Hi,

I missed responding to the survey for the closed beta (and the link no longer seems to work), but wanted to provide my feedback, so I'm throwing it here. It's an unstructured and ad-hoc list of particular things I've noticed while playing, it's not hugely sweeping stuff nor is it specific bug-fixes, and yes, I suspect some or much of it has been mentioned before (no, I don't have time to trawl the internet for every bit of feedback provided by others).

Comments come with 30 years of playing every strategy game you can imagine (yes, including Amplitude's own ones!) starting with Dune followed by Warcraft and Civ I in the early 90's and going through the eras, games such as Command and Conquers, Empire Earth and Age of Empires, Supreme Commander and Heroes of Might and Magic, Total War games, all the Paradox games and Civ games, the indie ones that crop up all over the place, etc, etc. However, let's not beat around the bush, the game is going after the Civ market, so I will be drawing some comparisons there.

So, in no particular order:

War/AI aggression. It's constant. Grievances are permanently being demanded by the AI making friendly relations with neighbours almost impossible, they'll demand completely silly things and refute most demands in return, I might want them to stop trespassing, but they want a territory in return, etc, then you eventually and inevitably end up at war.

War support. I think the system needs rebalancing. Hunting down single stack armies is far too effective at making AI surrender quickly. Taking a city is 10 support, making a 1 unit army 'retreat' is 8. Make this scale instead. Larger army killed = more war support loss (even better, make the war support loss in scale in proportion to total army size, such as is often the case in Paradox games). Making an army retreat should cause less of a war support loss.

On this front, wars  are often over too quick more generally mid-late game. The AI run around with lots of armies (especially lots of small ones, and they're bad at grouping multiple larger stacks near each other), they quickly start losing/retreating with them and before you know it they want to give up and nothing on the map has changed hands.

Why do we HAVE to force the AI to surrender immediately once they reach 0 war support? Often I'll be about to take an important strategic asset, or simply want to wipe them off the map, it's frustrating to have to bounce between war and peace constantly, because it seems once you start in a cycle of war-peace-war with a particular nation, that never ends until they are wiped out (because they'll constantly hate you, trespass, raid, have grievances etc leading to another war). Perhaps add a system whereby empires start taking penalties to stability or something once one side reaches 0 war support, eventually making peace the only option, but giving enough of a buffer so that certain objectives can be taken. Of course, one could adopt their playstyle to ignore enemy armies and only go after strategic targets and tactically take some losses yourself to balance our war score loss, but this seems like a frustrating workaround to me. I have the forces to repel my enemy, let me do it while also taking my objectives and without many losses.

Units don't enter a city immediately after a siege (and all units involved in the siege cannot move that turn). Most of the time the city is then immediately walked back in to by the opposing side with 0 resistance. I could in theory specifically plan to place some units just outside siege range in preparation for that when the city is taken, but that gfeels like a frustrating workaround instead of a useful mechanic.

Gunner units: they seem overpowered, they're a fairly easy/early unlock for each tier in the tech tree (starting with crossbowmen) - they match equivalent melee units in strength, with the added bonus of a ranged attack when its their turn. I can't find a situation where building units such as Pikemen works out beneficial, even against a cavalry-heavy foe. I haven't unlocked and compared every unit so this is a bit of an anecdotal generalisation.

The AI can ignore closed borders constantly trespass and raid for no apparent reason (even AI without the relevant trait that allows trespassing). Even if I have just made an AI force surrender in a war, a couple of turns later they'll start trespassing somewhere and this often ramps to be having 10 or so trespass grievances before we end up in another war.

The map is gorgeous, but it needs to feel a bit more involved, more biome types, resources (which aside from the few vital strategic ones seem to be of little consequence), unique features to make you think "ooh, I want/need that land", at the moment unless I'm missing a strategic resource I have very little care where I take except 'for the sake of it'.

Hoping the final game offers different victory types over just 'fame'. Replayability will increase hugely if I can for example focus tech for a tech victory, or domination, or religion, culture etc (yes, just like Civ games). The various pre-game tweaks and options are a huge factor in Civ replayability and give a reason for trying diverse playstyles and empire choices.

There are some unusual UI choices and omissions. I didn't note these down while playing, but sometimes it was frustrating to find the info I needed. I know others have talked about this, hoping someone has managed to put down specifics.

Vassals system seems a bit... lazy. And doesn't seem to stop them wanting to declare war on you as soon as they can. I'd happily be a benevolent leader to a vassal by reducing their tribute if it meant they like me and don't immediately try and rebel. 

The tribute from vassals seems insanely high, especially early-game. I never needed to put any pops or effort in to money making at any point. Early game vassals gave me 200 gold per turn. By mid-late game vassals appear to give 400-600 gold per turn.

Tech doesn't progress at all in line with cultural progression, either speed up tech, or slow down era star gains (I recommend the latter, but I personally enjoy longer playthroughs. Hoping the final game has a multiplier option to speed up slow down the gameplay/turns like Civ games do, as this again adds replayability). In every game I'd be in medieval tech using units such as crossbowmen by the time I reached the industrial era. Turn 200 I'd generally be using arqebusiers. Civilization games have a sort of tech/culture banding system which speeds up/slows down tech progress depending on world eras, which helps balance out both general progression and competitive progression across the world. I haven't noticed something as pronounced in Humankind except granting additional era stars.

Way too much emphasis on the first 30 turns for setting up a good empire that impacts your relative power for much of the game (or until you become aggressively expansionist)

Era/Fame progression more generally is all over the place between AIs and seems wholly inconsistent game to game. I totally get that some AI will do better than others, but even in early game the difference can be from 500 fame to 2000 fame (see above banding system comments).

I really hope larger map sizes come in to play. The 'territories' system makes what initially looks like a large map actually feel really small and you end up with border friction and the need for aggressive expansion/defence from really early on.

Civics: not sure why the system is so purposely obtuse. I never got to many of them on my playthroughs and thus have no idea what to do to get to them. So I'd either have to go and look them up online post release or just play dumb. It's currently a system that hugely benefits only experienced players as they're the only ones who'll be able to think about civic planning (some of the Civic boosts seem to be pretty powerful, so it's not an inconsequential thing).

Minor fun point: it would be cool if the number of people you see 'walking around' in a city/districts relates to the pop of that city. It is weird seeing as many people walk around a pop 0 to pop 5 city as I do in a pop 20 city.

That's all that's top of my mind, there's more I'm sure if I played more and/or had been specifically trying to think of improvements as I played. I want this game to succeed, as Firaxis need a bit more competition in TB 4x genre.

I didn't mention anything around the system such as culture, religion, wonders, diplomacy more widely and the like. These systems feel pretty thin, but I don't really have any good advice for what I'd like to see as an improvement (short of saying take a leaf out of Civ's book, which is a cop out and not the right answer anyway). So I've left them as I'm sure more involved people have given thoughts on them.

As mentioned above, I've focused on specific things I've noticed that feel a bit off, rather than trying to comment about potential missing features or things I'd like added for the most part.