Hey All!

Since this is the first time you get to try out the Neolithic Era in an OpenDev, we'd really like to hear what you think about it! Did you enjoy it? Was there anything you particularly liked or disliked?

Let us know your first impressions here!

I couldn't get the hunting stars despite killing enough critters. Is this a bug or do I need to kill specific things?

Mausklickmoerder wrote:

Neolithic era was cute, but I hoped to find more natural wonders or interesting landmarks. Meeting other tribes was weird, though. I couldn't interact with them in any way but combat and they automatically respawned even if I wiped them out. I also met them way earlier than I think I would.

I would have liked a bit longer in the Neolithic era - I had a fight with one mammoth, placed two outposts and discovered 2 knowledge points and then moved swiftly onto the next era - would have been nice to have the time to explore

I liked the Neolithic era. It looked like there were some neutral dark red tribes running around as well and I think I saw one spawn from a Sanctuary, and they also counted towards my hunt animals star because I didn't hunt any animals that playthrough and still got it. Additionally, I wasn't able to actually select a legacy trait from that era. I got the knowledge and did the event decision, but in my empire screen it had an x through it. Was this feature intentionally cut from the OpenDev and did anyone else have this experience?

I've found because of the pace of the game it is more beneficial to plop a city out ASAP rather than take the time to scout around much in the noelithic. Curios in particular felt useless as a result - I'd never be close to having the required number before going into ancient, and the super small amount of fame isn't worth the turns I'm losing developing my cities.

The Neolithic era is very, VERY short. Assuming you play optimally you can be out of it in 5 turns (ignore curios and rush food spawns, or bullrush a tribe and hope they stand and fight but weaker start for your civ). While I understand that it shouldn't be a huge odyssey given that the "real" gameplay starts in Ancient era, it is pretty jarring. You can also get monumentally screwed if you run into bad terrain (for example starting your movement turn "entering" a river)

I love the idea and it reminds me of old "pipe dream" suggestions I saw for Civilization (adding an era before Ancient instead of settling immediately on game start), but right now there is no reason to take your time and you can rush out of it very aggressively. As far as using it to scout for city locations, this feels like a bad idea compared to just taking your start location (it's fixed for everyone so it should be no secret that settling on the river a bit south from starting is a REALLY good starting location)

And also, some AIs seem to have a LOT of trouble getting out of Neolithic. I had AIs only get out of Neolithic like halfway into the game, I presume because they took a bad fight and never recovered, or got trapped by Ancient civilizations enforcing their territory

I agree that the pacing is too quick (but it's not just the neolithic).

There is an advantage to stay at Neolithic a bit more than necessary, though. You can start with an insane number of scouts this way, while later you need to build units in cities (and they cost citizens which grow a bit slow).

I love that you integrated the Neolithic era into the game! What a fantastic way to start your journey, as a nameless hunter-gatherer tribe. While I overall enjoyed it, I have a few points of critique as well:

1. In general, I think it was a bit too easy. There was no real threat, even big animals like mammoth were easy prey and I was able to advance to the next era within 5 or so turns - without any previous experience about what I have to do.
2. Related to 1., I think mammoth give too much food. I had to kill 2 mammoths and together with one or two curiosities, my tribe was already at full capacity (4/4 units).
3. The respawn mechanic is weird. I wanted to find out what happens when your tribe gets killed in battle, and it just respawned. This seems a bit anticlimatic. It would be great if you could maybe implement a mechanic, where the last unit of your tribe can't be killed. Instead, when it looses a battle, it automatically retreats, albeit severly injured. This makes it more realistic and challenging to come back from a bad encounter.
4. When you found an outpost in the Neolithic age, the outpost would automatically build farms around it and start exploiting these tiles. This was very immersion breaking for me, since there was not a lot of farming going on in the Neolithic Age. It also directly contradicts the hunter-gatherer playstyle you are trying to emulate. Please change neolithic outposts so that they do not exploit the surrounding tiles - or change the graphical representation on the map.
5. Maybe outposts should also cost food, to make it a more interesting decision whether you focus on early expansion or units/pops? I currently don't see a downside to grabbing as many territories as possible as early as possible.
6. You have these nice artworks for curiosities, but they are easy to miss if you don't pay attention. Why not display them in the notification bar instead of the general "you found a curiosity", which does tell you anything about it, in case you missed the popup on the map?

Gaining tribes in Neolithic is too easy and since you can turn them to scouts or extra population in Ancient I feel like delaying culture pick is a too strong strategy. Perhaps the cost of new tribes should increase exponentially and number of tribes required for era stars should be lowered.

