Breaking your feedback threads into topics makes it difficult to address more fundamental issues to your game. Specific mechanic tweaks are often needed, but that's the kind of thing that changes every patch these days in gaming, so most of the specific feedback threads you're asking for aren't meaningful to me.

I am significantly more concerned about the overall experience. No individual element of this game is awful except for it's tutorialization, but tutorialization is literally the only thing that matters in me getting my friends to play. I have convinced one friend to buy it and try the beta -- he stopped on turn 20 because it was confusing and exhausting -- and he had recently finished a conquest victory in Civ 6 on Emperor. I already have three 4x games from your studio that my friends won't play because they're imposing, and I really don't need a fourth one.

I would also like to say that calling this an "OpenDev" process leaves a really bitter taste in my mouth. An open door lets traffic through in both directions, but it seems like you're just siphoning free QA and design feedback from the community without providing anything back.

Where are your recorded blind playthroughs? Where are your optical heatmaps? Performance advice? Your system for testing mechanical changes and the results its given? How can other developers learn from your experience? You've given one GDC talk I can find, which would be a way to give back to the community, except your GDC talk was explicitly about making OpenDev a one-way street. And that was in 2014. If you "view the community as part of the dev team", like you claimed in that talk, give us access to your data.

You've given nothing back, and it makes me reticent to give you anything. Nevertheless, I will.

What follows is my unedited transcript of me playing the game. It won't compare to lab sessions, but I don't even know if you do those. Parts of it will be wrong or contradicted as I play -- that's normal and hopefully you guys know how to interpret these.

Humankind Beta Feedback

First run

1. Hard to tell when actions succeed.

    a. "Settle" works but gives little feedback when pressed.

    b. "Deploy in combat" works -- i think your main unit is auto-deployed? -- but gives no feedback

    c. "Start Game" gives no feedback but an audio cue

2. Tutorial popups are confusing.

    a. "Expert" button does nothing

    b. Clicking off them does nothing

    c. No option to close individual window without disabling Tutorial

        At least, that's what I'm assuming "closing all linked tutorials" does. I don't know what a "linked tutorial" is but my instinct is that it's the next one in the series. If this just means "other help windows currently on the screen", maybe change the wording so it doesn't sound like a permanent commitment.

        This is made more confusing because the very first message showing curiosities doesn't have an "acknowledge" button but the second one upon getting your second tribe unit does. I don't know if I've disabled all tutorials around curiosities by hiding the first one.

3. Events

    First event: "Lost Souls I"

    First option "Spawns army MyNewArmy in Hunting Party":

        I don't know what an army is. Is this going to be a new unit? They're called units when I hover over them in the Hunting Party window on the right.

        It was just a new unit but organized as a separate squad. I guess that's an army, but this seems a lot more confusing than it needs to be. This popup should be "Adds Tribe Unit to Hunting Party" or something similar.

== Turns 4-6 ==

Animal sanctuary tutorial message disappeared because I zoomed out too far.

Second animal sanctuary (I think) tutorial message appeared and disappeared when I hit "perform planned movements."

Outpost creation hover tip "The first steps into new lands..." has a confusing second paragraph. "Claims" is capitalized twice but is used once as a verb and once as a noun, which is confusing. Capital-C "Claim" should only be used as a noun. "Attaching" has the same confusing problem. You follow this rule elsewhere: hover over a nomadic curiosity and only the key nouns are capitalized in its description. (Rule followed most other places too, just an example).

"This Claims the Territory as ours" is confusing as "This" is unreferenced, plus it's passive voice which is always a little more work. Perhaps "This outpost" or "An outpost", if that's what this message means.

I got the animal sanctuary tutorial message a third time, but this time is was half offscreen to the left, as if I needed to pan over to see what it was referencing. I did, and it disappeared again.

After alt-tabbing and coming back the message reappeared for the fourth time and I finally read it. Wew boy, the capitalization thing is hard to read. Maybe just switch to bold for key terms or something, because When you Read and Every other Word is Capitalized it Feels like You're being Threatened by A serial Killer. Less negatively, it's like reading Jonathan Swift. Which is better but still really tiring.

Back to animal santuary tip -- i got a fifth one, which repeats the second half of the one I saw the first four times but is actually different. What? "Destroy a Lair" vs whatever the first popup message was called.

