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Danann posted:How viable would an all elpphant run be. Considering that all the cultures that use elephants are also production powerhouses, pretty darn viable I'd say
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Sep 8, 2021 05:28
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Danann posted:How viable would an all elpphant run be. That's Carthage/Mauryans -> Khmer -> Mughal -> Siam. You'd have a decent civ in the Classical era, two of the best cultures in the game for the next two, and a decent civ for the Industrial era. Sounds like a pretty fun and powerful gimmick run.
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Sep 8, 2021 05:41
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i actually did an elephant run accidentally in one of my first runs, it works quite well 
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Sep 8, 2021 05:56
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Come to think of it, I always seem to gravitate to each era's elephant civs too. They're often really good! Incidentally my kids won't let me play Age of Empires 2 when they're around, because they find the Dying Elephant sound effect too distressing...
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Sep 8, 2021 08:12
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I'm still not entirely sure how to feel about this game. I guess right now I'd call it extremely flawed but also really compelling? There are so many little things that add up to really detract from the experience. All of the bugs, how out of tune pacing is on science and production vs. era progression (or at least out of tune from where I would prefer it to be), the crapshoot of where and how resources spawn on map generation and a lack of options and controls for map generation, etc. To the point where in the Beta I absolutely hated the game, and nearly stopped playing entirely a few hours into full release. It was the opposite experience I had from Endless Legend, where I loved EL on launch but came to hate it as more expansions and DLC came out. Still I stuck with Humankind and eventually found a groove where everything finally clicked. In the time it's been out, I've played as many games to completion as I did in the first couple of years of Civ 6's lifespan. Games go by fast even on Endless speed (where I think the pacing is better if still entirely imperfect), and turn processing going quickly does a lot to mitigate what in other 4Xs is the late game slog of hitting End Turn waiting on a victory condition to complete. The combat is good and fun once you figure out the idiosyncrasies of things like ranged units, and is a real step up from Endless Legend and a breath of fresh air from the AI's inability to handle one-unit-per-tile armies in the last couple of Civ games. Era Stars and score being the sole victory metric provide constant objectives to accomplish that keep things moving at least mentally even at times when you're not actually doing a lot. It creates a gameplay loop that, at least for now, is mostly satisfying and keeps that "One More Turn" kind of addiction going. Talking with some friends, I think my biggest complaint, and one I've seen made here and elsewhere, is the lack of character or generated narrative. 4Xs aren't really story generators in the sense that a game like Dwarf Fortress is, but narratives and characterizations still develop over the course of a game of Civ due to the way AIs have concrete personalities and flavor that react to the player accordingly. Stellaris for all of its faults really nails this, where faction identity and characterization alongside galaxy geography and events add texture to the 4X gameplay and allow the player to cast events into dramatic arcs. This may sound silly, but Humankind's mechanics and presentation do away with any artifice that it's anything but a zero-sum game, and I think that's to its detriment. The AI personas don't feel particularly different from each other. Interactions with them boil down to proximity: if they start close to you then beat them up for their resources and your early- to mid-game expansion, if they start further away then they just become gold sinks for trade. The only real development over a course of a game is if any of them are willing to try and hobble you once you inevitably pull ahead in score or a relevant resource metric, assuming you're on a map type where the AI is even capable of putting up token resistance. (The AI is bad at navies, and the game is also pretty bad at making navies worthwhile.) Otherwise the player is essentially in one bubble and the AIs in another as far as interactions and conflict go. The culture mechanic is cool, but is also the primary culprit for the game's lack of atmosphere. It doesn't feel like you're playing the Egyptians or the Romans. You're deciding to take Industry Bonus Bundle #1, and this one just happens to have pyramid graphics for its districts. The soundtrack also doesn't help. Really good music tracks are few and far between. The majority can simply be called competent. I'm not entirely sure that there's anything that can really be done for that. I'm not a game designer, but it seems like Humankind's core conceits and mechanics just don't support that kind of immersion or narrative gameplay. It's not that kind of game, and I don't think Amplitude has ambitions for it to be that kind of game given what's on display here. I can envision Humankind becoming tuned enough through patches that it can become the ideal version of itself, what's there already is a good enough base and like I said I've