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nurgles_herald wrote:

Sorry if this is against forum rules, here's a stream of me vibing with Bruno and just talking about Game Design in Humankind.

https://youtube.com/live/m64MsTFAa98?feature=share

tl;dw- I think that the game is honestly probably one of the best *designed* 4Xs I've ever played, but unfortunately it has some serious problems in the front end.  Some of the massive deltas kinda make it feel like the design intent was for the player to *organically* discover the power of snowballing, but I think if we just had a better tutorial and a few adjustments here and there this really could still be a Civ killer.

On the note of scoring surplus, I think if it got assigned at either end of turn or on buyrushing it would align meaningfully more with what I perceive to be the design space of Humankind really- to be as open and welcoming as possible to newer players while being as interesting as possible to invested ones.

Maybe late game infrastructure actually should be *worse* but you can build it all in an existing city by just bringing a builder or settler to the city in question and clicking something?  I dunno, I get that you guys wanna get around the late game infrastructure problem and mad props for attempting to tackle it, but most people don't know how much random nonsense stuff hurts them in a 4x.

Hey!! Thanks for sharing it (and no, it is not going against the rules)!
I will try to get some free time to check the full video 🥰

It's just the "Fundamentally Emergent Vibes" stream from the other day if Bruno already bugged you about it.  If not, please feel free to watch it but it is almost a podcast.  I do not know how to do fancy editing and refuse to learn, I need to spend my time learning games rather than silly video things for dopamine abuse.  You can get 95% of the value with me in a tab while you play around with whatever game you've got coming down the pike for us in 2025.

I suppose to tl;dw the video for folks at home, here are the 5 main points after discussing the video at length with someone in my discord- note, this are direct quotes from discord, so I'm a little spicy.

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1. 1.) AI behaviors do not express how the game works at all - if the player is to understand Humankind, the AI needs to act as a pedagogical tool; so no more skipping to Ancient before Story in our Stars, no more collecting 19 stars in Ancient; the AI needs to show the snowballing vs fame tension
2. [11:36 PM]2.) Food gen in Neolithic needs to be really heavy at game start and not spawn more as the game progresses and maybe even remove food; this will significantly reduce food deltas between starts and also help people "feel" the natural push to leave the Neolithic
3. [11:37 PM]3.) Mammoths should not have sanctuaries period but should spawn extra mammoths via some sort of biological process; this allows the player to manage the mammoth population more directly and with more inherent tension, and also would significantly reduce the chance of one player getting 9 and another getting 2 via the mammoths randomly walking around the map
4. [11:38 PM]4.) The balance needs to align well with the HUD, so aesthete cultures need to be strong, but this should factor back into point 1- namely, that the AI should express to the player that some cultures are generally better than others and aim to take those early to encourage the player to want to compete with the AI for those cultures
5. [11:39 PM]5.) The insane snowballing imbalance feels like it was designed by a tortured genius screaming at the void, hoping players would organically "discover" the snowballing imbalance vs fame tension; tone down the imbalances but maintain them as it is crucial in Humankind for some things to be better than others so folks need to compete for the good stuff