I find idea of Neolithic Era very interesting and liked it implementation in general. Here are some of my thoughts about it:

1. It's really hard to reach 10 Knowledge currently. Curriosities with appropriete resource are pretty rare on the map. As result ability to get Knowledge star is unreasonably harder then star for hunt or pops. It would be great if we could get some through events, outposts and interactions with other tribes (be it battle or some primitive diplomacy).

2. It would be great if foundation of first outposts weren't as easy and felt more monumental. Maybe they could cost hunter unit or two and be prerequest for progressing into next era. 

3. I would love to see little bit slower Neolithic Era progression. Pops and hunt star could need little bit more to slow thing down a bit.

LunargentThorn wrote:

2. It would be great if foundation of first outposts weren't as easy and felt more monumental. Maybe they could cost hunter unit or two and be prerequest for progressing into next era. 

I think it would be a good idea to sacrifice a unit to plop an outpost. I actually think this would be a good way to slow down the game by requiring you to use a unit for every outpost in the ancient era as well (which gives you a reason to make the scout unit).

Hi'

I have tried playing the game and got a little way into the game, but it just more or less sticks after a couple of turns. Exploring a bit I find my laptop GPU is the one below the minimum required which is a great shame. I did note while using task manager that the game used 100% of the GPU ram, yet none of the shared ram.Is this an oversight?

 Now I've been play computer games for long time my first machine being a Sinclair ZX80 and when younger (chronologically) I could upgrade machines frequently, even to the extent of building my on rigs. Nowadays things are different. The machine specs for games is getting higher and higher that a part of the consumer base is being left behind by the specs. In the early days of games the coding had to be so much tighter than now in order to get the absolute best out of machines due to the limits of the hardware that was available.

coloneluber wrote:
I think it would be a good idea to sacrifice a unit to plop an outpost. I actually think this would be a good way to slow down the game by requiring you to use a unit for every outpost in the ancient era as well (which gives you a reason to make the scout unit).

Yeah, but the hard part is "which unit?", especially when you have an army with different ones. It might need an extra screen after you click to set the outpost to select it?

Elhoim wrote:

Yeah, but the hard part is "which unit?", especially when you have an army with different ones. It might need an extra screen after you click to set the outpost to select it?

You could do that. You could also have a separate unit for the ancient era like the colonist in later ages, except it builds outposts with an influence cost.

One idea could be that military units can build outposts, but you need a "settler" unit to actually build a city.

Also had issues w. not gaining hunting stars in spite of successful hunts.

Will also agree that mammoths are too easy to kill.

Elhoim wrote:

One idea could be that military units can build outposts, but you need a "settler" unit to actually build a city.

I dislike this idea. The aspect of the game where settler units are not required to expand is one of the best parts of it imo. It allows the player to play in a more free form way is a great difference between it and the civilization series. It also makes the settler unit you're able to get further down the line in the early modern era more impactful because it makes a city on the spot instead of having to do the outpost>city path.

We might want to break this off into it's own thread to not clog up discussion about the Neolithic era.

Neolithic era may be the first biggest difference between Civs and this game that players come across, and I find it very cool and meaningful.

It's cool, but VERY exploitable. Moving to bronze age with 25 tribes, 400 influence and two outposts prepared for cap+it's first extra province is insane. I'm pretty sure I could've pulled 2 more outposts for immediate second city too if I played it better. 

Then you just recycle tribes into pops to fuel your cities, I don't know why I'd want to move up the eras at 5 tribes when mammoths give you 2 tribes per kill and 40 influence too, you accumulate momentum so fast in neolithic and then it slows down tremendously as soon as some git invents agriculture.

The speed at which your cities grow increases with the number of pops too, so moving up the ages before you have a fat stack of tribes feels like a trap.

coloneluber wrote:

LunargentThorn wrote:

2. It would be great if foundation of first outposts weren't as easy and felt more monumental. Maybe they could cost hunter unit or two and be prerequest for progressing into next era. 

I think it would be a good idea to sacrifice a unit to plop an outpost. I actually think this would be a good way to slow down the game by requiring you to use a unit for every outpost in the ancient era as well (which gives you a reason to make the scout unit).

I'm quoting those two because I strongly agree. 

I really enjoyed the neolithic and would love to see it fleshed out and lengthened a bit but I agree with everyone else that it feels super exploitable. How about adding in a global food resource (like gold) that all scouts share from but then add a 1 or 2 food per turn maintenance cost to each unit... one of the great things about playing in the neolithic should be a feeling of struggle and a need to settle down and farm or starve... right now there is no struggle and your honestly stronger even if your neighbours are settling down.

