Mausklickmoerder wrote:

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...

I get that. The name Humankind doesn't match the gameplay though. If you don't have military units you wouldn't be doing anything but clicking boxes in various popups, your city construction queue, and the civics/tech screens - there would be no characters on the map. There are only soldier humans in the game. That isn't representative of humankind. Further, this game seems in many ways to be attempting to take the CIV VI concept to a higher level. But, it isn't really a civilization game in its current form. It's a military game and the only moveable characters are military units. That's my first impression, and the type of game it is doesn't have anything to do with my subjective opinion.

Just finished my first play-through and overall I really enjoyed the experience and wanted to play more. The things I enjoyed most are the pacing, tech tree and city management systems. The things I liked in general but felt needed work were the combat, diplomacy and economy aspects of the game. In all I am glad you had another open dev and I am looking forward to the final product later this year.

I really enjoyed the pacing of the game with each age feeling distinct and not too short or too long. I did find myself wanting to stay at each age longer, but I feel that this was a case of me not building my special district right away and not wanting to lose it. Maybe allowing 1 culture specific district per city from past ages could mitigate that sense of loss on advancing. Otherwise I felt that each age was long enough that I could enjoy using the units of each age which makes it feel worthwhile to build units. Combat pacing was also well done I love the idea of large battles being fought over multiple turns with possibilities of reinforcement on both sides, but I felt like I was given enough turns to accomplish something meaningful during the 3 rounds per turn.

The tech tree seemed well balanced with each technology granting what feels like a meaningful upgrade. It is fairly simple but I don't really see a need for the tech screen to be complex. I was able to find every upgrade I wanted easily and none of the tech I researched felt wasted. Tech also seemed to be paced well as I felt that even though I did not go out of my way to get a lot of tech in my empire I still managed to be at the tech level of the age I was in.

I love building cities in this game. Probably some of the most fun I have is building the large cities across multiple territories and my favorite tech upgrade is the hamlet because it feel so rewarding to place. However, city management does have some problems. Stability is a pain in the ass to track as the bar doesn't really give you the information you need to determine whether or not you can pay for a district. In the very early game I found it difficult to place districts as I couldn't afford them but later in the game when I had all of those luxury goods bonuses I had less than half of the districts I could have supported because I didn't know how far into the green I was. Furthermore, while having the game block out buildings that would do literally nothing was a nice change, what exactly you get from a building is still a complicated math problem. I would really like it if in the tooltip the game would tell me exactly how many resources a building will give me the moment it is built much like a district. That way I can make informed decisions without having to look for and count all of the river/forest tiles in my 4 territory city. Also I found myself losing population without any warning that my people were starving, this should probably be an end turn button priority message. Overall I enjoyed city building but the UI needs to be more clear on when to build districts versus when to build buildings.

Combat feels overly simplified and feels like a lot of wasted potential. Spearmen, for example, have a generic passive bonus against cavalry. This is boring. Instead why not give them an active ability like spear wall where instead of attacking they get a charge and ranged attack defense bonus on the 3 sides they are facing. For cavalry instead of the ridiculous 6 movement give them a charge ability so they can move 3 hexes in a line and attack anything in the way. What I am saying is giving every unit a single active ability instead of these passive bonuses would go a long way towards spicing up combat and make it less of a stat fest where the best tech wins.

I also want more diplomatic options. Demands have so much potential to be amazing and yet are incredibly boring. Demands should be weighted similarly to the way they are in a peace deal. There should also be more options in resolving demands. For example, I have a demand for my opponent to cede a territory. He is afraid of me but won't give up land. I should be able to offer him to pay up in equivalent gold or resources or maybe even vassalage if I have enough aggregate demands and military power. Similarly rather than the stupid clean slate deal demands should cancel other demands on equivalent basis. Finally I think offering vassalage should be in the alliance negotiation screen as a powerful empire should be able to peacefully vassalize a weak state that they are on friendly terms with.

