Ludovide wrote:

I'm just going to add that when hovering over a wonder/district it would nice to be able to see what the base district does. I often found myself having to open up the wonder claiming screen just to see what the wonders I had put down actually did. Same with emblematic districts. I can always look in my city to see what a farmer's quarter does, but once I've moved on from a culture there doesn't seem to be a way to find out what the emblematic districts of my previous cultures do beyond what their yields currently are.

The same should also work for players in the diplomacy screen. I wanna see their history of cultures and what those cultures do for then. It is really important especially in the case of an aggressive neighbor to know what their bonuses are. Especially for new players this would make the game more accessible.

I really enjoyed playing the VictorDev and Closed Beta, but there were a few things that I came across that I found might need to be dealt with:

Such as for provinces/outposts names, which I have a suggestion about. There should really be a way to rename them (like how you can rename cities) once you've claimed the territory/land, it starts to get really confusing, annoying, and troublesome later on when there's so many provinces/territories in the empire, especially when they appear in notifications and the diplomacy screen as a result of AI demands or peace deals. After all, I highly doubt anyone would be invested in remembering the default names of provinces/outposts without a "personal" interest. Additionally, if there isn't, as I have not really seen a way in any of my play-throughs, a way is needed to toggle an option to display/view the names of my provinces/territories when I would need to reference them when a notification appears about said province/territory.

There's some issues with some of the random event pop-ups that appear. For example, one event told me that as a result of war, some of the AI's population are trying to immigrate to my peaceful war-free borders, which was a very nice event as I get to play as the benevolent ruler letting in refugees, but my issue that I saw is that the event just said the refugees were coming from "AI Empire 3" instead of displaying the AI's culture, which had me very confused as to where they were coming from due to having three different AI empires near me.

Another issue with the events I saw is one that appeared for religion, something to do with a foreign religion coming into my empire, only issue is... the religion had the same name as the name I picked for my religion. So while my empire was practicing Shintoism, apparently the dirty foreign missionary heretics of Shintoism were dirtying my empire with their heresy.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or something, but when I unlocked the tech to merge cities and I saw the button for the option on my cities, I couldn't merge them at all and there was no explanation as to why I couldn't, such as I am missing a some cost, some other requirement, or etc. Either the ability just didn't work or there was a requirement that wasn't being told to me.

I also think that there should be an option to raze/destroy/remove cities, especially the AI's as it is often that when I win a war a take the city, I have to keep it, even if the AI made a mess of it, there's no option for remove it and start over. There should be an option to either raze a city to the ground, maybe make an option to migrate the population to the rest of empire until the city is abandon and then it can be razed?

Shogun_43 wrote:

I also think that there should be an option to raze/destroy/remove cities, especially the AI's as it is often that when I win a war a take the city, I have to keep it, even if the AI made a mess of it, there's no option for remove it and start over. There should be an option to either raze a city to the ground, maybe make an option to migrate the population to the rest of empire until the city is abandon and then it can be razed?

I was able to direct my units to ransack a city to the ground. It usually took a long time, but at the end, the city center was gone. I had to do this because of the city cap issue. I got to the point where I was well over the cap and into negative influence territory. The only way out of the hole was to remove cities.

MarLard wrote:

Hello! This is the first beta I played for the game - it exceeded my expectations, I had a blast and can't wait for August. Here are some notes I took during gameplay about UI/UX:

- I would really appreciate a way to quickly browse empires on every tab of the diplomacy screen, rather than have to go back to Relations to switch the empire I'm looking at

- Trade:

1.  I would love a recap screen of all Trade Routes in effect on my empire - see for each resource who I'm trading it with. If there was one, I couldn't find it.
2.  On the Trade tab, I could see what resources I'm buying from the other empire, but not what I'm selling to them; that seems weird.
3. I could absolutely never tell why/where a trade route was getting interrupted; a localized marker on the disruption would be nice, and the Localize button on the notification should bring you to the disruption rather than the resource

- In the Cities list, I would like to be able to see city stability at a glance like I see other important city values, as well as sort cities by stability.

- The Wonder claiming feature seems a bit hidden; it's only accessible through what you'd think is only a convenience menu (the cities list), and the button for it is quite non-descript, looking like a filter or similar tertiary UI function. An icon would help it stand out as something actually important. That feature is also not tutorialized until you have saved enough influence, which you might never do if you never noticed its existence (not helped by how discreet it is)

- Exact borders of territories are hard to see when zoomed in (mostly on unsettled territories but also for territories inside your empire)

- Seems like attacks on your units should be the topmost notification you get. Right now, the game tells me I can open grievances for an attack before telling me who attacked me and where, it's quite confusing to understand what actually happened

- When playing an Expansionist culture, my annexations attempts got interrupted several times without me understanding why. Does the unit have to stay on top of the outpost? If so, it's not quite clear, the same way it's not quite clear at first that Ransacking will get interrupted if the unit moves (logical maybe, but not very clear in the UI). An animation/change of state of some kind on the unit to clarify it's in the process of doing an action that takes several turns would probably help.