Here's another idea that may be a little far fetched have the neolithic end in an ice age (or some other soft disaster) after a preset number of turns (15-30ish?) and depending on how well you did determines what and where you start once the ice age is over and you and all of the other civs come out the other side with the first settlements.  

As people have said Neolithic Era is interesting but too easy to exploit and I think there are a two key things that make it so.

1. Being able to build multiple outposts immediately.
   
   I think this should be limited to just 1 outpost which can be relocated if I can find a better place for it as I explore. This would give me another reason to explore the map and find that perfect spot that I would like to settle and become my capital city. Leave the territory claiming and expansion to the Ancient Era.
   
   
2. Allowing me to split my initial units into multiple.
   
   I dont think this makes sense at this stage of the game. My tribe should be moving together. If they split, they'd probably just become two seperate tribes instead. If instead we could only have one unit, then gathering more food is good way to 'power up' my tribe, allowing me to take on bigger game (Mammoths) or fight off other tribes more easily. Mammoth kills and successfully winning fights against other tribes could therefore provide more Fame points, boosting my progress towards the next Era.

I think another problem that makes neolithic era exploitable is how easy it is to gain influence points. You get 40 just by killing a mammoth. This is super exploitable - basically you could stock up on influence points and plop down multiple outposts as soon as you enter ancient era (even if you limit it to one outpost in the neolithic era). I suggest scrapping influence in this case. You could get extra fame by killing larger games.

That seems like a good solution.

I agree that being able to build just one outpost that you can relocate, having just one tribe (so trascend with 4 + outpost) and removing influence gain would make it work much better. The main goal should be to find a good spot to settle your first city, not fill the map with outpost nor create lots of armies.

Great idea. Needs some work. I like to over populate on units to give myself a population bonus. Removing the healing on Neolithic tribes might be a good way to negate some early game pushing. You get the one event - and one healing related event or one random other effect. Also it might be an unpopular opinion but I think remove the ability to ransack on tribal units. Until there's culture you are focused on scavenging/hunting, and, possibly exploring.

I will point out to all the people bemoaning the advantages of Neolithic. Turning into a culture capable of diplomacy is pretty crucial to not getting too badly stomped. The Olmec's just eeked out a star and immediately asked for a non-aggression pact. If I wanted to just be a gamer about it I could have declined, but, I feel that it was a momentous occasion. They aren't an unknown raiders/scavengers - they are a people! 

Elhoim wrote:

One idea could be that military units can build outposts, but you need a "settler" unit to actually build a city.

That already exists. With the tech, you can build different level of settler, spawing a city with more building, without the outpost.

But I did not try it, if a settler cost influence too, it look like useless to me has I have enough gold to instantly spawn good outpost as cities (an outpost with enough food). An outpost with few food is always added to a existing cities. A good city have take an outpost. A huge cities have some wonders and annex two or more territories.

For neolithic era, when you understand it s cheated to wait, I dominate my continent in normal by harrassing an opponent. Switching era with 3 outposts and 8 scouts...

The worst diffculties is cheated for AI, they spawn later unit to fast.

Elhoim wrote:
having just one tribe (so trascend with 4 + outpost) and removing influence gain would make it work much better

That is an extreme change that would make neolithic far less interesting and fun while also reducing strategic choices.
Choosing whether you want to settle or stick around a bit longer to collect the 10 ruin perk and more pops should be a legit choice, similar choice is present at every era where you pick between sticking to your current culture for a bit longer or moving onto the next one and losing your current unique stuff. 10 ruin perk being the way it is seems like a direct encouragement to do that even, since you'll have way more than 5 tribes by the time you find enough ruins of the right type.

The bigger problem with neolithic abuse in my opinion is the extreme shift in momentum that happens when you switch from it to ancient - one second your dudes are multiplying like flies and next you're tied up by much slower pop and influence growth. It makes you want to stick as stone age Grug for longer because it's just more fun and being settled is like being put into chains in comparison.
Before I realised that I could abuse mammoth farming and recycle my dudes into pops (that button is surprisingly easy to miss) I played a couple games where I settled fast and had cities growing "naturally" and ancient era was just slow as hell, I didn't even get my religion in the ancient era because pop growth was so slow, I made no new units either because again, pops grow REALLY slowly if you don't have a bunch of tribes to fill them out. Number of pops you have in your city just affects pop growth rate far more than having lots of food does, which is realistic, but it seems to directly encourage aforementioned tribemaxing.