Animal sanctuaries are actually pretty hard to tell what tile they're on. All the other above-tile placards identifying neat features are centered but animal sanctuaries are offset in a weird way that makes them look to be in the center of three tiles on an intersection point.

Clicking "Ransack" showed the ransack tutorial message which says "click on the lair", but I can't figure out where to click. On the shield doesn't work -- in fact hovering over different parts of the shield give different projected moves on the ground. If I can't click on the shield don't have the tutorial message put a big-ass square highlight over the shield.

Finished clearing out the sanctuary next turn and it just says "Ransack Successful! You successfully plundered." But, uh, plundered what? What did I get for this? It cost me several turns.

== On Stars (Turn 7) ==

Just got the Fame popup and I'm already sure this is gonna trip me up. Fame's the Hylian Crest from Zelda for some reason, not stars, the symbol used to represent fame for the last hundred years. See "Hollywood Walk of Fame."

Stars, meanwhile, are overloaded and mean at least two things. Influence, same as Endless games, and also "Era Stars".

It says I can stay and get more era stars or pick a culture. It strongly advises picking cultures first because they're exclusive, but it doesn't say why I'd even want more era stars.

"You can get more information by clicking on the art..." okay I did but then the message disappeared. Guess I have to read and internalize every message before clicking anything because I don't know when stuff is going to move around.

===== More about tutorial messages =====

So far, by turn 7, there have been five ways tutorial message get dismissed:

1. At random (probably unintentional, either bug or misinterpreted case #2)

2. When you demonstrate mastery of the content of the message (unreliable, sometimes triggers too early)

3. When you click "acknowledge"

4. When you click "hide"

5. When you click something else that has its own tutorial message primed to fire.

Arguably only #3 should work. #4 should present some modal that confirms you're disabling more than this one tutorial message if that's what it does. The other ones should not dismiss the message. Let me tell you when I'm ready.

==== Back to Turn 7 stars =====

Obviously I'm not supposed to understand the details of what these cultures all mean yet, but some of them are written in especially confusing ways. For example, Egyptians "Grand Planners" ability. "+1 Industry on District producing Industry Modify District Industry cost by -10%." In writing it out, maybe it's just a missing line break and there's actually two abilities here, but there's only one symbol and no visual clue to suggest this.

There's also nothing suggesting if some cultures have been taken already. Maybe none have, but the tutorial made it seem like some could/should be, so I dunno.

I picked Babylon because science has never been the wrong choice in a 4x game.

I expected something to happen when I did that but I'm still in Neolithic era and my "era stars" goals are the same.

Oh, it does it when you end turn. (I later watched a friend play and he got a tutorial message telling you this. I did not.)

== Turn 8 ==

"World Deed Unlocked : 'Wonderful Vinicunca'" -- no idea what this means. There's a zoom-in button which loads a page full of these one-off deeds, but it doesn't say what the hell a "Vinicunca" is. Google suggests it's a specific mountain in the Andes. None of the other deeds are about specific Earthly terrain features. If there were a handful of other natural wonders in this list, I'd be clued in to a game goal around exploration. As it is this whole thing leaves me scratching my head.

After culture upgrading, some of my armies have two units and some have one. Before this they all had one. I understand why they're all scouts now -- some kind of automatic era upgrade -- but I don't understand why two of my three armies got a free unit.

I really like how quick combat sets up and goes now. I always skipped tactical deployment in Endless Legend (or oh god watching space battles in Endless Space) because the temporal overhead of doing it wasn't worth the potential advantages. Now it's quick like a battle in Civ.

But I don't understand why killing deer gives money now.

There was a popup about cities and grids but nothing that told me how to actually make a city. I'd built an outpost a few turns ago and I found the create city button. I wasn't expecting it to just become a thing instantly.

I went to create a farmer's district and got another un-dismissable tutorial popup. Trying to hide it by hitting the arrow thingy near the top plopped my district down in the wrong spot. I found the cancel button in the construction queue so can try again.

I picked Babylon, whose special district gets bonuses for farm district adjacency. Therefore I want to plan out a good spot for a ring of these, where I can place special building in the middle. I can hover over the six hexes near my city to see how a farmer's district will change FIDSI production, but I can't hover over more distant hexes to see how a farmer's district would theoretically change production there once I'm able to build in that direction.

