I felt the overall economy and pacing of the game was much better compared to the last OpenDev. I felt this was hugely improved and probably the most enjoyable part of this OpenDev! 

In regards to food and growth; Overall I like this growth system! I had to focus on food most of the time to stay at max growth rate, and I had to build much more food districts compared to Lucy OpenDev. Sometimes it was hard to create enough districts to create worker slots for the growing populations. Because of this new growth systems, agrarian cultures and their abilities feel much more impactful now!

In regards to Industry; Industry districts were still important but it didn't feel as overcentralizing compared to Lucy. I never reached a point where industry snowballed and outpaced the industry cost scaling for districts. Throughout the mid to late game on average districts took 3 turns to make. The one exception to this was when I played as the Mayans, their industry bonuses are very strong and I was able to build quarters in 1 turn. When it came to rapidly building, I relied less on industry and more on using money to quickly build districts.

In regards to money; Market districts and infrastructure were definitely my lowest priority. My primary source of income was either through trade or vassals, Market districts and money infrastructure are overshadowed compare to those sources of income and feel a bit underpowered. They Levy Administration infrastructure feels bafflingly weak in my opinion. It only gives +3 money on the main plaza, early game the time it takes to make is too long and the bonus is so small its not worth it. Choosing to build Levy Admin early game most importantly is precious time lost building food and industry. (This is an issue I have with most early game infrastructures in general). There aren't many things in game that can only be obtained through money other than trade licenses, so in games where I don't feel like trading, money doesn't feel all that special and I dump it on building districts faster.

In regards to science; I have concerns with the pacing of science. The rate of research itself actually feels pretty good. My main issue in a vast majority of my games was that era stars were outpacing my science. In games where I committed heavily to science, picking the science legacy trait in the Neolithic era and spamming science districts, I only barely get to the first few techs in the era I was in. In other games where I didn't commit to science as much, I was sometimes two full era's behind technologically from the era I was actually in culture wise. Because of this I wasn't able to test out a lot of the emblematic units in my time with this OpenDev. Because of this, building science was a high priority, whenever my food and industry was stable, I would build lots of science districts and infrastructure. Mid to late game, spamming science districts and slotting lots of workers into science didn't feel as impactful or noticeable to science growth. Even key infrastructure like schools and alchemy labs which give the most essential science boost, have a hard to notice impact. The most impactful and noticeable science based decisions I've experience was early game. When creating my first city, I found I always needed at least one pop slotted into research. Without at least one researcher, getting starting techs could take up to 12 turns, where as having just one drastically reduced research time to 4 turns.

In regards to building cities and Influence; I generally like the pacing of making cities. However my one criticism is I think the amount of turns it takes to convert an outpost to a city should be greatly reduce. Influence is pretty hard to generate early game, and the influence cost to make a convert and outpost to a city usually very high, so I think its fair to lower the turns it takes to convert and outpost to a city. As for influence generation, I'd like for the early game infrastructure that give influence, (forgot what it was called, the sculptors plaza?) to cost less turns to make. Early game there aren't many options for increasing influence income, this one of the few options but it takes to long to build, especially problematic when needing to resist early cultural conversion from opponents.

Some final thoughts. Mid to late game is the part of the game where I find myself "just passing turns," at least on peaceful playthroughs. I think I'd be nice if you could place emblematic quarters anywhere without needing to be adjacent to an existing district. Since emblematic quarters are now capped to one per territory and you only have so long to build them until needing to advance to the next era, I think its fair that we should be able to have more control to get the perfect placement for these districts, kind of like building mini wonders. I'd like for Infrastructures for focus more on upgrading existing districts, rather than just giving flat resource amounts. 

Despite my criticisms economy and pace feels greatly improved! The game feels very close to complete and I feel hopeful that Humankind will actually be able to meet the August release date!

