvantage you, simply because they give you Fame. Like ascending your culture to the next era, for example.

Spending resources to get Fame, or "cashing out" of this endlessly expanding economy with at least some of your resources needs to be a good idea. Spending industry on something that doesn't give you Food/Industry/Money/Science or even a military advantage, but is actually a drain for no concrete gain, except of course the victory points of Fame. Creating resource sinks in this way is one approach that would add depth while simultaneously slowing down rampant exponential acceleration. Players who invest one hundred percent of their resources into expanding to get more resources, will find at the end of the game they have less Fame than people who spent at least some portion of their resources in Fame rather than reinvesting every last dime.

It shouldn't be too hard to invent things the player could construct, policies they could implement or pay for, that are a direct loss, a net drain, a "waste" of resources, except they give you Fame. Doctors Without Borders, feeding the world's hungry, creating the Olympics, fostering the arts, creating the United Nations (influence?), the Space Program. So many things you could do- that actual nations in the past literally did do for no other reason than prestige, legacy, and fame.

The in-game function of these would be so that instead of spending your Industry to get more Industry, or using your Money to get more Money, you do have to eventually cash out of that circular system, and have to balance your acceleration with actually doing your main mission of accumulating Fame. There should also be an incentive to do as much as possible of this in each era, rather than 'boom so you can boom harder later' being clearly a superior strategy.

I agree with 80 % of things said here.

The only thing I fundamently disagree, it's the snowballing effect. It's normal if a strong player who knows the game in a correct start, snowballs. It is like this in Civ VI, in Endless Legend, and so in Humankind.

Yield scaling is insane and need rework. District spawning was too intensive in the alpha, and is still too intensive here. It's not fun to spawn cluster of districts. It's a "quantitative" design, not a qualitative one.

If for exemple, the egyptian pyramid, boost the industry distict, it's fine. But only rare and unique districts should work like that.

I agree 100 % with that Bridger said :


I tend to agree with you OP.  The yield inflation is absolutely insane as the game goes on.  I think having a small adjacency bonus is OK, but on top of the base "+1 per adjacent X" there are all kinds of infrastructures and cultural bonuses which stack on top of each other.

The other thing that bothers me is how stupid the cities look.  They sprawl across the landscape like a modern megalopolis from the start of the medieval age.  By the time you get to the contemporary era, the whole damn planet has been urbanized.  It looks really bonkers.

Reducing the number of districts (limit them somehow) would help, but also allowing them to be disconnected from the city center would be better.  At least then it would look like a bunch of smaller urban areas instead of a massive city the size of Belgium has been built in every capitol by the Classical age.