This is frustrating. It'd be one thing if these things were inferrable but they aren't. Hover over each of the six spots by my city and I see a different food number for each one.

The "Placement Details" window doesn't actually provide any details and seems flat-out incorrect. One tile says +6 Food -1 Production -10 Stability if I were to build the district there. But the details window says +4 Food from Exploitations, +1 Food from District, -10 Stability from district. Adding them up, you get two different sets of numbers:

Details window vs. in-world summary

+5 Food vs +6 Food

-1 Prod vs 0 Prod

Each tile is wrong differently, too:

+6 Food vs +2 Food

-1 Prod vs -2 Prod

After further tests, it's some kind of Z-clipping thing. If you zoom in so you can only see one tile, and approach that tile from a flat neighbor, you get the correct numbers in the details window. The window still doesn't tell you _why_ the numbers are different, just that they are different and that those differences are from a specific invisible source ("exploitation").

== Turn 11 ==

Map scroll speed is a cruel joke and there's no option to increase it. It takes between 1-1.5 seconds to pan a single tile's width at maximum zoom out. Reasonable zoom is still only a couple tiles a second.

Also surely map panning should be faster when zoomed out, not slower. I want to cover more ground so I zoomed out. Could be wrong here but lord it feels weird. IMHO triple all base pan speeds and add a negative sign to "map scroll speed zoom multiplier".

I also don't understand why ransacked animal sanctuaries are still on the map. I don't think I need to do anything to collect that 10 coins but it's still there distracting me several turns later.

------------

Small bug: end turn modal button functions in real time, not based on already issues commands.

Precondition: Have a movement order queued, finish all other unit movement so "End Turn" becomes "perform queued moves"

1. Press "perform queued moves."

Expected:

Moves are performed and turn button goes to next mandatory (end turn in this case)

Actual:

Move begins to be performed. End turn button changes to "select idle unit". When pressed, this selects the unit currently moving. When unit ends queued move, "end turn" button reverts to "end turn" because the unit was never actually idle.

-----------

== Turn 12 ==

"Culture Chosen" message for other tribes is awkwardly written. "The Nomadic Tribe reached the Ancient Era with the Harappans" implies that Harappans (and other cultures) are pre-existing on the map and can be found. Unless I'm mistaken the Babylonian culture I picked from a menu had no existing world state before I chose it, but this message makes me question that assumption.

(This is extra confusing because shortly after I found an independent tribe, which DO exist on the map. So unless you've memorized every culture name and you never add more in patches/DLC, this alert will always be confusing.)

Another natural wonder deed got completed, this time for the Danakil Desert. I swear I looked for other natural wonder deeds -- that's why I keep notes -- but it appears there now for sure. Maybe natural wonders don't appear in the deeds list until discovered, but that makes the "list of potential deeds" a big lie. Now that I know I can't trust the deeds list I guess I'll just do every stupid thing that occurs to me in case it's a secret deed.

The lesson you've taught is "nothing you do matters because rewards are secret and random" which I don't think is the intention. The 50 fame reward for finding these natural wonders completely dwarfs the 20 fame I got in the tribal era. Is it possible the tribal era doesn't matter at all? I mean I knew the era count you guys were advertising was misleading -- I've played Empire Earth -- but I didn't expect one to take 6 turns and have no lasting effect on gameplay.

Seems like random discoveries don't give unit food -> automatic unit creation after advancing. I got random troops for advancing so farming early discoveries for food instead of e.g. science or money after advancing has unclear utility.

To be clear, I'm not annoyed that I don't perfectly understand everything about a game I just picked up. I'm annoyed because I can't even make reasonable guesses to guide my play. I'm worried that I've screwed myself already by turn 12 but going back and playing the first 12 turns again doesn't provide enough feedback to give additional clarity (I tried at this point, though I did not try gathering tons of food before settling. I will on my next game. Maybe era stars can be carried over?)

"Technology Queue" tutorial window is undismissable and hides half the tech tree. Closing research and reopening it doesn't dismiss it, but scrolling to industrial and back does.

