Goodluck wrote:

Overall the pacing seems alot better than Lucy, however the balance issues exist:

• Resource stacking is very powerful and completely dwarf everything else. This means large empires become very snowballing. When a single marble give the same production as a factory to all cities and 2 marbles give twice the amount it quickly lead to extreme yields, which make further expansion even easier which give more cities and resources and thus even more snowball potential. Suggestion is to add diminishing returns on resource stacking, first resource could give 100% of the value, second could be 50% and third could be 25%.

I feel like tech costs got scaled up a little bit too much. While in lucy it was much too easy to research everything, I feel like I'm constantly an era behind in tech unless I'm playing a scientist culture. I think this has a lot to do with how long it takes to get your first tech that boosts science at the start of the game, combined with much slower expansion and city development. 

I had a pretty serious issue with the pacing as I played. (Maybe I'm just too good at these sorts of games?)

It felt like advancing through eras and obtaining new cultures was EXTREMELY FAST; without even paying any attention to the era stars I would accidentally just shoot up in score. This resulted in situations in which my emblematic unit was literally two entire technology ERAS ahead of where I was currently at. Meaning I never even got the technology to build any of them before being able to move on to the next one. Infact, it turns out that if you get to the modern era before the 150 turn mark, your game just ends. I frequently had matches ending at turn 110! I never even got to boats!

I also noticed in most of my playthroughs that my building queue lagged far behind my technology pace. Each time I would get a new technology would unlock on average about 2 buildings. These buildings would take anywhere between 4-6 turns except in cities where I hard focused production (2-3 turns). The technology itself would take about 6 turns per tech so the end result was that I would have cities with structures that were eras behind my tech. It felt like there was never any time to build them since I also had to allocate production to new districts. Never mind building units either. 

It is possible that because this is opendev; the game is on an accelerated pace timer; it makes sense since logically I would expect 150 turns to end in the start/middle of the medieval era in a normally paced game. But I would probably make it take much longer to advance to new cultures (maybe more strict tech or infrastructure requirements as a minimum?) since I; literally did not even look at any of the requirements, and just blew through them totally by accident.

kaskarn wrote:

Goodluck wrote:

Overall the pacing seems alot better than Lucy, however the balance issues exist:

• Resource stacking is very powerful and completely dwarf everything else. This means large empires become very snowballing. When a single marble give the same production as a factory to all cities and 2 marbles give twice the amount it quickly lead to extreme yields, which make further expansion even easier which give more cities and resources and thus even more snowball potential. Suggestion is to add diminishing returns on resource stacking, first resource could give 100% of the value, second could be 50% and third could be 25%.

I think this, in particular, requires urgent fixing. The linear gains from additional resource copies are too strong, cause a massive snowballing effect, and undermine the incentive to find new regions and resources since they are not inherently preferable over familiar ones. 

This. Well, either this, or maybe consider the number of cities that use a luxury resource.
A single city could consume a single resource unit each turn. That would require manually selecting what each city uses somehow.
More elegantly, the bonus could be divided by the number of cities that you have.

Let me make a separate post to suggest this (here) for forum clarity.

Litany wrote:

I really struggled to build up my cities on this build. I've said as much in my first impressions but the changes to district and infrastructure bonuses really pulled a lot of the fun away for someone with a builder/passive playstyle. I think past turn 100 I was passing every other turn waiting for basic infrastructure pieces to come online or mass spending my population away to try and get some sort of engine going. I far more enjoyed the sprawling cities we managed to build in Lucy. 

The additional restrictions to district placements feel like a backwards step, the freedom in Lucy to build around extractors, ports and other distant districts which weren't tied to the core city was an excellent mechanism to balance out for a bad initial placement or to exploit good tiles. It differentiated Humankind from its predecessors, now district construction feels almost Endless Legend like, which could be laborious in a bad way. Talking of unique features now lost, the unit upkeep was not noticeable in my games but I'm not happy it's there. Building units already tanks the economy by eating pops. No further upkeep seemed just such a good clean design decision, making units into investments as opposed to burdens.

The earliest techs are very slow to get, you basically need a science district asap now city centres no longer exploit those tiles. This was very counterintuitive to me. If there was going to be any tile which could exploit all resources it should be city centres. It also really dumbs down the initial city placement to wherever provides the most food.

District stability cost is too high to work around all these new restrictions. So if the goal is to severely hamper the potential for growth the changes are a resounding success. My feedback on that is that's not fun.

