How does your progress through the eras feel? Is it too fast or too slow?
Do you feel your research progress roughly matches your progress through the eras? Does it match what you would expect for a game meant to last about 300 turns?
As more or less everyone else I was progressing to the eras way faster than I could research or use the emblamatic units. I think the era star levels should be perhaps adjusted/slowed down, especially the influence stars were simply coming to me without any effort (and without picking any influence-focused cultur over the game). It could be also a cosideration to change the number of era stars needed to progress to the next era. The research progress itself felt okay for a 300 turns game, I reached biplanes at around turn 185.
How do you feel about the speed of population growth?
Population growth felt fine now. I really liked the changes to the required food per population as it prevents the snowballing population supported by farmers in the earlier eras, a really important change to keep that food per farmer at 6 to maximum 8 in most of the game.
How do you feel about the value and the growth of the different resources (Including Influence)
Production and science is okay. Gold is a double-edge sword - upgrading (and to a minor extinct maintaining) units is to cheap, buyout production is a bit to expensive. The main problem is influence - beside the first 30 to 40 turns of the game the value is still way to low. I just colonized a whole continent and switched by civics as I like without even looking at my influence stockpile as it was enough every time - and this without even picking an influence focused culture. So the influence cost should increase way faster (especially for enacting civics).
Are religions still to powerful, or are the bonuses at a more appropriate level now?
How does the neolithic era feel now? Can you still grow your population too quickly?
Religions felt okay this time. The neolithic era also is fine (while the hunter star pershaps is still to easy).
ritchiaro wrote: I think an easy thing that could address this is having more valuable competitive deeds for the late game that bring around a thousand fame or so. The competitive deed system in Humankind is really great, because it gives players a large variety of goals which they can pursue that are all measured in the same "currency". However, they generally feel a bit under-powered, which in the early and mid game is not a real problem, since the player needs to build up an empire. However, when the empire is build up, the empire itself is not a good goal, but competitive deeds should be the main fame source in the late game.
I have to agree with this. The fame reward system is one of Humankind's main unique features. It should be a primary focus of the gameplay and your strategic planning, espiecially since Fame is how you win in this game. Just playing the game with no real focus and being rewarded for doing so automatically isnt all that engaging. I should be checking the available fame rewards screen every other turns looking at what I should be trying to do next.
A good example could be, I'm lagging a bit in Fame but my neighbour has boxed me in and I can't expand without war. They're also stronger than me so starting a fight might be a bad idea. What else can I do to generate some fame? Well I'm coastal, so maybe I can focus on building some ships and exploring the world to search for Natural Wonders. Get rewarded for being the first to discover them and getting Fame rewards for being an Explorer civ?
Like ritchiaro says above, this should probably be an even bigger focus in the late game to generate Fame. Being the first to build a railway system, first to launch into space. First to create a monopoly on a resource. These should all be the primary type of goals for each player after reaching the later eras.
Economy I'm having doubts with how economy scales in the game once you produce to much of gold or production itself. I fully understand that it's easy to exploit some resources and scalability helps to restrain the player from snowballing certain mechanics (ex. buyouts) but at the same time it generates a dilema: as a player, how can I know when investing in producing more of a certain resource is actually going to help me, or is just going to make my economy "scale"? I was producing little money (around 100), I swifted to Dutch and and in 10 turns I became a banking machine earning over 600 gold. But it didn't matter. The economy scaled with that increase and all my efforts to benefit from my new culture were a total waste. Ironically the game ends up punishing the players who try to be as efficent as posible with a certain resource, which is pretty contraintuitive in a strategy game.
Infraestructres with bonuses ("per worker", "per district", "per population", "per tail of certain type", etc.) should show an estimation of how much it's expected to produce. It would be a significat "quality of life" improvement.
Religion I don't understand how it works and how "faith" it's produced or wich exact porpouse it has. What is worst, I didn't feel like I had to care about it.