This is where I'd refund the game if I didn't love Endless Legend. Frustration is my primary emotion. To be fair, literally every Endless game is frustrating for the first several games and it's why I don't recommend them to my friends even though I like them more than Civ. But that's worse, not better. I'd really like to see eye and mouse heatmaps for this game. I looked for them on "OpenDev" but it seems like it's open in one direction only. Another frustration compounded.

"Empire Bonus" popup says "...[Empire Bonuses] are immaterial and will immediately apply across your entire Empire." I don't think you mean "immaterial". I'm assuming you're using it in the sense of "intangible", but the more common definition by far is "irrelevant" or "unimportant" and that can't be what you mean. You could simply remove "are immaterial and" and more people would correctly understand this message.

At least this one is dismissable so I can see the tech tree.

== Turn 14 ==

Got the "The Walking Wounded" event which references "During the recent brutal battle...". I have not had a recent brutal battle. I have had exactly two fights with single deer with no combat losses. Apparently one of my scouts lost a leg and his "whole character has changed, becoming aggressive, demented, or unable to bear others' presense." Guess that deer really spooked him.

I picked the option giving stability -- that deer veteran is a hero -- and the sound effect that plays has way too much bass. The game's generally quiet (good), and I'm playing at a quiet comfortable volume on speakers, and the weird bass hit at the end of that popup's sound effect was physically uncomfortable and made my speakers crackle.

Since I'm bringing up sound, can I just say I love the music in this game like I have loved the music in all Endless games. Your musician(s) -- and the "Endless Choir"? -- have kept me invested past the frustrating beginnings of all your games. Your games have great core mechanics that make them fun, but it's 2021 and there's a new game with great mechanics every week. There are also 30 years of games with great mechanics cheaply or freely available. Competing on polish is frankly more important to me -- it's why I think _Distant Worlds: Universe_ kinda sucks even though mechanically it's one of the best games I've ever played.

== Diplomacy Screen ==

I really, really like the map view and money display in Diplomacy mode. I've never understood why so many other games in this and related genres puts diplomacy on a whole separate screen as if your diplomatic actions don't depend on positioning and cashflow. Unfortunately you can't see military units here so it's not quite as useful as it could be. It's weird because fog of war is rendered properly accounting for unit line of sight -- this feels like a couple days of effort that could make this screen 10x more useful.

(It's possible my scouts I got after taking a culture don't count as military units, and "real" units will show up here... but I don't have any real units yet so this is confusing at this moment.)

I also love the underlying systems at first glance. Your cold war/territory-based aggression system has always made a ton of sense and I'm glad to see it again. The Mycenaeans accepted peace but refused trade treaty (fair, I don't have anything to trade yet). I was worried while proposing the trade treaty I'd be making them pissed off for proposing things they don't like -- so many games do this -- and I was presently surprised to see "proposed treaty" as a positive bonus, not a negative penalty.

I hope I don't get blindsided by pissing neighbors off by being chatty, will revisit if it happens.

== Turn 15 ==

Unexpected: hovering over an enemy unit doesn't do anything.

Pleasantly surprised: can just click enemy unit to see what it is. (I know that works at least some other Endless games, but I didn't remember)

Issue: enemy army name has a bad custom name "MyNewArmy" instead of being automatically renamed based on its composition. A one-unit AI Scout army should always be named "Scout" or something.

== Turn 16 ==

Finishing off a wounded mammoth to steal the reward feels great, hahaha.

(Next bit redacted in Turn 22)

That +10 stability popup screwed me.  I finished my first farming district, dropping to 90% in theory, and I hoped to let it increase naturally before building another district. But it can't increase naturally because it's at 100% because of the popup. If I queue another district, it'll finish When popup ends, dropping me to 80% at once and dropping me below the 90% threshold.

But I don't have any non-districts I want to build yet. Just a lumber yard that doesn't help my first city at all (oops).

So I guess I'm building another district, but I really wish "natural stability gain" included the effects of temporary modifiers in calculating what 100% really means.

Bug: when building a district, hovering on a tile beyond your city's immediate neighbors says "Cannot be done on that type of tile." This is false, I can build farm districts there, I'm just not close enough. This is another polish issue that makes it difficult to plan out district builds.

Ideology bar graph tooltips are busted.

