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Last I checked there were still some complaining about "forced diversity" and "who do they think they're advertising to, Black feeeeeeeeeeeemaaaaaaaaales don't play a lot of video games" comments left, for what its worth.
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Dec 12, 2020 01:58
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Yeah that's what I saw. Plus some "she has blue hair, lol sjw alert!!!" bullshit.
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Dec 12, 2020 17:04
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These are better pictures of the Globe in Stockholm.  Its kinda big.
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Dec 12, 2020 18:49
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Gort posted:Are vegetarianism and currency abolition things you can do? How would resource allocation work without currency? Some sort of computerized labour/industrial credit system?
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Dec 15, 2020 05:06
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I think the new OpenDev scenario is live? They put up a Getting Started video on YouTube and some people are discord are talking about it, but I don’t see any news from Amplitude themselves.
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Dec 15, 2020 16:13
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Yes, the scenario seems to be live. https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/1124300/announcements/detail/2897467157683864376
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Dec 15, 2020 16:48
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Looks like instead of preordering you can also link a Twitch account to you G2G account and watch 3 hours of various affiliated streams.
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Dec 15, 2020 17:06
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What a lousy system is G2G. It wouldn't even let me register, saying my email address (that i've used for 10-15 years with every other site), is invalid. Good show! Hope they don't require that to play the game later.
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Dec 15, 2020 18:42
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I had fun with the opendev. Went with Zhou and then Maryans.
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Dec 16, 2020 03:10
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Yeah I'm very much enjoying this. It's a solid combination of number crunching and fun empire building. I hope Amplitude take their time and release this in a good state with some decent mod tools, because I think they could have a good little hit on their hands that could be expanded on for awhile to come. Also it's just like really beautiful with great music. It also runs very well for me.
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Dec 16, 2020 03:38
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It didn't run well for me, but I didn't upgrade my graphics card when I bought myself a new computer (they're all sold-out or super expensive).
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Dec 16, 2020 03:44
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yegods posted:What a lousy system is G2G. It wouldn't even let me register, saying my email address (that i've used for 10-15 years with every other site), is invalid. Good show! Hope they don't require that to play the game later. Is it possible you've used it there already?
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Dec 16, 2020 10:08
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Started up a game, interface is dense but very well organized, as per usual from Amplitude. Maybe it's just familiarity with the structure of empire-building on Earth as opposed to Fantasyland or IN SPAAAAAAACE but this clicking a lot more with me from the get-go than either of the Endless titles did. Not far enough in to get a handle on everything that is involved in combat, but first impressions are that I greatly appreciate simplifying units to a standard "combat strength+modifiers" format rather than the deluge of stats, abilities and equipment bonuses you're inundated with in the Endless games. Or maybe it expands to become more needlessly complicated later, but at the very least the combat system starts out as simple and straightforward, which is already a massive improvement from Amplitude.
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Dec 17, 2020 00:32
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yegods posted:What a lousy system is G2G. It wouldn't even let me register, saying my email address (that i've used for 10-15 years with every other site), is invalid. Good show! Hope they don't require that to play the game later. Heads up, GMail had a major outage yesterday that was bouncing a ton of e-mails from gmail addresses, might be worth a new shot.
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Dec 17, 2020 02:57
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Chronojam posted:Is it possible you've used it there already? Nope, never heard of the site until this offering. It wasn't gmail. It was my email address, and it didn't send anything, it just said it was invalid.
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Dec 17, 2020 08:49
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Played one full game of this. It's shockingly easy to just max out food such that it was more optimal to put food all the way down at the bottom of citizen assignments because I was bringing in just that much from exploitation alone. Military units however will draw from the population so there's one reason to not just go ham rush building everything with population. You can use influence to claim a wonder although you have to finish building it in order to claim another wonder. Absorbing cities is honestly not worth at all unless you really want those pretty borders or you need to free up some administrators somehow. Not only do you lose a land spawn there (forcing you to build a garrison-type district) but you're also going to crash hard on stability and you can only grow one pop a turn which is more crippling then it looks considering the need to use pop for military recruitment. Multiple cities seem like the way to go since they make more pops in parallel.
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Dec 18, 2020 10:16
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Yeah my takeaway after like 1.5 games is that the systems are good, the numbers are bad. Lotta balance and pace changes needed, because right now you just break the systems so quickly as you snowball every interesting choice into irrelevance.
