Ok, so here we are with plenty of new Victor feedback. I'd like to first say that HK is surely shaping up to be a fantastic game, and this OpenDev already shown a great deal of improvement over the Lucy build. I'll focus this report on the issues I found, but this by no way means HK isn't a good or fun game, just that I'm pointing to what can be made better before release. I'll also try to not discuss bugs like the various graphical glitches or the fact that many Early Modern Emblematic Quarters could be built in multiples per territory since by now I assume you're well aware of those. I'll try (key word here is try) to present suggestions to each issue, but of course, my knowledge of civics, technologies and cultures is limited by the scope of the opendevs revealed so far. So, without further ado, lets dive in:

- Economy

- Issue: In Victor, there were two big changes with early science and money. First, Outposts, City Centers and Admin Center do not exploit money and science anymore. Second, the base per-pop yield of workers was increased from 4 to 6. Those changes, together, made it so that the early money/science was almost completely dependent on pops (either through trader and researchers, either through "per follower" religious tenets). Pops became the key aspect to snowballing then, making early civilizations that can have a big pop growth (such as Harappans and Olmecs, for example) disproportionately strong. Solution:  Make City Centers and Admin Centers exploit science and money again (the change to Outposts not exploiting them is great and should stay). This will open different settling strategies for early science and money, and allow cities that focus on military and or building through forced labor not be as much screwed in early tech and money.

- Issue: Non-scaling infrastructures are much worse than the scaling ones. Most infrastructures do scale (I'm calling "scaling infrastructures" all infrastructures that have effects on the vein of "+x% something" or "+X something on something else"), but the few ones that don't (they are the influence infrastructures with only +2 influence on city center, and the money infrastructure that gives +3 money on city center) really stick out as being quite bad, even on the early game. I believe that the only infrastructures that should not scale with something in the game should be the Stability ones (Public Fountain, Acqueduct). Giving a scaling to all infrastructures avoids this pitfall of having a really weak infrastructure amidst all the great ones. Solution: Change the following infrastructures as such: a) Levy Administration: from "+3 money on main plaza" to "+1 money per population"; b)  Pottery Workshop: from "+2 influence on main plaza" to "+1 influence on district producing industry"; c) Theater: from "+2 influence on main plaza" to "+2 influence per territory"; d) Playhouse: from "+2 influence on main plaza" to "+1 influence per population".

- Issue: City creation was dependent only on outpost industry. While it made sense in the outpost  construction queue (with food adding to pops and industry building extractors and harbours), when you wanted to turn an outpost into a city it was harsh to have to wait 15, 20 or more turns for your outpost to become a city because you settled on a high food spot. This promoted a meta of having outposts on high production places become your city centers supported by high food outposts attached to them as extra territories, which may be counterproductive based on the geography and the culture you're playing as. Solution: Have both food and industry contribute to the city creation bar. The outposts with higher FIMSI (which, for outposts, is only food and industry) would become cities faster, regardless if being high food, high industry, or mixed spots.

- Issue: Settlers allowed players to bypass completely the influence cost of creating new cities. Settlers are great idea and a good way to jumpstart your economic development when founding new cities, and even if they do come only in the midgame they have a nice niche to fill. However, building cities with settles completely bypass not only the influence cost of creating an outpost but also the big influence costs of actually founding the city. Solution: Attach a influence cost to the "Create City" action when performed by a Settler. To account for the added steps of actually building the settler and moving it to the place you want the city to be, I think it is reasonable to have it be at a discount rate when compared to creating cities normally - I suggest a 25% discount on the influence cost of the outpost + creating a city.

This is a post in a series of connected posts about the Victor Opendev. You can find the posts discussing other topics below:

Naval & Air: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/210-victor-opendev/threads/39509-feedback-naval-gameplay?page=1#post-315474

Religion: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/210-victor-opendev/threads/39525-feedback-religion?page=2#post-315475

Diplomacy: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/210-victor-opendev/threads/39502-feedback-diplomacy?page=2#post-315476

Combat & Land Armies: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/210-victor-opendev/threads/39501-feedback-combat?page=2#post-315477

Civics: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/210-victor-opendev/threads/39508-feedback-civics?page=1#post-315478

Cultures: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/210-victor-opendev/threads/39500-feedback-cultures?page=2#post-315479

Independent Peoples: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/210-victor-opendev/threads/39526-feedback-independent-people?page=1#post-315481

Since savegames were asked for in general, I think I can drop some here that have a broken economy, gold is not the only one that breaks.