What if instead of nerfing neolithic into the ground to be as boring as a "naked" ancient era their power differentials could be equalled out? I definitely agree on mammoths being way too good, halving their rewards would be a decent start to making them more fair, perhaps also making them dangerous enough to require a stack of 3 tribes to take down. But also them being the biggest source of influence for this stone age tribe feels completely right, you would become more influential by being good at hunting giant mammoths. 

Making ancient era more dynamic should be a big priority though, being able to get extra tribes during neolithic is a big part of that, since being able to boost your cities with tribes does provide a nice kickstart to your civilisation.

Next point that needs to be stated very loudly because lots of people seem to forget about it - AI sucks right now, it's not even close to being able to play the game, which is also one of the things that allows the player to run rampant and put outposts everywhere while an endless tide of tribes sweeps across the land. Even if you don't put outposts everywhere AI barely shows signs of life. It's not difficult for the player to just waltz into a region that has an outpost in it and burn it in a turn - you've done, I've done it - but AI isn't good enough. Not at neolithic era, not at any other eras.

It would be very silly to balance the game around that level of stupidity however, taking tools away from the player because AI wasn't made to utilise them.

It is also worrisome how eager people are to propose harshest nerfs and especially hard caps (ew) whenever a balance issue is brought up.

Balance around strength is balance around fun.

Mostly agree with previous discussions. Just want to emphasize what I think are the key points:

+1: Neolithic era is a cool concept (super super cool)

+1: Balance needs work

+1: Avoid hard caps, and instead balance around soft costs and benefits - cost to create outpost, benefits from mammoths, etc.

TimBur wrote:

Mostly agree with previous discussions. Just want to emphasize what I think are the key points:

+1: Neolithic era is a cool concept (super super cool)

+1: Balance needs work

+1: Avoid hard caps, and instead balance around soft costs and benefits - cost to create outpost, benefits from mammoths, etc.

Soft caps could work with adding maintenance costs

1 minor point:
those "knowledge curiosity" don't give you sience, but influence. The naming suggest the other.

So i didn't know I could already claim an territory.

Adding food upkeep would be a great idea. That way you would be naturally inclined to settle once your tribe gets too big and you can't find enough food to feed them. 

I agree with the opions voiced in this thread, but wanted to share my thoughts on how the era is too easy:

I think the combat AI of animals lessens the challenge of the neolithic era too much. Since high ground gives a large combat bonus and animals (or neutral armies in general) seem to be programmed to always attack if possible, it's often enough to stand ontop of a hill and watch mammoths (or any other animal) suicide into you, giving you huge rewards with little effort.

Animals in real life are generally not aggressive and they certainly will avoid a fight to the death and try to flee. So I would suggest to implement this in their behavior, which would result in real hunts, where in combat you have to attack the animal and can't stay defensive on high ground for an easy victory. That makes the combat more challenging and thus makes it harder to aquire food. Also it gives animal combat strength a purpose; currently it's largely irrelevant if you attack deer or bears since the high ground bonus let's you dominate either way.

Tanel88 wrote:

Adding food upkeep would be a great idea. That way you would be naturally inclined to settle once your tribe gets too big and you can't find enough food to feed them. 

Ah, yes, scaling food needs with each additional tribesman is a great idea. Makes a lot of sense and stops the abuse of spamming scouts.

I really enjoyed the neolithic start. I think there are some interesting options here, do you rush out to 5 pop by turn 5 and pick a culture you really want, or take a few more turns, and actually get the 10 curiosities. If, every time you get a new tribe, you split the party, I found you can cover a lot of ground. I got to 150 influence, 7 pop by turn 8, getting the pop and knowledge stars.

I think what most here don't consider, is that the AI is quite weak,  so it doesn't really matter which strategy you do, they still get to the ancient era later, so you always have the first pick of cultures. But in a multiplayer, I think those two strategies should both be viable.

I personally think the neolithic era is really fun, and needs the least amount of balancing effort. Though currently the 10 knowledge neolithic legacy reward was really vague and unclear, what if any impact they had. Do they affect some future events?

VargK wrote:

I agree with the opions voiced in this thread, but wanted to share my thoughts on how the era is too easy:

...
Animals in real life are generally not aggressive and they certainly will avoid a fight to the death and try to flee. So I would suggest to implement this in their behavior, which would result in real hunts, where in combat you have to attack the animal and can't stay defensive on high ground for an easy victory. That makes the combat more challenging and thus makes it harder to aquire food. Also it gives animal combat strength a purpose; currently it's largely irrelevant if you attack deer or bears since the high ground bonus let's you dominate either way.

