I enjoy playing the neolithic era in the beginning, but I think it should last just a couple turns longer. The AI is rushing the civs with just 1 goal. On humankind difficulty depending on my civ choice I have 8-11 turns to pick what I want. If the AI tried to get at least 2 goals they could get some more people out of it as well. They could also compete with the players religion earlier and they wouldnt think the player is stronger than them because of more scout units.

I agree that the food required to make a new unit should go up the more you have, like someone suggested. 
I'd like to see more types of animals if we can get a longer neolithic era. Like they would spawn in areas that have the proper terrain. Bears, deer and mammoths are nice alrdy but more variety would be appealing in the era. 

Neolithic era still has a set meta unfortunately.  Stay as long as you can manage (depends on other civs), put down as many OP as possible, have as many units as possible, then use the scouts after you move to the Ancient Era to bumrush some moron (usually purple because they are the easiest to pick on in Victor) and make them your bitch vassal.  

I haven't found a better strat or a more reliable one.  I'm concerned neolithic in its current state is very one dimensional.  There are many suggestions floating around to radically change it, and any of them will probably lead to more one dimensional gameplay.

However, it is worth remembering that the Neolithic Era was created to prevent two things plaguing other 4x in the genre

1. A bad start ruining the game because you have to settle Turn 1 so you don't fall behind (Endless Legend esp.)
2. Your start being entirely due to random chance because you have a very limited distance you can move before you have to settle a city.

In that light, it's working perfectly.  A little too perfectly.

Outposts after your first now cost more Influence to place in the Neolithic than they do in Era 1.  So the dev team fixed the Outpost-spamming issue from the Lucy OpenDev: you can claim territory faster after you civilize than you can in the Neolithic. 

The last critical remaining Neolithic issue is the one folks have been talking about here:  getting as many Tribes as you can in the Neolithic slingshots your Era 1.  There's a few ways that could be nerfed, including the ideas posted above.  I don't have a real preference about how this gets addressed, but I hope it does.

A tangential issue to the above is that the Hunter era star is a newbie-trap (and AI trap).  You will crimp your Era 1 horribly if you kill 3 things quickly and then civilize, but there's no easy way to flag that for a new player.

I would suggest setting hunting stars demand to maybe 10, but make bears count as 2 and mammoth as 4, which mean you would have atleast gotten 50 food and 50 influence from hunting, vs 15 and 15 as of right now.

hito wrote:

Neolithic is interesting. At first I thought it was trivial because the hunting is easily the fastest - especially since other nomads count for the hunter star - but rushing into ancient isn't necessarily great, especially if your trait/EQ isn't immediately helping you snowball. (Testing the extremes of rushing, I once went Ancient on turn 6 with the Phonecians - and then proceeded to get stomped because my terrible city took forever to get rolling.) As people have said upthread, getting population to disband into workers is monstrously strong, so staying Neolithic for a time is useful. Because of that, even though the scientist star is almost invariably the last, you're allowed to wait for its benefit just because you're killing time in the Neolithic anyway.

So the good news is that there's more to chew on than you'd think. The bad news is that it's communicated in an unsatisfying way. Disbanding your first units is intensely powerful in a way later disbands aren't, since those later units TOOK a pop to make but your firs tone didn't. And having nomads instead of scouts is incredibly useful, since they get food rewards from curiosities and hunts, and those fractions of a pop are better rewards than the piddly garbage you get for touching points in the Ancient Era. The problem with the Neolithic being interesting is that it's interesting because you have BETTER options than when you "ascend". This breaks intuition, fights the UI (which wants you to go Ancient ASAP), relies on a strategy that's hidden in an unintuitive place (the tooltip for Disbanding), and has the unsatisfying side-effect of giving you fewer Ancient culture choices that people who rush. The fact that you'll ultimately end up better than the rushers by doing it "right" doesn't stop it feeling wrong.