The era stars are slow to passively accrue, so in Victor instead of doing what I enjoy and being rewarded for it I was forced to chase whatever cheap stars were closest to completing to keep up with the AI. Which have mostly been combat stars, which is not my playstyle.

I really enjoyed the Lucy construction economy, it felt fresh. I'm worried there may have been some clustering and other cognitive biases applied in the previous feedback. The Victor changes are too far in the other direction in my opinion. I feel like city/construction related era star values could have been adjusted for the same effect without removing a fun gameplay loop. If era progression is too quick, slow down era progression, not the players.

Everything else in these changes kindda works, Influence has been a bottleneck to early game expansion in every game which is good, that said the AI seems to be expanding just fine but that's off-topic for this thread.

Wow I had a completely opposite experience from you. Literally every single thing I completely disagree with. Both tech and era still too fast, ai still didn't expand enough... Seriously everything I would post is completely backwards from what you posted, this was a huge step in the right direction but didn't go far enough.

I was playing on one difficulty above defiant, what difficulty where you on? I'm wondering if that could explain our radically different experience?

Also how many units and outposts did you have before you exited neolithic? I had 10 units 3 outposts all the tech explore and had basically wipes out my nearest neighbor before I got my first culture. Did you do anything similar or did you rush to get out of the neolithic?

i'm experiencing a very trivial game in term of difficulty, i don't even care about gaining stars and voila' i can advance era and choose a new civilization, i think my cities are underveloped while my technology is running a lot. It's like there is a lot to do but no time to do things. Instead if you focus on economy you can just buy everything you see.

Much better pacing than before. I actually like it now (mostly)

Some late game infrastructure is not good enough (say +2 on city center is meaningless at this stage). Linear effect from luxury resources is wee bit too much. As a solution may be spend resources on cities say 1 resource per 1 or 2 cities and if you have surplus resources should be less effective. As an example 4 Marble resources is pretty crazy and I never actually had any issue with stability since every resource gives +5.to stability to all cities.

After some more time with Victor, I think I feel pretty confident in saying that it isn't that techs cost too much, but that the AI are advancing too quickly that makes the game pace feel  fast still (though better than in Lucy). If we are assuming that a typical game is about 300 turns, then the last 150 (or more, depending on how quickly you're advancing)  is only 2 of the 7 eras! So the time limit given by the opendev combined with AI jumping eras the moment they hit seven stars is what is making the pace feel off imo.

I will say that I'm actually glad you can't use extractors and some other districts as points to build, because it cheapens the importance of city placement. However, I would like to see the return of this feature for a few EDs, as I feel like that makes them a little more unique.

Build times have increased overall. Your decisions feel more impactful in deciding what to build... if you're using production. I felt this way in Lucy, but it wasn't as obvious since production was also insane, but gold is king in Victor (specifically if you get Carthaginians, their legacy trait is way too powerful imo.) Some of the later infrastructures will take 3 or 4 turns to build with solid production, but you can buy 1-2 outright every turn if you've focused more on just having gold. And because gold has the flexibility of being used anywhere, it just makes it way better than production. 

I will say that the increased costs on constructions have made it very difficult for smaller cities later in the game. The AI seems to underbuild infrastructures and districts, which means when you capture their cities you have to do a lot of the legwork. It takes forever because their production is atrocious and costs seem to scale as the game goes on. Obviously gold circumvents this if you've been focusing on it.

In my first play through I did a largely commercial playthrough, without knowing what to expect. Now I know it's way too powerful. As others have said, if you focus on gold, you're going to end up being able to fully build out a whole city in 1 turn (8-11k gold/turn is outrageous). The Dutch warehouse is >100 gold/turn each; Byzantium hipprodome is going to give you at least 30-50 gold/turn each. And I forgot what Carthegenians and Phoenicians give, but it all contributes. So gold is OP.

In my current playthrough, I'm doing a pure food build. Similarly I'm getting massive amount of food, you can easily get some emblamatic quarters with 30-50 food/turn. The difference is, there's no point to having huge population cities. Because the amount of pops able to work on FIMS is limited. So I guess there's just a huge amount of people standing around doing nothing. As another have mentioned, you can kill them to speed up shared projects - but (1) that's bad roleplay and (2) who cares about shared projects. Gold is king for finishing buildings, even more than production.

Well, I will contribute by resuming exactly what people already said :

1) A really good balance work has been done since Lucy ( focused on Food and Industry mainly).
2) Gold is still too powerfull
3) Science and Eras aren't scaled well at all in Victor unfortunatly. I would even reckon Science doesn't feel rewarding. Which is not that bad as Science=Win is a classic Civ 5,6 move.