I think that should apply to the passive animals, like deer, which should run & make you chase them, but not to the aggressive animals like bears. Mammoths should be in a middle ground, if possible.

FaeBriona wrote:

VargK wrote:

I agree with the opions voiced in this thread, but wanted to share my thoughts on how the era is too easy:

...
Animals in real life are generally not aggressive and they certainly will avoid a fight to the death and try to flee. So I would suggest to implement this in their behavior, which would result in real hunts, where in combat you have to attack the animal and can't stay defensive on high ground for an easy victory. That makes the combat more challenging and thus makes it harder to aquire food. Also it gives animal combat strength a purpose; currently it's largely irrelevant if you attack deer or bears since the high ground bonus let's you dominate either way.

I think that should apply to the passive animals, like deer, which should run & make you chase them, but not to the aggressive animals like bears. Mammoths should be in a middle ground, if possible.

Bears do attack you right now already

indrkl wrote:

FaeBriona wrote:

VargK wrote:

I agree with the opions voiced in this thread, but wanted to share my thoughts on how the era is too easy:

...
Animals in real life are generally not aggressive and they certainly will avoid a fight to the death and try to flee. So I would suggest to implement this in their behavior, which would result in real hunts, where in combat you have to attack the animal and can't stay defensive on high ground for an easy victory. That makes the combat more challenging and thus makes it harder to aquire food. Also it gives animal combat strength a purpose; currently it's largely irrelevant if you attack deer or bears since the high ground bonus let's you dominate either way.

I think that should apply to the passive animals, like deer, which should run & make you chase them, but not to the aggressive animals like bears. Mammoths should be in a middle ground, if possible.

Bears do attack you right now already

I'm aware of that. Was making a distinction between animals that should run from a fight [deer, which currently do not], and those that should fight as they do now.

Hi, I would like to talk about a point in the neolithic that I feel is very important for the overall game experience:

Exploration is far too unbounded. By the end of the era you can have an army of 4 or 5 scouts having revealed more than half of the continent. I think this is a very important issue, as it makes exploration and discovery in the later eras less appealing, and you are also left with a bundle of units that you don't know what to do with anymore by the Ancient era. I would like to suggest a couple of fixes for this issue: (a) Make the fog of war hide tiles (as if you hadn't explored them) in territories where you don't have an outpost, until a certain milestone such as the writing technology (maybe with a delay of 2/3 turns or something so your field of vision isn't too limited), that will prevent you from just running your scouts to the edge of the map and will actually encourage exploration in later eras when you have unlocked the ability to chart the land. (b) Make exploration a little more dangerous. In my opinion, right now, unstacking scout armies in the neolithic is a no-brainer, as a single scout can easily survive the ocassional bear (if you even run into one). I think you need to add more wild (dangerous) animals and/or barbarian-like hostile tribes, to force the player to focus on growing their tribe and think twice before unstacking. I think this also makes sense from a historical point of view, where small groups of tribesmen didn't just wander away from each other due to the great dangers the world posed at that time.

When I first heard about the neolithic era, I was pumped because it fixed an issue I had with the civilization series, which is that you have to pretty much settle at your starting location, or one or two tiles adjacent to it, or otherwise the opportunity cost is far too high. However, I imagined the neolithic in Humankind as a short period of 4-5 turns where you explored the immediate vecinity of your starting location to find an ideal settling spot. I think it is possible to give the player the hunter-gatherer experience without making them run around half of the continent (or have a perfect recollection of what they saw if they do).

afarteta93 wrote:
you are also left with a bundle of units that you don't know what to do with anymore by the Ancient era

You can recycle them into pops, just disband a unit that's inside a city's borders, that works with any unit and even ships. 

That's the best part about having lots of tribes when you move up to bronze age, filling up the cities with them.

I like the idea, but somewhat related to another comment: I could bully the green AI for four - five rounds at least, having them respawn at the same location and just using a river advantage to hammer them, upon which my two scouts with a bit of animal hunting ended up with two experience stars. After the green AI moved further South, I took the capital of the brown AI after having burned down some outpost next to me, with these two scouts and a battery ram (thanks to two really powerful Confucian schools, it was easy to get the tech early on). After those ~20 or ~30 turns it was all decided. So I would hope the spawning changes to not allow you to bash other tribes and that they generally go about defending their properties a bit better / or even attacking your own.

alQamar wrote:

The AI (in Lucy Dev) will not go on to the next era if the player does not do that.  

