The Merchant active ability was pretty weak in my experience.  It should automatically grant you a trade route to the resource it's used on, which would make it a useful means of securing access to luxury and strategic resources.  Additionally, the amount of money gained if used on an already developed resource should be increased, as it's quite a pathetic sum at the moment.  I would prefer to see the cash reward based on the income of the nation controlling the resource you are investing in.  If the resource in question is both already developed and you are already trading for it, the monetary reward should be further increased.  

I think this Closed Beta was very fun but unfortunately I couldn't play as much as I wanted.

Concerning culture and affinities, here are my impressions:

Even though I think that, in general, including passive and active abilities for each affinity is very nice in theory, imho, it felt short in the execution part. Firstly, because as always in this game UI is a constant problem, but I'll get to there in my post in UI thread. In short, in many times the text shown was simply wrong and/or confusing, making it difficult to me to even know what was happening or what was supposed to happen at certain times.

Overcome that, let's go:

AESTHETE:

I didn't see any clear benefits in influencing another territory beyond getting more influence, that is indeed scarce early game but kept being pretty abundant late game. This resource still needs serious balance and it's difficult to tell, but I thought that the active ability is a bit too situational. I liked the former more.

It made me think, as well, on how influencing territories should affect more on gameplay or even stability. I felt almost no consequence on influencing others and in my 3 runs I did't had problems on maintaining my own territories with my culture. And what happened sometimes was an osmosis event that gave me science that is only good...

Beyond all this, i could not know what "cultural proximity" even means, so I can't say anything about the passive one.

AGRARIAN

Nice active ability, albeit very situational as well. Grievance part was not working.

The passive one is strange, because it is temporary... I think it's okay? But it should be clear on tooltips.

Yet, agrarian era stars were super easy to obtain, the easiest of all. It incentives conquest maybe unintentionally, because it counts total population. Maybe it should count only internal growth and maybe the migration thing from the active ability. Even without conquest, it was fairly easy to get, even when I was not focusing on it.

BUILDER

Active we already knew, powerful and interesting.

Passive is not so nice, because the stability bonus is temporary without any indication in the texts. I don't know it's okay or not balance wise but it felt bad while I was playing because I found out about this when I simply could not maintain my cities anymore at a certain point of my first run...

MERCHANT

I was confused because the text for the passive one was (AGAIN) plain wrong. I only found out merchant cultures maintained the former ability when I saw the original post of this thread. But I felt happy, because it's a nice ability.

Active one is not very interesting at the moment because of how influence is scarce at early game. In late game, there were no place to use it because all people had their luxuries improved. Sometimes I used it to obtain points from independent peoples and thas was cool, because it's a cheaper and more efficient way to do it, establishing merchant cultures as the best friend of independents in the game.

EXPANSIONIST

Didn't have the opportunity to use the active ability because it took so long and sometimes I didn't even have the money and it was fairly inconsistent. It's always easier to simply ransack the outpost and make a new one. Bad ability.

Passive one is nice for the player but null for the AI as they continued trespassing and giving me opportunities to exploit it in form of grievances and kills even when they were not expansionists. Probably a bug...

MILITARIST

Although home guard units are weaker, apparently later in the game the ability becomes more useful as the cost of professional military gets very expensive. But the main use of this ability for me was not for war or defense purposes, but for pop growth, because of how it works in this build. The way it is implemented is definitely bad, because I'm certain that it was not intended.

Passive one is ok and nice.

I thought militarist era stars were too easy to get as well, partly because of the glitch where the AI were always offering easy kills trespassing my territory during all the game. And militarist ability and wars in general are too powerful as is now because pop and builder stars counts total pops and districts on territory when I think it should count only the ones we built....

SCIENTIST

It's the only one I think that didn't change between build and didn't need to. It's on an excellent position now.