With that in mind, here's how I think you can make the smart way to play Neolithic become the obvious and fun way, in a way that I think would reaaallly push Humankind's early game to be more fun than anything else other there:

• No more food star. Your reward for having more people is having more people, which is an incredible reward already.
• Instead, you only have one star, the influence star. Scientific curiosities now only reward influence. Hunts give both influence and food, winning against other tribes give influence, maybe even certain discoveries of resources or wonders can give influence.
• Influence star has TWO ranks. At the first rank, you get a Neolithic trait. These can include the three options in the scientific menu, although I think it'd be coolest if they were things that interacted positively with microgeography. So stuff involving rivers, horses, certain terrain types, etc., to interact with how you think your first city will look based on what you've seen. Unlike cultures, they can be shared between civs, so you can pick whats best for you without racing.
• The second star lets you go to Ancient, as normal. And there's no incentive to slowroll, because...
• Your nomads don't automatically become Scouts, you keep them as nomads! (And maybe have them as options alongside Scouts to make more if you really want.) Hunts and curiosities continue to have their same food rewards if a nomad is involved. But this isn't broke, since...
• The disbanding rule is changed to specifically exclude Nomads. (Of all types! Screw you Huns!) You don't get a pop for disbanding them. Instead Nomads get a special action called "settling" that must be done on a city District. Settling consumes the nomad and only gives the flat value of food inside of them at the end of the turn. Making it an ability makes it more clear to players it's an option, while nerfing the gain makes it less powerful to stack to ~10 pop in the very start of Ancient.

More of a feature request than feedback, I guess. But I want to emphasize that I started very cynical about the Neolithic and then ended up surprised at the depth it ended up having. Unfortunately, that depth right now comes in the form of exploiting a breaking strategy that is both very powerful (the economy isn't ready for your city having that much pop early on) and totally un-fun (cultures are the fun bit, and I have to force myself to wait like a dog balancing a treat on it's nose, without the attendant Fame reward you get for doing so in later era). I think doing this or something like this would make the depth of the Neolithic I found a little less broken and a million times more accessible.

Yeah, I was thinking along the same, with influence and founding your first oupost being the main drive of the neolithic.

I started a playthrough on the 2nd easiest difficulty to see if I could wipe out the AI players before they even pick a culture and settle a city. Seems like the game just spawns new units for the AI if their last unit gets killed. I obviously did not have vision of the entire map, but I had around 50 units on turn 30 that were spread out on the starting continent. At least twice after killing an AI unit, a new one was spawned inside visible territory.

 I think you should be able to wipe out players that early if you do manage, since I doubt it would be feasible on any difficulty higher than the few easiest ones. 

Neolithic era is great, but I'm afraid of 1 thing:

That it can be too random for players and make some really hard advantages for someone lucky enough. For example, once I was able to have 12 scouts, 22 curiosity picked, many animals killed having 165 influence in total at turn 10-12 (don't remember), in other playthrough I entered into the ancient era at turn 8 with 6 scouts, 5 curiosity and 4 animals killed only so I've got like 45 inflience only.

Btw finding curiosites is the harderst way to get a fame start. It should be balanced.

In general, I love the neolithic era.  It encourages you to explore and gives you an opportunity to actually decide where to settle down, especially since building your first outpost isn't even that beneficial at this point.  The ability to grow troops by gaining food is major.  My second playthrough I was able to generate a large army of ~8 units before I moved to the next era, which allowed me to immediately dominate the closest empire.  If anything, it feels like it ends too quickly.  Especially the science option seems like it takes way too long relative to the other stars.  This often seems to be my favorite era so far (I love exploration), and the fact that it's over after just a few short turns disappoints me.  Of course you can delay moving on (I did that for 2 turns my second playthrough), but most of the time that feels like a sub-optimal strategy since you may not get your ideal culture if you take too long.  I definitely exploited the free unit-generation and influence gain my second run, to great effect.

I have a pseudo TL;DR in my conclusion segment for those who dont want to read my word salad

To preface I only had about 50 hours in this open dev so my opinion may be less informed in comparison, however min-maxing the neolithic on max difficulty was something I took great enjoyment from and therefore makes me think I may have a few opinions to contribute. I shall break them down into what I deemed as the major gameplay elements/aspects and have various subheadings for the postive, negative, and finally some workarounds and thoughts for each. The order of importance (from a "I want to become the strongest going into the next game perspective) is as follows:

Please note this is in the context of Humankind difficulty, not to bring in elements of AI or combat (which I may make a post should I find my contribution substantial enough) and what I view as "optimal" gameplay

1. Outposts
2. "Storyline" - Quest bonuses
3. Nomads

Outposts

Pros

Flexible city choice: prospective areas for cities, output steroid or strategic positional placement, having the outpost first and leaving the choice to make it a city or linking it up later is dynamic and very engaging, makes optimal play not become streamlined as pivots are not locked out by the placement of cities (purely defensive spots can become productive cities if the borders shape out differently, added to cities etc.)

