Hello dev team, hope you're well! Previous post was re the Lucy OpenDev build, and it's great to see more of the game and some of the changes being made. We played through two Humankind sessions on Friday and Monday, and here's the notes - I said to chat to shout if anything was confusing or they spotted any errors, so it's a collective effort. 

Firstly, a huge thank you to folk like Cat and Salterius who stopped by and helped out with some unfamiliar features, as well as confirming that some of these are already known issues and being worked on. I think the biggest issue for me this time around is language choice and context; I appreciate there's a precedent because of Endless games using specific terminology and an additional want to use archaic language because it's a historical game, but it ends up being confusing to new players and to non English speakers who don't have local translations available. So you're going to see a fair bit of this specific feedback, and hopefully it'll make sense!

As a side note - I couldn't get my Games2Gether account to sync properly with Twitch, despite it being fine during Lucy. Everything Twitch's end suggested it was linked up properly, but nothing was showing, meaning that for the first 30-40 minutes I couldn't activate Twitch drops for viewers. Game2Gether's end hadn't synced anything for 3,000+ hours, despite activity on the account and repeated attempts to click through and sync it via the Twitch drop system. Same issue also appears to be happening with my Steam account, which is why I thought I'd report it as that might affect more than just streamers with Personas. You have to manually go into your Account area and force a sync - although the Steam sync button is not on the same screen and can be found on your Profile. It would be good if they were both in one place, as well as syncing more regularly/clearer communication about where to go if this happens to people. It's not a huge pain in the butt, just a bit of a confusing one. 

Play session #1 - first 75 turns:

1. SEGA intro when booting the game - can this be turned down? The bass is pretty aggressive on headphone users, if you're quick you can skip it.  
2. Outpost placements suggestions - LOVE IT. Same deal for district placements, and clearing ruins. Am aware it's a buggy feature currently, will be fantastic when working 100%.
3. Queue builds in outposts - can we have them? 
4. Star progress bars on the top left side of the screen - brilliant, visual and easy to understand. Plus it saves me pinging back and forth into the Era Star menu. 
5. Is there a memory leak/graphics quality issue in the Diplomacy screen, possibly tied to dynamic avatars and their graphics quality? We seemed to go from smooth as butter to losing frames whenever we were in that menu, and the game did seem to get a little worse the longer it was open. I was running it on Good or lower settings, but the avatars look like they're not changing at all when you edit graphics' settings.
6. AI Personalities: There were a few instances of odd behaviour during the game - Keita refused to "Trade Luxuries", then offered it to me the next turn when we didn't change anything - but overall, the personalities feel SO much more fleshed out this OpenDev. Yellow and purple spent a good portion of the early game testing our limits, which developed into one being afraid and falling in line, and the other losing everything and becoming a vassal. We managed to get several Personas to agree to trading, no skirmishes, and even an alliance without too much hassle, so I'm super pleased with the direction it's gone in!
7. "Renounce" is still a bit confusing in the context of grievances. Bear in mind other 4X games use "denounce" as a mechanic to begin wars, which is the exact opposite of this, so I'd still urge changing that word to something else like "dismiss grievance", "abandon demand" or "give up demand".
8. Grievances mechanic changes look great, but as we were going Phoenician and early trade relations, I don't think we had any AI make demands because it would have ruined their exports - none of them wanted to agree to mine either, so we very quickly stopped asking and just dismissed any drama.
9. Loving the AI badges, archetypes and strength information! Was initially confused about why the badge had reset when I jumped Eras, but I like that - Vlad was going hard on the level 3 Thief train until he changed cultures and calmed down. 
10. Retreating mechanic - every time I used it, my troops would retreat INTO enemy territory. I assume it sends the troops to the closest outpost/city, but sometimes that means you've lost the unit because it's flailed itself somewhere far worse than the original starting point. Can we have some options about retreat direction? 
11. Civics tags are showing pink debug text in some UI windows when you mouse over the various axis choices. Apparently this is already being looked into, not 100% sure what causes it to trigger.
12. Battle preview text sometimes gets stuck on the map when there's no battle or units in the area. Mainly happened in enemy territory, persisted until relog. 
13. Trading window could do with a bit more context sometimes, mainly in relation to the demands feature as it doesn't appear to update during turns. I went to trade with the Nubians (yellow) as we had agreed to luxury resource trading - their resources weren't visible, but I wasn't sure why. Was it because he hated me/was afraid of me? Had his extractors broken/not been built? Or were my demands blocking trade? I dropped the demand, and immediately he traded salt with me himself, but there was still nothing in the trade area for him. I could probably have traced back the import/export routes to work out exactly where this salt came from (my soul??), but in early game I didn't have the whole map available. 
14. Sometimes when trade routes are blocked due to violence, it would be good to have more context about who/where/why. I had a non aggression pact with this Persona, but had five resources halted - this caused the game to generate grievances, which didn't really clear anything up. We eventually worked out that the routes were going through someone else's territory that we couldn't see yet, and that was causing some "customs issues".
15. Import/export routes fabulous, but please have the chevrons/arrows along the entire route constantly as otherwise you spend a bit of time looking for them.
16. I've got something about destroyed extractors and "outposts" getting mixed up somewhere in the game's tooltips, I think this was in relation to other players' resources.
17. "Professional soldiers" - at the time, I wasn't sure if this was referring to all units, or just specific unit types which might not include levies/peasants etc.
18. Faith font colour of cream is impossible to read on white backgrounds and tutorials. 
19. Emblematic tutorial outlines in gold are often misaligned to unit/district outlines. Same issue with cultural transcendence. 
20. Still a lot of inconsistency on tooltip descriptions - "zenith", "violent" etc aren't capitalized in one place, but are in another. Mainly around the Independent Peoples' units and cities - "violent" mouseover tooltip also spells "independent" wrong. This was something I reported from Lucy which hasn't changed, so will keep checking back on it.
21. "Irreligion" civic - this urgently needs some additional text to make it clear that if you pick EITHER option, you lose your religion. Especially with Secularism. Perhaps rename this entire civic to "Atheism" and include a bit of warning text?
22. Can we have options to decline some Civics so they're not constantly pinging us to make a decision when we get more civic points? Specifically looking at the above but also the "Slavery" civic which only gives me options of slaves or more slaves. Appreciate that this is based in history - but if we can jump cultures every x number of turns and build World Wonders from other continents and time periods, then we should be able to decide that we don't want slaves. Doesn't even need to be reflected in the society axis choices if that makes it extra awkward - just let us have the ability to turn down options permanently if we know we don't want them.
23. Counterdemands need to be clearer, as it's sometimes still vague as to who is getting what. 
24. "Coreligionist state" needs to be changed to a more obvious term - I shouldn't have to Google it to double check what I think it means. I think this lives in the Mandate Patronage Tier 3 area of the religion UI?