definitely been playing a lot of it. But I don't see this game ever becoming my ideal 4X, I guess. There's also some real weirdness going on in how certain cultures are presented or what's been picked for their emblematic roster. Modern Turkey, extremely famous and well-respected for its unique public schools and Stealthy Operative Missile (original concept, do not steal). Japan gets robotics labs and art of a robot serving up ramen like somebody read too much cyberpunk the night before turning in the culture concept. There are no Austrians, but Austro-Hungarians which seems really ironic as a culture pick given its realities as a political body trying to paper over an otherwise unstable and failing multicultural society in an era of ethnic nationalism. Their emblematic district provides stability because that makes sense, and their emblematic unit is an agent from an intelligence agency that wasn't special and that doesn't seem particularly defining if you're trying to present cliffsnotes Austria-Hungary to an audience. The Aztec emblematic district is a sacrificial altar. The Soviets get an arms factory that produces a gun resource which reduces stability. Sweden is a contemporary culture with research institutes and stealth ships. There's a gap between culture representations where it seems like somebody actually opened a book, did some reading, and tried to be respectful, and others where it's more like the stereotypes and biases of a modern French person being put into the game or where just whatever was used after a basic Google search. Given some of the picks and corresponding player icons, I also can't help but get a whiff of trying to appeal to the kinds of lowlife nationalists that infest the fan forums of the strategy genre. To be fair, I may just be nitpicking a bit and also too online. But it also seems like another casualty of the culture system. The cultures don't need to be represented with any flavor or accuracy, they just need to fit the mold of what bonus bundle types are appropriate mechanically for that point in the game.
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Sep 8, 2021 18:05
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Danann posted:How viable would an all elephant run be. If you went all in on aggression and managed to clean everybody up by the early industrial I'd wager it'd be pretty powerful. Most of the elephant civs are also the higher tier production civs like Khmer.
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Sep 8, 2021 18:31
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Has anyone played multiplayer yet? I keep getting a "non-matching version" error. My friend is on Gamepass and I'm on Steam. My friend's not able to update the game on Gamepass, the update button simply doesn't respond.
Chamale fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 22:31
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Chamale posted:Has anyone played multiplayer yet? I keep getting a "non-matching version" error. My friend is on Gamepass and I'm on Steam. My friend's not able to update the game on Gamepass, the update button simply doesn't respond. Its really unstable and buggy
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Sep 9, 2021 00:33
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Captain Gordon posted:Its really unstable and buggy amplitude mp.txt
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Sep 9, 2021 00:36
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i played 3 games on launch... weekend? they all went fine, we had a couple people hang on initial loading screen and that's just kill game and retry, only takes a minute, and i think a total of 2 desyncs, which is just load game and resume playing. so, it's perfectly playable you might lose a few minutes every several hours in my experience we kinda stopped because of other issues tho, the game definitely needs a little bit of polish here and there. still was already a lot of fun tho
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Sep 9, 2021 00:42
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Kor posted:There's also some real weirdness going on in how certain cultures are presented or what's been picked for their emblematic roster. Glad someone else finds cyberpunk android paradise Japan weird. At least Germany's unique unit isn't some Wehrb-bait super tank like in older Civ games. Now for the record, there was a lot more going on with Austria-Hungary than just a slip-and-slide towards 1918 and I'm happy there's some representation of multinational cultures in the game, but yeah it is a bit of an odd depiction. I'd blame that in part on the barebones numbers-go-up nature of the influence system (reminds me of culture in Civ pre-Ed Beach) making it difficult to do much interesting with aesthete cultures. Speaking of, I'm also starting to think the archetypes really hurt the whole culture system. Flavor issues aside, entire categories of cultures end up suffering because their bonus bundles aren't based on whichever yield is king. And yeah, the contemporary era in general is kind of a mess.
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Sep 9, 2021 03:02
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Dayton Sports Bar posted:And yeah, the contemporary era in general is kind of a mess. I almost feel like Contemporary may have been designed as two separate eras originally, merged into one at a pretty late stage of development.
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Sep 9, 2021 03:25
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I find industrial and contemporary squished as gently caress yeah.