First here is a production only focused game with Egyptians -> Maya -> Khmer -> Mughals

production turn150 humankind difficulty.ctr

reached 21.7k production in the capital with the Builder ability activated and 10.8k production without it. It can produce multiple districts every single turn.

Second save is a merchant only game with Nubians -> Aksumites -> Ghanaians -> Dutch
Merchant HKdiff turn150.ctr

this one I could have ended a bit after turn 100 but kept going until turn 150, I reached 72k gold per turn income and the fame goals view shows a negative gold value.

I had so much money and time that I sailed to the new continent and made it all one big city with all the money I had.
Also because of the early trading affecting AI relations heavily, I have fought 1 defensive battle against a brown AI scout in that entire 150 turn game. All of the AI just agreed to an alliance with me. Traderoutes also boosted religion spread and eliminated every other religion from the game for the first time in my games.

Then lastly is the save where I spread the focus to setup everything high population, high production and high science with Egyptians -> Celts -> Khmer -> Joseon
Joseon Turn 128 full industrial tree researched, lots of production.ctr (humankind difficulty)

the egyptians allowed me to setup the cities faster with a little more influence helping the religion's influence boosts. Celts' purpose was just setting up the cities with Nemetons for food every population and Khmer for the same reason boosting industry.
Built lots of holy sites and wonders and then researched the whole Industrial tech tree as Joseon by turn 128, all thanks to the tier 3 tenet that gives science per follower for every holy site.

These are all examples of how unbalanced the economy still is. Religion's holy site bonus being the most unbalanced part of all this. You can look at the yields and graphs on these saves if it helps analyzing what goes wrong with the balance. The Humankind difficulty AI struggles to keep up with my economy from the very beginning.

Litany wrote:

And 2. revert the new basic district placement restrictions so they can be placed adjacent to other constructions, optimising an individual district placement for an additional +2 FIMSI output is, evidently, not what's causing pacing issues overall.

You could say that again, I do wish Amplitude brings back the more free-form district placement of Lucy, the only thing that needs to stay restricted I'd say is Emblematic Districts. Although like you said there are still some weird ones like the Cyclopean Fortress. FIMS on city center would also be great, combined with that other post about city creation time being based off food AND industry I can see the early game of humankind feeling a lot more fun.

Also I still think it would be cool if Amplitude at least tried to experiment with District Money upkeep instead of ever increasing production cost.

Romarocky wrote:

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.

This short comment absolutely nails it. Insta-buying is such a detriment to gameplay. 

Here is what i experienced, on the hardest difficulty:

-Citybuilding/Unitsbuilding: In the first 30 turns the pacing was good, but after at least turn 50 my cites were steamrolling

-> One reason was the possibility to buy out everything immediately. Maybe you should change it the way it was in your previous games, when the construction finished the next turn. Even after buying it.

-> Improvements like walls, etc. should cost upkeep. There is no reason to think about what to build, because gaining production is pretty easy (which is okay to some extend). So you just build what you can, which is almost finished after one turn. Upkeep like in Endless Space would at least in the beginning force you to think what is really needed. Also you should think about making improvements more expensive to build/maintain if the city is bigger. I played with one big city - as stability was not a real handicap - and it produced even Wonders in a couple of turns.

-> Stability was no handicap because the theatre district (forgot the name) did not cost any money to build/maintain. As it is easy to gain a lot of production it is possible to build a handful of these districts in tree or four turns. Those districts, like the garrison district should cost upkeep.

-> Some mentioned that units should not cost upkeep, since they already cost population. I disagree, they should cost even a lot more! My army upkeep so so ridiculous small that i almost forgot i had one.