(Strategic/ Lux) Resource reliant: Thematically pleasing and very fitting for the Neolithic age, a balancing factor for bad yields is how the outpost and subsequent city can be redeemed, also creates priorities, areas of interest and directions for troop movements

Terrain considerations: Defensive positions in the future, river bends, forest etc are all very well realised and are things I actively look for and get excited to see for early game cities, just like it would be in real life the rivers being extremely favoured for early civilisations. If anything these factors are even slightly understated, with adjacent tiles to rivers not receiving bonus from river, could be an addition later or to certain common buildings.

Cons

Massively 1st turn favoured: Having passive food production which can turn into an additional nomad which can automatically spawn from the outpost/ pops when becoming a city keeps a strong importance on the first are you spawn into and not placing your outpost turn 1 to look for a better area is inadvisable. so someitmes you become stuck with subpar base yields of your outpost.

Un-interactive: This element is a gripe with outposts in general but is acutely felt in the Neolithic and subsequent 2 ages. This exacerbates the first Con, since the location becomes too important for your Neolithic outposts and has a multitude of other issues:

• Specialisation unfavoured

A high food city produces the nomads which accelerate your game, but has no production to become the outpost in the first place, whereas the high production outpost becomes a outpost instantly (in the case of a four stack and good land) but does nothing in the neolithic age. This means balance outposts are the only option for your first outpost unless your have precognition of the surrounding land (ie. real game playing the map for the first time)

• Disconnectivity

This point will be referenced later under nomads, but the jist of this point is your nomads can just leave the outpost to hunt and scout and never need to return to it. Should it be pillaged a sole nomad takes 4 turns which is more than enough time to either a) defend it or b) just leave it. There is no cost associated with the outpost or maintenance or support you can give it. This bleeds over into the city upgrade (and somewhat out of the neolithic) which will always be fixed and un-interact-able since you cannot chop it out and the outpost just freezes itself like a massive black hole in your territory for 5-10 turns

• "Pointlessness"

Similar in principle but differing perspective. Whereas Disconnectivity is the internal role and impact of the outpost for the player, this aspect is regarding the game-state and the relation to other Actors. The outposts act as a rough line for future borders but I have no incentive to engage with them. The Neolithic age lacks diplomatic reprocussions but is also the most vulnerable to your fledgling empire committing a 4 stack to destroy outposts is unviable as it sets you too far behind in the context of the game just to harass 1-2 immediate AI.Seeing an enemy outpost in a zone you wanted becomes a - "well darn my luck" rather than a world shaping event that contorts the gameplay and forces an interesting game-state to shift from an internal focus to an external one. And more importantly outposts which do not illicit a response from your opponents creates a stale gameplay flow in my opinion and (in the context of the single player experience) being faced with the unexpected and unpleasant circumstances is what keeps games fresh and challenging

Note: It is very easy to create a shut out situation with yellow and purple by destroying their outposts and keeping them in neolithic which can be very advantageous, but doing that in neolithic is what I claim to be sub-optimal since the same can easily be done with Runners (auto upgrades being something other posters have mentioned as a potential issue addressed later)

Storyline - Quest bonuses

Pros

Provides a massive incentive to delay your advancement into the next age, the one free nomad is disgustingly powerful, especially since it spawns outside the stack and full movement. Furthermore the inheritance (+1 food/industry/science thing) if optimised give you tech / pop/ district 1 turn sooner and has the most obscene snowball effect on the entire game afterwards. I would even go as far as to say delaying up to 3 turns for the bonus is worth it. That is excluding the other factors that come with being neolithic (talked about in nomad section)

Quests are fun : nothing longwinded about this point, endless and quests go together, and just fits with this take on civilisation going and creating its own tales and myths means you will have your own questline to follow

Cons

Opaque: The triggers for certain events like that barn one I never paid enough attention to so I have no idea how to proc it, or which unit stack it will spawn on, should have paid more attention. Which leads to the following issue

Meta-gamey: once you know that a certain event happens I am overly incentivised to play to it and force a certain chain to go off. with Legend some random curios might start you off on a chain or your main racial questline will just happen which I never had a problem, but seeing as this game strays away from the fixed race style of Civ making them tied to your civ is impossible, and there just isnt enough time in the neolithic age to get a solid chain going to integrate the questline into the direct gameplay.

