The concept of the merging cultures and 'evolving' societal choice that the game is being marketed as seem to not be central to the goal of the game.  The player accumulates Fame in various  ays to a final count at the end of the turns. After playing about 30 hours on the Lucy opendev I can safely say that I can succeed just by paying some attention to resouce management and using military to expand and keep the neighbors from expanding too much.   Naturally the devs can just ratchet up the AI's bonuses or other perks.  But, I think the balance needs  to be adjusted so the other choices  matter much more.

Agreed on Norsemen and Dutch. Augmenting the capabilities of land units makes it more useful.

I'd also like to add that I think the Greeks are the best combination of balance and fun in the game at the moment. Their +2 science per researcher is decent when they are picked, but continues to scale well throughout the game as cities grow in pops without being game breaking. Hoplites are just a decent unit that can stay relevant into the early medieval thanks to their phalanx ability, but aren't busted since they are still a melee unit. The amphitheater gives influence based on adjacency to other districts, which makes it fun fitting it into a city and trying to optimize around that district. It's scaling through eras keeps it relevant so that you don't want to replace it, and the Amphitheater comes early enough in the game that influence is still relevant. 

My only gripe with Greeks, really, is that influence really loses prominence later in the game when the only real use for it is wonders. It seems to have some connection to culture, but it isn't really clear what culture does beyond giving you grievances if you're dominant in another civ. Otherwise, though, I think it is a good example of a civ that is well balanced, fun, and has bonuses that stay relevant.

For perspective, I would argue one of the most poorly balanced cultures (in a "it really doesn't work" way) is the Franks. They are an expansion civ that don't have any bonuses geared towards getting more territory, thus hurting fame generation capabilities. Their extra population growth speed is wasted because most cities benefiting from it are already growing at an alarming rate, and pop growth is limited to 1 pop per turn. The scriptorium is extremely niche because religious districts are extremely niche. Perhaps the only reedeming factor is their EU with 3 strength over the Knight and heavy charge, but this does require 2 iron and 2 horses, which may be problematic in some situations. This is just a civ where none of the bonuses really work together in a cohesive way. Ottomans are pretty bad too (Sultan's Realm ability and Sultan Camii are absolutely useless).

The culture merging is not really merging but picking what trait you want the civ to have?  I don't really feel my civ growing on me after playthrough.  Like merging ought to have something more special to it.  Say if a tech or building would become available if you chose this two or three culture in the past.  

In my opinion, the fame bonus for transcending your culture should be removed. Since the implied goal of the game is to reach the highest possible fame, it feels like the player is actually being punished for switching cultures (effectively losing 10% future fame gain). Considering that mixing cultures really is the fun part of the game, I find this to be a rather poor choice in game design.

Switching Cultures gives you an additional ability (the old one is not lost) essentially transcended cultures just gave the ability “+fame” instead of +something useful for your empire.

Krikkitone wrote:

Switching Cultures gives you an additional ability (the old one is not lost) essentially transcended cultures just gave the ability “+fame” instead of +something useful for your empire.

True, and on its surface the choice between more points and more power seems like a fair one. However, I don't think it will be much of a choice in practice (and this is, of course, speculation based on current state of the game). In multiplayer, you'll always pick power, since fame will be irrelevant and games will be decided by elimination. In single player where you'll essentially compete to beat your previous score, picking more points will be the obvious answer. And of course, if you're just playing to while away the hours, neither really matters.

So, in my opinion, removing (or altering somehow) the transcend bonus won't affect multiplayer, and will expand the players' choices in single player games.

ForrestS49 wrote:

I wanted to raise something that is not mechanical. I found it very strange that the Olmec culture's city (or at least their first city) has a Spanish name. I can't recall it off the top of my head, if I can edit this comment I will add it in, but it was something akin to San Fernando. I don't understand why a culture's city name would be in the language of a culture that did not even interact with them, as they had disappeared before the Spanish came to Central America, if I am not mistaken. I understand we do not know very much of the Olmec, but I would hope that city names could reflect something besides the eventual colonizers of the region that the Olmec lived in. 

I was also shocked that the name was San Lorenzo but, to be honest, we can't read olmec glyphs, and have no clue how they named their cities or even what their language sounded like. I guess they could have invented something inspired by modern languages spoken in the area but referring to the cities with the name we currently give to the archaeological sites might be the less intrusive option. They took the same approach with the Harappans, but maybe because the modern names are not in a western language it was less jarring.

Cultures feel quite shallow compared to their Endless counterparts, but hold up just fine against what Civ does. But culture transition is not only fun, but brings a strategic depth to the game that most other titles in the genre completely miss. With each era you and the AI have the chance to adapt and change goals, and I think the way Fame is awarded encourages doing different things in different eras. Its all horribly unbalanced, unfortunately.

I don't like the inconsistency of the naming conventions. IMO there should only be one Japanese or Persian culture in the game. I also don't see a reason why the Umayyads get named after a ruling dynasty, but ancient Persians don't get the same treatment. Also, Norsemen, really? Not Vikings, or simply Norse?

I didn't get to play enough to try all the cultures, but as others have pointed out, the culture change feels abrupt.

A culture tree would make sense, such that some cultures can "evolve" into some cultures, while others would have different options, and even overlap. The trees could be loosely based on historical developments, though this does not align much with the "re-write history" emphasis of the game.

Cultures can be separated into flavour and mechanics so I'll talk about both.