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Dec 18, 2020 15:25
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I think the game is good, but also kind of boring. The good is that I like the information. I can find almost everything I need relatively easily. This would probably change as I got better at the game and needed more exact information, but for the state the game is in and how long I've played it, I'd say that the UI is good. I also liked how influencing other civs worked. I didn't put a lot of points into influence, so other civs were influencing me to change my culture to be closer to theirs. Similar things happened with science. When too many of my neighbors had a tech I didn't have, then I would be able to purchase that science at a low rate. Religion was a bit confusing to me, but I like the mechanic I see so far where civs can compete to control a religion and only the leader can assign the tenets. So pretty good mechanics. I'm happy with them. Changing civilizations during the game is bad. Being able to change your advantage makes every game the same. Instead of having to play the game in some sly way to fit my advantage, I can now just adjust to whatever is happening in the game. The result is that you can go with the flow so well that every game will play out similar to the last. I found choosing my opening culture to be mostly irrelevant because it required no commitment. Because of the civilization changing, I think the game will hit a ceiling pretty quickly with me. I'll probably play the game every once in a while because it's a good game, but I'm not going to get excited about exploiting certain aspects of the mechanics or getting to learn the game really well because the best way to win the game is just play boring. The Human Crouton fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 18:32
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I never knew they finally released the full version of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHe39twaj8c drat it's good.
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Dec 19, 2020 01:24
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I put it on normal difficulty and was, on the whole, underwhelmed. I seemed to blast off in power incredibly fast, so that I spent most of the game just clicking away turns or building stuff and random because it didn't seem to matter. Researched all the techs long before the scenario ended. AI seemed a bit confused and passive. Got invaded early by the brown guys to my south. They sent four scouts into my lands. I had an army of like 3 warriors 2 archers. Chased their scouts around for a bit and killed them. Peace negotiations resulted in my being able to make them my vassal. Never heard a peep from them from the entire rest of the game, but by the end they were feeding 2000+ gold a turn into my treasury. LOL Alternately, I launched an invasion of one of the other states on my home continent for resources and occupied the whole thing but only had enough warscore to take two provinces. I dunno. Split the 'New World' with the purple country, although I was pretty passive about it and they got 2/3rds of it. Pleased they expanded well. They also had like 20+ units running around my undefended colonies but were peaceful and happy. A few turns before the end the black country started demanding one of my New World provinces they were no where near. I told them to buzz off, so that maybe there would have been a war? Didn't matter, I had so much gold I could purchase new colonial provinces to full productivity in a single turn and buy armies instantly. Speaking of armies, I couldn't figure out how to load land units like settlers onto boats. The caravel said it could transport units, but if I moved them together they only moved at the slow 3 per turn rate, not the full caravel speed. Game was lousy about communicating some stuff, like what 'goodie huts' did when you popped them, or why I go an era star. It just pops up saying it happened with no info on what or why. I have to agree with the sense that there are lots of things that make the game feel... 'generic'? The whole AI EMPIRE (2) thing is _awful_. I guess they should be named after the leader? Like LUCY'S EMPIRE or something? The diplomacy avatars are pretty goofy and seems like there are some bugs. I demanded the vassalization of the empire I mentioned earlier and on that surrender the enemy AI made threats and I cowered? If you can play against your own AI avatars I'll definitely end up making some historic figures to play against. I'd rather play against 'Napoleon of the Manchu' or 'Julius Caesar of America' then 'Larry', 'Vlad', and 'Betty-Sue of the Babylonians'. Ugh. I know the changing cultures over time idea is central to the game, but it does feel like it just blurs you and your opponents into a smear of sameiness. It also just feels weird and a bit disorienting to have my neighbors be Hittites then Romans then Japanese then French. The city building art makes everything feel samey. You'll have these beautiful deserts and different looking landscapes but the instant you build on them they all turn into very similar looking green farmlands. Absolutely no idea what's going on with civics. Mousing over the sliders doesn't say what I'm sliding towards and the effects seemed unimportant compared to how much power my cities turned out naturally. Religion technically existed in the game. I'd like to see the zoomed out map shade by color and a mini-map. I felt like I missed something on the city construction tutorial. City building felt like a bit of a black box. It seemed like my infrastructure(?) projects made unimproved rivers so good that if I wanted to put a farming district on them the tooltip said that would _decrease_ the amount of food produced?! I just mostly threw down random crap and was producing so much it didn't seem important exactly what I built. I feel like if I focused in on something I probably could have smashed the balance out of all wack, but it wasn't even needed. Honestly the impression I came away with from the end, thinking about Civilization is that Humankind has tons of choices, but none of them seem to matter much, it's just a big storm of numbers. Civ 6 the choices you're making seem to be a lot more permanent and important. I don't regret buying it. Seems like there's a lot of potential here, but it also feels like it has a long way to go.
