Due to the fact that I like to toy with my civilization games and very rarely finish a game (consider that out of nearly a thousand hours of CIV V, I may have finished 20 games at most, the rest of the time is spent tinkering here and there and trying new openings) I didn't get to the very end of "Lucy" to submit my report so I would like to do that here. The points below are from the notes I kept as I was playing and are not ordered according to the severity of the issue.
Civics and Religion Exit Process: This is really cumbersome, you have to click on the event or the civics menu, enter the civics or religion menu, select what it is that you need to do and then you have to click on the exit button. Simply pressing "ESC" or something else should have been enough to do the trick. As it is, entering and exiting the civics/religion menus is time consuming and cumbersome.
Unit Cycling: I don't know if there's a hot key for that but if there was it couldn't be intuitively found. In general, hovering the mouse point over items of the GUI should reveal their hot key. This isn't the case with Humankind. "TAB" is a nice default button for keyboard users in order to cycle units. Pressing the "next idle army" button was cumbersome.
Fortify Until Healed: This doesn't seem to work. I don't know whether discovering a tech after the medieval era makes this work but as far as the III age where I played I couldn't make it to work.
Diplomacy Interface: This didn't make too much sense to me and seemed a bit unpolished to be honest. I need more information about the attitude of the leader to whom I'm speaking. Grievances where a bit difficult to spot on the diplomatic map. I feel that this interface needs expanding and it's certainly not up to par with Endless Space 2 or even CIV VI's interface.
Trade Deals: I kept recieving these messages and although I clicked on the focus icon I didn't get any extra information which was confusing. Did I consent to selling a luxury item or is this trade automatic once you agree to luxury good trading? How much money did I get out of the deal? Are there any other benefits? This was definitely a dead end for me.
Ideology Shifting Events: This was a real annoyance. You have these events which alter your ideology sliders. You had to close the event, enter the civics menu and then enter another screen to find your ideology sliders all the time keeping noted the icons presented in the events. Then you had to decide which event suited your ideology style, close the civics menu, re open the event and select it. This was totally counter-intuitive, I hadn't understood straight away that events alter my ideology sliders and only found out via trial and error when I happened to remember that: "hang on, that silder wasn't there, when last turn I spent my civic point".
Religious Bonuses: They don't show when you mouseover an output value of your city. It does mention that you get a +8 from somewhere and I did figure it out on my own that this was probably my religious bonus but it should distinctly show.
Runaway Science: Playing the Babylonians in the first era felt like playing a runaway train. I got seven stars way too easily, got the pick of the choice for the second era which was yet another science civ and then the game snowballed away. There should be a difficulty modifier built in, some sort of a break which slows you down from researching nukes when others are still fielding crossbows. Paradox employs such mechanisms in the Hearts of Iron series by stating that "the tech you are researching is 2 years ahead of its time. Get penalty X"
Runaway Production: I selected the Egyptians and then two more industrious civs in a row. I could build wonders in two rounds and everything else was single turn build. The capital had production values in excess of 1200 and from what I saw in youtube that was modest compared to what others accomplished. This needs to be scaled back. You shouldn't be able to build an infinite number of neighborhoods. The sprawl on the map gets way out of hand very early on. There should be more discontent when your city gets this large. Perhaps introducing a health metric to keep things in check. You shouldn't be able to create such huge metropolises so early on in the game.
Infrastructure Upkeep: I never ever had a monetary problem, never bother building marketplaces or anything else money related and ended up raking money in the thousands. Infrastructure should cost money. If it did, this was unclear. The military should have a monetary upkeep value as well. It shouldn't be this easy to accumulate so much money. It ended not having any real meaning in my games.
Civic Points Gain: How fast do you gain civics points? What influences this gain? This was unclear to me and the information, if present, was very well hidden.
Military Unit Upgrade: There wasn't any easily accesibly information about the upgrade path that a unit would follow. Also, I discovered a locked "attachment" down below the unit interface by pure chance as I scrolled down. What does this attachment do?
Great People/Leaders: Are there going to be Heroes/Great People? These were great in Endless Space 2 and they're also really nice in the CIV series, they're missing here.
Minor People: Totally unclear how they spawn or how they can be influenced. Shouldn't all these animals/minor civs be more aggressive towards you?
Animation on epoch change: It is slow and glitzy and I'm running a decent specced PC
Military Unit Building: The cost in populace for ancient units is excessive. One populace for an ancient unit can be crippling at first. Perhaps if one populace represented say a thousand people and a unit needed half of that? Or something else entirely. I ended up not building a lot of those or none. I wasn't really challenged to build them to be honest.
All in all this was a positive experience for me. The game was stable, the graphics superb and the concept of swapping civs every era, although old in the board game world, is something which is implemented for the first time in the civ genre. I also like the combat mechanism so far, it has been improved since the first OpenDev. My biggest worries so far are the runaway production problem andthe runaway science problem. These need to be addressed otherwise the game is in danger of becoming rapidly too stale. I must say that I really liked they way that the developers are treating the community via the OpenDev sessions and I only wish that other companies would do the same.
i agree entirely that there needs to be more consistent money drains in this game, because you do need money to run an empire, and not investing in the expansion of your economy should result in further restraints in expanding your empire in other means, like industry. Something like putting a maintenance cost on makers quarters would be a good start. That, and the actual market quarter tends to not yield very much money.
VF0079
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Enjoy the game!
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