Like ritchiaro says above, this should probably be an even bigger focus in the late game to generate Fame. Being the first to build a railway system, first to launch into space. First to create a monopoly on a resource. These should all be the primary type of goals for each player after reaching the later eras.
A space launch is a great idea for a competitive deed, especially if it is very costly to get everything you need to do it. The technology requirement would need to be costly, and I would need to have infrastructure in place for cities as to contribute to a shared project (for example they need a space center building or something like this, which requires other things to be built first).
The resource monopoly idea is also great.
Here are some other ideas for competitive deeds that should be easy to implement in the remaining time:
- Having built 7 world wonders (requires a lot of production and influence, two things that currently are very abundant in the late game)
- Having a city with 100 population (makes it worth not sacraficing pop in big cities)
- Being the first one to enact the labor charter
- Having the first alliance (for both of them of course)
- Having exterminated a player who has a traitor badge
- Having settled on three different continents
- Having built the first airplane in the world
- Having built the first ship in the world
- Having spread your religion to another continent
- Having converted another culture to your religion
- Having 1000 / 2000 / 4000 followers on your religion (once all tiers are taken, faith becomes useless, so having high value competitive deeds for this would make it more interesting
- Having send the first satellite into space
- (it's hard to come up with deeds for the latest era since we don't really know what is in there)
However, the key thing here is that competitive deeds would need to give a reward that high enough to actually make a difference. Currently they are less valuable than most of the era stars. So prioritizing a competitive deed is less rewarding than just sticking around in the era for a few more turns to wait for other stars that are based on accumulation of influence / money / pop. And working on a challenging task should be more rewarding than just waiting around. Otherwise the game becomes dull.
Also, the good thing about having more valuable deeds would be that it gives players who are behind in fame hope that they can catch up while it also means that if one is in first place, one can't just relax and know one will win the game.
I see now how religion can be powerful and important if you focus on it (Civs like the Teutons, high tier tenets)
But there is still a lack of identity to religions. There is no sense of flavor to how a religion begins or develops. It’s simply a bundle of boosts that have little impact on the narrative of our empire.
Some of the techs you can unlock late game, such as early modern/industrial feel underwhelming when compared to early game techs which makes progressing through the tech tree feel less rewarding the further you go in game. There are some amazing techs late game which felt great to unlock, but then you have techs like playhouse, which give luxury manufactory, which is really good, but then it also gives playhouse, which gives you +2 influence on main plaza. That would be a really good ability in the ancient era, maybe, but by the early modern era it just feels underwhelming compared to the other infrastructures you can build.
On the speed of population growth, i felt that it was pretty good. it felt like it appropriately progressed, and even when I went very agrarian focused, it slowed down in later eras due to food consumption. The big issue with population growth for me was how slowly you get specialist slots. If I am 20 population over my population limit, getting a single farmer's slot or trader's slot feels a little weak. Also, a lot of emblematic districts don't give slots (which is totally fine) but it feels really hard to get enough slots to keep up with population growth. Especially after forced labor is removed (I do like that forced labor gets taken away, but it makes over population harder to deal with). I feel like there should be more ways to get 1 of each slot, for example, such a slum district or infrastructure which could give you more specialist slots. Or just some other way to combat over population.
I feel the pacing is mostly a problem because I feel very limited in what I can build due to stability nerfs from Victor and the reduction in effectiveness of sacrificing population to speed construction. Further, the map was resource-starved, with more cramped territories compared to Victor (at least, it felt that way, maybe it wasn't actually). I played at Nation and smashed the AI in every area, though it sounds like Empire will offer a good deal more challenge. The problem is everything is so slow to build now, and we are so limited in the amount of districts we can construct due to resources scarcity and the reduction in effectiveness of luxuries compared to Victor, it creates a "snowball" effect where building is much slower, so resource accumulation is also much slower. I was pretty consistently at least one era behind, sometimes two, in infrastructure and units, compared to my "cultural era".