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Dec 21, 2020 01:48
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Fintilgin posted:Long post I didn't even get to the last era. Is there a "new world" mechanic? I agree with pretty much everything you said here. Some of your criticisms can eventually be fixed because they are math and AI based, but some of the others will persist no matter how the formulas change. The changing of civilizations sucks hard, and unfortunately the game is designed around it. I found the entire experience to be nebulous and unmemorable. Like you, I identified opponents by color, but never really found them to have any form. I just knew that my color should be more prominent than any other color. I couldn't even learn the other color's abilities because those abilities would just loving change. I think this game maxes out at a C grade.
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Dec 21, 2020 05:03
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I think numbers are the most boring thing. Strategy games live and die by meaningful decisions, numbers are for math nerds.
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Dec 21, 2020 05:17
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The Human Crouton posted:I didn't even get to the last era. Is there a "new world" mechanic? Well, there was a continent that was empty when I got there. There are things that I really like, for what it's worth. Attaching territories is cool, I had 5 cities, most of which had 2-3 territories attached, and man they were putting out numbers. My star city had ~2000 production and with overflow was building half a dozen infrastructure projects a turn. Again, it made the choices irrelevent. Each project did interesting bonus things, where if the numbers were balanced you might have to make hard choices.... but I just built the whole dozen in 2 turns, so..... LOL. Number inflation feels a bit... JRPG, where you start off being excited to add +4 industry and then your city takes off and you're dealing with numbers in the thousands. Was playing on 'serious' difficulty. Wiped out the purple country on my home continent (I mean 'egypt') shortly after they founded their first city and green and brown wanted to ally with me later, so our continent was just peaceful. I should do another run and this time try to conquer the whole landmass. The warscore/crisis system seems to have a lot of potential. I really really appreciate how quickly the game moves and how quick the turns are. Hoping it gets pulled together and a big balancing pass done. Sometimes it feels like they just threw every single system they could think of at the game (civics feel tacked on), but a bunch of the systems have a lot of promise too. We'll see. EDIT: It ain't gonna be a civ killer tho EDIT: Honestly, I'm curious how moddable it would be. If you just made all (or many) of the fun interesting cultures availiable right from the first age and then it only allowed 'transcend' it might be interesting. Some of the cultures seem mega unbalanced though. Like Korea gives you +4 sci per coastal tile, which means harbors are sucking in tons of science. I saw another culture where their special power was -20% outpost cost  
Fintilgin fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Dec 21, 2020 |
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Dec 21, 2020 05:30
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I had a run at the beta as well. Have to agree with some of the mentioned points. The whole switching between civilizations made it all feel a bit identity-less and the ai was no threat at all. I played on the normal difficulty level and at no point did the ai ever attack me, despite me having 0 army and having very rich cities. The civics also annoyed me, somewhere during the game i got a popup to get a religion civic where the choices were something like atheism and separation of church and state. I picked the non-atheism one cause my religion was doing good and without warning i still lost my religion. Feels like it should give at least some sort of warning on the choice screen for that. Every civic appears to either do absolutely nothing but move sliders, give tiny resource bonuses or have an unmarked game changing effect. Tech wise, playing zhou, i maxed out the tech way before i could even change era's, which left me waiting for another star to pop so i could move on. I also kept getting constant popups about my city no longer growing/starving despite getting a new pop every few turns. Another thing that really annoyed me is that when you manually move a scout on auto explore it doesn't turn off auto explore. I saw a nice place to settle, send my scout there for 4 turns of travel and when i checked in later he had auto explored in another direction.
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Dec 21, 2020 10:11
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It’s kind of hard to evaluate how I feel about stuff like culture switching when the numbers are so wildly off. If I was scraping by and a new era let me change to someone with a strong new quarter or ability that let me shore up the part of my economy that was doing poorly it’d probably be a lot more satisfying. I agree though that people (not in this thread) are wildly underestimating how important prominent leaders are to Civ’s popularity. Though if they can get balance pulled together I still think this will be a very successful game.