Nomads

Pros

Risk-reward of splitting Having the role of nomad be everything, your military, your growth, your scout, your influence gain, and most importantly your Pop makes a single nomad very risky but the information it can gain be a boon. this makes for, at least conceptually, a tricky trade off situation where you might be inclined to cover more area but expose them to predation or attack from opposing tribes a single lost nomad is  hefty blow, and getting them tied up in retreats or cut off by wild animals is something acutely felt. They are the core of the entire age and rightly so.

"Dangerous" Hunts The Mammoth being the poster child for this category, needing at least 3 nomads to guarantee a healthy kill shape the gameplay of the neolithic. Very fitting and I will actively pursue a mammoth I see. Their movement is also slow enough that they dont get completely out of sight even in rough terrain I definitely get into the neolithic hunter mindset where I am very eager to hunt these mammoths. The interplay with the above point of risk reward also comes into its own here. I have a  diffcult choice to make, looking for curios effectively or keeping a strong hunting party on hand for the mammoth

Cons

Auto-healing/Speed

These two elements go together in mind. The high movement in this age, or this game in general, is amplified with the strong auto healing of your nomads making for a very swift end to such a sensitive period. By healing so much you can continue scouting with no cares in the world, and the high movement means even if you see something dangerous you can just run away I never thought of my HP on my units unless they were directly next to an AI even after mammoth hunts on with only 2 nomads. Which somwhat undermines the positives of the "dangerous hunts" pro I wrote above

Food overflow/sharing

the feeding mechanics are very interesting and is very distinct compared to civ, the problem as has been mentioned a lot in this thread is the remainder left over when advancing just disappearing making the player feel like there was "waste". I personally do enjoy noob traps in games since it can be a great way to create a strong skill divide, but looking at the game in a conceptual and primarily single player view, I can only ask what happened to this excess food? This magic appearing disappearing food also teleports when other stacks come into range of combat. Whilst not even reinforcing they can receive partial foodstores which is both odd and frustrating to deal with giving strange 0.5 values which cannot be seen.

Disconnectivity

I alluded to this prior, giving all of the nomads auto-healing, fast movement, auto growth etc. make them very central to this age which they must be but overshadows the purpose and role of the outpost. Thematically shouldnt the outpost be the place where the once nomadic tribes shift into the agrarian societies of the ancient age? Furthermore as the central hub of the blossoming civilisation no nomad has ever had to even once return to the city, even when disbanding they just need to be in the borders and they get instantly absorbed. I do find it amusing however that having built the outpost they will never have to lay foot into it as long as they live.

Production conferred to fledgling outposts unclear I never got around to this before the open dev ended but I wanted to know how much each nomad would give in production to the base of the outpost, I think it was something like 6 or 7 but I have no clue, so I would lime that to be stated somewhere

Influence Gains

This may be somewhat contradictory to the Dangerous Hunts' point, but the absolute superiority of hunting mammoth into the 100+ influence range, and the relative ease each mammoth giving 20 a pop skews gameplay to necessitate a large influence bank so cities can be developed and attached at a reasonable pace or else suffering through a 4 pop cap 2 citizen limit on the various industries. Far too powerful especially in comparison to the ancient era +3 influence from district (+5 from civic is mandatory but that is a civics thread waiting to be made)

Lack of Danger (moot point, more of a consequence of the meta)

It has been mentioned by other posters too, but I will leave special mention here as well, leaving out combat disucssions for their respective thread, the wildlife has 3 foes, the deer(free) mammoth(with 2 nomads risky,with 3 free) and bears which I have only encountered in the tundra area near lake baikan on 4 occasions and since I was mammoth hunting posed no threat either. Ironic considering that I praised the danger mammoth pose, but I view this as the compounded effects of the 2 cons (auto healing, influence) and the pro of the mammoth itself. Essentially creating a meta where I run around with 3 stacks for easy mammoth kills and cannot be threatened even if AI were to show up.

Suggestions thoughts and concluding statements

Outposts - too secondary in their role, lack interaction with the players units and the "world" diplomatically and from a meta perspective

Questline - too short and almost "random" requiring meta-knowledge to force and thusly ruining immersion

Nomads - too mobile and heal automatically, detracting from the risk-reward style of breaking up vs sticking together

Sanctuaries - act like ruins, curios goody huts you name it, but dont seem like what the name implies