+1 I think the nerf to population sacrifice went too far in the other direction and now I need 14 pop for one infrastructure so I can't even use it to get rid of my extra population who will die in two turns anyways :(
Seems like a good solution would be that you can only sacrifice 1 population per X turns (maybe one per turn?) and it would only add a set amount of Industry (1 pop sacrifice = 4x current 'industry per pop' value?).
The game seems to really push you to advance into the next era as soon as you reach 7 stars. I am not certain if this is what the devs intend to reward, as this means you'll almost never get silver era stars, and def never get any gold era stars. Perhaps something more subtle or somehow make clear that advancing right away isn't always the best course.
As it stands, I was ALWAYS advanced further in era than I was in science, even when I went and focused on science production for a while. Era stars are just too easy to earn from just 'growing' and they are far too easy to earn through conquest.
Some of the techs you can unlock late game, such as early modern/industrial feel underwhelming when compared to early game techs which makes progressing through the tech tree feel less rewarding the further you go in game. There are some amazing techs late game which felt great to unlock, but then you have techs like playhouse, which give luxury manufactory, which is really good, but then it also gives playhouse, which gives you +2 influence on main plaza. That would be a really good ability in the ancient era, maybe, but by the early modern era it just feels underwhelming compared to the other infrastructures you can build.
On the speed of population growth, i felt that it was pretty good. it felt like it appropriately progressed, and even when I went very agrarian focused, it slowed down in later eras due to food consumption. The big issue with population growth for me was how slowly you get specialist slots. If I am 20 population over my population limit, getting a single farmer's slot or trader's slot feels a little weak. Also, a lot of emblematic districts don't give slots (which is totally fine) but it feels really hard to get enough slots to keep up with population growth. Especially after forced labor is removed (I do like that forced labor gets taken away, but it makes over population harder to deal with). I feel like there should be more ways to get 1 of each slot, for example, such a slum district or infrastructure which could give you more specialist slots. Or just some other way to combat over population.
There is the Brazilian legacy trait that gives a lot of slots and the Chinese unique district.
First about AI. They feel like they have flat bonuses instead of percentage based (I don't know the actual numbers, it just feels like it). In the early game they are way too fast. After turn 50, maybe 100 they just fall of. That breaks the AI pacing, because it can go into medieval era as fast as turn 35, but in different (or even the same) case it cannot progress to early modern even at turn 150 (had both those things happen in only few games).
I really like the pacing of technology. It feels like the "technology eras" last just perfect. I would like a wider tree with more connections to have more choice here. I really liked those situations in a tree where I could get to a technology by more than one path, and I could skip the other path. That made my culture distinct, and the choice interesting. But those choices are a rarity. Especially the first two eras feel like almost everything is mandatory. Most of the interesting choices (that are actually choices) come at early modern and industrial era. So I'd like to see a wider tree with alternatives, and alternating paths. Like for example I need to be able to extract iron, that technology is almost mandatory because trade is unreliable, so to get there maybe make like 3 different technologies that aren't crucial to one another, and aren't that important overall. That would make me choose the path to get to that iron. I could also chose to spend time and turns to discover the other technologies, but that is also a choice, not a requirement. That feels very nice in the few cases that are already in the game.
About era and culture pacing it's way too varied. Most of the time it's way too fast. Also threshold for stars seem to be a static number every era. That makes transcending almost useless, course you can just hoard your progress, get into new culture, one turn later receive like 3-5 stars at the start and end that culture era in like 5 turns, just because of those requirements. Yes you cannot advance the tech tree without transcending, but in early game you're slow there anyway, and if you build your cities well enough you can recoup that easily with any science base culture later.
