There were two main issues with the geography I noticed during the OpenDev, as well as some issues with unit pathing. Aside from that, the empire placement, resource placement and topography all felt good, pretty and balanced, aside from some luxeries that factions started with being superior to others but that's more of a gameplay issue.

First was the lack of clarity whether certain terrain had penalties on it, for example certain cliff formations being climbable while most weren't, this was especially noticeable during battle as units traversed these cliffs. The other visual detail that could be improved on relates to roads, as it's difficult to determine where they actually are sometimes, primarily when dealing with forests, the 2 movement usage tile. It's unfortunate too because lowering forests to 1 movement is one of the primary purposes of roads, but they get in the way of seeing the road itself, some clarity like a clearing around the road would be nice.

The other issue was that territories were a bit too large, a couple territories felt like an appropriate size like the land bridge that connects the starting continent, however the rest felt much bigger than they needed to be and made the world feel smaller, since cities and outposts were much much closer according to districts than they were physically. A decrease in territory size would also help in making city placement more engaging, since you'd really need to decide what your city wants to focus on out of the more limited FIMS available.

As for the Pathing issue I've noticed units being unable to disembark until an island's entire coastline was discovered. It got annoying fairly quickly and I hope to see it fixed since it heavily impeded my exploration.

In 4X I like to have the option to choose a different kind of map setting, like play on islands, small continents, big continent with lakes etc. which then affects how it's generated. Forcing like a naval focused game if wanted with only small islands. In humankind's terms small is probably anything from 1 to 4 territories for an island.

zeszymi wrote:

eraserman wrote:

The territories are too large.

The Average city will only be able to exploit at most 1/3 of the tiles inside of any given territory over the entire 150 turns. Maybe if we could build districts off of strategic and lux extractors, it would feel better, but right now it often feels like there's a lot of empty land per territory, especially since it feel like the average city is going to want to attach at least 1 outpost due to the city cap.

Furthermore, the size of the territories, combined with how close every civ spawned to each other, meant two things. 1) Early game outpost expansion to claim borders and regions away from your core cities disappeared in the Ancient era, which is way to early. The concept of early limited wars where you and your neighbor fights over territory by building and burning outposts is very interesting and unique to this game, and yet there was no time to do so, since said outposts being fought over near instantly get attached to your cities. Ideally, you would have something like city->attached outpost -> normal outpost -> Disputed territory -> civ 2 normal outpost -> civ2 attached outpost -> civ 2 city in terms of distance. The distance in terms of territories between the player spawn and the default brown team felt more right.

 2) Neutral forces, ranging from wild animals to independent people, never showed up near the player, which made interacting with them nearly impossible. Considering independent people are supposed to be the barbarian/minor civ equivalent in Humankind, the fact that it often felt they were a million miles from me means I never care about them. I never felt the need to try and influence them, bribe them, hire their armies or interact at all. If they were actually near my borders, said desire for interaction, and for controlling them against potential rivals, goes up. And to do that, they need to be able to spawn between all the players, which can't happen if all the territories between them get grabbed instantly.

But the actual terrain distance, it actually didn't feel that bad? This was very obviously a map seed using the Civ 6 terra map decision (one "Home" continent with all the major players, a second "away" continent to expand to mid/late game). Viewed from that lens, I assumed that civs would spawn a bit more cramped, and interaction distance was about what I would expect as a result. However, if I had picked the default map gen option, I would have expected the civs to be more spread out and less concentrated. But as is, it isn't to hard to interact with your various neighbors with troops, and there is enough distance that you have time to move units in response to a sudden declaration of war.

So if the terrain didn't change, but the territories shrunk by about 30-50%, with the associated increase in number of territories, I think it would feel a little better. Probably closer to the 30% shrink then the 50% shrink.

On a different note, sometimes it was very hard to tell whether a cliff would be scalable or not, and it caused some very weird choke-points, especially with the way the territory boundaries were drawn. I'd like if the boundaries primarily followed rivers and hill ranges, and if there are none then it should default to straight lines.

Yes exactly, there is a lot of unused space. With smaller territories there would be more space for independent people and wild animals. Also gaining more territories should cost more and more influence so playing influence driven nation would be more valid than it is now.

Fully agree with both of your points here.  Breaking the map up into more, but smaller, territories, would also help the Expansionist affinity, which seems to be the weak sister of the affinities, currently.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote: 
We'd like to hear from you what kinds of maps you play on in 4X games. What do you consider a good or bad map? Are there an terrain features you particularly like or dislike? Are there any settings you particularly enjoy in other games?