OTHER CULTURE BALANCE CONSIDERATIONS

I agree with some people on this thread when they say the emblematic quarters that benefit from adjacency with other quarters are waaay weaker in this build because of how stability and production costs works now. But maybe it's an opportunity to make them stronger. Because the adjustments made were for good.

I also agree with the ones that mentioned that the restriction regarding building emblematic districts when progressing through cultures could get a rethink. Now, with all EQs being one per territory and the current pace of the game, it's simply frustrating not being able to build them anytime we want. District building is being limited by stability and production costs so well that I think that this restriction is simply not necessary anymore. In a design point of view, I think it's also strange that we keep our LT and unit but not the EQ.

Thank you for the opportunity to play the game and I think it has a lot of potential! Good work to all people involved!

ritchiaro wrote:

I think of of the affinity abilities are really fun (I especially like the builder abilities and scientist abilities, they seem to be in a good shape). I have some suggestions how to make the other ones more interesting.

I think the money cost for the active aesthete ability is too high. Maybe reducing it makes it more viable? I could only use it once or twice in the early eras and feel like it does not provide as much of a choice. The bonuses are also kinda weak so I would probably make it a bit stronger. So I would increase the influence gains from the ability. I would also like to do it on foreign territories. I really liked that part of the Victor OpenDev.

The active agrarian ability seems weak and expensive. In the early game it is way too expensive to use it and in the late game it doesn't make a real difference. It also only makes sense on border cities, which limits its applicability a lot.

The passive expansionist ability should help with unit health. If I am able to trespass but get a huge health hit, then it does not really do much for me. Maybe reducing the health-cost of trespassing makes sense there, or allowing units to heal in unclaimed territories, which would be perfectly in line with the expansionist theme. But the healing should be either really slow or require me to not move in order to not break the game.

The active merchant ability seams really useless. The use cases for this are extremely small since it assumes someone is not improving a resource. The opportunity cost for this action is way too high since I can just wait a few turns for them to finish it. I'd probably prefer something like the science active ability that allows me to convert production and science into gold.

I think generally it might be good to make the active abilities stronger to make them more interesting. Maybe the conversion-ration for the builder and science abilities should be 1 to 1.5 or 1 to 1.25. And the other ones can be reduced in cost and/or just made more impactful

An extension to my previous comment after playing the beta a bit more: Overall agrarian and builders have a means of dealing with stability somewhat reliably if played well, while others do not. Since stability is one of the main limiting factor in the early and mid game, this gives them a certain advantage. So it feels like merchants and aesthete which also have a more economic game-play overall would need something to counter that (scientists can just get new techs that help them with stability so that seems fine). Since their active and passive abilities are weaker overall I feel like these two might need a small buff overall.

Expansionist and militarists are probably less limited by stability since they aim for a more wide than tall game. So they would not need a stability buff.

But I think overall the balance between those abilities probably is somewhat fair (not good, not bad, but just fair). So balancing those probably has a lower priority as compared to improving the AI and the late-game pacing issues.

CULTURE BALANCE

Passives

The cultures don't seem very well balanced. There are often like 2 or 3 viable choices per era with ridiculously overpowered passives and the rest is just meh.

Unique Districts

If I remember this correctly, all the culture buildings were districts, right? And none of them were infrastructure? Imho this makes the "unique" districts pretty repetetive so it wouldn't hurt to throw a few unique infrastructures into the mix instead of districts. And maybe add some unique multipurpose districts? They all seemed to be just a better version of the basic districts. I'd like some unique districts that can exploit 2 different resources for example. Like actually make them feel like they're something different.

Unique Units

Ridiculously overpowered! The unique units are so much better than the normal units of their era that you have no reason build any non-unique units. Even the AI spams unique units and nothing else. Like one AI I had like 5 wars with during the game... the whole game he built only Immortals. I never once saw him use a different unit!

All unique units need to be nerfed. They should be a strategic option for a unique playstyle or combat strategy, not automatically best at everything.

