I think it's the most important period throughout the game, and it's way more important than it should be. Taking the Neolithic Era as long as possible and retaining as many territories(even making 2 cities at the start of the Ancient era is not difficult) is a more powerful strategy than grabbing good ancient cultures.

1. Nomad trait makes positive feedback itself. This cycle is way faster than that of the Ancient Era, prompting players to stick in the Neolithic Era.

2. There are some easy ways to gain food(hunting mammoth). The chance to encounter them is random but its importance in the early game is huge.

The basic structure of Humankind is selecting a culture each era. Of course you can also transcend or delay choosing next culture in order to gain some more fames, but I don't think making players to delay choosing the 'first' culture is a good design. The Neolithic Era is just a prequel of the entire race. It's not the most interesting part of the game, and it doesn't have to be. However its importance is too big in spite of the serial nerfs on values. Maybe there's some ways to fix the mechanism?

The mammoth issue could be solved by giving them 1 to 3 extra strength so you need 3 tribes (or 2 and really good tactics) to take one down.  The positive feedback could be a “Tribe cap” like the city cap…every tribe over 5 you pay 1 influence per turn.  if stockpiled Influence reaches -10 one of your tribes leaves, and your influence is reset.

A harder-to-implement idea would be the amount of food to gain a pop increases with the number of tribes you have. Something like

1-10 tribes = 20 food

11-15 tribes = 35 food

16-20 tribes = 50 food

etc.

I'd wager that this is a significant coding issue, though XD

LiquidEggProduct wrote:

A harder-to-implement idea would be the amount of food to gain a pop increases with the number of tribes you have. Something like

1-10 tribes = 20 food

11-15 tribes = 35 food

16-20 tribes = 50 food

etc.

I'd wager that this is a significant coding issue, though XD

I've thought something like increasing the food threshold for the next tribe by a nice, scalable number might work. Something like +4 on normal, +2 on quick, +1 on blitz, +8 on slow, +16 on endless. Some problems do arise from this however.

1) How do you account for the population in outposts?

Wouldn't it be annoying if your outpost grew by 1 pop right on the turn you were going to pick up a curiosity, thereby increasing the amount of food needed by tribes to grow and denying you another pop? I think a solution to this could be only counting Tribe units and not pop in your villages, so you could actually manage your food thresholds by disbanding tribes at the cost of hurting your exploration and map presence. But this is only one solution to a tricky problem.

2) How do you account for multiple tribes reaching the next food threshold at the same time?

This is much more difficult. Say you click the "Move all units" button and two armies collect curiosities at the same time, or you hunt a mammoth and two armies in the battle area gain enough food to grow at the same time. Where does the new tribe spawn, supposing the other army will not have enough food to grow? The issue with hunting could be resolved by not splitting food between Nomad armies within the battle area before reinforcements are unlocked, but how do you solve the two tribes picking up curiosities at the same time? Randomly choosing which army will gain a unit if they both gain enough food simultaneously and tasking the player to be more judicious about the order they move their tribes in is a solution, but it feels unsatisfactory. This is a difficult problem to solve.

3) How does this change generalize across Nomad armies?

You could just say, "this only applies to Tribes in the Neolithic era." But having Neolithic tribes governed by one set of rules, while Hunnic and Mongol Hordes are governed by another seems very off. Alternatively, you could apply these rules to Huns and Mongols as well, since they do need to be tuned down a bit. But then the other problems remain and are applied to even more cases. For example, now that reinforcements will be available, how do you account for the simultaneous growth problem post battle?

I do feel like a soft limitation on Neolithic growth like this is the way to go, but it doesn't come without its own score of problems and I can see why the devs might be hesitant to implement this or anything like it.