(There's a Short and sweet summary at the bottom of this post)

Space 4X:

In Stellaris I usually go for the largest galaxy filled to the brim with A.I empires, as I find the political landscape (especially with all the DLC) vastly more interesting to me once the eXplore part of the genre gets completed in the early game. Stellaris has very limited explore events (random events that appear in my owned territory or as part of ongoing diplomatic shenanigans) after the borders are all taken, but the quite basic interactions between all the empires on the map, and in the Galactic Legislature, is enough to hook me. I mean, I already played more than a thousand hours of that game--so the only thing bringing me back are the DLCs, but my point still stands that I prefer noisy galaxies with lots of political shenanigans effecting the landscape around me. I do appreciate paradox, however, making an entire DLC just about increasing the number of Exploration events and anomalies, so that players who buy it don't get stuck with the same rotation of events in all their games. One thing's for sure though, I'm 100% okay with the game forcing me to spawn near empires that naturally hate my existence lol--as the game doesn't really have the perfect type of diplomacy interactions that keep peacetime entertaining between A.I. It's trying, though.

In Endless Space 2 I almost always go for all unique factions playing within the galaxy, just because it feels nice having the whole cast participate in a game. I've been playing around with Luxury and strategic resources availability so far, and I find the interesting games be ones where strategic are rare, but Luxuries are abundant and Anomalies are abundant. As the planetary anomalies really help give character to each solar system--especially some of the special events that may happen on them through the exploration phase. Low Strategic, in theory, gives me incentive to have a trade dependency on monopolizing players, or go to war, but in reality I just put on my big boy pants and build a behemoth to farm a black hole 'cause Riftborn are a little too emotionally attached to that one piece of Adamantium I'm literally offering just about everything I have for lol. Endless Space 2 tries harder with monopolies when it comes to Luxury resources, specifically making it so that only a specific type of resources appears in a specific zone of the galaxy, but the A.I is just too stubborn to part with even just one of the later tier resources that it takes all the fun out of that mechanic, at least in a peaceful play through. Fighting over zones with specific resources is much more interesting.

Land Based 4X:

So unlike space 4x games, land based 4x games don't have the limitation of space being the only landscape to play in and change variables of.

In Alpha Centauri I usually went with maximum rain fall, all the worms, and all the moons just for the challenge and adding more stakes into using terraforms to clear out the environment and make so all my cities end up being on mountains once the ecological cascade happens where the water just keeps going up. I was really into fighting the map and changing it into something that isn't red and dreary while also defending myself from a turn ten war by that little deplorable Chairman Yan.

In Endless Legend the best maps, by far, for me were the ones with these significant and neat little features within regions when I set things to chaotic and all the cliffs. Naturally generated wonders, if you will. I remember loving how an entire desert region had this little stair affect with the cliffs as they climbed down to the ocean water, and I especially enjoyed how the Roving clans questline on that map allowed for a personal narrative of crossing a literal ocean of ice and back for a wintery expedition within the final era. Another map generated a peculiar Volcanic region with a line of parallel mountain ranges with a lava river flowing between that I just had to built a city within that valley lol. Making strategic resources mostly be available in the oceans in the Margawr expansion did succeed in giving players a huge incentive in building navies.

In Civ VI I haven't played that much around with the map to figure out which I like the best, but since all the maps are basically flat terrain with single tile features, I don't find any of the maps memorable, outside of the ones that create interesting features with impassable mountains. I have similar Problems with Age of Wonders: Planetfall, as that game also follows the flat-board map generation style.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Here are some factors to consider:

• Map size relative to player number

If I want to experience more crucial interactions between players before everyone begins to snowball, I'd go Smaller map size compared to player number.