I was unable to fully ascertain whether it was because the difficulty was too hard or too easy, but I found the pace in my initial playthrough was way too fast (default difficulty). I was a few turns from entering Medieval era and someone hit Early Modern. In my second playthrough the pacing was slower and I did better (Easiest difficulty), but in my two playthroughs I did not once get to test or try out Early Modern at all. :( I found I got too bogged down in both playthroughs to fully enjoy the game at its fullest. The first was due to trying to expand and not being able as I was being steamrolled from all sides and spent most of the game vassalised. The second I was doing much better but ran out of time in the opendev because I was occupied with other things (uni asignments) and didn't have the time to spend :( :(

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. really enjoyed the FIMS-concept, and the impact it had on both city building - and indeed, world building. Amazing to see city sprawl like this. Well done!
2. moreover, I don't think I can go back to CIV after experiencing the territory mechanic and all its implications. The concept of outposts and annexation adds a lot more depth and meaningful complexity than CIVs culture-based tile growth, in terms of diplomacy, military, culture, religion, as well as economic. I found myself constantly weighing pros and cons of what to do with my land. My mind was almost literally blown when I found you could merge cities!
3. love how you trimmed the fat from CIV and there's no more workers to bother with.
4. Stability as a proxy for happiness / cultural momentum / ceiling makes sense. I found it more engaging / more focussed than both CIV V's happiness and CIV VI's amenities mechanics.

Feedback

1. in larger cities, placing new districts leads to iconography diarrhoea. Consider being able to toggle individual FIMS-metrics on or off from the overlay. 
2. it's unclear to what extent Stability will be impacted when annexing a new territory to a city. Consider including an overlay for this.
3. cities have population limits. Nonetheless, I was able to grow cities to well over these limits without incurring any (noticeable) penalties - at the same rate as cities where this cap had not yet been reached, mind. Consider this triggering events and heavily decreasing stability.
4. the adjacency mechanic needs to be looked at again. Ocean territories consisting of several islets have next to no value from an economic perspective seeing as you can only build next to your outpost / centre (eg the territory to the east consisting of several 3-tile islets). Consider making harbours a nexus point.

Either tech tree progression is now a crawl, or era progression is too fast, as stars are way more faster to collect. Research should be slightly ahead, pushing era progression, not lagging several eras behind, just because you aren't playing Joseon.

i played in the default difficulty and on my first runthrough (no prior experience with Lucy, but watched a streamer...) it was way too easy, I outpaced all AI players by far. On turn 100 I had 7000 fame compared to 2250 of the best AI.

During the first 50 rounds I thought that I will never develop a meaningful empire by turn 150, but in the end, I had 52 territories settled. I like that you can snowball from a certain point onwards. There should be some restraints on getting ahead too far like AI growing grievance against you if you advance too quickly or grievance for being in an advanced culture or maybe the first who grows a city to 20 pop experiences sicknesses or revolts which you have to combat and receive civics and/or science from and those trickle down to neighboring AI players, so as if the neighbors copy your advancements in culture and science and advance faster if you are ahead.

After playing the game very intensively I think I found a civilization pick sequence that guarantees a win on difficulty Humankind every single time (unless the AI picks them before the player). I have some balance suggestions that makes this path less over-powered and results in more interesting decisions. The civilization route is Olmec -> Mauryans or Maya -> Khmer -> Joseon. With that combination I was able to research the entire tech tree (including the industrial era thanks to science affinity being able to reach into the next era) before the end of the game, build a lot of railways thanks to 1000+ production is all of my main cities, and have something like 5000 science per turn.

In the ancient era influence is king. The more a player can expand, the more long-term benefit the player will have. They can claim a lot of territory and due to the high influence it is harder for close-by players to demand those territories. Since the Olmec are the only civ that is reliably able to generate a lot of influence, picking them almost guarantees you to have the most land of all players when you enter the classical era. Since the ancient era is really short (maybe it makes sense to make it longer by increasing the thresholds for the corresponding stars), one can't really make use of the abilities of other civs as much as of the Olmec ability. For example the agriculture affinity is very unlikely to actually fill up at all on the ancient era and definitely won't fill up as often as the influence affinity. The merchant affinity is not as useful due to low money income. The production affinity sacrifices all science in the early game, which means the production does not do anything if it means one can't get the next technologies quickly, and the science affinity ability is also not useful since in the ancient era one always needs to produce something in order to be able to compete with other players. So the non-influence abilities come at a very high opportunity cost or won't realistically happen in the early game. The influence ability comes are no opportunity cost and the Olmec legacy ability is giving them the single most limiting resource of that era almost for free. So that makes them in my experience with the game (maybe there are other strategies, but that is my personal impression from playing most of the early game civs at least once) the uncontested winner of the ancient era. So I would suggest to buff the weaker civs to make them able to actually use their abilities effectively.