The gold economy felt generally non-existent in the game. I never went out of my way to acquire gold and I still seemed to have a lot of it. I also rarely seemed to spend gold as the only things that seemed to use it were trade routes and rushing buildings. Food seems to be the most powerful resource as pops are everything in this game from production to military power. I didn't dislike the economy it just seemed like gold should have more value as a resource. Perhaps introducing mercenaries or adding upkeep to buildings and units would make it more viable to collect as compared to any of the other options. Culture is very frustrating to deal with early game. I had the AI Olemecs slam me with so much culture he would get claims on my territory 5 turns after I founded it. There does not seem to be an option in the second age that counters this.

In all I love this game and even if it launched in this state (with all the bugs fixed) I'd be happy with the product, but I feel it can be so much more and I'm glad you guys feel that way too. Thank you for this opportunity to participate in this development and I hope my feedback has helped.

I have to open with I didn't play the Lucy Opendev, so all my opinions are from me going in mostly blind. 

Also, this is mostly based off of my first full run, where I went for Mercantile/Gold cultures in every era. My main rules were: Prioritize money, try to be peaceful and play tall, trade/ and sail the seas. The main lessons from that were that gold is op beyond belief, the AI takes forever to attempt religion, Fame and Science having "eras" that get completely disconnected was bizarre, warfare could be interesting as long as nobody brought elephants, and the AI never built a boat.

Pace/General Mechanics:

This seems to be pretty all over the place. At first, the turn-by-turn felt nice, exploring, setting up an outpost, hunting animals and spotting a few wild AI scouts. Then building a city, researching, unlocking stuff, pretty good. Then the 7 star eras kicked in. I was late to the first, tied into 2nd, and then was almost a full era ahead for the rest of the game fame-wise. As each new mechanic was introduced, it seemed like the AI needed the tutorials more than me. Religion was just an on-switch, that you poke at occasionally to demand someone accept your religion that's already eaten 80% of their territory. I got an alert once about an influence takeover, but took one religious tenet that completely overpowered all neighboring influence from then on. I still don't understand what the influence takeover does other than causing events if your city (and seemingly the city itself, not attached territories) neighbors someone else's city. My "sphere of influence" was basically the same as the known world by the end, and it didn't seem to have done anything. Making religion more involved, and the influence spheres actually do something visible, or if they do explain somewhere when and what it's doing would go a long way.

The way large battles can take multiple turns is fantastic, and lets a very fun and challenging set of ebb-and-flow happen in battles. I had multiple fights start out as a small skirmish, that drew in outside armies on both sides, with one side taking the advantage one turn, then a shift the next as new reinforcements arrived. The only problem is you can start a fight with one tile touching your fort, and buyout instant armies right into a fight and reinforce with them. Once I figured that out, any fight near home-turf was just a matter of putting gold and pops to the slaughter.

The biggest pacing issue, and my main gripe about the game other than stacking buff balance issues, is that the Era pace is completely broken. I ended the game in the early modern era fame-wise, a little ahead of the rest of the AI, but AI and myself were barely inventing the crossbow, and neglecting chunks of the tech tree to get that far. Being told that my empire is reaching world war 1 culturally, but it's been 125 turns and I'm fighting with unique units from 2 eras ago (Specifically the broken as hell Carthaginian Elephants that can 2-shot a persian immortal anti-cav unit, which was still the leading military tech units I had when I ended the game as Venitians. Not sure if you're supposed to still have access to units from multiple eras back.) All the facets of the game had this gap. I have no clue what half the civics are, because other than religion, I only unlocked 3 or 4 per category, but had 3 spare civic points stocked. Religion just kinda happened in it's own realm. I could buyout an entire city of districts, infrastructure, and repeated festivals in a single turn because I was making thousands of gold a turn at war. I had maxed stability, seemingly infinite money and influence, maxed out religion before anyone else had a 2nd tenet, had civic points and tech to spare, but the game ended what seemed like 100 turns too early, congratulating me for progress I didn't feel I'd been able to make.