In the long run also, getting the stars all the time for the same things seems a bit stale and boring. If what we need to progress is FAME (so being famous for something) maybe introduce more (like WAY MORE) competitive deeds that give stars, and push the star requirement higher. I don't think changing the values of each standard deed is the way here, maybe make them start from fresh each time (example: this era you need to get 12 more population than you started with, not just flatly have 56 etc.), If it works that way already, then there is a bigger problem here that I don't know off, but really in one of my games I could advance to new era like after 8 turns (it was from medieval to early modern if I remember correctly), because I stayed in the previous era too long (just to build culture special buildings btw.). Also, I didn't like the double dip competitive fame/stars like Symposium. It basically gave a fourth technology star for that era. But even if I don't like it, maybe the game need more of those if we need more competitive stars.
About population growth - don't understand it almost at all, but still can abuse it building almost no costing scouts, waiting few turns for population to recover, and then disbanding those scouts back. I actually like that system. But it makes farmers useless. Farmers generally even without that feel useless. Farmers quarters and some tech buildings are way better, to a point its easier and faster to put everyone on industry and build farmers quarters that tu use actual farmers.
I agree to someone's idea that buyouts are way to costly, and instead of bigger flat cost you could introduce some penalties to buyouts (stability for population, maybe income or something else for money), maybe severe but timed ones (like -10 stability per population sacrificed for 10 turns or something?). The money prices also inflate too much, but production staying the same, makes money useless or obsolete/afterthought after few eras.
About neolithic era, it still feels too fast to overpopulate. Maybe introduce +1 or +2 food needed to spawn new unit for every population you have in your nation? Also I don't know if something like this exist or not, but please make it that unused, leftover food that is left after you switch eras translates to anything when switching to next era. Maybe just money or influence. Right now it really feels like a waste, and is punishing wide exploration. To counter that (going too wide) being too much of an issue maybe make a rare aggressive animal in neolithic so players cannot spread themselves too thin. Other than that, neolithic era pacing feels fine.
I was playing on a relatively easy difficulty (Town, I think it was). One thing I noticed is that I was getting era scores at a far faster pace then I was moving through the tech tree. To the point that in my last two eras, I wasn't able to build the emblematic unit because I didn't have the technology required for it. I don't even think I got the second-to-last tech before I hit the contemporary and ended the game.
Other things related to pace. I'm still not entirely sure what causes civic choices to appear. They'd just randomly appear, and hey, another thing I can choose. Other things that felt like they were just there and I had no control over was culture and religion spreads. By the end of the game I was absolutely the dominant religion, with every AI having my religion as their state religion. But other than making sure I produced some faith, I didn't do anything. And the numbers that appear when you click on the circles to see how the spread is moving? I have no idea what it means or how it determines those.
I feel the pacing is mostly a problem because I feel very limited in what I can build due to stability nerfs from Victor and the reduction in effectiveness of sacrificing population to speed construction. Further, the map was resource-starved, with more cramped territories compared to Victor (at least, it felt that way, maybe it wasn't actually). I played at Nation and smashed the AI in every area, though it sounds like Empire will offer a good deal more challenge. The problem is everything is so slow to build now, and we are so limited in the amount of districts we can construct due to resources scarcity and the reduction in effectiveness of luxuries compared to Victor, it creates a "snowball" effect where building is much slower, so resource accumulation is also much slower. I was pretty consistently at least one era behind, sometimes two, in infrastructure and units, compared to my "cultural era".
+1 I think the nerf to population sacrifice went too far in the other direction and now I need 14 pop for one infrastructure so I can't even use it to get rid of my extra population who will die in two turns anyways :(
Seems like a good solution would be that you can only sacrifice 1 population per X turns (maybe one per turn?) and it would only add a set amount of Industry (1 pop sacrifice = 4x current 'industry per pop' value?).
Ooh! Yes! I think this would be a good way to balance it, since you'd no longer be able to buy out whole wonders by completely depopulating your city but you also won't be hindered by buyouts requiring you to depopulate your whole city.
TLDR: The mechanics work great, but massive balancing changes still need to be made.
