Hey everybody,

We hope you're enjoying the Victor OpenDev (and the improvements we've made since the Lucy OpenDev!)

To keep this forum easy to navigate, please do not start new threads to share your first impressions, and instead collect them here. Afterwards, make sure to leave feedback on specific subjects in the related threads, and feel free to start a new thread for any subject not yet being discussed.

We're looking forward to hearing from you!

Just finished my first game and maaaaan I missed this!

As much as I feared the new limited EQs, seeing them all in their more overpowered state (Except the Venetian Botteghe di Artisi which seems untouched?), I think I can adjust to this.

The small adjustments are fantastic, like auto-explore toggling off when you move a unit. The UI is looking better. The culture costumes for the avatar are getting better and more detailed each time.

The Final Fame Tally is better than I expected, and I'm loving the stats at the end.

This is going to be a very fun next few days.

I would agree with some of this on the zooming, it feels a bit forced after a while and takes away from the beauty of the terrain. Other small details for me were that after a while I lost pretty much track who is who of the AI, especially on the other continent, given the changes in cultures. I felt like I would really appreciate a litle diplomatic dossier that reminds me what cultures they were before for me to understand their past strenght and play-style. Also would be nice to have a like a relationship heat map where I can track how the AI has their own relationships. I mean I get it that same are allied and so on, but would be nice to see this development coming that they likely get into an alliance so I can do my strategic planning around this. Also I did feel that the AI changed its view of myself too frequently. I like a lot of things in this built and diplomacy, just sometimes I thought every other round they have another opinion of me. And I did mostly trade with them and didn't really fight anyone. Also one rather specific thing is that I, mostly by mistake, turned my very succesful religion into atheism. And then I accumulated like eleven policy points with no choices to invest them anywhere as no policies came up. Would be nice that this might be handeled a bit differently. Anyhow, great experience overall and thanks again.   

Science Quarters are now useful.

Money EQs are *really* good.

Market Quarters and their infrastructure upgrades are still trash.

Diplo circles need their culture specific icons back.

First impression: accessibility settings really need a font size slider. My eyes are f'd, if I continue squinting like this my eyes will implode into the back of my skull. Which would be a pity, seeing as this here OpenDev has been the light at the end of a Covid-filled tunnel, and I'd need my eyes to enjoy it.

Halfway through my first game and I'm way more into this than Lucy. The game pace/economy changes for sure are the biggest reason why, and now I get to feel like other parts of the game get to stand out on their own rather than be overshadowed by the numbers being bad. 

One thing I think would be nice is to see more of a gradient for Stability. Right now I really don't feel bad just slapping more attachments/districts on to my capital with little thought because there's the huge 30 - 90 gap. Some more steps in between would be nice - even if they don't dissuade me from doing those things maybe they at least pare back some of my gains. 

Excited to play more tomorrow and every day until this ends! I definitely didn't think that with Lucy, so I think this is a solid change overall. Thanks!

Finished my first game and it was good. I liked the A.I. interactions with me. though I felt the food system could be a bit more obvious. It kept saying a city was starving but it seemed fine. lastly I felt it was a bit to fast. I wasn't even able to research all that much from the final age before it ended. like only one or two techs.  

i am surely a noob for your games, but for me, civ6 player, this was most boring game ever. Ever worst then AoW:Planetfall.

3 hours of: 10 turns to farms, 40 turns to turn outpost into 2nd city. And of couse endless zerg wars. AI at other endge of continent  became a suzerain of 2 other nations and they just zerg me. With units for popolation my chanses was zero, ever less then i lost only province with iron and copper.  + invisible units bug, and plus, my favorite, city capture just by stepping on 1st tile by enemys ! Awessome idea!

And somewhy i was unable to transport land units over 1 hex of coastal sea, ever then tutorial said now i can.

I cant ever lose becose AI gift me 1 city with 1 territory, so i cant get to a poll.

I never says civ is perfect and hoped to get another good game, but for me, noting good in this game. For a zerg wars i prefer RTS.

GroBoiD wrote:

i am surely a noob for your games, but for me, civ6 player, this was most boring game ever. Ever worst then AoW:Planetfall.

3 hours of: 10 turns to farms, 40 turns to turn outpost into 2nd city. And of couse endless zerg wars. AI at other endge of continent  became a suzerain of 2 other nations and they just zerg me. With units for popolation my chanses was zero, ever less then i lost only province with iron and copper.  + invisible units bug, and plus, my favorite, city capture just by stepping on 1st tile by enemys ! Awessome idea!

And somewhy i was unable to transport land units over 1 hex of coastal sea, ever then tutorial said now i can.

I cant ever lose becose AI gift me 1 city with 1 territory, so i cant get to a poll.