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Sep 9, 2021 04:32
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Kor posted:There's also some real weirdness going on in how certain cultures are presented or what's been picked for their emblematic roster. Modern Turkey, extremely famous and well-respected for its unique public schools and Stealthy Operative Missile (original concept, do not steal). Japan gets robotics labs and art of a robot serving up ramen like somebody read too much cyberpunk the night before turning in the culture concept. There are no Austrians, but Austro-Hungarians which seems really ironic as a culture pick given its realities as a political body trying to paper over an otherwise unstable and failing multicultural society in an era of ethnic nationalism. Their emblematic district provides stability because that makes sense, and their emblematic unit is an agent from an intelligence agency that wasn't special and that doesn't seem particularly defining if you're trying to present cliffsnotes Austria-Hungary to an audience. The Aztec emblematic district is a sacrificial altar. The Soviets get an arms factory that produces a gun resource which reduces stability. Sweden is a contemporary culture with research institutes and stealth ships. There's a gap between culture representations where it seems like somebody actually opened a book, did some reading, and tried to be respectful, and others where it's more like the stereotypes and biases of a modern French person being put into the game or where just whatever was used after a basic Google search. Given some of the picks and corresponding player icons, I also can't help but get a whiff of trying to appeal to the kinds of lowlife nationalists that infest the fan forums of the strategy genre. To be fair, I may just be nitpicking a bit and also too online. But it also seems like another casualty of the culture system. The cultures don't need to be represented with any flavor or accuracy, they just need to fit the mold of what bonus bundle types are appropriate mechanically for that point in the game. I also saw the Hitcher Hiker's Guide-rear end Marvin lookin robot in the Japan image and clicked my tongue in disapproval. Having lived a good chunk of my life in Japan I can say I would not make having fancy tech or research their whole thing. I'm not sure what would suit a 4X, since a lot of the things that seem emblematic to me about the place are more suited for a city-builder than a 4X game. Maybe they could get a train network built automatically across all of their cities? Or massive stability boosts? Bonus troop health to represent good, affordable, and accessible healthcare? But, gently caress the robots. Its all the work of that poo poo rear end """robot""" pepper that softbank was trying to wow clueless people with awhile back. The loving thing is just a standard menu system with pre-recorded audio slapped into a terrible body that just gyrates around! gently caress pepper. The American emblematic quarter, the defense agency, shouldn't provide defense bonuses to adjacent units it should just globally lower stability on all other nations or randomly change a civilizations avatar and personality. It also sorta feels like they needed X number of cultures to fit each of their archetypes and just sorta forced some square pegs into round holes when they needed to meet the quota.
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Sep 9, 2021 14:41
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Tree Bucket posted:I almost feel like Contemporary may have been designed as two separate eras originally, merged into one at a pretty late stage of development. I don't think it was that late in development, I believe number of eras and number of cultures per era (and thus overall number of cultures) was set pretty early. It seems like they just crammed a whole lot into contemporary.
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Sep 9, 2021 15:41
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I wish the final era created your own unique culture based on the route you took to get there. Or let you choose your bonuses from a list or something.
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Sep 9, 2021 15:57
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I really think Amplitude needs to undo the nerf on sacrifice population for production. Right now the difference between taking production cultures in the early and midgame compared to not doing that feels staggering, or at least that's been my experience. Surely there's a better balance to be found there.
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Sep 9, 2021 16:47
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Dumb question but how do I checky current rank/fame in relation to other civs? I have only found one civ so far, but just wanted to check how I was doing in relation.
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Sep 9, 2021 18:31
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ughhhh posted:Dumb question but how do I checky current rank/fame in relation to other civs? I have only found one civ so far, but just wanted to check how I was doing in relation. Hover over your fame icon in the top left
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Sep 9, 2021 18:34
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it is very easy to end a game in the medieval era if you go harappans -> maya -> khmer get a ton of pop early when it is at its' highest value, prioritize industry, science, money, and food in that order, and if you and the AI's all started on the same continent, you should be in a great position to instant-resolve some elephant wars on your way to global conquest. won a game on the slowest speed and whatever difficulty is after nation on turn 160
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Sep 9, 2021 20:28
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Chamale posted:Hover over your fame icon in the top left This is also a good way to see if you have time to try to get those last couple of stars before moving forward or if the other cultures are about to snag Khmer, or whatever. This is a 'no farms at all' run, and it's kind of lol. 
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Sep 9, 2021 20:36
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I watched a friend play the game and I realized there are some brutal new player traps. A lot of choices in the early game are "correct choice" or "massive setback". Public ceremonies are all loving terrible and you should never do them, it's throwing production in the garbage (with the exception of getting fame for doing the first Symposium).