Proposal :

1) Diminish Gold income (or at least some LTs, it has been done with the Byzantine, I can't see how the Carthaginian's will stay the same).
2) Set the minimum era stars up to 9 or 10. Or make the AI more clever about it, ie it is actually them who make me feel the pacing is too fast.
3) Maybe buff the Science a bit if 2) isn't possible.

Overall, Food and money are the superiors FIMS at the moment, just balance them all and it will be okay ;)

Amazing game anyway.

I agree that gold is a bit too powerful and causes a situation where prioritising buildings or infrastructure becomes superfluous because everything can be bought with gold anyway. Regarding science, I think the tech costs are okay as of now and reducing them would make the eras progress too fast. I would even argue for increasing the tech costs, as I was able to almost finish the V era techs in one of my runs, although I think this may be a consequence of the Carthaginians and Joseon combo being a bit imbalanced (the cothon does not prevent you from building a harbor in the same territory, which allows you to have both a cothon and a harbor exploiting the science on coastal tiles. I don't know if this is a big issue or it appeared more serious due to the map being very water-heavy).

Regarding the pacing of the AI, I have played in the civilization difficulty and I still progress through the eras faster than them and with more stars, and I don't think I am a pro by any means, I actually had not played a 4x game prior to Humankind.

I actually like the pacing of the science in general. Coming from Lucy, my tech decisions felt a lot more meaningful in Victor, instead of just basically smashing everything. I think the reason it feels too slow is that flat buyouts are too broken. Gold supremacy is a symptom of a broader problem of buyouts (both money-based and pop-based, though the former more than the latter since at least pop buyouts slow down your ag star) being too strong. So as good players, we're properly abusing the buy it now button when we can. We can't abuse it for science, so of course science feels slower than the things whose costs we can totally ignore.

I think if we substantially nerf buyouts, and then slightly increase flat tile yields (and especially adjacency effects, which are pretty damn ignorable right now), the game will naturally slow a down by the hampering of the broken strategy. If that happens, I bet the science will feel right in line with the rest of it.

Also, something has to be done about luxury stacking. I really like the stability system generally, but heavy traders just get to ignore it and get a bunch of benefits to taste.

I also agree with most feedback.

Gold is too powerful. I invested everything in gold (cultures, faith, buildings) and could buy nearly anything on all cities. But my science was really far behind. So I switched to a science oriented culture, bough the special district on all regions, and started discovering a tech every one or two turns...

Without gold, I would say that my science was WAYYY behind my era. I didn't get any of my special units until very late in the era, or even during the next era...

I played with the default difficulty and won easily, but on higher difficulty, gaining even more era points is mandatory to stay on top... meaning the technology would probaby be even more far behind.

I think that  :

1. Science should get a small bonus (or technology cost should be lowered),
2. Eras should last a bit longer (maybe require one or more stars?)
3. Gold should be nerfed (unfortunately, because i really like gold :D )
4. Some specific killer combos should be fixed to prevent massive snowballing (some religion perks, and luxury resources)

- Science felt right, except Id wish there where more techs, the tree feels very empty at times.

- Eras went by way to fast, more stars to progress might fix it. But the stars are not created equal so might be hard. Getting science stars where hard even as tech civ, as there wasn't really enough tech to get in an era. Expansion stars, I wasn't close to getting past the early game. Culture just seemed to happen first every era without me trying at all.

- Money is OP. Almost as OP as religion. Since religion gives you everything in insane numbers, including money.

- Fast buy should probably just speed up buildings, not complete them fully. Both money and pop kill version. Force you to build a reasonable amount of prod buildings.

- Food was king early game, until it became pointless later.

- Gold starts super slow, unless you pick the right cultures. 

- Trade was way to good. It by it self took care of stab. Making the lux'es that only gives stab kind of bad as I got more then enough already. Lower the +stab on most resources to +1 or 2 and add diminish returns on them all or something

WheezingBard wrote:

Anno wrote:

Gold is perhaps too powerful. Focus on it enough  and it seems really easy to buy out a huge percentage of your buildings/units. I think being able to acquire stuff in bursts is an interesting upside of gold as a resource, but maybe there’s too much of it out there past the early game 

I feel a similar way about influence. You can't do as much with it, but once you have some it's very easy to get more. I was able to assimilate independent peoples extremely quickly and with no real regard for the city limit, since the only penalty seemed to be 30 influence per extra city per turn, which I had more than enough of.

We need an inflation mechanic