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Dec 21, 2020 14:14
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One trick I found out during war is that razing administrative centers and city plazas will allow you to bypass the war score limitations on grabbing territory by turning those territories into unowned ones that you can plop an outpost immediately on the turn after razing. Gotta pay some influence costs but really at least it does something other than be a useless wonder claiming bank towards the end of the scenario. You can also raze your own admin centers too to turn territory back into unclaimed territory that can be turned into a city territory. Also razing your own districts doesn't cause any stability hits at the moment too so if you've built a district on top of a resource you can raze it and go on your merry way. Best done with a full stack of units though since the amount of turns spent razing is inversely proportional to the amount of units in the stack. I tried out a city spam playthrough and it seems like it only works best once you have the hamlet district researched. With hamlets you turbocharge FIGS exploitation for returns better than infrastructure which can be used for building more hamlets, maker districts, or units with some infrastructure building if necessary. Hamlets also work super well with new cities because the initial cost of districts will be low enough that you can probably outright gold rush a few to jumpstart the new city better than building infrastructure. One cheeky way of using the fort districts ime is to build one on the border and then spawn a full stack of units right on top. as long as you don't lose the fort you'll have a army spawner that can reinforce battles and bring up reserves faster than moving units across the continent. Gunner-type units are pretty powerful when facing non-peer units. They take a measly 10 HP damage while hitting the enemies for 50+ on retaliation. With high ground the enemy unit is the heavy damage threshold and can be killed with a stiff breeze. Scouts upgrade into knights and presumably the classical era horsemen so keep them around for that reason.
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Dec 21, 2020 23:00
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The AI has been weird for me even playing on the highest difficulty at times. Regardless of difficulty they've sometimes been huge threats and somewhat competent, advancing in age ahead of me and taking cultures before me and others they just utterly poo poo the bed and end up scared of me, even if I'm experimenting with different builds and weaker cultures on the hardest difficulty. Buggy stuff is also an issue and I wish there was a way to put harder limits on knocking empires out of the game. Adaptability is good to me in 4X games so I dont see culture switching as an issue as much as balance and other core mechanics needing work; so far some culture picks are clearly better and more impactful than others in certain ways and thats reflective of how the core systems play such as Egyptian's huge production boon being easily broken, or Olmecs an easy way to never worry about loosing religious dominance and reap the benefits of unlocking more tenets. I think there's also some obvious synergies that make some cultures lead naturally into each other, while others seem more suitable to being based on what your current build or decisions have been so far, like choosing the Axumites because you've made lots of farmers quarters already versus the Maya because you already have makers quarters to work with. As much as I don't mind the lack of identity being a thing in the game, I recognize its significance and appeal to Civs success. Personally I like the idea of an adaptive naming system for the various empires that draws on its most recent cultures in some way. The Franco-Maya Kingdoms is a more fun thing to engage with in the context of this game than "Empire (3) Franks" even if you don't have a more iconic personality to engage with like Charlemange or Joan of Arc. I think the avatar system is probably a recognition of the need to have a face to engage with regardless.
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Dec 21, 2020 23:45
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I think a lot of the things they've done here are really cool, and it's really nice to see some new ideas in a very stale genre. I give them the benefit of the doubt that they will figure out balance and AI issues. I think my biggest concern is the game seems kind of boring. There's something that is just kind of unsatisfying and bland about everything. It's also really hard to figure out what the hell the different districts and infrastructures actually do. There are a lot of numbers floating around and I don't know what most of them mean.
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Dec 22, 2020 00:24
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I'm kind of souring on the population = military mechanic because it basically kills wars in the Ancient era due to how incredibly slow population growth is. It also exacerbates a lot of problems in the game too. Cavalry's high combat strength and mobility means that not only is it the best at field battles, it's also the best garrison unit and emergency draft unit up until the Early Modern era. Because population is so precious, there is no point to an infantry unit that's going to eat poo poo and doesn't even stop a horseman from shanking the ranged unit it's nominally screening. They're decent if emblematic or if you have literally no other choice, but if you have enough horses and iron then open palm slam the knight/elephant button as much as possible because cavalry does everything that melee does but better. Even city sieging can be done with cavalry because you can just wait to spawn ranged units and if the enemy tries to sally they're now fighting outside the walls where your objective is. Ranged and gunner units have a niche in that they can perform retaliation-free attacks behind city walls and will upgrade into very good gunpowder units when you get into the Early Modern era but both types of melee units underperform for their population cost and in practice are a better levy i.e. better than nothing except for the part where melee units cost population that could instead be used for more ranged units/cavalry. Early modern is kind of an exception since melee upgrades to halberdiers but knights remain knights. It's also an era where not having saltpeter means you're going to flat out lose every war because arquebusiers and musketeers (the latter being the most egerious) are going to be double dipping damage with ranged attacks and retaliation. Ditto if there's mortars involved.