Flavour

Currently the flavour for the cultures themselves is great, there are some exceptions as people have noted but overall there's been a good job capturing the feel of each culture. My personal opinion on the cultures that could use a little boost are; Norsemen and their Naust, it looks just like a regular harbour nothing special, The Spanish City centre not actually being a spanish city centre but a castle from the medieval period constructed by Aragon, and the Poles Emblematic Quarter being a Barbican, something that was universal across europe during the time and not emblematic of the Poles at all (at the very least the name of the structure can be changed to the Polish version "Barbakan"). Aside from the specific cultures it's great that as you progress your new buildings and cities to suit your culture, but I'd like an option to change existing city centres and districts too. It shouldn't have any gameplay allocations, it'd just be nice if my civilization decided it wanted to update some older architecture and there should be the option.

Mechanics

There's a lot to say here and I think most people have pointed out the major imbalances already. Some I think haven't been mentioned is that yes naval units can't attack coastal units, but even if they could their stats suck and their range is awful, so those should be increased to so they don't get outgunned by bowmen. This would increase the value of the naval Emblematic units, the ability for naval units to interact with sieges would also help. The celts feel incredibly weak and need an overall buff Gaestati are so weak it's not even funny, even a single extra Strength would make all the difference and the fact they're agrarian also doesn't help them out much. I played Franks too and they honestly felt really weird but still decently strong thanks to their improved knights, Their emblematic quarter should provide a bigger bonus considering it itself is not a religious district, right now +4 is nothing for the effort especially considering franks can't spam them, Their reduction in growth time is alright but a bit hampered by the existing restrictions on growth and the expansionist affinity doesn't help them at all. I understand the Charlemagne inspiration for the franks but without the ability to make use of the increased growth rate, in order to settle the theoretical provinces the expansionist affinity provides their game-plan doesn't function.

 It's odd that the Byzantines are so reliant on horses due to their district, it's honestly funny how much of a horse-based economy they are. Speaking of I noticed there wasn't any Aesthete cultures in the medieval age, the Byzantines would be a good fit for it since tourism is also a money increasing ability that the affinity grants and the ability to instantly convert a province's culture makes sense considering their history with the rus. The huns and mongols are really strong as of right now due to their EQ being considered a district, I also think mongols are better off being expansionist due to historical reasons, and for teutons to be militaristic instead, also for historical reasons, aside from that these factions are pretty strong and could use a bit of a nerf to their districts, and have their units be a bit weaker in the case of huns and mongols, maybe by 1 STR.

The spanish Conquistadors are a side-grade to the existing arquebus, having both at once feels like an oversight as conquistadors can't upgrade to musketeers but the arquebus can. Rakehts from the Iroquois also feel a bit anemic for their category but that might be because I didn't feel the need to use stealth against the AI and against a real player I can see sneak attacks from 41 str units being pretty deadly even if they're quite weaker than a normal musketeer.

I didn't get the chance to really delve into many cultures but I hope my feedback is appreciated.

I want to say again that I do hate the fact that the Polish Emblematic quarter is the Barbican, I'd be fine it was replaced with something else such as the Folwark. It would also be a nice tie-in to the agrarian side of poland that isn't quite in the game, since all their bonuses are purely combat focused.

I'd also like to say the Mycenaean cyclopean fortress has a bit too small of a radius to make its effects worthwhile, unless the city happens to be built in a good enough choke-point, something that shouldn't be required for the basic emblematic structure of the culture to function. A 2 tile radius would be fine with a small increase to the building's industry cost for the quarter to be worth it.

The Assyrian Emblamatic quarter also gets a dishonourable mention here for simply being a Bastion but arriving earlier, and Bastions are not good enough to be given an emblematic Quarter spot.

I don't know what to say about the English Bastion replacement, based on the first Opendev I had high opinions on it, but that was during a much earlier time. If anyone had used them during Lucy I'd enjoy hearing their potential and usefulness. Otherwise I'd say Strongholds are a decent Quarter, nothing staggering but has great synergy with their longbows.

I have really mixed feeling about this game mechanic.

On the one hand, it really is cool that your land has a history, that there are some landmarks from earlier people. Also the cultures are appropriate for the time period, no stone age USA for example.

On the other hand, this replacement of culture during age change seems a bit forced and arbitrary. Also the ability to replace your culture with something unrelated (culture from different side of the globe), seems odd. Overall this game mechanic is in an uncanny valley for me: those cultures somewhat resemble real cultures, but they are used so arbitrary that they lose any relation to a real thing. When I played Humankind I almost had to remind myself to replace culture names with some meaningless tokens in my head: those are not Greeks, they are culture "foo", those are not romans, they are culture "bar", etc. :D

The one thing about the transition I find counter-intuitive is that I can usually play Zhou and pump out schools and delay taking a decision on ascending or transcending, which delays the current science progress. But once you think you got all the era stars you can reasonably get, I move on to the next culture and immediately research almost all the technologies from the next era. As a consequence, you get very quickly through the classical era into medieval, which gets you to much better units and then you can start steam-rolling. This science aspect or how to ascend/transcend should be worked on imho.  

reich238 wrote:

The one thing about the transition I find counter-intuitive is that I can usually play Zhou and pump out schools and delay taking a decision on ascending or transcending, which delays the current science progress. But once you think you got all the era stars you can reasonably get, I move on to the next culture and immediately research almost all the technologies from the next era. As a consequence, you get very quickly through the classical era into medieval, which gets you to much better units and then you can start steam-rolling. This science aspect or how to ascend/transcend should be worked on imho.  

You should post this in the Pacing Thread as an example of the game being too fast.

I liked the diversity of cultures, era after era.

I felt that each culture could have its own stars for fame, in order to add more diversity in these stars from one era to the other.