Cities/Territory

Outposts and the attaching system work alright. It seems to help for playing tall by being able to build off outposts in other zones, but at the same time it took a while before I wanted to build anything outside my capital. Cities felt kind of hollow. My capital, (due to op money) had every building/wonder/religious temple available, but nothing was specialized. My capital could do everything in every category perfectly, and founding other cities felt more like a way to launder money by insta-buying them to max with 0 population. Building Rome in a day is super disappointing when it works like a wal-mart; every one is the same as the next, just depends how many people happen to be there. Having some sort of trade off, terrain being a bigger influence on what each city is capable of doing well, something to make it so my artic camp and tropical island aren't carbon copies of eachother. 

Ui

Ui felt like an abusive relationship. Mostly due to bugs. Sometimes it was super readable and helpful, like city screens. Sometimes I felt like I had been cursed, like the first civic pop-up locking my screen up so I couldn't clock on the map or scroll using the mouse, could only select one unit, and couldn't issue any orders to anything. I'm still not sure what exactly happened there, but it only fixed on a full game restart. Some tooltips are broken, like many of the sliders on civic options having a mouse-over text that seemed to be placeholder Put_something_useful_here type things in a pretty purple color. The Irreligionist civic is outright lying, and doesn't accurately explain that it's a "turn off religion" button, even more proof religion is a light switch. Putting that off the edge of the tree entirely would be nice. With the rest of the civic options, putting something more than "wonder what could unlock this??" as a tooltip on locked civics would be nice. Some hint as to what eldritch demons I have to summon to unlock more options would be nice. A lot of the time spent wrestling with UI was just baffling. Why do region names and city names not showup on zoom out? The only method I had for discerning what was what was to click a city, and I could see the names of attached zones only. Trying to guess what I would get in a war was mindboggling, and sometimes region names and city names were not even close to the same, so that I'd ask for a region I was convinced didn't exist, only to be handed the capital city that had a completely different name. Please, either put the region names on zoom out like endless legend, give us a map mode, or instead of labeling everything with the empire it belongs to, but the name in the nice pleasant box where every other 4x game puts the city/outpost names. I know by the Crest who owns a city, I want to know what city it IS. 

Also, a breakdown on what is happening with certain mechanics, like religious spread or sphere's of influence would be wonderful. It's impossible to know what is happening, or why it's happening under the current system. I'm aware sphere's of influence are changing, and influence in that region is causing it. I don't know what that means, why I care, how I can use it, or what is even affecting the influence in a region specifically. Same with religion. 

Diplomancy and Trade

I am in love with Diplomacy, for the most part. The treaties are kinda barebones, but solid. The war and alliance options are clear-cut. The trade tab is pretty straightforward, though traderoutes being semi-permanent after a one-time cost is strange, and abused instantly for endless gold if you're a merchant civ. The traits system, and the showing of personality quirks, strengths, and current stance towards the player were all really nice once I figured out what they all mean. It let me effectively manage and plan my relationships with AI, but also surprised me when my rash traitor neighbor never actually attacked me, instead betraying more opportune targets because his economy was reliant on our trades. The demands system is odd at first, but I love how you can press minor or major issues, and the AI will either submit, or leave you hanging, generating war support or creating a balance of grievances to cancel out. I wish the AI would outright refuse grievances like players can, but maybe they never had a situation that justified it in my game. Figuring out I needed an international incident to justify a war was very intuitive and I loved it.

The bad of this is that trade itself, like most gold related issues, is easily broken, and I owned a copy of every resource in the game by the end, and was exporting everything in existence. There should be some balance between outright losing a resource when you sell it like Civ, to the current have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too system, thought it's more like buy a cake that someone else is still eating, eat it yourself, and then sell it off while still eating. Nobody is losing in these trades, so why would you ever not sell everything not nailed down?

Overall, there are parts of this game I love to death. There are parts that are just unpolished, and need some tuning. And then some parts (poor poor religion, actually seeing an AI use a boat) that feel unfinished. The game is at it's best when it's pushing and pulling on you, when your losing fight turns into a comeback because you rushed some scouts in to reinforce from over a lake, or when a rival is demanding reparations or land, so you make counter demands to diffuse things. Managing war support so you don't lost a war you have to upper hand in due to public outcry. More incentive to switch culture types as your easy-trading days turn into warring expansionist, or scientific studies in the new world. 