AFFINITIES

Didn't seem much relevant. I never had a reason to use the active abilities. The passives I used were either bugged (Builder) or irrelevant (Scientist). Expansionist passive was ok. The other affinity passives look good on the wiki but I never got to try them.

Dayvit78 wrote:

I wanted to play Khmer for roleplaying purposes, but anytime I've chosen a different culture, I've had a much more difficult time. They really are the superior culture in Medieval Era. Food and production are very important since buyout can't really get going unless you choose Carthaginian and then Dutch.

High population doesn't cause stability loss, but districts do, so it's better to have more population than more districts.

It is interesting how in this closed beta having a really strong district is more than double as good as having a half-as-good district since stability is a bigger issue than in Victor. I think that is the reason why Khmer feel even stronger in this version as before. Playing the Khmer feels really good. I hope that they way how the devs deal with this is not by making the Khmer feel boring but nerfing them too much (as they did with the Olmecs for the closed beta), but that they make the other cultures more interesting.

Blacknet wrote:
I'd like some unique districts that can exploit 2 different resources for example. Like actually make them feel like they're something different.

There is one district that does that, it's the Khmer's Baray which exploits food and industry and it is extremely powerful, often granting yields in the 40 and 50 (when combining food and production).

But I agree with that suggestion that there could be more like that! 

Undernier wrote:

Blacknet wrote:
I'd like some unique districts that can exploit 2 different resources for example. Like actually make them feel like they're something different.

There is one district that does that, it's the Khmer's Baray which exploits food and industry and it is extremely powerful, often granting yields in the 40 and 50 (when combining food and production).

But I agree with that suggestion that there could be more like that! 

The Nubian's Meroe Pyramid too. It exploits industry and money.

Also the Babylonian's Astronomy House exploits science and food.

The Caravanserai exploits industry and money.

And of course all of the unique harbors exploit all resources.

A major issue is conquering cities give you progress towards stars like agarian and builder, like you can get all builder stars just by occupying cities and not build anything yourself which make no sense and is one of those things that make military based strategies so powerful since military and conquest help you get all kinds of stars.

I’ve mainly tested Aesthete, Scientist, Builder and Militarist affinities in my 3 playthroughs. The new active merchant’s ability is a nice change, and provides a good opportunity and a cool way to spend influence.

In the contemporary era there is a lack of militaristic cultures. There are expansionist cultures, but the representation of Americans in the game is not expansionist at all. They are launching a rocket, making us believe that they are just space expansionists and much more closer to a representation of scientific culture, but in reality American expansionist policies are more present on Earth itself. I find it cynical the way the Soviets are portrayed as the militarized and the Americans as the dreamers who conquer space, given that the United States has long been the most militarized country in the world, and that it could very well be a militaristic culture in the game. The United States is already portrayed as militaristic in other games like COD, so why not address this lack of a militaristic culture in the contemporary era? But if you don't change the affinity of cultures, at least change the representation of Americans, portray them as militaristic expansionists like the Soviets, instead of a rocket it could be a nuclear missile, for example, or jets flying. I commented more about this on this post in this forum: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/168-general/threads/41145-suggestions-for-realistic-representations-of-the-us-and-brazil?page=1#post-321151.

In this link I also talk about Brazil being misrepresented, as the food production in the game is entirely aimed at the population of the country itself, but this does not occur in Brazil, as most of what is produced is exported. This means that there is often a shortage of food in Brazil and food prices increase for Brazilians, and many do not eat well because the food is being exported to other continents. So food production is more related to the economy than feeding its own population. There could be some mechanics in the game that would convert food production into money, or that it would be possible to sell food to other countries, but it is still possible to change Brazil's affinity for aesthetics, as Brazil attracts many tourists and is very influential geopolitically, a representation of a carnival parade in an aesthetic culture would be more appropriate than the current agrarian one, representing a landowner, as it is these landowners who cause hunger in Brazil when they decide to export rather than feed their own population.

