Consolidated Feedback from ~20 starts and 2 completed games of the Closed Beta - 4xAlchemist

Humankind Feedback - Closed Beta

Monday, 21 June, 2021

18:27

Dear Will and the Amplitude team,

As a big fan of ES1 and ES2 (from beta through becoming one of the larger content creators for the game on youtube). As a long time CIV fanatic (3/4/5/6) I've been looking forward to your take on rewriting history. I haven't played endless legend, so I'm sure some of what I love here is built on lessons learned in that game.

I started about 20 scenarios, playing 2 all the way through. I only tested the “Humankind” difficulty level.

I mostly wanted to write to highlight a few of the bugs and frustrations I encountered when playing the game in the closed beta.

However, first I wanted to offer a high five for some of the things that I think the game does exceptionally well:

Visual look and feel of the design is excellent - as expected of Amplitude. The polish is a trademark of your studio and we see it again here. The choice to ditch the minimap from Civ was an excellent one. Playing in 4k is wonderful and immersive.
The district/exploitation/population mechanics are deep, interesting, and require exceptional planning. I love them. Stability is a great mechanic to balance things together as well. I think there are some balancing issues for some cultures but I'll mention that later.
The interaction of cities, territories, and the city cap also feels like a good set of limits that realistically capture some of the challenges of managing a far flung empire in ancient times. The city limit of 2 is a master stroke and the scaling of territory attachment costs are also really good.
I find the combat deeply interesting in bigger battles once I got the hang of it. The stack size limit (not zero, not infinity) & multi-turn system are both interesting new features that work great here.

So with that out of the way, here are 25 annoyances/suggestions/bugs/frustrations that I encountered during my playthroughs. I hope they're helpful as you head into the final release.

When I finished the scenario, the form for providing feedback failed to load, so I'm writing this instead.
Faith meter per city not accessible
Force peace can come at an inopportune time
Districts vs "Districts and Exploitations" - this makes the Harappans, Egyptians, Joseon, and other Cultures with bonuses that are supposed to apply to Districts only much more powerful than intended.
Attacking into deep water doesn't work, even when you are in shallow water
Neolithic outpost creation doesn't use influence
Preview Combat sticks to the map
When building units, the city can draw from Industry Workers to fail to build the unit in the allotted turn time (particularly when building in 1 turn)
When Disembarking, if fog of war is nearby, unit will prioritize moving into fog of war instead of just getting off the boat in front of them
Would be great to have a more visual representation of what/where the current district being built is
No notification when proposing an alliance to AI
You can cause the AI to lose 4+ battles in a row if they have a stack on the coast and get surrounded.
Forests take way too long to cut down. 4 TURNS!?!?! Maybe shorter for every person in the army
Please make button to move armies before all other alerts are handled (like ES2)
Right click to dismiss popups constantly moves units that are selected. Caused repeated frustration throughout playthroughs as I was constantly trying to get rid of popups.
Not able to pass through my own fortifications with my army during peacetime with no enemies around
When AI does not choose a new Culture it always says they stay in the Ancient Era
Declare War does not inform you how much war support is needed to enable the Declare War option
When capturing a city, none of your units move into the city center and opponent can capture it again for free the next turn even if they have just 1 unit sitting outside their city.
At turn 101 I randomly received a ton of small vision areas all over the map
During large battles, AI units will get stuck in the move animation or the start of an attack animation for 10+ seconds
The Maya special building may be too strong. Joseon building should be fine as intended but as currently functioning is far too strong.
Renounce or Demand tooltip doesn't make sense. Says renunciations create Demands.
It seems like the answer with the game is to go both tall and wide at once as much as possible. Even as a major city is adding super expensive new territories, the influence costs to make new cities stays super low. Thus, the game is encouraging you to constantly make sure you're at the city cap. I wonder if the total number of territories should be linked to the costs of making a new city to make more interesting choices between TALL and WIDE.
Clarity on the levers used to tune difficulty of the AI. Also - IF POSSIBLE DIAL UP THE HUMANKIND DIFFICULTY A LITTLE BIT MORE AND/OR ADD AN EXTRA LAYER FOR MASOCHISTS LIKE ME - IT WILL KEEP US MORE ENGAGED FOR LONGER. The fact that Endless difficulty in ES2 stopped being challenging was a big reason I disengaged from the game.