How does your progress through the eras feel? Is it too fast or too slow?
Progress through the eras feels way too fast. The first star of all categories (except maybe military) are achieved by themselves. This makes 6 out of the 7 stars needed just generate themselves automatically. At the same time, these few stars barely yield fame, so often times simply staying in your current era is a great way of earning tons of fame. Meanwhile, the AI seems to always advance as soon as possible.
On the note of fame, I feel like deeds and natural wonders should be heavily altered. Deeds should provide way more fame, making them relevant to the game. At the moment, a deed barely provides more fame than one era star. The same is true for world wonders. Additionally, less significant deeds should be added to the game to hold the fame values the current ones have. These could be stuff like being the first one to advance from era to era, or being the first one to extract a luxury or strategic resource.
Naturla wonders, on the other hand, should be nerfed in terms of early game influence but become more relevant as eras go by (maybe make them provide higher yields as eras progress, making it relevant to keep hold of the particular territories that contain them as time goes by). Wonders currently provide around 50% of early-game influence, which is insane considering that they are only supposed to be found by chance. I have started over 10 games in Empire difficulty, and in around 5 I did not claim a wonder in the first few turns (and by few I mean rushing south based on prior knowledge of the map). In only in 1 of those 5 rounds did I manage to be competitive against the AI in the ancient era, and it was due to me knowing exactly where the sanctuaries and wildlife were in the neolithic era so I could get my population up to 10 before advancing and then feeding half my forces to the city within the next 10 turns.
Do you feel your research progress roughly matches your progress through the eras? Does it match what you would expect for a game meant to last about 300 turns?
Not at all. I believe the game is not actually designed to be around 300 turns, more like 500, and this is not bad. There is too much content to fit in only 300 turns. The progress of my units fell perfect in itself. I believe having the same kind of unit for around 20 turns feels perfectly natural. Any less than that and there would simply be many units that don't get any use throughout the game. An extra long game than expected is perfectly fine, while it also allows to explore more interesting mechanics. Longer eras means more stars can be achieved, meaning higher star thresholds can be put in place, making fame a more integral part of the game rather than an afterthought at the end of it. Similarly, higher star thresholds allow for more interesting strategies, since the 7 bronze stars are achieved in auto-pilot mode.
How do you feel about the speed of population growth?
Growth felt perfect. I like the balance population growth was given from the previous open dev. However, just like the bonuses from most cultures, the civilization bonuses that yield food should be nerfed. Since food is essentially just translated to other resources, especially with the forced labor mechanic, agrarian cultures feel too powerful in the mid game. Once the ability to consume population into other resources, growth feels almost useless, since additionally most of the yields are obtained from districts and other infrastructure by this point.
How do you feel about the value and the growth of the different resources (Including Influence)
Overall, cultural bonuses feel too powerful. The only way to get through the tech tree is by choosing science-yielding unique abilities. The only way to get gold for building buyouts is by choosing gold-yielding abilities and so on. It almost feels like, especially in the early game, that all mechanics can be ignored except for the one your civ focuses on. At the same time, trascending or choosing a civ with the same focus as your previous one does not get any significant benefits. It feels like the story telling aspect of the game is broken due to this. Except for food, where by going full agrarian you can get insane amounts of food throughout the game, there actually no benefits from following a storyline with your civ, especially with science cultures.
However, the growth of resources feels mostly appropiate. Industry should probably be bumped up a bit, making infrastructure actually buildable, whilst late-game infrastructure should probably be buffed. In the late game, building a district or a cheap early game infrastructure was often times way more benefitial than building late game infrastructure. At the same time, due to the high cost of infrastructure and its general low yields, I often found that I only built infrastructure when stability was an issue, and then I stoped building it immediately after I managed to get my stability back up again.