If I want to experience the chill pace of exploration and setting up a frontier for my empire, I go with larger maps.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Continent size (i.e. land to water ratio)

70% Water, 30% land. To compensate for this, regions are small. Island atoll maps are dear to my heart whenever I wanna emphasize prioritizing Ocean combat and, if the game allows it, figuring out creative ways to keep travel and response times low between cities. Exploration suffers as a result, though, as the sea is just... well, almost always a flat board in 4X games

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Continent shape (regular or more chaotic)

Chaotic. Idunno, in endless legend, regular just doesn't give me the higher chance of creating interesting maps to explore compared to a more chaotic flow. In Civ, I usually go with normal generation as I can't really trust the game that much to not spawn a bunch of lines as islands. Although I do appreciate the things Civilization 6 provides me with being able to keep a single tile island competitive as long as I have the correct governor and enough trade routes running through it for industry lol. In Age of Empires: PLanetfall the game really only has regular continents, islands, or land only where all regions are normal shape, flat (exception of mountain only regions), and maybe sometimes have a special landmark structure in it, so I can't really say much about it.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Number, size, and location of islands

As long as the islands aren't just extremely difficult to exploit lines and/or dots, more than a handful exists on the world map to give ocean exploration something to look at, and they're located in... interesting positions within the world map (Real life has had a pretty okay random generation of interesting islands to exploit), I'll leave the game with an okay impression of the map. I find Flat islands quite uninteresting, though. 

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Strategic and Luxury Resource distribution

In theory, making strategic and luxury resource distribution limited to specific zones on a map for each resources should create the most interesting gameplay for diplomatic and political reasons. Where dependence on certain resources can be the difference between an empire having to cozy up to another, or just go all out war. In real life, just about every nation is catastrophically dependent on trade with another nation to suite their resource needs (Sorry Thomas Jefferson), to the point of having immense debt partly because of it. But in 4Xs, that type of interplay ends up existing with providing little consequential fallout for players heavy in trade, as the whole point of 4Xs is to become self sufficient--even in the Anno series, which is interesting 'cause that entire game is about the wonderful curse of trade dependency lol.

If the consequence of limited luxury resources and strategic resources is that the game just becomes slower, but those resources are still evenly spread around the map, while allowing certain players to snowball like crazy, then I'm fine with having many luxuries and strategic. Otherwise, I prefer having luxuries and strategic be limited--but in a smart way. I appreciate what Endless Space 2 tried to do in that sense, with luxuries limited to zones, Green and purple usually limited to single planet systems or just gas giants, but the stubbornness of the A.I in trades, even when on friendly terms... yikes.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Food and science curiosities in the neolithic

Food and science curiosities have been okay to collect in the neolithic era for this opendev. I don't really have much of an opinion on them, besides they exist just far enough and numerous enough to do their job effectively in forcing the player to explore.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Distance to other civilizations

Pretty okay. A.I was placed far enough that the player had to go out of their way to ruin the A.Is day, so the distance did its job in preventing spawn killing.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Civilization clustering (evenly spread, or close together?)

Humankind Vitor Opendeve Empire starting placement felt Evenly spread for how crowded things would get.

In summary:

• A good map, for me, is a map that generates regions with unique natural landmarks, creates zones of resources unique to them in order to provide resource monopolies/dependencies between players, and gives players just enough time to take their fill of exploring the land before settling down.
• A bad map, for me, is a map that is flat, with little interesting environmental formations, and gives every player all the things they need  to snowball in their corner without interacting with other players.
  

Of course, this is all preferential and dependent a many variables, which include build times, travel times, and gamespeed.

• Map size relative to player number: Feels ok overall, could maybe take another +1 or even 2 factions to turn up the heat (each faction increases the chance for more conflict and diplomacy). If minor factions would be more actively raiding and lending their armies out that would fill in the gaps as well
• Continent size (i.e. land to water ratio): Ratio is fine: Deep see is asically useless space overall and serves as separator only. It fulfills this function well now and does nto take up overly too much space.
• Continent shape (regular or more chaotic): The more chaotic shape is much better for ships to explore and circumwent enemy area of control. Choatic is good in this regard BUT please be aware to continents and seas with 1 hex of width is generalyl not a good idea as it slices up consistent areas for land battles and manuevers without providing substantial benefits. In very rare occasions 1 tile width is ok for visual variance but needs to be limited overall
• Number, size, and location of islands: Island number is very good now IMO. Some islands and island groups I feel are too small: Again its ok to have 1 (or 2) tile islands very rarely but they should be found in multile locations in ever map: they are just visual flare that needs to be used in very small doses. In this particular map I would remove a group of single tile islands
• Strategic and Luxury Resource distribution: Difficult to say: they all melt together for me. Dont realyl feel the difference between them. I am aware of strateic resoruce use but always had what I needed - didnt need to buy. Maybe that means they are a bit too abundant...
• Food and science curiosities in the neolithic: Food excellent, science is harder to come by
• Distance to other civilizations: Feels good but as mentioned above one more civ to mix up early game relationships or more actvie natives would be perfect IMO. Its acceptable right now
• Civilization clustering (evenly spread, or close together?): They feel evenly spread - again the density of each clsuter I would increase by one more civ maybe or make the natives more active players: raiding civs, renting out their armies and be harder to assimilate

Suggest having slightly less blockers to pathways on land: units have a hard time finding their way and get blocked by units of other empires in pathways

Dinode wrote:
There was this one territory up north which was just a couple of tiny islands and some pearls. That was barely worth working with, especially since you can't build districts on more than the one you built the outpost on.