For example for the agriculture affinity I think the threshold should be significantly lower to trigger that and maybe it should give +2 or +3 population on the capital so that even when you have few cities it still does make a big difference.

The ancient merchant civs might just need a raw gold boost so that they actually have reliable bonuses towards buying something. They can't trade much in the ancient era, so they probably need some raw gold bonuses or stronger gold-generating districts.

For the science and production affinities I think enabling the civ to not translate 100% of the production/science and gold into science/production but maybe having a slider for the percentage each of them (maybe in another menu to keep it simple for newcomers) would make users able to actually use those abilities effectively. I have no good ideas for the other affinities since I rarely play militarily.

Additionally to the suggestions for the specific affinities, I think players should have early access to influence-generating buildings in order to allow other civilizations to also generate enough influence to not let the Olmec get all of the territory. I don't remember the name of the building that gets unlocked at masonry that generates influence but maybe move that earlier into the tech tree or adding another building that generates influence which is available right from the beginning would enable players to expand as well if they are close to an Olmec player.

In the classical era influence is still king. While the classical era is certainly more balanced than the other ones and merchant, production and food-focusses civs are able to make better use of their abilities, I they can still only build their emblematic districts in attached territories or cities. So if they don't have enough influence to add those, all their abilities are limited to just a few small number of territories (except for the harbor replacements of course, which I appreciate is available for outposts, making them more balanced for coastal maps, but coastal maps only). So as a non-influence civ I am still compelled to pick influence believes or influence civics, so I can't make the best use out of my abilities and focus on what I actually wanna focus on. Maybe this can be addressed by adding more influence-building to techs that are in the middle of the classical era tech tree so that having a lot of science is one way to give me influence by quicker researching techs that give me the ability to generate influence, and having a lot of producing gives me the ability to build more of those (maybe even in my outposts?). Right now the only way to get influence is to have influence, since most influence modifies in the early game scale with territories. So if a civ gets influence bonuses those are able to snow-ball while other abilities are not able to snow-ball as much. So the other civs have a harder time competing with influence-focused civs in the classical era (Maya are also strong since their legacy ability synergies well with the Khmer). Also since the aesthete stars are generally easier to earn than the other ones (even when not having an influence affinity) those civs are just getting more fame overall than others.

In the medieval era production is king. With the current balancing of the game the most useful cities are settled / attached by the end of the classical era. Building districts and building now makes a player snowball. The single most powerful civ in the medieval era is with no question the Khmer. Their emblematic district is just totally overpowered giving absolutely insane yields that also scale with time. Their yields scale especially well since they are self-reinforcing. Since they give production and food and benefit from population (food) and districts (production) having those districts exponentially improves the power of the cities. If one has picked two influence civs before that means one has a lot of territories. So there is a lot of space for these super powerful districts. I think the only way to balance the Khmer is to reduce the power of their district. Having cutting their scaling bonus in half or something like this.

Also, I imagine that if the ancient and classical era would be more balanced, the gap between a player who picked two influence civs and the Khmer and other players might the generally lower. But still the problem with production-focused civs in the medial era in general is they are able to just immediately make use of their ability while others, such as the merchants still need to actually get the resources that they benefit from. Since production civs are able to translate science and gold temporarily into production, they can very quickly build those Baray districts. Merchants still need to find a way to get more gold, which relies on more external factors and which does not help them as much once they change their affinity since many of their effects are only temporary (e.g. halved buyout costs). So switching away from a merchant is much more expensive than switching away from an influence or production affinity since they don't rely as much on the availability of their affinity in the long-term and have an equally strong legacy bonus. So in relative terms they "loose" more. So my suggestion would be to give merchants a more permanent bonus by making the legacy bonus stronger and making their affinity ability give them more raw gold maybe. Also increasing the value of market quarters would make sense by increasing their raw gold output and/or adjacency bonus to other districts and local features such as rivers for example.