Actually, i'm quite sure (at least in Normal difficulty, that i've seen the AI get to the following era before me.

I agree that the Neolithic era is fun!

Finding new curiosities on the spots I previously wandered through is fun too.

But I don't like how exploitable it is. Imagine a situation in which every time 20/20 food is reached and a new tribe unit created, that tribe unit is split off from the army and sent to gather curiosities and hunt deers. It results in exponential unit count growth, the whole continent becomes covered in those units, as well as outposts.

This can be fixed by putting a limit on the number of armies, at least for the Neolithic era, and it can be raised later.

Nyarl wrote:

Elhoim wrote:
having just one tribe (so trascend with 4 + outpost) and removing influence gain would make it work much better

That is an extreme change that would make neolithic far less interesting and fun while also reducing strategic choices.
Choosing whether you want to settle or stick around a bit longer to collect the 10 ruin perk and more pops should be a legit choice, similar choice is present at every era where you pick between sticking to your current culture for a bit longer or moving onto the next one and losing your current unique stuff. 10 ruin perk being the way it is seems like a direct encouragement to do that even, since you'll have way more than 5 tribes by the time you find enough ruins of the right type.

The bigger problem with neolithic abuse in my opinion is the extreme shift in momentum that happens when you switch from it to ancient - one second your dudes are multiplying like flies and next you're tied up by much slower pop and influence growth. It makes you want to stick as stone age Grug for longer because it's just more fun and being settled is like being put into chains in comparison.
Before I realised that I could abuse mammoth farming and recycle my dudes into pops (that button is surprisingly easy to miss) I played a couple games where I settled fast and had cities growing "naturally" and ancient era was just slow as hell, I didn't even get my religion in the ancient era because pop growth was so slow, I made no new units either because again, pops grow REALLY slowly if you don't have a bunch of tribes to fill them out. Number of pops you have in your city just affects pop growth rate far more than having lots of food does, which is realistic, but it seems to directly encourage aforementioned tribemaxing.

What if instead of nerfing neolithic into the ground to be as boring as a "naked" ancient era their power differentials could be equalled out? I definitely agree on mammoths being way too good, halving their rewards would be a decent start to making them more fair, perhaps also making them dangerous enough to require a stack of 3 tribes to take down. But also them being the biggest source of influence for this stone age tribe feels completely right, you would become more influential by being good at hunting giant mammoths. 

Making ancient era more dynamic should be a big priority though, being able to get extra tribes during neolithic is a big part of that, since being able to boost your cities with tribes does provide a nice kickstart to your civilisation.

Next point that needs to be stated very loudly because lots of people seem to forget about it - AI sucks right now, it's not even close to being able to play the game, which is also one of the things that allows the player to run rampant and put outposts everywhere while an endless tide of tribes sweeps across the land. Even if you don't put outposts everywhere AI barely shows signs of life. It's not difficult for the player to just waltz into a region that has an outpost in it and burn it in a turn - you've done, I've done it - but AI isn't good enough. Not at neolithic era, not at any other eras.

It would be very silly to balance the game around that level of stupidity however, taking tools away from the player because AI wasn't made to utilise them.

It is also worrisome how eager people are to propose harshest nerfs and especially hard caps (ew) whenever a balance issue is brought up.

Balance around strength is balance around fun.

First post here, just wanted to say this is really excellent and well thought out feedback. I wholly agree with this.

I like the concept a lot because it lets you really get into exploring, but it feels like it goes by too fast and there isn't enough to do. I'd like to see some sort of simple interaction between tribes beyond attacking, more types of landmark sites with maybe some flavor text to tell you about what you discovered, and a longer Neolithic period. I find myself looking forward to playing in Neolithic in the full game quite a bit if it gets more fleshed out.

I liked the Neolithic Era in concept because it was a fun way to explore territory and do "different" things than the start of any other 4x.

In practice, it felt like growing population through killing animals is a bit overpowered compared to growing population in small cities naturally in the ancient era. I don't know if the game is trying to make a message about the growth superiority or hunter/gathering vs early agriculture, but it seemed to me to be unintended.

Also, science spillover wasn't immediately apparent to me. So, at first it felt like I had to advance ASAP to avoid getting behind in technology, but in later games I realized that I could instantly research several ancient era technologies if I had delayed era advance. (This actually became a much bigger issue in later eras, though.)