Right now, playing a static, mindless, boost your numbers and spam method wins easily. Why change culture types when money always wins? Why worry about systems when every war is ended by instantly buying an army right into any fight that starts. Why explore the world or mess with independent civs, the AI won't, they don't care about boats and only interact with most mechanics passively, so any active intervention just shuts them down. 

I completely forgot independent tribes were a thing. They either assimilated instantly despite having just spawned, or existed somewhere out of reach and out of mind. I don't even know how to hire mercenaries from them. 

It's fun to just be playing the game again. I like a lot of the balance changes made since Lucy, although I think some stuff can be rolled back. I'm also going to miss the "realistic" pop gen based off of population but the system right now is definitely cleaner and easier to understand. So far I'm attempting a full militarist run without any FIMS bonuses and it's oddly fun, especially once you notice how cheap military units are to produce. The combat definitely still feels good and I'm having an enjoyable time.

In my last playthrough I was simply building holy sites that gave me huge yields (if you take the right tenant). I probably had like nine stone rings that gave me more than 60 gold per turn each and tons other benefits). In the end you don't even build any districts anymore, which makes city development strange. I just pop the stone rings out to where I think I need a road for my next attack on an opponent. And the somewhat unexplainable thing for me is, sometimes you can build multiple holy sites and sometimes it is not available (maybe the AI build them?). Would be nice to make this entire city building a bit more organic than that.

I found this to be a huge improvement over the lucy open dev and will play through it at least one more time. I ended with about 9k fame points at around turn 140ish. Before I give too much of my feedback I'll point out that the biggest complaint I'm seeing from other people is that the eras progress too quickly. I think people are missing the point that you really want to hang out in an era and get at least 15+ stars before progressing to the next era, It's a HUGE increase in fame point generation to get the 3rd star in several areas. You might really want to consider upping the fame star requirement to 10-15 (7 is too few) but then add in a 1 star per turn (0 points) catch-up mechanic once anyone researches a tech in the next era as well as the extra stars as soon as someone advances. 

So for those of you saying the eras go by too quickly focus on getting 15-20 stars, for those of you saying your getting steamrolled by the AI early on hang out in the neolithic until you have 10+ units, advancing too soon is a noob trap.

Now then for my experience, I played on the difficulty one up from default and the game was still too easy, the second play player had 2k fame compared to my 9k and I was constantly a full era and about 10+ stars ahead of everyone. I think the AI is too easily intimidated and maybe needs to take into account the strength of their allies when deciding to go to war or concede to deals. If it's already doing that then the AI needs to be more open to allies. I did not find the ai to be too zerg like, quite the opposite I found them to be way too passive and easily intimidated.

I still think the pacing of the game is too fast (but MUCH improved over lucy) my main problem was that influence is too scarce early on and then too abundant by turn 60 onward. I went from not having enough to settle cities to having so much that I bought and built all but 3 wonders (yes I had like 15+ wonders and was building them about every other turn from turn 100-130). A large fraction of that was the influence per population per holly site, those tenants are broken.

Along with influence and expansion imbalances, the settler comes way too late in the tech tree to really be useful, by the time you get them the map is painted. Now having said that I intentionally didn't focus on tech until towards the very end and only discovered the new world on the last few turns of the game but it feels weird to be practically in the modern era before colonialism kicks in.

I'd really like it if your culture-specific buildings carried over through all the ages, it's a huge loss to capture or settle a new city in the 3rd or 4th age and not be able to build your 2nd or 3rd age buildings.

Last random thoughts:

-Like everyone else religion feel uninvolved, I just accumulate points until I can buy a bonus, meh. Not sure how to fix it, civ's way of using missionaries to fight it out doesn't feel like the right answer, and just spending other fism to build buildings also doesn't feel right. Maybe something more story-oriented using the events system? I think the biggest problem is that you just kinda earn religious points passively side by side with the rest of your resources, you're not really needing to sacrifice or make an interesting choice to get religious points.