-Diplomacy:

-> Okay so far. But it is way to easy to get a vassal. Someone declared war on me and I won it just by killing his attaking armys. So far so good, I like the war support mechanism. Its comprehensible that a bad war has to get to an end since the population ist not willingly to fight in it. But without even getting troops on my enemy soil I was able to make him a vassal. This should be harder. Maybe its necessary to have bigger army size or that its not possible to vassalise someone who has more than one city. At least it should be harder, because having a vassal is gamebraking. His tribute (only money i guess?) was so high that i was able to buy out almost everything I needed. Futhermore he did not try to set himself free, even after 50 turns.

Conclusion: All buildings and some districts should cost upkeep, getting vassals is way to easy and they are to strong. I really want to love this game but its too easy yet.

Seems like a lot of us have same thoughts.

Small continuation of my Egyptians/Byzantine impressions:

Gold:  broken 

Just to be clear - in the early game money are relatively scarce and important resource. Moreover, oeny bonuses from market quarters are quite thematic and require good positioning to be effective, also yearly gold infrastructure can be useful as well,

However,  the more game progresses the more gold you have due to the following:

1. trade routes - as you can sell a lot of your luxuries and buy a lot of them easily, your cities benefit massively from trading (while the gold per route is small, number of routes is huge)

2. Gold from population - the bigger your cities become, the more gold you're getting from traders slots (+ infrastructure) + some Unique districts are giving you a lot of gold (hell, +50 from hyppodrome).

3. There is nothing to spend gold on! - unit maintenance is small and incompatible even if you build a decent aries or navies, no district costs, , no need to pay your independent people allies, pay for luxuries or anything like that..... your treasury is just filling quicker and quicker (wish my investment account would work like that in real life ;)). There should be costs to run the mation, maintain cities, units, trade routes, religious objects etc.

4. The ability to instantly buy district or infrastructure  (esp muliple times) should be limited to 50% and the rest needs to be produced. Otherwise the power of gold is insane and unrealistic.

Influence: kinda broken as well

While nfluence was really really important early game (and that was cool) after you settled the continent, set up your cities and make your culture staable there is again nothing to spend it apart from wonders. You kinda forget that it's in the game  TBH I wasn't even sure why I need it and should I build anything influencing it all. 

While it's nice to see cultures competing over each other by the amount of influence they produce, there is pretty much nothing to spend it on (cost of assimilating or setting u new cities are tiny comparing to how much influence you can accumulate). 

As with gold we need to spend it on something, it has to be drained by e.g. your cities. diplomatic actions, culture choices, Idk some form of world congress.

Luxuries:  biggest issue for now

To keep it short: Luxuries are abundant, everyone can buy them and the costs are tiny (and no gpt is weird) and if applying correctly stacking bonuses + infra giving you uber combos for the development. Also insane numbers of trade routes. In my opinion this is the biggest issue and it has to be reworked.

Potential solutions:

1. You can trade luxury/strategic resource only once (mb even it means you're trading it away completely).

2. There should be gold per turn costs for buying luxurry and strategic resource and the AI should recognize good/bad deals and be able to bargain,

3. Most crazy luxuries with mostly bonuses "+ x to all cities" should be nerfed, like "+ x to three cities" so you will be forced to buy more copies of the same luxury or at least make diminishing returns from another copy of the same luxury resource.

And one more thing:

Yields per pop - with variety of luxuries and infrastructure even by early medieval the benefits of putting citizens on industry/gold or science (and food to some extent as well) are way biger than constructing the new ditrict which means that you can focus primarily on city growth and ignore district building to a major extent (well ok, you need additional slots).

After a couple of playthroughs, I think there should be some way to address the balance between rapid development and district spamming in the current build.

Judging from the Industrial Era techs and infrastructures, late game does encourage you to build up district clusters or even district carpets, instead of simply replying on exploitation.

On the other hand, there is not really a downside of district spamming; you can cover every single tile in a territory with districts and swimming in yields with not penalty. There are just so many things provide stability, with -10 stability per district one can still happy spamming. And, I would say, able to spam in an unlimited way greatly reduced the value of careful planning in a strategy game.

I roughly remember there is an unused district cap per city. Maybe it can be a soft cap with scaling stability penalty on the city, unless you really invested in stability.