On the other hand, public ceremonies felt completely useless. An investment of almost double or triple the cost of a district for half or less of the returns is completely insane. I belive giving public ceremonies proportional benefits instead of nominal ones could probably adress this a little. However, even then the base costs should be reduced. This change in the mechanic would also align perfectly with the progressive costs of public ceremonies, contrasted to the fixed costs of districts and infrastructure.
Lastly, influence seems to scale poorly. In the early game, fame feels insanely important, epecially against higher difficulty AI, and almost useless all the way up to three masted ship. By the time this tech is unlocked, so much fame has been collected that settlers feel irrelevant and almost the entire new continent can be settled within a few turns with regular embarked units. Additionally, from a storyline standpoint, the resource that is supposed to reflect diplomacy feels too overpowered in the earliest eras, where diplomacy is limited, and underpowered in the late game. where diplomacy should be relevant. Giving diplomacy more active abilities as eras progress could be very usefull, since currently it is only used for basic infrastructure and as a mild war deterrant. In the form of cultural influence against other empires. Linking back to a response to another post I made, I belive influence could be used in vassalage and diplomatic relationships, similar to how it works in Crusader Kings: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/169-game-design/threads/41031-suggestion-on-vassal-mechanics?page=1#post-320905
Are religions still to powerful, or are the bonuses at a more appropriate level now?
The religions feel appropiate, but having control of a religion feels pointless. As many people in this thread have said, having control of a religion is a huge investment that could probably be achieved elsewhere. In particular, getting the bonusess off of other civ's religions makes it completely useless to have one yourself. Not only that, but it is not possible to build holy sites if your religion has fallen under the control of another civ. This makes it completely impossible for religion control to switch hands. I believe this is the complete opposite of the intended purpose. Additionally, most bonuses are not altered by whether or not you are the religious leader, so why bother focusing the scarce early-game bonuses in building up a religion when you can leave the task to the AI. Especially in higher-up difficulties where the AI can build the first holy site almost immediately while you are struggling to get your infrastructure up.
Granting non-leading cultures the ability to build holy sites as well as the ability to use faith to do so would not only make religion more interesting, but it would also make faith a more significant part of the game. Giving the religious leader additional bonuses would also make it more worthwhile being one.
Out of all the mechanics in the game, faith feels like it is the one that needs the most changes. All other mechanics still need tweaks and changes, but faith would need an overhaul that is most likely not achievable by release date.
How does the neolithic era feel now? Can you still grow your population too quickly?
No, population growth feels appropiate in the neolithic. However, the costs of the first outpost should probably be incresed, fomenting more exploration rather than first-turn settling after finding the first curiosity. One of the things I liked about the open devs was the ability to explore the map without being forced to settle almost immediately. It gave the game an almost unique flavor that has now been lost due to the relative ease of finding at least one curiosity. With the current amount of resources, and considering that randomized maps will most likely not give you a curiosity on the first turn, I think that the first outpost should cost 10 influence and the second one 20. Once a city is built, the costs could drop back down to 10 and 25 for adjacent territories. I do not think this would be broken considering the low early-game influence production in the first place.
This distribution, along with a nerfing to natural wonders, would allow interesting choises based on neolithic era events. Players who find a lot of wonders and curiosities could settle a city and up to 3 outposts within the first 10 turns (around 75-100 influence), while players with low influence income in the neolithic could probably settle one city and one outpost (20-50 influence). However, tall players could catch up with wide players within 4 or five turns in terms of territory, making the gap significant but not game-breaking. With the current build, I can easily picture a game where you only manage to find 3 or 4 curiosites in the neolithic and get absolutely mauled by an AI that got 2 wonders and 5 or 6 curiosities.
First about AI. They feel like they have flat bonuses instead of percentage based (I don't know the actual numbers, it just feels like it). In the early game they are way too fast. After turn 50, maybe 100 they just fall of. That breaks the AI pacing, because it can go into medieval era as fast as turn 35, but in different (or even the same) case it cannot progress to early modern even at turn 150 (had both those things happen in only few games).