1. Mouseover on some Era stars aren't showing - it's inconsistent as to when/where and doesn't persist through opening/closing that menu. It showed up the most when I was looking past at past Eras to show chat what we'd done.
2. Past fame points that you've obtained per Era appear to misreport when using cultural transcendence, and combines them instead of listing them separately. I was playing the Phoenicians (Ancient and Classical), and it looked like it was reporting everything done in Classical.
3. When trading resources, the "buy" button doesn't show a price when greyed out. You have to click on the icon on the map itself to go and look at costs and possible routes. Would be ideal if the "buy" button always produced a tooltip with that information as standard. 
4. Science tech boosts from cities offered as a popup when on zero.
5. The deployment phase needs to be a little clearer about when it's coming up - even if it's just changing the "confirm battle" button to "confirm battle and deploy units". 
6. Reinforcements are amazing, especially for sieges - but it needs to be a bit clearer that you can do this for any sustained fighting. I don't think it needs to be done more than once or twice, because it's very simple and easy once you "get it". It's just "getting it" as a new player to the mechanics - as this is aimed at new players to the 4X genre as much as the existing player base, I'm hoping a nice tutorial in the final game solves all this.  
7. Blue vs purple - very hard to see the flag amongst it all, or at times which units were mine. 
8. Multiple units do their attack animations at once during your turn - LOVE IT.
9. "Clear ruins" - if there's no ruins to clear, it shouldn't be sitting at the top of the build menu blanked out. Just seems a waste of the UI space. 
10. "Cannot be done during this battle state" keeps popping up when deploying units out of deployment zone, mainly around reinforcements. It could do with better phrasing - what can't be done during this state and when can I do it? 
11. "Sortie" during sieges could do with being tweaked - I knew it's French for "exit", so could work out what was probably going to happen, but lots of chat were very confused by this. I appreciate it's a military term (like below), but changing this to something a bit more simple would go a long way. 
12. "White peace" should be just "make peace" - half of chat thought this was some colonial nonsense. To put this into perspective, the only places I can find this phrase being used past World War I references are in historical strategy games; it's an outdated term which you don't need and shouldn't use. Even Wikipedia hasn't got a tab for it past an offhand mention under other types of peace; so please retire this phrasing from your games - even if it's not for the potential racial confusion but for the fact it's outdated and confusing terminology. Feel free to ignore all the other feedback in this thread, but I know several people including myself would be disappointed if this wasn't changed. I appreciate it's not probably been thought about before, but it's small changes like this that makes gaming more inclusive.
13. Trade routes occasionally get a tooltip bug (%traderoadstatusdestroyed) when they're disrupted. I think this was mainly showing up around the "buy" feature.
14. One of my swordsmen died in battle, but graphically remained on the screen and units UI area on 2hp. It resolved post battle, and units could use the tile he died in, but it would have been a nightmare if I hadn't spotted it and had a lot more units in the area during that fight. Salterius asked me to upload the savegame from during this fight, so hopefully you can see for yourselves/replicate: Undead Swordsmen oh no
15. Surrender terms and war points - love how it works, but I was confused initially. Mainly around ownership of cities I stole, as graphically it was showing I owned them but then had to pay to keep them. Just needs a mouseover tooltip or something that goes "you might have taken this city, but as part of negotiations you have to discuss its future ownership" or something.
16. Vassal state resources need tweaking as it still shows them for trade in the trade resources area when you already own them. It's good to still be able to see the routes and what they have, but we don't need the "buy" buttons etc.
17. Post getting two vassals, I noticed a bit more drama with no known path and diplomatic relations pop up texts. One vassal had to pass through the other, so I'm not sure whether somewhere in the setup there were some border issues? Could also have been them fighting an Independent City or two, but that sort of links back to having more context in general for trade route failures. The trades seemed to work themselves out in the end!