Yeah. While not a lot, this map had more than one useless island regions.

A few points from me:

• The map is gorgeous. Seriously, it puts every other 4X to shame. Give your artists a few giant pats on the back when covid allows it again.
• For FIDS amounts per tile display (on the white background), the numbers get smaller the less there are, and the '1's are barely visible, these should be made more clear. However, I did not like the white background themselves, it's too much contrast with the beautiful map and obstructs lots of it. Can this be modified? Can the background be black instead?
• In victor there was little diversity in biomes, like tundra, jungle, mountain chains etc. It doesn't have to be like in EL where specific biomes are heavy in a certain resource, It would be more for aesthetics and realism. I'm fine with balancing food vs industry and sprinkling in science and money. The fact that you can't exploit the 2 latter ones is a problem for another thread. 
• I found the distribution of strategics very good in Victor. In general, strategics should be scarce enough that a it's worth fighting a war over or being forced at peace for trade. I can't really put a number on what percent of players should have access to a certain resource, but my gut feeling says about 70%. E.g. 70% of players should have access to at least 1 Horse deposit during the period where horses are relevant. Other players should fight for it, trade them, or change to strategies that don't require them.
• Lots of luxury resources is great! But Victor might have slightly overdone it, i felt it was a tad too much, like 10-20% too much.
• I found lots of rivers annoying in the early game (Lucy had this problem, Victor was much better)
• I like that players spawn on 1 or 2 continents and there's at least 1 continent and a few islands uninhabited at the start.

I like continent maps with islands, where some continents are inhabitet by nations, and others are empty.

Also it can be cool, if each continent will have it's own resources (one continent has horses, another - tea etc.)

Shukfir wrote:
Also it can be cool, if each continent will have it's own resources (one continent has horses, another - tea etc.)

Yes this is needed: need to make sure that various groups of factions all have different luxuries

Not so easy with strategic resoruces but some segregation would be good there as well or at least differentiation in which continent has abundance of whic hstrateic resoruce and only 1-2 from the rest overall. This way basic units can be built in any continent with some trading or light conquest but getting more specific units depends on which continent hte player is or if they are able to expand their trade enough to get what they lack on that continent

In general, I tend to like all of the factors you mentioned.  More specifically, I tend to prefer more of the "world type" approach rather than a specific "continent shape".  For instance, Civilization's "archipelago" is usually what I choose if I effectively want pure naval battles, with "continents" if I want a new-world or clustered feel, and "pangaea" if I want all empires in one place.  The specifics such as a "land to water" ratio sounds like it could be interesting, but could be hard for me to really distinguish between (say, 50% for land heavy, 70% for earth-like, or 85% for heavy naval).  Without personally seeing the maps, it's hard to say if too much or too little water would be very limiting in terms of overall resources and territories.  I do like more chaotic maps personally, but I recognize that it can severely affect game balance.  No matter what, I would like either a reasonable amount of key strategic resources distributed evenly, or be able to survive without those resources.  In Civilization, if you don't have some resources (such as iron) you could severely limit yourself later on.  In this game, that may be offset through the trade system.

I do think that most islands should be near continents (large landmasses) when possible.  Don't be afraid to generate semi-large islands either.  I'd like to see more opportunity for a japan or indonesia style map where significant resources can be found within reasonable distance, and less hawaii, where you get small, essentially useless territories/landmasses in the middle of nowhere.  I do REALLY like the whole "new world" concept, but in most games it becomes where the first to seriously expand there wins.  You could say that happened in history too (France, Britain, and Spain), but it ended up "backfiring" in the long run for all three to some degree.  In a game like this, that is especially cool as fame determines the winner, not "biggest empire at the end".  In short, I'd like a "new world" option, but I'd most likely use it more if there are mechanics that play to it.