- I was quite confused at not being able to withdraw specific demands. It also seemed like you had to accept/refuse demands all at once? That seems very strange. I got into a situation where I think the AI just couldn't pay the total amount of demands, so they just got stuck unable to accept any of them at all. It feels like you should be able to withdraw, accept of refuse specific demands.

- Breaking an alliance also removed all my grievances, I didn't quite understand why; seems some grievances, such as demanding a city because of religious population, should remain?

- I really really want a Terrain/Elevation map; reading types of terrains at a glance is hard and elevation can be nearly impossible, even in battle where it is crucial. Being able to toggle the map into a simplified, clear layout of tile types and elevation would help a lot.

- When hovering above the button to build infrastructure that affects specific types of tiles, I would love for the relevant tiles to be highlighted and the bonus yield shown on them, the same way as when you build a new district. For example, highlight river tiles when building irrigation, highlight mountain/rocky terrain tiles when building masonry...It can be hard to visualize how many relevant tiles your city has and calculate the benefit otherwise.

- The little outpost/district yield recap above the selected tile often gets hidden behind other icons such as tutorial pop-ups or trading post icons.

- I would like to be able to see precise numerical values on research advancements in the Technology recap (aka how much research is still needed to reach the next tech) to precisely micromanage my scientists.

- Unimportant, but it would be handy to be able to hide/reduce the icons for districts/infrastructure/units we know we'll never want to build on a specific city, to get them out of the way (it'd help remembering our specific plan for each city as well)

- When a battle takes place close to a city, the battle overlay covers the city districts, making the city layout impossible to read so it becomes very hard to decide what/where to build next. I'd prefer for the battle overlay to only show up when I click on the battle, or to have a way to toggle it on and off.

+1 to all this, especially the hope for adding stability to the city overview screen and the ability to hide infrastructures we know we don't want in this city! I have ADHD and can struggle to remember what my plan was for certain cities but I don't always want to queue fifty billion infrastructures if I know I'm about to research a new, higher-priority one that I'll need to manually move to the front of the line.

I'd also add:

- For the infrastructures, please add some way of telling us what total benefit we'll get out of it. Sometimes it's a no-brainer on whether or not to add industry to forests vs rocky fields but sometimes we might need a bit of help adding the numbers up.

- For the battle overlay, it would be nice if there were three settings: on, off, and just an outline around the battlefield instead of the grey color all throughout. When it's on, it's hard to tell which terrain is which, but when it's off it's hard to know where the battlefield ends.

Something which has kind of been bugging me is the yields icons on the tiles disappear if that yield is not being exploited. For example if a tile gives both science and industry, and an industrial district is built next to it, the industry yield icon will stay, but the science yield icon is completely hidden, with no way of bringing it back. It would be great if there was some sort of overlay button that showed the hidden yields, or if they were kept visible but greyed out or had their opacity decreased to indicate that yield is not being exploited.

I noticed that has no option to increase the speed of the cursor to move in the map either using the mouse or keyboard, it would be wise to have this option in the configurations also if its acessible to do could have some to turn the direction in the map. 

AOM wrote:

Shogun_43 wrote:

I also think that there should be an option to raze/destroy/remove cities, especially the AI's as it is often that when I win a war a take the city, I have to keep it, even if the AI made a mess of it, there's no option for remove it and start over. There should be an option to either raze a city to the ground, maybe make an option to migrate the population to the rest of empire until the city is abandon and then it can be razed?

I was able to direct my units to ransack a city to the ground. It usually took a long time, but at the end, the city center was gone. I had to do this because of the city cap issue. I got to the point where I was well over the cap and into negative influence territory. The only way out of the hole was to remove cities.

Huh, I did not know that, I assumed players would not be able to ransack cities they owned/controlled, similar to a "No Friendly Fire Allowed" concept/limitation, since I knew I could ransack the AI's cities, but I had no idea I could still ransack cities even after I took control of them. Thank you very much for the info AOM!

Though as a suggestion to the devs, it might be prudent to make that capability a tad more obvious to players

Or just have a different button to raze a city that I own. Ransacking my own cities takes forever, gives a ransacking reward, and feels really weird. You can ransack your own districts, too.

The color of the text for Faith makes it very difficult to read against a white background. Consider outlining or shadowing it in black or gray for some contrast.

ritchiaro wrote:

It seams like there is a bug with the visualization of eliminated players when loading a save file.

Orange has been eliminated here as the tool tip says but it is not shown in the ribbon:

I ran into that issue as well.

In conjunction with mousing over civ icons to display info, it would be nice to mouse over hexes and it display who owns it.