Absolutely. The AI feels overpowered At the beggining of the game, claiming tons of territory and forcing you into wars to expand. At the (current) endgame, you could almost do anything and still outpace the AI. Although I don't think it is completely game braking in Empire difficulty, it makes higher difficulties completely unplayable, and making the early game essentially a race to catch up that is thoroughly unenjoyable.
Shataraterevar wrote:
I agree to someone's idea that buyouts are way to costly, and instead of bigger flat cost you could introduce some penalties to buyouts (stability for population, maybe income or something else for money), maybe severe but timed ones (like -10 stability per population sacrificed for 10 turns or something?). The money prices also inflate too much, but production staying the same, makes money useless or obsolete/afterthought after few eras.
Yes, it would also make the gigantic range of "strained" more interesting. Currently, I find myself only worrying about strability when I either run out of it from building districts or I'm considering expanding a city.
I felt religion just did its job on its own, i didn't really interacted with it (except for narrative events) and it provided quite good bonuses so it felt too easy. I think the religion gameplay can be complexified a bit.
My technology was always 2 eras behind my current era. I think it's a bit because i didn't focus science early, but mostly because I progressed through the eras to quickly. I think the era stars goals are too common, so you don't have to really try to achieve them you just unlock them by managing your economy. Maybe have more specific and diverse goals (why not linked to the era history) to reward some specific gameplay styles (or maybe replace the era stars by the deeds or something similar ?).
In the city the last type of production (ceremonies, games...) is totally useless and not worth it.
Also, at some point, Influence become totally useless.
I feel the pacing is mostly a problem because I feel very limited in what I can build due to stability nerfs from Victor and the reduction in effectiveness of sacrificing population to speed construction. Further, the map was resource-starved, with more cramped territories compared to Victor (at least, it felt that way, maybe it wasn't actually). I played at Nation and smashed the AI in every area, though it sounds like Empire will offer a good deal more challenge. The problem is everything is so slow to build now, and we are so limited in the amount of districts we can construct due to resources scarcity and the reduction in effectiveness of luxuries compared to Victor, it creates a "snowball" effect where building is much slower, so resource accumulation is also much slower. I was pretty consistently at least one era behind, sometimes two, in infrastructure and units, compared to my "cultural era".
+1 I think the nerf to population sacrifice went too far in the other direction and now I need 14 pop for one infrastructure so I can't even use it to get rid of my extra population who will die in two turns anyways :(
Seems like a good solution would be that you can only sacrifice 1 population per X turns (maybe one per turn?) and it would only add a set amount of Industry (1 pop sacrifice = 4x current 'industry per pop' value?).
I completely second this, one problem I had is that when I wanted to sacrifice population to build a wonder or holy site it wouldn't let me distribute the sacrifice among my cities. The current build forces you to sacrifice 29 pop or so straight from one city which is bonkers. Being able to sacrifice pop 1 by 1 would allow the player to distribute the population loss more evenly.
At the same time, trascending or choosing a civ with the same focus as your previous one does not get any significant benefits. It feels like the story telling aspect of the game is broken due to this. Except for food, where by going full agrarian you can get insane amounts of food throughout the game, there actually no benefits from following a storyline with your civ, especially with science cultures.
@Duthrach That is not entirely true. If you use the industry districts wisely you can get to a point where you can build a district every 2 turns (or even quicker with the builder active ability. Then you can ignore stability completely thanks to the passive builder ability. That becomes so insane that you actually run out of land at some point and since there are no buildings left to build, the only thing cities can build is projects and units :D
There is a similar strategy with gold. The gold bonuses stack quite well so you can get quite cheap buyout. It worked really well in Victor, not so much in the current closed beta on higher difficulties.
What I am trying to say is that Humankind offers a wide variety of play-styles: indutry-focused, food-focused, and gold-focuses, and of course military-focuses. I think that is a really good thing and I think it is important that these different strategies as well as a mix of those remain roughly balanced so that there is not only one way and every player can chose whatever they prefer.