Empire clustering is a good option I would like to have, but it may be map specific.  Using that feature, you could create the "new world" concept out of a basic "continent"-style map.  As for the neolithic era, it seemed to be a good overall distribution in the opendev.  This is of course with the caveat of needing too many science curiosities, which I've mentioned in the neolithic forum.  Unless you make it so players play longer in the neolithic era (which I would approve of!) I don't think any changes are really needed there.  If you do allow for longer neolithic eras, then either reduce the amount of food or increase the amount of danger.  It is easy to runaway with armies generated based off of food.

Typically, I like to either play a "true random" map (for the novelty of each game!) or a more balanced continents-style map (for more fairness and to reward naval exploration).

Oh, one more thing: Rivers. Big rivers should be navigable and have their name spelled on the map. That would be cool.

I like when factions are evenly spaced out from one another. But I'd like to see more free people in between.

I must say I really liked the map, if all auto-generate maps are like this, I would be pretty happy. For a more detailed feedback:

- Map size and relative number of player: I always tend to max out the number of player, so generally speaking, I prefer big maps. However, given that there are 10 cultures per era I suppose the number of player will be 10 at most, so I think the map must not be too big. The major factor for this is:

- Distance between civilizations: for me, it is perfect as it is, I want to be able to make contact early. So I think this ratio size of map/player is good.

- Continent shape: I like it in the middle: chaotic enough so that there are some interesting points, but not chaotic to the point that everythink just look the same mess. I think this map achieved this, though if the edges of the continents were a little more chaotic, I wouldn't mind. I loved the geography that is created by the terrain height, with cliffs and so on. Beautiful.

- Islands: I think you could attach more small islands to continental territories, and avoid territories with only islands of less than 5 tiles since these are not very useful. I do not think they should not exist though, just be rare.

Regarding the placement, I like when there are Islands (big or little) everywhere around the continents, and then some in the middle of the ocean. Which brings me to:

- player placement: I think players should be spread evenly on big continents, and that there should be some players on archipelagos to allow for a variety of gameplay. I also think that some big islands or small continents should be empty at the start of the game, to reward exploration.

- food and science in the neolithic: seems good for me

- ressource placement: overall, one to three ressources per territory seems find, but strategic ressources were maybe too scarce. It took me two games to find more than one iron on the map, which can be heavily penalizing when your unique units rely on it.

Other remarks:

- I agree that territories are very big, and I usually attached three territories to each city, so my cities only covered around a tenth of their area by the end of the game. But I like it, it means there are various ways to expand even if you settle your city on the same spot. Also, I suspect that later in the game cities become significantly bigger.

- I found the tile yields and the bonuses from infrastructure enough to incite me to found cities in historical terrains: I mostly avoided the big central desert and my main cities were founded on rivers. I think this is very nice.

- Sometimes terrain can surprise you, with edges that you can't climb while it look like you should, and vice-versa. Maybe a good idea could be to add an overlay, similar to the FIMS overlay, that show a big cliff symbol on impassable edges. It would make things clearer when needed, without diminishing the beauty of the game.

- My only real complaint about the map are the natural wonders: they are very valuable in the neolithic era because they give you a reliable way to generate influence, but they does not do a whole lot more than this. They don't have particular yields, all feel identical because they do not have specific bonuses (they do not look identical though, they are beautiful) and if anything, you don't want to settle near them because they remove an edge to our quarter, edge which would be useful for adjacency bonuses. I think they should be buffed in a way that separate them: for exemple add them a great amount of various FIMS depending of the wonder, or make them trigger events or give unique abilities (for exemple, the lake Baikal seems to have a lot of fish and rare species: it could give a huge amount of food at first, and science later in the game after having discovered something like biology. It could also be linked to events to protect the wildlife, making the lake lose its food an creating more science). I also think natural wonders could interact with religions in some way, because this type of place typically look like something that could reinforce religious fervor.

There is currently an issue where islands that are completely covered in districts are immune to being sieged. Please allow naval units to besiege land provinces, even as a tech.

Dear HUMANKIND team,

one of the most intersting part of 4x game is expanding the territory (at least for me, I love this part). but how we can expand our territory  in HUMANKIND is not fun at all. In Humankind, every outpost/city has fixed tiles, this makes no sense and I just dont understand what is the idea of it. I would suggest that there are few tiles(maybe 20 tiles) once the outpost is placed(this 20 tiles can be automatically chosen or they can be assigned by player) and then if we want to expand our territory we need either place new outpost or we can buy the tiles (and attach them to the near outpost/city) by using influence/gold.

In one word, I want to decide the border of the city rather than HUMANKIND decide it.