== Turn 19 ==

"Attitude Changed! The Mycenaeans now feel differently about you..."

Well, is it better or worse? lol just tell me, don't tease me. 

It was better -- but it still doesn't tell me that on the diplomacy screen. If I hadn't noticed it used to be "uneasy" or something there's no way to tell now. Might have been it used to be "worships you like gods" and now it's only "pleasant" and I should be worried.

More generally, I don't really give a shit about their _current_ attitude. I care about how that attitude is changing over time. If attitude is position, I want velocity and acceleration. A little sparkline would convey worlds more than "pleasant". An arrow up or down next to "pleasant" conveying general sentiment changes over the last X (10-20?) turns would be less radical but still useful. Especially if the arrow was bigger/fatter/whatever if the changes were more severe and the opposite when changes are gradual. (That said sparklines are everywhere on the web now and I don't think you'd need to explain one if you added it.)

Also, the war support bar doesn't make any sense. We both started at 50. There's is going up 2 a turn, mine down 1 a turn, both drifting towards "equilibrium". So I guess our equilibriums are different -- makes sense, I'm Babylon he's Mycenae -- but it doesn't tell me what those equilibriums are. The shading on the bar seems like it'd be it, or the black line, but their bar is growing away from the line and mine is growing toward it.

Also I get the potential visual symmetry of making the bars mirror images of eachother, but it makes them really confusing to talk about and maybe simpler is better here. This is much less egregious, but it reminds me of the tech tree in Endless Space 2. That thing is basically impossible to read/navigate purely to serve a style choice.

== Turn 20 ==

Civics tutorial tooltip #5, after pulling back out of a zoomed-in civic for the first time, talks about "Civics points" and that I'll need to wait for more of them. I don't think this is worded right. This implies the existance of a resource called "civics points". I think maybe this means "wait until new civics unlock" or something.

== Turn 21 ==

I got a popup to found a religion, but I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure if there are other choices besides "Polytheism" and "Shamanism" that I could have been offered had I played differently. It's frustratingly opaque and video-gamey.

There are also no tooltips for the religion talking about cultural aspects of the choice and what that choice might influence in the future.

Maybe there's no more to this choice here and it's just asking me to decide if I want more faith or influence from holy sites. I dunno.

The faith screen tutorial popup, "Religion Mode", has the word and symbol for "Faith" in such a color where there's no contrast with the white tutorial background. That said it looks like this popup you're willing to use bold and color to highlight key terms instead of the serial killer capitals of the last 20 turns, heh. It also correctly capitalizes only nouns while still bolding important verbs. Maybe this is what you're aiming at and the rest are stubs/works in progress, but if not, please strongly consider doing the rest of the popups in this style (after fixing contrast issue).

Minor bug: my religion was named "Babylonians Shamanism", should be "Babylonian Shamanism". I changed it by hand and now I regret it, I'm worrying I set a dirty bit that will prevent other automatic renames once I change from shamanism later.

== Turn 22 ==

Stability popup didn't screw me. The game uses the same term for two different resources -- "stability equilibrium" and "current stability". The +10 Stability on the popup was "stability equilibrium", not "current stability".

This is presented in a confusing way when the underlying concept is straightforward. It makes this concept difficult to talk about verbally, especially when playing with new players. The game already uses "war support equilibrium" so it doesn't add a new concept to the game's vocabulary to split stability up like it is under the hood.

== Turn 24 ==

"The people of Xuange have converted to Babylonian Shamanism."

Great. I don't know what Xuange is. I don't see a city or outpost on my map called that. That's because it's linked to my main city, which removes its label. You can only see its name if you click on the tile with the old outpost center and/or click on your city and laboriously scroll to the outpost at 1.5 tiles a second.

"The people of Alioth have converted to Babylonian Shamanism."

Great. I don't know where Alioth is. I don't have any more linked outposts. I found the zoom to event button but it opens the religion screen over my capitol.

I shouldn't get conversion events for places that I don't know about. If this is a city I haven't discovered, either spreading my religion there should discover it on my map or I shouldn't be notified that they practice my religion. Either is reasonable and would model a different religious structure.

== Turn 39 ==

Man, some of these tutorial messages just keep coming back even when I've disabled them. Either that or they're so similar to ones I've seen they just feel like duplicates.