Unless I misunderstood something about how food worked, it seems that excess food is lost once a pop is born. I ended up microing most of my cities to have "just enough" farmers to get a new pop in order to maximise the yields of each individual pop. It would be nice if the auto manager balances this by itself.

Of course, if excess food DOES matter, and I misunderstood something, then this is of course not a needed feature (but would be cool to have either way)

After a few days playing the Closed Beta, the game seems promising and really pretty! Unfortunately the performance on my PC was so poor I couldn't go further than the medieval age. Honestly, my persistence on testing a game that performed so bad is a compliment to how good it seems so far. Here are my thoughts on UI and UX:

UI

• I found tutorial tooltips a bit obstrusive, hovering over data and other parts of the interface;

• Hopefully there will be a way to not show intro videos by default;

• As other civs change their cultures, I can't keep up with who they are. The text colour helps, but their leader's name could help in recognizing who is who;

• There should be an alarm a turn or two before a city loses population due to low food production;

• Trade routes seem important to some cultures, but there's no easy way to view all routes. I had to go in trade screen with each other civ to see that;

• The stability cost of claiming or attaching territories to a city is not clear before doing it. That results in frustrating changes I couldn't anticipate and save scumming. Perhaps the stability cost could be previewed along with the influence cost;

• Notifications like "Phoenicians feel different about you" are more confusing than informative. Different how? Even clicking on the link to the Diplomacy screen doesn't clarify what changed;

• Negotiating with multiple civs is frustrating if I have to exit diplomacy screen to talk to another leader. A way to switch between civs while in that screen would be best;

• Relationship detail text is not always clear. Stuff like "They feel we're failing our duties as their liege" doesn't help as said duties were never clear to me;

UX

• My PC is not new or high end (i7 2600K, 8GB DDR3, GTX 1060 3GB) and Humankind performs terribly in it, even in Fastest settings. I'm aware it's outdated hardware, but it can still run many current games in acceptable quality and framerate. Humankind seems too resource hungry and poorly optimized;

• Starting a new Humankind save can take as much as 30 minutes, and loading a previous one usually takes about 15. That's 15 minutes even if I'm already ingame, which makes save scumming even more frustrating;

• Along with the poor performance, the program stops responding too often. Even the "such action would mean declaring war, are you sure" prompts can freeze the game for anything from a few seconds to a whole minute. Other times, the program stops for so long Windows suggests killing the task;

• Starting or loading a game sometimes stops mid loading screen and returns to main menu, with no error code or explanation. Once or twice I was able to glance some text in the split second the game took to show main menu, but it was too fast to read. Only solution I found when that happenned was to close and reopen the app;

• Sometimes the game logs me out of games2gether account when I open it.

The game might not run on my current PC, but it sure seems fun! Hope everyone has a great time when it's released!

Kwami wrote:

Or just have a different button to raze a city that I own. Ransacking my own cities takes forever, gives a ransacking reward, and feels really weird. You can ransack your own districts, too.

It does feel really weird. I think the city cap is weird. It's an arbitrary thing that makes it very difficult to defend your borders from forward settling AIs and IPs without losing a lot of influence. Almost every single game, soon after I settled my capital, along would come an AI or IP to settle directly adjacent to my border. When the outpost turned into a city before I could ransack it, I would inevitably go over the city cap after taking these cities. It just feels wrong that an arbitrary cap causes the player to do something so non-intuitive that a lot of players are unaware it's even possible. I know, along will come someone to tell me it's to stop me from having too many cities, and someone else will say I can research to get more cities or change to a culture with a higher cap, etc. Don't bother. I know all of those things, and I still think the city cap is an arbitrary thing that makes no sense historically.

I don't know what topic to write this in. I'll leave it here. I don't feel that I am creating a unique nation from several cultures. Yes, there are small bonuses, but there is not enough external change. I would like the avatar to have some items from past eras, for example, costume jewelry, a helmet, a staff, etc. so that progress can be seen directly on the avatar, depending on what cultures were throughout the game

User Experience for Graphics: My CPU (Intel i7-8th gen 4 core @ 1.8GHz) and RAM (16GB @ 2400MHz) were well within the hardware recommendation, but my GPU is only the built-in Intel UHD Graphics 620. However, I have 8 GB of memory dedicated to the GPU - as soon as an outpost was founded, my 3D processing unit would max out and render the game un playable, even though only 1 GB of my GPU memory was being utilized. Because my 3D render was running at 100%, the rest of the game would not load or progress. I understand that this problem may be because my GPU is not up to spec, but the game should not be unplayable. It would be appreciated if there was a way to run the game for those of us who cannot afford full desktops or gaming laptops. I was unable to get past turn 30 without my game crashing. If I remained in the zoomed out map view I could run the game fine as none of the outposts or cities would render. Gameplay was enjoyable, but unfortunately could not play much due to graphics processing.