I like the English in the medieval era since they have a way to make use of their previous agricultural focus towards production to build more districts. I think that needs to stay. But the other civs maybe also need a way to get production in the medieval era. I think adjusting the science mode to a percentage-based slider would potentially fix this since civs then can still build something while benefiting from their science focus. Or maybe having a temporary bonus in their science affinity that gives them production and/or money from researched technologies so that they are able to snow-ball a little bit within their era like the Khmer and English.

In the early modern era science is king. Now that most of the infrastructure is there and building more food and production districts is not as valuable anymore due to diminishing return, one can use those high population numbers, many territories, and high production per turn to one-turn (or even half-turn) campuses to grow the science output to an absolutely insane level and one will never be contested again, since more city slots means one can continue to expand, more access to techs means one can find new places, and one can now snow-ball due to researching techs quicker. Since on already has a high number of territories and a large production, one can also instantly build many instances of those buildings in many cities.

I'd like to see more different strategies like the one I explained here. In my personal analysis this strategy is just superior to other strategies every time since there is always a very high opportunity cost to other strategies (e.g. standing army military required population and also needs science and production, gold is less valuable when switching away from merchant abilities, and so on). It's hard to make those other strategies more viable since this strategy just works very well on almost any 4X game just due to the inherent structure of those games, but I feel like Civ6 for example somehow does a better job at making other strategies viable by enabling civs to better focus on another path. In Humankind due to the fame mechanic, specialization on let's say faith only or influence only, or science only has a lower value since the main source of fame due to the stars is still requiring civs to do well on other things than they main focus. And as I tried to lay out in this post, there are main focus areas in each era that have a higher value not just within this era for fame but also for the later stages of the game. This means the opportunity cost of specializing on something else than the era-specific resources is giving a player not more fame in this era but puts them at an economically weaker position in the next era. On way to balance this is to give them some economic buffs like the ones I talked about above. Another approach would be to have more or more valuable world deeds that reward other strategies so that even with a weaker economy, one can still get more fame. For example having a high amount of fame for earning the most amount of money in an era, or having a world deed for being the first one to research a technology for each era to buff the science affinities in other eras than the early modern era. Or a world deed for being the first one to reach a population of 10 / 20 50 / 100 / 200 on a city / on the entire empire to give agriculture civilization an additional fame advantage. I feel like the game would be more fun and encourage us to play for longer (potentially resulting in us buying more DLCs) if there would be a larger variety of strategies.

Laliloluhla wrote:

@ritchiaro
Actually Nubians are kings.
In all seriousness though money is still a resource that gets out of hand rather quickly even if you don't focus on it (I was making 15k per turn without any percentage based legacy traits. the Nubians only have +5 on deposit). It allows you to get stars for absolutely everything else, with the only one that took slightly more being agrarian but that's just due to me going 100% into money in science when I could've put a bit more on food. This score was achieved by turn 130 on Humankind difficulty with only Nubians.

6451 fame at turn 130 is not suuper OP. You probably lost the fame from wonders I guess. With the strategy I described above I think I got something like 7300 by turn 130 or so. Unfortunately didn't make a screenshot so I can't tell you the exact number now that the OpenDev is over.