"Deploying your Troops" has a typo'd "{0}" instead of a right-click icon at the end of the first paragraph.

Attack prediction health bars have same issue as war support bars. Three colored sections don't make sense. My unit has 18 health, predicition is -22 to -33, so the non-empty part of the bar should be one color and it should represent loss.

Map focus constantly has a bouncing "!" above it. I have toggled the option a couple times and it still really wants me to notice it. Even closing the notification area doesn't hide it.

== Turn 40 ==

Just now noticed that outposts also have a build menu, because I noticed a population gain alert that wasn't for my city. I don't understand what population does for the outpost itself. Maybe just a pending thing if you build it into a city/link it later? i dunno.

More importantly I didn't know I could build resource exploiters from outposts. I'm surprised that isn't an end turn optional or an alert or something, you essentially never don't want to do this. They cost almost nothing compared to the price of building the outpost and is probably why you built the outpost there in the first place.

Also I don't have to be adjacent to the resources to extract them, oops. I played Endless Legend which I think worked the same way so I'm surprised I got this wrong.

== Turn 44ish ==

Became Mauryans. It's kinda dumb because I was at 3 stars a couple turns back. I wish the stars list on the main screen showed some indication you were getting close to some, like a half-star or 3/4 star instead of just empty ones.

Claimed the wonder that lets your units ignore forests for the rest of the game. It'll take 46 turns to build though, and I wish I'd had an inkling of that before making the choice because I could have used 250 influence for way more interesting things while I get production in line. When choosing it should show production cost in your capital city, or maybe all cities since city limits are so low (good thing).

On a whim checked outposts and they can also build harbors. Am repeating myself, but easy to miss. I gotta remember to check outposts after every research just in case.

Also weird they can build harbors and extractors but not military fort districts, since all three don't require adjacency. It makes sense to defend remote resources with forts, even expensive forts (influence vs production) that don't contribute stability. A fort at half the cost of linking, but without resource gain from linking or associated stability penality, is a compelling option.

== Turn 46 ==

Two neighbors declared independent wars on me on the same turn. I conceded.

Roughly consistent with my first half-dozen attempted playthroughs. I've played an awful lot ofES2 and a passable bit of EL (clocking 866.9 and 202.3 hours respectively) and the overall concepts are similar enough that I wasn't expecting such trouble. While I've encountered a few bugs, the vast majority of my problems come from inconsistent/nonexistent communication that prevents me from making any meaningful decisions. Some examples from my current game:

Nothing on Research Quarter or Artisan Quarter gives any indication that indicates your Research Quarter gains an adjacency bonus from (or maybe that it grants one to) Artisan Quarters, yet I've multiple Artisans Quarters I can place Research Quarters adjacent to in ways that ensure no other district touches the Research Quarter, where I'm giving my Artisan Quarter a +3 Science boost. That's a pretty large boost for an adjacency bonus, and definitely something I would have planned my city around if I had any indication it existed.

Or how about my Cothon extending its exploitation two tiles instead of one, but only when the tile is Costal water in districts I control. Or maybe that it does act as a Harbor for your Fishmonger improvements (which makes sense as it's effectively a Harbor replacement, but it certainly could be communicated that way).

Only... why is it benefiting from Silk or Saffron? Does it also count as a Makers Quarter and Farmers Quarter? Or the Forge and Animal Barns, for that matter. What's the rule here, if it produces the resource it benefits from the boost to districts that produce the resource? If that's the case, I've not found anything in any tooltip to indicate that. Is this a bug I should be reporting?

I get that it's still in Development, but if we're being asked to give feedback on mechanics and game balance it sure would help if I had the information for proper decision-making so that I could really push game balance. Otherwise, this is all a PR stunt and you're not actually interested in actual game balance and mechanical feedback.

> Everything Jeriah said

Really good feedback which I also agree with. Thanks for chiming in.

I started up another game to interact more with war (read: actually build units so I don't die on turn 40, heh.) The same problems persist there too.

I have two armies within a couple tiles of a Hittite army. One of my armies is a single scout whose auto-explore insists on marching into hostile territory during a war.

The other one is 3 spearmen and 2 javelin throwers. I feel pretty good about my odds against the Hittite's two spearmen.