-Certain combinations still feel overpowered, my next playthrough I'm going to test out going double econ out the gate, combining -20% buyout costs with -50% buyout costs I'm going to guess will be game-breaking we'll see. Like I mentioned above stacking the influence per pop onto holy sites was also broken. but the flip side of that is that some improvements are practically worthless with no synergies at all. 2-3 turns just to get +2 influence on the main plaza, or just +3 gold on the main plaza... meh those feel like noob traps they are so bad.

-Diplomacy isn't bad but I don't feel like I'm in control of the situation, I can't make choices to try and influence friendship or try to manufacture grievances, generating fabricated causus belli's or sending diplomats to attempt to bring your nations together is needed. Like many things in the game, there needs to be more active agency on the part of the player and less passive accumulation of numbers.

-I didn't get into any naval warfare at all will report back after my next play-through.

All in all buying the preorder was money well spent and its great to see the huge improvements keep it up.

Here are some thoughts that don't fit neatly in other threads:

1. EUs could use another balance pass. There is a lot to consider here, but the general idea is that the "perfect" unit has high combat strength, fills a gap in the roster, comes early in the tech tree, and has low resource cost. EUs in practice probably shouldn't do all of these though or they will be too strong. Some units do this better than others. The rarer the resource that you need, and the further in the tech tree the unit is, the stronger they need to be. This is a problem for units like Paretorians, because Iron is actually quite difficult to get. Further, they only replace a unit that everyone gets in the classical era rather than filling a gap (warriors), and ends up facing off against medieval tech units. Compare to the Saṃnāhya, which requires no resource, fills a gap between archers and crossbows, and comes at the mounted warfare tech. Your available resources should be something you consider if you intend to produce EUs, but I found that, in both Lucy and Victor, Iron in particular was very difficult to get, which really lessens the value of iron-based EUs. Likewise, EUs near the end of the tree in any given era are lower value because not only do they come later, but they are balanced against same-era units when they will largely be fighting next-era units.

2. Expansionist cultures are still bad. Too hard to generate expansionist stars relative to other stars, and their ability is still the worst by far. I'm not sure what the devs envision as the use case for this. Beyond the early game, it is rare to find outposts that aren't immediately integrated into cities, the 5 turns takes a long time, expansionist cultures don't typically have a lot of gold, and no one in their right mind will give open borders to an expansionist. I feel like expansionists  should get bonuses to war willingness (or w/e it is called) and their ability should let them generate claims on neighboring territory, perhaps at the cost of influence. Expansionists are also a bit all over the place in terms of focus. Not to pick on Rome too much, but I would never spend the time building their EQ. And then I look at the EQ of Spain, Teutons, Russia, Assyria... and they all just seem too situational (though perhaps some of these would be better if the AI had a better religion game.)  

3. Mid-game Expansionists have a heavy focus on... faith? This ties into my point above. In general I think there is too much focus on religion with expansionists, I'd like to see expansionists that do other things. Ottomans are probably the worst culture in the game. Please give them a trait that is actually useful. In the early game you have the Assyrians, Achamenids, and Romans. While you can debate the relative strength of these cultures, it is obvious how their abilities tie into expansionist gameplay. Then you start getting Teutons, Ottomans, Spanish, and Russians, all of which have EQs that provide faith. I understand how this fits in with the history of these given cultures, but it doesn't play at all into expansionist gameplay, and the religion game seems to be pretty much over by the time these EQs become available. (The exception here I would argue is the teutons, who have a more obvious case: conquer territories to spread your state religion, which increases your science and money yields)

3. Money is too good in Victor. It was good in Lucy too, but overlooked I think because of how production was. With changes from Lucy, money is now much better than production. Money is always good in these games because it is effectively production that can be used anywhere at any time. I found that even compared to a city that was almost entirely production focused in good production terrain, gold focus outperforms it pretty significantly. I could purchase a few constructibles every turn, whereas producing later game infrastructure would take 3-5 turns. Anyone who picked Carthage in particular is going to snowball if they've focused gold. Please nerf Carthage to like 30% (or less) reduction lol