But all those fame numbers don't matter for a single game since there is some randomness and also map-dependentness involved. In the Victor OpenDev you had two natural wonders that you could get influence from (which I assume you did very early, getting 10 influence per turn for free just by knowing that this is where you need to settle). That might not be the case in an average game. But maybe it will, we will see once we see the map script. But if you don't always have access to two natural wonders, then influence is more scarce and its harder to expand without a source of influence. Sure you can get it from holy sites relatively early, but we want a variety of strategies, not just one OP pick for religious believes. Once you have enough influence merchant-only might be strong, but without those two natural wonders I don't think Nubian-only would be competitive with let's say Olmecs into merchant-only since Nubians would probably lose half of their ancient era influence putting them into a place where you don't have enough infrastructure in the classical era. Staying within merchants is strong, probably one of the few affinities for which it actually makes sense to keep it throughout the game (maybe militaristic as well, but haven't tried that yet since it's just not my style, but maybe Humankind will change that in the long term due to more fun battle mechanics). But I don't think it is an auto-win since it is terrain dependent whether you get enough territories in the early game. And while Humankind does a good job at making the later stages less dependent on the early game than let's say Civ6 due to the era-based fame mechanics and star-thresholds being dependent on the previous era performance, but I feel like in human-against-human games the practical rules are different. If your neighbor has significantly more infrastructure at any point AND a reliable way to generate grevances and war support (like Olmces have with their affinity ability), you might be vassal for the rest of the game. LOL. And money is probably the only thing with which you literally can't get out of the vassal relationship. So I still like to see a more reliable way to generate influence for other cultures in the early game. Relying on natural wonders won't be strong enough.

ERA ADVANCEMENT

1. Just as in Lucy, I feel like we earn era stars far too quickly right now, and it doesn't give you the chance to really savor the era and the various things each has to offer. While I never advanced immediately, and as many have pointed out, it is often not advantageous to do so, the pace still feels far too fast. To be fair, I have a bias in that I definitely would prefer a marathon pace, possibly up to 75-100 turns or so an era, but I feel like we're far off from the stated goal of about 50 turns an era. Either way, I hope there are options for people to pick the pace they want the most.

2. As it is the one era I want to go by relatively quickly, I feel the Neolithic Era is in a much better spot than it was in Lucy! I was able to achieve all three era stars, get 10 or more hunting parties, and found an outpost or three sometime between turns 10 and 20, and while I could have stayed longer to get more population, the fact that you now accumulate far less influence and science meant that it didn't feel like the clearly better option between remaining and going into the next era. I do think the hunting star could use more kills to unlock, that there should be more hostile animals, and that the AI shouldn't advance until they have 2-3 stars.

3. As far as specific era stars, I think stars for everything except Science (which has a set number, of course), and Expansion were the ones that were too easy to get. While the Expansion stars feel hard to achieve at the moment, if the requirements for gaining the other stars were made a bit higher, thus extrending each era, then the numbers might be in a better place.

TECH TREE

1. During my first playthrough my tech advancement was much slower than it was in Lucy, and my rate of progress through it felt satisfying and like it was at the right pace to keep the era going for a while. Unfortunately achieving most non-scientific era stars still felt like it happened too fast, and I was ready to advance to the next era far too soon after having only unlocked a few techs. However, during my next couple playthroughs I adjusted to the lack of having science from Administrative Centers and was able to progress through the tech tree super quickly with any culture that had a science exploiting EQ.

2. Like many others here I was able to field trains and biplanes with Joseon well before turn 150 (which leads into a topic about culture disparities, but I'll save that for later), which means I researched to the end of the fifth era out of six before even getting to the halfway point of the game in the full version. There definitely needs to be a lesser disparity between cultures that do and don't focus on science, but right now everything feels like it is in place and that will mostly be a number tweaking game. I will maintain from my last writeup on the Lucy OpenDev that I think another tier or two of useful techs per era could help a lot with slowing down how fast you can blast through each era's tech tree while still maintaining the satisfaction of unlocking a tech every several turns or so.

3. Right now, the AI is terrible at keeping up with tech. In almost all but my first playthrough I was way ahead of them, which provided me a massive advantage in wartime. There was one instance though where the AI was sending Immortals at me while I was producing my first Spearmen. That was a yikes moment as I had to figure out how to cope with that threat. ← I want more of this!