lomadia wrote:
"White peace" should be just "make peace" - half of chat thought this was some colonial nonsense. To put this into perspective, the only places I can find this phrase being used past World War I references are in historical strategy games; it's an outdated term which you don't need and shouldn't use. Even Wikipedia hasn't got a tab for it past an offhand mention under other types of peace; so please retire this phrasing from your games - even if it's not for the potential racial confusion but for the fact it's outdated and confusing terminology. Feel free to ignore all the other feedback in this thread, but I know several people including myself would be disappointed if this wasn't changed. I appreciate it's not probably been thought about before, but it's small changes like this that makes gaming more inclusive.

I wouldn't jump at every normal phraseme or idiom that uses words black, white, master, slave and so on, that is daft SJWs' benefit. I don't know about native English speakers, but as non-native I've immediately knew what that term suppose to mean, as we have corresponding term in our language.

I do however agree, that changing it to something like "Status quo ante" would be more universal.

Sublustris wrote:

lomadia wrote:
"White peace" should be just "make peace" - half of chat thought this was some colonial nonsense. To put this into perspective, the only places I can find this phrase being used past World War I references are in historical strategy games; it's an outdated term which you don't need and shouldn't use. Even Wikipedia hasn't got a tab for it past an offhand mention under other types of peace; so please retire this phrasing from your games - even if it's not for the potential racial confusion but for the fact it's outdated and confusing terminology. Feel free to ignore all the other feedback in this thread, but I know several people including myself would be disappointed if this wasn't changed. I appreciate it's not probably been thought about before, but it's small changes like this that makes gaming more inclusive.

I wouldn't jump at every normal phraseme or idiom that uses words black, white, master, slave and so on, that is daft SJWs' benefit. I don't know about native English speakers, but as non-native I've immediately knew what that term suppose to mean, as we have corresponding term in our language.

I do however agree, that changing it to something like "Status quo ante" would be more universal.

If Humankind is attempting to bridge the new player gap, it needs to consider this when it comes to archaic terms. These are phrases that native speakers don't use unless they're deep into strategy games or historical warfare, or go to Eton and are taught to speak Latin for fun. I'm not sure it's fair to say it's "daft SJWs' benefit" when there were POC viewers in chat agreeing that they'd like a less potentially charged term, and these viewers helped draft the above request to tweak it.

This isn't a "normal phraseme" in English; a position I'm coming from and one which you've kind of dismissed in this reply. I have some experience with English language and quite a few copyrighting projects under my belt, so I'm using my experience to suggest more accessible alternatives. I also ran the phrase past people like my other half, who grew up in a military school and has retained more than a decent working knowledge of historical warfare and politics. He agrees it's beyond obsolete as a term. 

I'm glad we agree it should be changed though!

"POC viewers in chat agreeing that they'd like a less potentially charged term" - yeah, that's SJW bull crap I'm talking about, when appealing to passion is held higher then appealing to reason. Next thing they are going to tell, that to "rise the white flag" means "to show superiority".

Recognizing unintentional anachronism is valid and sufficient reason to update the term. Conceptual manipulation - is simply demagogy, we should be better then that.