Dunno if fits in this topic but i think would be more smooth the transition in the eras if the players could construct the previous quarters in the next era as rebound even if they dont had started previously, i say this more because military quarters are complete forgotten or became obsolete in the first era by the one who have it. Another thing naval units should embark a little more earlier even if they would have a slower pace. 

The Militarist affinity action:
Raising the home guard action could be very powerful, not for war, but to move your population freely to where you need it.

I don't know if that's part of the intention but it actually makes sense given that many of these cultures did migrate or settle (e.g. Huns, Goths, Mongols, Norsemen, early Aztecs).

I didn't put this much to practical use in my playthrough, but I noticed I could keep moving population back and forth between territories unrestricted and for free.

Maybe you should add a cooldown/limit to it so it can't be used again and again in a single turn?

One idea how to make the aesthete game more interesting would be to:

(a) change the aesthete start to counting the number of foreign territories influenced by you, and

(b) giving aesthete cultures back the ability to influence foreign cultures like in Victor.

(a) makes the aesthete stars more engaging, more fun, and more unique, also more in line with what it should metaphorically stand for.

(b) would give aesthetes a stronger bonus towards achieving those stars while not being enough to just rely on this.

This would also help in making the era stars a bit more "expensive" which would help solve the pacing problem. 

I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned this, but, if you play at higher levels, it is usually the case that you get to pick from the same few leftover cultures. I agree with whoever said the cultures aren't balanced, and the AIs take all the best ones. It could get a little wearisome always playing the same culture and never getting to try out the others. I didn't really notice this on Metropolis level and below, but on higher levels, it definitely became an issue. It's was a bit trying because in the Neolithic era, it isn't like there's any real strategy you could employ to get to pick your culture before the AIs do.

A few issues that are thematic rather than balance-related:

Umayyad EQ: Grand Mosque

The Grand Mosque only gives science and does nothing for religion - that's weird for a place of worship.

I would love if it also produced faith or at least would synergize with religion.

Example: +X science per follower of state religion in city

Hunnic/Mongol Horde movement points:

Their base movement is 4 like foot units and not 6 like other mounted units. I know they are too powerful in combat, but I'd like to see them with a total movement of 6 and then nerfed in other ways.

I don't have any specific feedback for any of the individual cultures that has not already been discussed; however, I would like to point out that the current mechanic for picking ANY new culture/affinity at the start of each era feels like it takes away from the story each game is trying to create. For example, starting agrarian and switching to militaristic in the next era feels WRONG.

Upon entering a new era, if the player picks a culture within the same affinity (or progresses with the same culture) the player should be rewarded with options like: 

• Some kind of feast or celebration event, that grows the current population or boosts production temporarily in existing cities (scales with era).
• A stability bonus unlocked for the new era (i.e., +5% stability in all existing cities); and the bonus would not apply to any new cities founded and would expire at the end of the era.

Upon entering a new era, if the player picks a culture with a different affinity, they should have to incur some kind of resource cost to switch affinities and make a decision like:

• Pay “x” amount of gold or influence (scales with era)
• Lose “x” amount of population in current city (scales with era)
• Suffer a stability penalty (i.e., -5% stability in all existing cities) that does not apply to new cities and expires and the end of the era.

Also, I realize this might prove extremely tedious, but I think each culture would benefit from being assigned a “preferred” ideologies/government style, and the player would unlock special era bonuses for the chosen culture if their current government closely matches the chosen culture’s preferred play style.  I think this would also add depth to our decision making with events and picking up certain civics.  

Bernardx10 wrote:

Dunno if fits in this topic but i think would be more smooth the transition in the eras if the players could construct the previous quarters in the next era as rebound even if they dont had started previously, i say this more because military quarters are complete forgotten or became obsolete in the first era by the one who have it. Another thing naval units should embark a little more earlier even if they would have a slower pace. 

I definitely agree that the ability to build Emblematic District should be kept, especially with the one ED per territory rule we have now.