TERRITORIES & EXPANSION

1. The influence cost of founding outposts, attaching territories, and city creation feel far better balanced now. Given the current pace of the game it feels like it's in a great place, though if the pace of eras is slowed down a bit, then it may be necessary to adjust influence costs or gains accordingly so that there is still more territory to acquire into the Industrial and Contemporary Eras.

2. The cost for absorbing cities, especially small single territory cities with only a few quarters and no infrastructures feels too steep. That it is prohibitively expensivene to merge two bigger cities is fine, but merging a new acquisition, such as an Independent People's city should be a bit easier to do. Perhaps the cost of merging should start out a bit lower and rise exponentially?

3. Echoing my comments from Lucy, I still feel like the city creation upgrades such as the Colony Model and Plan could have quite a few more infrastructures built in, and maybe get unlocked a little earlier? I simply find building Ancient and Classical Era infrastructures over and over again a bit tedious.

4. I think I would like to see most territories be somewhat smaller, as this would reduce the pace of expansion and keep you from getting crowded in by your neighbors too quickly.

5. I am really glad that you can now fight enemies and move through outpost territories without going to war over it!

DISTRICTS & INFRASTRUCTURE

1. One thing I really liked at the start was that Outposts only exploit Food and Industry now. It definitely made me feel like I should put some more thought into how I place them as far as planning for where I want future Merchant and Research Districts to go. It does make it much harder for Ancient cultures without a science-based EQ to get their research going, but that may not necessarily be a bad thing if yields for science and technology costs are balanced better.

2. In Lucy I would usually place a city center and then never build districts off of it, because it was always inefficient to do so when I could build them off a horse ranch or copper mine that wasn't already exploiting all the food and industry around it. Without that ability in Victor, it meant I was actually building my cities around my city center. I was reading from some other posters on the forums that this was a bug... but honestly I think it might be one that should stay. While playing I thought it was working as intended, other than the fact that I couldn't build out from a resource node that was attached to my city center, because it actually incentivized me to build my cities as cities instead of a single fortified district with a bunch of far flung districts all over the place.

3. While district spamming is still a thing, and pretty easily doable, I will say that in most areas it felt better than it did in Lucy. While I am glad that Merchant and Research Districts felt more useful, it did feel weird for optimal placement to be to carpet them together. Carpets of Farm and Maker’s Districts makes sense to me, but I preferred in Lucy that Merchant and Research Districts had adjacency bonuses that incentivized placing only one or a few next to Farms, Harbors, and Luxury nodes for Merchants, and Maker’s Districts and Strategics for Researchers.

4. I only built Commons Quarters during my first playthrough. After that I used Religion and Civics to make stability a non-issue, and saw no point in building these.

5. The additional restrictions to district placement feels like a step forward! Cutting off the ability to build around resource deposits and other distant districts mean that we're actually building a city around our administrative centers instead of having one weird walled off district with a bunch of far flung towns around it. Plus it makes you think more about how you're going to place your outpost.

5. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about harbors being limited to one per territory, but I’ve decided I really like it. It allows harbors to have really good food and money yields, as they should, without completely invalidating Farm and Merchant Districts.

6. If Wonders Exploit resources, I would really love to see what yields I’m getting from them when I place one down. Also, when I’m placing a district or claiming an outpost, the yields should appear in front of anything else. For instance, whenever I wanted to see if it would be worth it to build an outpost over an existing trade route, I was frustrated by the fact that the trade route tooltip would block my potential yields.

7. Most of the infrastructures are fine but I don’t much care for the numerous +1 Industry on Maker's Districts and adjacent Maker’s District bonuses. They feel piddly and repetitive and take far too many turns or too much money to add to a new city for too little benefit. One exception is the Forge which combines that effect with a +5 Industry per copper access, which incentivizes exploring and trading to get more copper and has a greater effect on your overall level of Production. The Maker's District infrastructures either need to be made automatic when you unlock a tech or they need to have something more added to them.

8. Infrastructures like the Forge and Stables need to more clearly communicate that their bonuses apply to your city based on access to copper and horses throughout your empire and not just that one city.