Centralise the outpost from a gameplay/design perspective, 

1. Have massively increased healing on nomads in the outpost/minor increases in territory
   • Increases danger and risk borne but going out far, makes circling your claimed territory beneficial
   • Slows down the pace of the game allowing for Queslines to be more realised in this age
   • May necessitate a more fleshed out 2 unit system rather than only nomads - unsure
   • These three points may already ameliorate the lack of danger and pace of neolithic age but maybe more predators, bears which need a party of 4 to guarantee a kill but costs 2 deaths, and give some sort of quest/long term flat bonus reward may also give purpose to bears/threats
   • mammoths should stay as they are perfect spot for rewards, I think it is the game around them which needs a little tweaks such as outposts
2. Have interaction with outpost / usage for production
   • small buildings, hutts or the like which may give additional citizen slots in later ages if the outpost is upgraded into a city
   • flat growth/production/ gold/ influence buildings, similar to the "your plaza gives ..." type that do not scale but give your earlygame a strong boost (gold is a bad idea un-thematic and not useful until 3 ages since influence food and prod are so vital earlygame)
   • border growth - the framework is already there in the influence growing in an area but maybe flesh it out in a similar tangible way like rise of nations
3. Make returns to outpost more necessary as time goes on, aligning gameplay with the themes and era shift
   • Food drop off to feed the outpost and create pops there
   • returning from big hunts, maybe even a loot bag which can be opened/ utilised after returning to town which gives the influence portion of your hunt reward? doing so means movement speeds dont need a change (for neolithic) since you will be coming back and forth with them
   • Unit upgrades being in your own territory is a common way but make it so that for nomads they need to come into the outpost to receive their upgrades
   • Require nomads to gain access to tiles, this could be combined with the 2) 3rd point as influence expands more tiles become available to passively harvest, maybe for your outpost to exploit its neighboring tiles to their maximum (or as a bonus) require a nomad/upgraded nomad to stand on the tile
4. Sanctuary interplay, the most unrefined of the thoughts as I write this off the cuff but a way to shift the focus is to have the sanctuaries become more of an active element in the neolithic
   • More reliable spawner, maybe even an indicator for spawns of deer, with would boost the point 3, giving an incentive to stay close to the outpost also signifying a shift away from hunter gatherer
   • Can interact with the outpost, maybe you can build a pen on it, invest production to spawn food from it etc etc. this way it occupies more of a civ 5 role of giving strong earlygame boosts to cities to help them off the ground
   • make it a strong consideration to leave the sanctuary alive rather than instantly harvest it especially if you have an outpost in the area

The Final sanctuary notes are rather unpolished and have more to do with map generation and game pace possibly but I see much design space to be had in neolithic maybe even possibly extending up to 25 turns with the addition of questlines, basic (flat) buildings, passive harvesting, cultivation of tiles etc. etc.

It is of minor note but curios and animals never seemed to spawn in LOS maybe it was my imagination but I seemed to find more stuff if I left things in the fog and scouted with big bands of nomads to guarantee kills.

Overall very high potential in this game here, I am looking forward to where you take it.

I love the Neolithic era but find the 3 hunts a little to easy. maybe  Re balance the units so a deer is doable with a solo unit, bear with 2-3 and a mammoth needing a full party. Also make it so you have to hunt one of each or just hunt more animals for your star. This will encourage  exploration to find the animals and food gathering for more units and let me find more anomalies. it might also be nice for a faith bonus if you find a natural wonder in this ear. Also where are the wolfs? Feels like the first aggressive unit we should have to deal with is a wolf(pack) not a bear.

Neolithic feels great. Simple, gives time to prepare for real gameplay. Would probably want to see even more variety, but nothing complex. Yeah, and 3 hunts is too easy for goal, make it 5.

A more complete feedback from my end after two playthroughs (one on hard, one on very hard). An avid CIV player, I cannot not benchmark Humankind against it.

Overall

1. I really like the neolithic era and like to spend as much time there as possible because it is fresh compared to CIV
2. I like the incentive of hunting longer in the neolithic, and then feeding those extra units back into your territories after you've transitioned to the ancient era.
3. in general, it's not clear what the curios yield before stepping onto them.

Feedback

1. the downside of the neolithic era is that you force all players into the exploration phase simultaneously. This has the following risks:
   - as the game progresses, the number of new mechanics introduced decreases exponentially over time
   - as the game progresses, complexity is introduced solely by scale, not by gameplay
   - as a result, the rest of the game becomes less interesting
2. consider adding a curio's yield in the tooltip overview tracker thingamabob below
3. consider adding a single column technology tree segment for the neolithic era. Makes no sense to come up with things like the wheel or hunting in the ancient era.