I never says civ is perfect and hoped to get another good game, but for me, noting good in this game. For a zerg wars i prefer RTS.

Seems you fucked up :)
I have played about 3 matches of this open dev on different difficulties and I have had no real problem such as you.
Either you missunderstood something with your placement of city, you didn't expand well enough...
OR you encountered some nasty bug I didn't.

A note before I begin; I'm a casual/sandboxy player who prefers to expand to make interesting, realistic cities/nations over minmaxing.  I'm also not a huge fan of wars, particularly in the very early game.  They can be fun when I'm more established, have interesting choices for units, and am looking to expand.  I'm playing on standard (Metropolis) difficulty.  All opinions are filtered through these lenses.

First Impressions:

I've barely been able to start the game.  I've made 4-5 attempts at starting, trying a few different things, but without fail I end up with stacks of units ransacking my first city within two turns of founding it.  For the most part I've been attempting to get the 10 knowledge stars in Neolithic, since I enjoy exploration anyways, but it seems to actively harm my chances of ever getting to actually use it.  Even going straight for population stars, I can't seem to have enough units going into the next era to keep the two AI that spawn directly on top of you from murdering me the instant they advance.  It honestly feels like they are made to specifically hunt you down, as even before we advance their hunting parties chase mine around the map.

Quite frankly, if this is any indication of what the game is going to be like, I'm very disappointed.

This is my first time playing any of the OpenDevs, but I've played quite a bit of Endless Space (1 and 2) and Civ (5 and 6). I always tend to gravitate towards either scientific or cultural civilizations/cultures, so of course I saw the aesthetes and went straight for them. Maybe I just need to play on higher difficulties (I went with the default, I'll definitely bump it up a level or two for my next game), but I absolutely steamrolled every other faction very easily, really from Classical onward.

I had a few issues with the purple AI while I was still the Zhou, but by the time I switched to the Greeks I went to war with them and took half of their (considerable amount of) land in the peace treaty. From there on out I stuck with aesthetes (Franks, then Ming) and was able to obtain a startling amount of influence very quickly. Maybe I wasn't expanding fast enough or overlooked a few things, but it felt like there weren't enough things to spend influence on, so I ended up assimilating nearly every independent people I came across. Since the only penalty I noticed to going over your city cap was -30 influence/city/turn, I hardly even noticed any negatives, and being able to spam the "praise" action enough that I could go from 0-100 with a people in 2-4 turns also felt ridiculous. I also ran out of decisions to spend civics on very quickly after adopting the Ming, but that might have been more of an issue with my playstyle than anything.

I see others in the thread saying that the early-game AI is too aggressive, and I can see that, but I feel like the mid-late game AI isn't aggressive enough. After my skirmish with the purple AI, I never had to go to war again and could just focus on exploring and city building. Even though purple could've easily absorbed the green and yellow AI and turned their war machine my way, they just didn't. The hyper aggressive magenta (?) AI also never went to war with me despite objectively having the stronger army and a real hatred of everything I did.

Overall, I think it's a good game, but I feel like there might need to be some way to nerf influence. The AI might just be a difficulty level thing, I'll pop into other threads after I've completed the scenario a few more times with different cultures and difficulties.

No totally agree. Starting AI too aggressive, later on they don't stand much of a chance. Must be a special case like fighting three allies at the same time for them to do serious damage. 

My very first impression was that it's odd that a game named Humankind has only military units on the screen. Where are all the other humans? Are other character types going to be added later or is this basically a war game with window dressing?

AOM wrote:

My very first impression was that it's odd that a game named Humankind has only military units on the screen. Where are all the other humans? Are other character types going to be added later or is this basically a war game with window dressing?

Well, its still a 4x after all...

After playing 25 hours of Lucy Open dev despite its problems, I was thrilled to get another opportunity to play. There are some massive improvements to be seen here, pacing is much improved and AI is actually interesting to interact with.

Unfortunately I ended up feeling bored very quickly. I felt like I was doing busywork without any sense of direction or even self imposed objectives. This is very weird and hard to explain (I generally enjoy 4X games a lot). I think maybe things feel too blurred together? As if individual decisions/cities/buildings did not ever make a large impact? And also that the game play never had a direction? I remember saying Lucy open dev felt "loose" and I still feel the same for Victor but have lost the excitement of my first hours with the game. I think I don't find anything impactful in this game and don't really feel driven to seek any particular goal.

This is a shame because I love so many of the ideas in this game (the culture system, the game is gorgeous, the sprawling cities, the combat system) and Endless Legend is my favorite 4X ever so I had very high hopes. Maybe this game is too much of a sandbox for me? I don't think this is really a criticism towards the game but rather a realization this is not quite for me.

In any case, I'm still looking forward to release, I might be surprised and become hooked again. Best of luck for the last few months before release!