The Hittites attack my scout. The tutorial popup for reinforcement pops up -- I figured I could do this from Endless Legend, no surprises yet. But the buttons to actually reinforce don't do anything and just say "can't be done in this game state." I'm in the deployment phase, which seems like the time to do deployment, but it doesn't work.

I end deployment and move my scout to the corner on high ground but bad rolls kill him. I figure I'll reload to try to figure it out again but I get an exception upon reloading the last auto-save:

Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

An item with the same key has already been added. Key: Amplitude.Mercury.StateShare.EventCompleteNotificationData

  at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue].TryInsert (TKey key, TValue value, System.Collections.Generic.InsertionBehavior behavior) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0 

  at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue].Add (TKey key, TValue value) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0 

  at System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, System.Reflection.BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0 

  at System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke (System.Object obj, System.Object[] parameters) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0 

  at Amplitude.Wwise.Interop.AkLogger+ErrorLoggerInteropDelegate.Invoke (System.String message) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0 

  at System.AsyncCallback.Invoke (System.IAsyncResult ar) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0 

  at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunInternal (System.Threading.ExecutionContext executionContext, System.Threading.ContextCallback callback, System.Object state, System.Boolean preserveSyncCtx) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0 

  at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run (System.Threading.ExecutionContext executionContext, System.Threading.ContextCallback callback, System.Object state) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0 

  at Amplitude.Wwise.Interop.AkLogger+ErrorLoggerInteropDelegate.Invoke (System.String message) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0

It feels really gross that the next message after this crash isn't "report this crash" but "sign in so we can show you Twitch profiles", but I digress.

This message made me nervous. This is a handled exception, which few developers have ever done right in non-trivial cases. It's just something we fail at culturally. When I reloaded the save again, I wasn't surprised to see it fail again with the same message. I suspect most non-developers here would suspect save corruption and give up on/refund your game immediately.

In my case I figured you were just incompetent. This exception should not be caught. Let it crash the game like most non-trivial exceptions. Rebooting the game fixed the issue. This is EXTREMELY junior developer stuff and you shouldn't be getting this wrong in a product this close to shipping, especially not in an established studio with your track record.

Your internal game state is dangerously volatile and it's not just this issue. Start a new game after resigning and your units will look like your old save's units for a second. The game isn't being reinitialized properly between contiguous sessions in general and I wonder how many subtle issues that don't result in uncaught exceptions are lurking invisibly. We'd know, if this were really OpenDev and we saw the crash statistics, logs, issue tracker, or anything else remotely Open.

After seeing this, I'm now going to close and reopen the game anytime I want to load a save, because I can no longer trust the game works after a load. Another frustrating source of significant friction, doubly so for new players.

Because of this issue, I am extremely nervous about the state of multiplayer. I suspect it becomes unsync'd and unplayable at about turn 50 in anything but lab conditions. This is an issue you guys have struggled with in previous games. The state of this one -- and the lack of any multiplayer promotional content or beta access -- is somewhat worrying.

I also ran face-first into the lack of reinforcements capability. It being buried way up in Organized Warfare and not even visible when opening the tech menu but being visible and seemingly ready-to-use had me pulling my hair out for several runs until I happened to tech deep enough to notice it.

I've also noticed some shenanigans happening with combat. I reported a bug earlier with manual battles that don't result in kills sending my units to the far side of the region, but during testing I noticed that the auto-resolve would consistently give my units kills where manual was impossible. Since I was running several dozen manual combats to test the bug, I thought I'd dig in a little. Across no less than 40 combats, trying every variation and tactic I could think of, I wasn't once able to kill the enemy unit in 3 combat rounds. In 5 consecutive auto-resolves, the same unit was able to handily kill the enemy unit and finish the fight tying with the best health record I managed across 40 attempts. I'm no stranger to EL combat, so unless there's some modifiers that are absolutely not mentioned it would seem auto-resolve has an implicit bias in your favor. That actually makes sense to me; they're looking to draw in non-Endless players, so putting some training wheels on to help out during OpenDev would only help that. If it's intended behavior, and I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt for the moment, then I'll expect it to be removed (or at least controlled via gameplay settings or difficulty somewhere).