POPULATION & STABILITY

1. Population accrues at a much better rate than in Lucy. It doesn't start off painstakingly slow like it did before then proceed to snowball out of control. I like that at the beginning you have to struggle a bit to balance Industry and Food, and at least as someone who never picked an agrarian culture during my multiple playthroughs, the balancing act never quite disappears, which is a great thing!

2. Something else that I feel would be helpful is representing migration in some way. Perhaps if a city becomes overcrowded, the population starts to migrate to neighboring territories (possibly even going to another empire!). This could be influenced by stability too, with citizens more likely to migrate to neighboring cities with high stability (“You don't want to move to Rome! The streets are covered in filth, there are no aqueducts, and not even a proper army to protect us from the Poles!”). Perhaps a tech sometime around the medieval or colonial period would allow you to designate Land Grants in certain territories, incentivizing population to migrate specifically there, possibly ignoring adjacency?

3. It still seems a bit odd that neither overpopulation nor sacrificing your people to buyout a constructible effect stability at all.

4. Stability seems to be an issue during the ancient era for a little bit, but becomes a non-issue too quickly, even when I'm building a new district every other turn or so. Using the Procession ability or picking a religious tenet like Steal Not pretty much seals up any stability issues you might have.

UNIT UPKEEP

1. I think the introduction of unit upkeep is a step in the right direction, but at the moment it is somewhat negligible. 

For the sake of game balance "per-pop bonuses" like Celt EQ should be relegated to infrastructure only and not districts. There's nothing wrong with the school or university but plenty wrong with the V.O.C house. The teutonic legacy trait bonus also seems fine since it's not on a per-city basis.

Credit to @docktorkain for the apithiny.

Laliloluhla wrote:

For the sake of game balance "per-pop bonuses" like Celt EQ should be relegated to infrastructure only and not districts. There's nothing wrong with the school or university but plenty wrong with the V.O.C house. The teutonic legacy trait bonus also seems fine since it's not on a per-city basis.

Credit to @docktorkain for the apithiny.

It would be easier to balance because you can only have 1 infrastructure per city, but multiple districts, which is why pop based districts get so crazy. Infrastructure don't feel that rewarding to build, endless legend infrastructure feels much more powerful but also less spamable since those cost resources, not just industry.

I generally agree that the pacing still seems to be a bit off and personally I feel the biggest reason is disparity.

The pacing for each aspect seems to be balanced around single cultures that excel in that given aspect, which means that stacking cultures who excel in a given aspect results in breaking the balance and not taking any of those cultures causes the aspect to proceed way too slowly.

The exception is war, which seems to just not be properly balanced in general as whether you take a military culture or not, you can excel in wars and vassalize empires, which happens to break all economic balance and war-based cultures are forced to vassalize or fall behind in every other aspect of the game.

The solution, in my opinion, is to try and make the benefits of the various cultures less abusable or less powerful put some of that power into civics and cultural decisions. I feel that someone who wants to put all of their focus into one particular aspect should still feel good about that decision and have a significant advantage, but I don't think it's right to cripple people in all aspects until they focus heavily on each one in turn.

Also, a note on overall victory pacing, it seems like the AI are not very good at optimizing fame gain (at any difficulty level), so if fame is the only possible win condition, then the AI likely needs a good deal of work before the base game will offer a challenge.

One note on Market Quarters:

Most of the Money income won't come from Market Quarters, but are from Money EQs, trade route infrastructures, and the stacking effects of luxuries. Building Market Quarters won't really yield you a lot of money - although Markets are already in a much better place than in Lucy.

Judging from infrastructures, this is mainly because the money yield of Market cannot scale. Farmers can scale based on infrastructures on exploitations, Makers can scale based on adjacency infrastructures, and Research can scale based on +10% +20% infrastructures. Markets don't have anything directly working on them to scale their yields.

Personally I would suggest tie certain trade route infrastructures to Markets ("+1 Money on Markets per on-going Trade Route"), increase the adjacency yield from Food Market infrastructure ("+3 Money on Markets per adjacent Farmers") , probably also link taxation infrastructures to number of Market in the city, in order to increase the yield and the importance of Markets throughout the time.