4. Influence scaling is weird. I feel like I desperately need influence for maybe the first 20 turns or so after my first city comes up, and then some stuff happens, and I basically ignore it the rest of the game except for wonders. I don't really have any insight into this. Maybe increase influence costs significantly for outposts further away from your capital? One of my criticisms of Lucy was that it felt like territories were claimed very early. While this is much harder to do now, it does feel like pretty much everything has been claimed by the start of the classical era, which is pretty much where Lucy was at as well. I've also managed to 3-star influence in pretty much every era of every game without picking an Aesthete. It basically eliminates the need to ever pick a whole subset of cultures, including non-aesthete cultures that have an influence focus like the Venetians.

5. Can't eliminate other players. I'm not sure why this was put in, but part of the genre is the ability to eliminate other players. They lose all their territory? Too bad, so sad, that's part of the game. No reason to stop the player from annexing an enemy's final city. The way war works in this game means you really have to mess up to get completely eliminated, it's not like anyone gets steamrolled in a single war. Let me take the AI's last territory.

5.5: Abuse case with wars. Whittle down an opponent to one city with a lot of attached territory. Declare war. End war demanding reparations and leaving city and territory intact. Get lots of money and expansionist stars (cause you get progress when you conquer the city and attached territory, even if you don't hold it). Repeat.

6. Ending Wars and Territory Labels. Same complaint as Lucy. I can't tell what territory I'm demanding when trying to take it after a war. This is a basic QOL feature.

7. Fame. Loved it before, still love. I think it just needs some tweaking with how fast you can generate score, and when the AI chooses to advance eras.

8. Cultural influence. I can see that sometimes my culture has influenced another territory (or someone else's culture my territory). It doesn't really seem to have any effect beyond generating grievances. I'd like to see more interactions with this, like ways to peacefully flip cities, perhaps if you are an aesthete.

9. Alliances with AI. Maybe it was the difficulty, but it felt like the AI never wanted an alliance. Could just be me or my playstyle though.

10. AI seems quite aggressive. Higher difficulty may be related, but they really like to dogpile you. I found if one enemy declared on me, I'd have one to two others breathing down my neck the next turn. I'm not sure if its a problem or not yet, as the player should be challenged, but it does seem to lead to the AI chronically underdeveloping cities in favor of massive armies. I will say that trying to kill stacks of immortals/hoplites/Saṃnāhya at turn 35 is not particularly enjoyable though.

I unfortunately missed the Lucy Opendev, so this was my first experience with the game. In terms of 4x games, I generally play Civ VI and Endless Legend, so I figured there would be similar features to Endless Legend. I have played the game twice so far, and feel like I have gotten a good first impression.

Positives

• The first thing that struck me was the game is absolutely beautiful. I love the design, the graphics, and the map.
• Besides the ancient era, I had a tough time deciding between several of the cultures to try out, which means they all probably have a decent balance and enjoyment.
• The battle system and stacking armies was something I enjoyed from endless legend, but not the actual combat itself. Humankind did a really good job of taking what was good from Endless Legend and leaving out the negatives.
• The idea of a grievance/demand system for war support and war score is really enjoyable as well as the idea of having vassalization.
• I was overall a fan of the district mechanics to this game, and did really enjoy to have such a sprawling city at the end game.
• Even with playing the same map twice, I felt that I played two very different games, meaning there is a nice level of variability.
• Lastly, and a bit more subjective, this game had the "I'll just play for 30 more minutes...oh wait when did it become 3 am" feel, making me feel like this game is almost ready for release.