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Dec 22, 2020 23:14
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It's hard to replicate cavalry in the game. It's hard to train horse men, and it's hard to breed lots of good warhorses. It takes time, and an asston of money, so you can't just have cavalry forces substituting every part. Also IRL they don't garrison well because the maintenance of horses takes focus away from garrison activities, and thus regular infantry was better at garrison duties. None of these matter in games, so whatevs, cavalry reigns supreme. It was never actually a decision "hmm infantry or cavalry" in history.
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Dec 22, 2020 23:23
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I've been doing some thinking and Ive come to the conclusion that Fame, while an interesting idea that should be able to solve the issue of typical 4X gameplay aiming for a distinct wincon from turn 1 and optimizing from there, is implemented in a way that produces samey generalist gameplay from each era to the next. Right now if you want to hit the stars needed for advancing an era, you might as well often do all the easy tiers of each star type producing a generalist approach. If you want to stay in an era and farm fame you often just want to do a generalist catch all approach anyway. I think the possible way to correct this, as half baked as my ideas usually are, is to increase the incentive for specializing and strengthen the opportunity cost for generalizing too much. Perhaps increasing the scaling fame value for multiple era stars of the same type, a cap on total stars you can collect in an era thats less than all the combined stars of each type, and perhaps slightly increasing the era stars needed to advance an era by at least one or two. This *might* shift gameplay so that there's more incentive to specialize your empire in a given era to get your main stars, supplemented with a perhaps deeper dip into one or two other star types but not leaving the optimal thing to just farm all the stars possible. So if you're a Science culture in the medieval era its more better to try and aim for three stars in science as well as maybe expansionst and food, rather than just three of everything or dipping into one each of the stars to just skip to the next era, but leaving the other open as possible but just will leave you behind in fame.
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Dec 26, 2020 19:55
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Rimusutera posted:I've been doing some thinking and Ive come to the conclusion that Fame, while an interesting idea that should be able to solve the issue of typical 4X gameplay aiming for a distinct wincon from turn 1 and optimizing from there, is implemented in a way that produces samey generalist gameplay from each era to the next. Sounds reasonable
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Dec 28, 2020 03:57
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This sounds great! https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/humankind-modding-tools-will-release-after-launch quote:..."We’ve been thinking about mod support virtually since the beginning of the project, and put greater emphasis on providing our community with powerful but accessible tools," they say. "Instead of editing game data files by hand, modders will have access to a set of Unity tools based on the tools our own team uses to add content to the game."
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Feb 20, 2021 01:34
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They posted a video about combat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9zVjQ9rk3c Me like.
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Mar 1, 2021 19:31
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How's the game shaping up, for those that are playing it?
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Mar 15, 2021 17:10
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Gort posted:How's the game shaping up, for those that are playing it? Unless there's some VIP-only testing going on under NDA I don't know that anyone not at Amplitude has played it since...December? On that map you could see some fun and interesting systems, but imo they were all pretty hard to actually enjoy because everything that had a number attached to it was crazy imbalanced all over the place. And not in fun ways.
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Mar 16, 2021 00:40
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Not surprising with how little we’ve heard recently. At this point though I’m not even mad when games are delayed, hopefully it’s enough to give them sufficient time. https://twitter.com/humankindgame/status/1375087475815813123
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Mar 25, 2021 15:12
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I am looking forward to this game but I think it was obvious to everyone they couldn't make the initial deadline. I hope the devs are somewhat spared for the crunch cycles that plague video games and that they can take the time to deliver a product they are satisfied with, even if it requires more delays down the line.
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Mar 25, 2021 15:17
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Delays are generally not a good sign - Cyberpunk got delayed a bunch and it turned out it simply wasn't delayed enough
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Mar 25, 2021 15:53
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 13:05 |
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a delay could mean a lot of things. they do have working demos which cyberpunk never had. i think most 4x games would usually benefit from extra time since a lot of it is probably tweaking and balance rather than “gravity doesnt always work right”
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Mar 25, 2021 15:56
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