But I fully agree with the fame and deep comment. I was thinking the same thing. Deeds don't make a real difference. They need to be come more valuable.
The Influence bank gets full, and nothing to spend it on:
@Meram You can colonize other continents. That does become very expensive indeed because all of the space is left for the player since the AI does not actually seem to be interested in expanding to other continent. In my most recent games on Humankind difficulty I was actually short on influence for almost the entire game. But maybe that only happens when you play in an expansionist way with 13+ cities and 35+ territories.
And you can use the influence for wonders and to change your previous civic choices.
However, once the AI is actually smart enough to compete for new colonies and the player won't have half the planet to colonize, I agree that influence needs another sink in the late game.
@Devs: I am still hoping that in the future there will be world congress that makes global decisions and you can buy votes with influence.
But for the initial release we will most definitely not see that happening I guess.
Maybe another influence sink could be to use influence to make grievances / demands go away. That should be pretty costly because otherwise it would break diplomacy. But it would enable peaceful players to use influence to potentially prevent a war, which would be a nice mechanic.
That should not be too hard to implement, since it is basically just one button next to the grievance / demand (which might be there from the beginning or unlocked via a tech). But it would make a large difference for the feeling of the game.
I played two games on Empire difficulty. In the first one Vlad went Myceneans -> Huns and destroyed me, because I wasn't prepared. In the second one I made sure to pick off all of his stray units, which made him afraid of me. I was never at war throughout this game and finished on turn 139. I think that's earlier than intended and it definitely felt too early.
I picked a scientific culture once - the Joseon. I claimed as many territories as I could - enough to get 3 expansionist stars in the industrial era and I was focusing on science in the last two eras. I had a very strong religion with two scientific tenets, harbors in every territory and all available scientific infratructure in my oldest cities. With all that I still didn't complete a single indutrial tech before winning the game. Science needs to be faster.
AI seemed decent, especially in that game where it wrecked me. In the second one the black AI was a bit scary - she was slightly ahead of me until I reached early modern. Then she fell off hard. When I won she was at industrial era 0 stars and I had a lead of about 1500 fame.
Infrastructure seems imbalanced. Science infrastructure is necessary to research anything and food infrastructure is also very important, Industry infrastructure is more situational, but it can be very good. Money infrastructure seems way too costly for its effect and I barely built any of it. Military infratructure was useless because of my completely peaceful play, but in the Victor opendev I was aggressive and this infrastructure still felt useless.
Era stars also seem imbalanced. I was getting aesthete and agrarian stars left and right, but admittedly I was generating a lot of influence and food. I went Olmecs->Carthaginians->Franks. What felt wrong was that I was also consistently getting Builder stars. I think I built very few districts compared to the size of my empire, but these stars also count resource extractors, harbors, outposts, holy sites and wonders. I got some militarist stars from bullying Vlad and several Sicentist stars throughout the game - that was about right. Trader stars were absurdly hard for me. I only got one and it was not as the Carthaginians. Yes, I ignored market quarters and money infrastructure, but that's because they give low value compared to other options. Money is expected to come from trade and I was trading a lot of luxuries. Also construction buyout felt pretty expensive, even though I had a 50% discount.
One last thought about legacy traits vs ED and EU. I think that legacy trait is the main reason to pick a culture, EU is irrelevant except maybe in ancient era and ED sucks for most cultures. I picked Olmecs, Franks and Joseon only for their legacy traits, especially the Franks. I didn't even consider building a scriptorium. The only ED I really made use of was the cothon, but that's because I prioritized building harbors and was planning to go Joseon. Since scientific progress is so slow, I didn't unlock any EU past the Frank knight. The only culture I didn't pick for the legacy trait was the last one, Russians. I just wanted to steal land from my nieghbours. The ED also seemed to combo well with my religion, but I didn't have the time to build any.
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