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.)

cannib wrote:

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.

Some basic "diplomacy" between tribes other than, "oog -- kill" would be nice. Obviously, nothing too complex. Agreement to join together on mammoth hunts to share the bounty would be logical.

It does seem to pass by way too quickly.

I really like the Neolithic era as a concept, and especially appreciate that it's an explicit game mechanic to wander around for a bit to find a good spot for your first city rather than the usual, your starting location is where you put your first city, so if it sucks reroll the map, which is a frustrating waste of time.

So aside from curbing the abuses of staying in it too long that's already mentioned, the curiosities need to be adjusted.  There's very little knowledge ones on the map, so just trying to get that era star can end up netting you a dozen population blowing out the pop era star multiple times over.  The growth and hunting starts are trivial to get, while the knowledge one delays your game, and if they change things to where staying in the neolithic era was more of a bad thing, that would make trying for that even worse.  Meanwhile food is just LITTERED around the map.  You can end up with the 5 population you need easily without hardly exploring the map when you can kill a single deer and find 3-4 food across just 2 territories.  Even WITHOUT collecting food scattered about, the hunting star naturally leads to the growth star anyway.

It would be much better if each path were more or less equally viable.  Population requirement should go up while knowledge requirement should go down or more curiosities for it should spawn such that each option is about even with each other and you have to pursue each on their own a bit rather than just happening to complete the growth star as well along the way every single time.

I love the era, and would love to see it expanded upon. I love the idea of a nomadic civ, and while it obviously can't last forever, I think a civ option that would let you stay nomadic longer and while being able to gain tech / culture / religion would be very fun. I honestly see this era as one of the standout differences from other similar games, and would love to see more done with it.