• I agree with many of the other comments on the pacing of the game. The 150 turn cap really hurts the testing ability. I always feel like I am rushing to get to the next era without just taking the time to maximize the era I am currently in. The eras themselves also feel like they go by way too quickly. If am normally a standard speed player, but if this is the standard speed, I have a feeling I may be playing more games on epic.
• Because of the speed, I felt that there were just too many things to build. After two approaches, the best approach felt like focusing on districts in the early game (with a couple of relevant buildings) then switching to buildings when the land is filling out, but by the time the game ended, I probably only built like 1/3 of the available buildings. The game might use a trimming of some of the buildings, but overall it would just be better if you spent a longer time in each era.
• The religion system was a bit confusing. Both games I played, I was able to get polytheism or shamanism and four tenants, but I was unable to get a structured religion like catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc. I saw in the livestream on Thursday that this was possible, but I could not figure out how to get it. In addition while I enjoyed that religion gameplay was passive at its core (compared to the active religious gameplay in Civ VI), but it is a little too passive to the point where it almost felt unimportant. 
• I did not like that the city center only exploits food and industry. One of my favorite parts of endless legend was identifying the right place to settle not only for food and production, but for the anomolies as well. Because city centers now only exploit food and industry and districts to exploit other yields do not come into play until the classical era (besides artisan quarters), it felt like the cultures that gave yields besides those two were much stronger. 
• The natural wonders (while cool features), did not feel like they offered too much in terms of yields and bonuses.
• The forced surrender screen was very confusing. Everything (things going to me or the A.I.) were listed as give and it further did not help that it listed the territory names and not the city names. I was essentially guessing which territory contained the correct city.
• I didn't really know how to unlock the civics but this seems like something the devs are already addressing.
• I feel like the vassalization mechanic can be fleshed out a bit. It would be interesting to see once you enter the later industrial and contemporary era (where colonization and vassals are frowned upon in the world) if it begins to hurt your diplomatic relationships with other cultures.

1. Faster animation slider option same as in combat but for non combat movements
2. Building/Unit Queue: The Queue and Buyout should not be separate toggles but show queue time and buyout numbers on same page (show as much info as possible with 1 page rather than toggles)
3. Faster WASD keyboard / mouse cursor to edge of screen panning camera movement sensitivity slider

I played one really short game, where I made a couple of bad decisions (boy, city placement is absolutely critical for the Zhou, or you're completely screwed), and now am a third of my way through the second playthrough, where a little knowledge has made it much easier!

First of all, I'm really enjoying this. It feels a lot more balanced, and the combat is much more fun than earlier opendevs - it seems just right now.

There's obviously a few bugs and oversights that will hopefully get fixed in QA - how has the slow scroll speed not driven your in house team absolutely mental?

The biggest issues so far seem to me to be that culture and religion seem very amorphous - it's not that clear what they're doing, it doesn't feel like you have much control over them, and it doesn't really feel fun at the moment. There needs to be some flavour to what's happening to draw people in (maybe more events will help?), but I don't really know or care where I should put my holy sites. Numbers seem to go up. That's... good? It doesn't feel at all like religion. I don't even understand anything to do with culture, but maybe this can be used to overcome some of the weaknesses around not being able to destroy other empires - to stop people cheesing other empires by just militarily destroying them, maybe they should have to be strong culturally as well?

Other than that, some good luck and strong combat in the neolithic period has made this second playthrough very easy. It's still fun, but I keep beasting my nearest two neighbours who have just left the Neolithic now I've well ensconced in the Classical. Not necessarily a problem, I could always turn the difficulty up.

Pacing seems decent, although I might enjoy slightly longer eras without correspondingly longer build times, Certainly not too off. I wouldn't want the only choice to be this or much longer. Ransacking seems slightly too long, but better than instantaneous.

So I already did 5 playthroughs of the Victor OpenDev. I know it's not really a first impression since I've played it several times already, but I can't find a thread that I can put my general impressions of the game so far. So, I'll just put it here, if the mods don't mind.

Just a disclosure that I haven't played the Lucy one as much as Victor because of medical circumstances (I had one of my wisdom teeth removed. During Christmas). I played it three times before it's end, so the improvements section of this feedback might feel a bit off. Like I said, I played Victor 5 times now and I intend to play some more as much as possible. :)

• Improvements and Good Stuff

-    The UI this time is clearer and more streamlined, especially the battle UI. I especially like the UI that tells you you are about to cross a river, the side UI that tells you if you're close to earning a star, and that your culture's EU is indicated in the tech tree.

-    A major improvement, and one that I've been annoyed about since I was able to play the civics screen, is the slider. It's so much clearer where you are in the slider and what bonuses you get. Hovering over a civics choice will move the slider along the spectrum, and that is very helpful. 

