/Begin Rant

I submitted an extensive bug report during the last play through and very little has changed. 

In my opinion, the Closed Beta is not playable... diplomacy is broken, fame doesn't make any sense, and the game is still full of glitches that require restarts.

I'm 3 plays into the closed beta and I can't stand this game. It's in worse shape than Open Victor. 

I feel like my feedback and my experience is not being heard - and normally it wouldn't bother me - but the Devs asked for it!

I would happily document every frustration I have with this game if the developers listened / responded to the feedback. Right now it's a black hole.. I'm putting in my time - what are you doing?

/End Rant

I have to say, I agree with you. 

It seems to me the Devs have no clear direction or vision for this game. For example, they responded to issues with people ending up with extra influence at the end of the game by making everything require influence. Ofc, if you end up with an extra city through battle and are losing influence, you need influence to get an extra city cap. Lol. The solutions they're providing are less than effective. Meanwhile, the game completely ignores the existence of the ocean, in spite of the fact that naval warfare and coastal cities in general have played an enormous role in human history.

It seems to me that they bit off more than they can chew trying to compete in the historical Civ genre, and now they're flailing.

After reading a lot of opinions here and on Steam, I am beginning to believe they thought they could re-skin Endless Legend and sell it as an historical Civ game to a loyal fan base.

Unfortunately for them, it seems they've included a package of hostile DRM that has turned a number of fans off, and they've decided to make the game basically un-moddable, which will turn even more people off and guarantee that modders can't provide solutions while they scramble to fix their broken mess.

If it helps, I only started with Poe and haven't found issues with diplomacy so far (other than war, which seems to be a common complaint). I actually understand the diplomacy in this better than a number of other 4x games, including ES2.

Fame is poorly communicated. I still have no concept of how I'm doing, relative to some vague wincon. I'm consistently steamrolling the AI in Fame, well in excess of how I feel I'm doing in terms of actual gameplay (which I'm admittedly doing much better than the AI, after the first 20 hours of unless tutorials and trial-by-failure). It mostly just feels like such an arbitrary number that it's meaningless. I gain whole orders of magnitude over the course of subsequent eras than I did the previous that I don't understand if it's because I'm doing so well at meeting those goals or if later eras are so badly inflated that I should be rushing through each as quickly as possible.

I can't say anything about the Humankind team, or Amplitude in general, having never participated with them before. I can say I was very disappointed with the later ES2 patches, and their insistence of leaving in broken and imbalanced mechanics around because they no longer had interest in supporting the game. I can say I've worked with small dev teams before, and even 5-6 community managers can easily be swamped by a couple dozen active community members making regular posts. I can say that, depending on their sprint cycles that it's completely feasible a month and a half isn't enough lead time to handle fine-tuning adjustments and they're still focused on big-picture changes at this point. I wouldn't say to lose heart just yet, give them until mid-July. That should be when they're wrapping up changes and move to bug-smashing. We should have a good idea then (assuming we can get our hands on a newer build by that point) as to how final gameplay is going to look.

AOM wrote:
they've decided to make the game basically un-moddable, which will turn even more people off and guarantee that modders can't provide solutions while they scramble to fix their broken mess

They are working quite hard on ensuring the game is moddable, with a modding program giving modders access before release, and they themselves are making a mod that will ship with the game.

AOM wrote:

After reading a lot of opinions here and on Steam, I am beginning to believe they thought they could re-skin Endless Legend and sell it as an historical Civ game to a loyal fan base.

 The Steam forums are a bit of a cesspool. Most people there are either convinced the developer is just trying to clone X game, or that it will be the true successor to whatever Civ game they liked most (usually 4 it seems), or that it will be some magical wake up call to Firaxis to make the next Civ game better (by which, they mean more like their favorite Civ game), or they just derail conversations.  

I hear you. And, yet, the Dev has told us this game has been 10 years in development. If this is the best they can do in 10 years, there's a problem. This Dev has bragged about sending people around the world to collect sounds for the game. If that's where they've chosen to spend their money while the code is in such disarray, I can't trust them to make any good decisions.

Then, there is the DRM and the code change in this beta that blocks modders from making .dll mods. They say they're all about community, but then they do that. The game is hostile to players, consumers, and modders.

FlamingKetchup wrote:

AOM wrote:
they've decided to make the game basically un-moddable, which will turn even more people off and guarantee that modders can't provide solutions while they scramble to fix their broken mess

They are working quite hard on ensuring the game is moddable, with a modding program giving modders access before release, and they themselves are making a mod that will ship with the game.

Have you looked at the code? Your statement is not true. In the previous Dev, .dll mods were possible. Since then, they switched the game code people receive (that was readable) to human unreadable assembly code.

That change made it impossible to make gameplay mods. If someone is interested in making superficial mods, maybe the tool they provide will do it. If someone wants to work on the many gameplay issues with this game, they will not be able to. If someone wants to add some new element to this game, they will not be able to. In the past, this Dev was not hostile to modding. Now they are. I have zero interest in a game that can't be modded. I have even less interest in a game with hostile DRM.

AOM wrote:

FlamingKetchup wrote:

AOM wrote:
they've decided to make the game basically un-moddable, which will turn even more people off and guarantee that modders can't provide solutions while they scramble to fix their broken mess

They are working quite hard on ensuring the game is moddable, with a modding program giving modders access before release, and they themselves are making a mod that will ship with the game.

Have you looked at the code? Your statement is not true. In the previous Dev, .dll mods were possible. Since then, they switched the game code people receive (that was readable) to human unreadable assembly code.

That change made it impossible to make gameplay mods. If someone is interested in making superficial mods, maybe the tool they provide will do it. If someone wants to work on the many gameplay issues with this game, they will not be able to. If someone wants to add some new element to this game, they will not be able to. In the past, this Dev was not hostile to modding. Now they are. I have zero interest in a game that can't be modded. I have even less interest in a game with hostile DRM.

the final code is never human readable, it's compiled.

maybe you mean it's protected now and can't be decompiled ? 

My frustration is that I've been almost completely unable to play the beta, as identified in other threads, even though my computer meets the requirements for playing. After reinstalling and using the fix given in another thread, the game won't even start anymore. It's deeply frustrating.