-     The trade section in the diplomacy screen better illustrates where your exports are heading to and where your imports are coming in

-    I like the stats screen at the end of the game

• Criticisms and Glitches

 -   I can't find the region names whenever a notification tells me something is happening to a certain region, or whenever I am on the diplomacy screen I couldn't really recognize what region I'm negotiating on or what region the grievance is.

-    Sometimes whenever I click on a notification for a treaty from another empire I've never met yet, it skips the introduction and gets on with the negotiation. I don't know if it's a glitch or on purpose, but it feels a bit off.

-    The "culture chosen" notification is a bit confusing and vague. Whenever I try to locate the empire whose culture just changed, it led me to the culture selection screen rather than the culture in question. It also says, for example, “’Huns’ have reached the classical era into ‘Huns’”.

-    It would have been better if the stats screen at the end would be a bit faster.

-    Even though I've played Civilization multiple times, I feel that Humankind is better without a calendar. Usually, in Civ, I try to play catch up with the calendar so that I go from one era to the next in the same way in real history. However, when I played the Lucy OpenDev, I feel more relaxed knowing I can transition eras without any concern whether or not that transition is off (like going into Early Modern in 1500 rather than 50 CE). I hope there will be an option to turn it off.

-     At some point I'm prompted to choose an irreligion civic, especially when my religion is the largest in the game... which doesn't make sense. I think a few historical steps have been skipped there. I hope the trigger for that civic choice would be fixed.

-     I'm quite disappointed that I can no longer attach districts to resource extractors, garrisons or harbours; it would have been nice to make coastal/resource focused towns

-     Why do independent people hate me? I tried to give them influence and money but they still see me as distrustful. Isn't it that when you give them lots of stuff they'll like you more? The ideology alignment is great, don't get me wrong. However I feel that there's something hidden there that prevents me from them viewing me more favourably, and I hope that gets fixed. Or maybe that's just me.

One final major point, I would say, and I would echo what has been said previously, is the pacing. For me, there are parts when the pacing is good. For example, in my last three playthroughs, I experimented with getting industrial tech and reaching the Early Modern period. Alas, I wasn't able to reach Early Modern before turn 149. In some ways, it's because my strategies and choices haven't been good, but (correct me if I'm wrong) if a normal game ends in 300 turns then I feel that the pacing to simulate history more or less is okay. There is that one caveat of technically ending the game with technology from the 60's. 

In other parts, however, the pacing isn't good. I can see this especially in how I can't build my EU for my culture - or even create a proper standing army - until I'm at the cusp of transitioning from one era to the next. Production can be quite expensive at times, and I wouldn't have time to use my unit before I transition because of that. 

Overall, like I said in previous OpenDevs, this feels like a complete game already, and props to the Amplitude team for that! However I feel some fine-tuning should be made so that the game might become better. Keep up the good work as always!

As a first impression, this game is really promising so far! I just wish a few things. First, I hope the region mechanic can be changed to something else as it never makes any sense to me in any strategy games. Region should never be defined from the start and expanded from nation instead. Settling things should also not be limited to create much more interesting situations. even though it may sacrifice game balance and maybe too chaotic for some other players.

To the contrary of some players, I actually like having an aggressive AI as it makes 4X games much more engaging. However, I do wish that the AI is not suicidal and doesn't engage if their units have lower strength than mine. I only made it 2 hours in, so I can't really judge the AI and other aspects.

Sadly, I don't think I can push my laptop to run this game anymore. Even on the fastest graphical setting and 720p resolution in the span of 2 sessions with one hour/session, I can only get 20 FPS at most and my laptop heats really bad, potentially hurting the performance in the long run. I thought if I could run Endless Space 2 decently, I could run this game as well, but turns out I was wrong. Here's my specification for those interested:
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz, 1498 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
GPU NVIDIA GeForce MX250
RAM 8 GB
OS Windows 10 Home

Endless Space 2 was a really great game for me, so I really hope you can pull this out Amplitude!