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Sep 10, 2021 05:36
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Chamale posted:I watched a friend play the game and I realized there are some brutal new player traps. A lot of choices in the early game are "correct choice" or "massive setback". Public ceremonies are all loving terrible and you should never do them, it's throwing production in the garbage (with the exception of getting fame for doing the first Symposium). Yeah, watching a new player grapple with HK is agonising. Please just build one Industry district or building, please, your science districts will take less than 80 turns to complete this way, aaaghhh e: doing my best to shut up and let them just play and explore but, maybe, you might like to consider building the extractors for your resources? It's super quick and will really help, please, you have two iron and piles of papyrus----- Tree Bucket fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Sep 10, 2021 |
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Sep 10, 2021 05:53
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It makes me wonder if they're new to 4X games or if they've always played that way. This style of min-maxing isn't new, it's just that Humankind rewards it more than ever. In my first campaign, I did the typical Civ thing of maxing out food first and then focusing on production and science later. I learned pretty quickly that population hardly matters and to do anything, you need massive amounts of production. It's the same basic strategy as Civ—you focus on increasing the one yield that will turn you into an unstoppable powerhouse and then use those concentrated resources to leap forward in the mid to late game—only in Humankind you do it with production instead of food, and once the snowball starts rolling, it builds up ridiculously fast.
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Sep 10, 2021 06:04
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I put up a new game with the very idea of just running heavy production as much as possible and I didn't have enough food to defend myself from like a 3 front war. Whoops!
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Sep 10, 2021 06:27
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i haven't tried multiplayer and likely wont but i think the game is somewhat tuned for a bunch of human players doing canny stratagems on you, so you have to balance production so you can do it right back to them / defend yourself on multiple fronts. because otherwise its a bunch of AIs who are fairly easy to lock into mutually beneficial alliances and then you just simempire your way into a massive runaway snowball and finish out the tech tree before any of the endgame stuff happens
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Sep 10, 2021 06:30
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:i haven't tried multiplayer and likely wont but i think the game is somewhat tuned for a bunch of human players doing canny stratagems on you, so you have to balance production so you can do it right back to them / defend yourself on multiple fronts. because otherwise its a bunch of AIs who are fairly easy to lock into mutually beneficial alliances and then you just simempire your way into a massive runaway snowball and finish out the tech tree before any of the endgame stuff happens this hasn't been my experience with the more aggressive AI types, but it does depend on the map and where the AIs land in relation to your start
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Sep 10, 2021 07:43
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Yeah the AI just needs to be way more aggressive in general. Even when you've got aggressive AI Hun or Mongol neighbors who should be all about harrassing the gently caress out of you, they seem almost universally content sit back and trade resources while you blob up towards being unstoppable. The only time I was able to get the AI to declare on me before I'd hit the exponential power spike was when I went out of my way to refuse multiple trade/NAP offers and skirmish with their scouts to generate a bunch of grievances for the AI.
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Sep 10, 2021 18:30
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i also set the pacing to endless and turn off all victories except space race because otherwise the player is likely to win
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Sep 10, 2021 21:20
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Sydin posted:Yeah the AI just needs to be way more aggressive in general. Even when you've got aggressive AI Hun or Mongol neighbors who should be all about harrassing the gently caress out of you, they seem almost universally content sit back and trade resources while you blob up towards being unstoppable. The only time I was able to get the AI to declare on me before I'd hit the exponential power spike was when I went out of my way to refuse multiple trade/NAP offers and skirmish with their scouts to generate a bunch of grievances for the AI. in my experience, the AI will aggress you if it perceives you as being weaker than it. if i rush the ancient era too hard without getting a couple extra scouts, i'll invariably end up with some on my doorstep. i've also had games where a bunch of neutrals spawn near the huns, which they ate, and they attacked me as soon as the AI knew it had 24 units to my 23. unfortunately for them my 23 units were egyptian chariots and persian immortals lol so, the heart of the problem is that its motivation to produce enough military units relative to the player is too low. if it manages to acquire a large army without building it (lol), it can and will go apeshit on you! Fur20 fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Sep 10, 2021 |
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Sep 10, 2021 21:50
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I've just found an infuriating bug. I had a stack of four Mycenaean warrior dudes ransacking an outpost of a player I wasn't at war with, but the AI turned the outpost into a city as i was about to finish the ransack and that just automatically wiped my stack. Not teleported back outside their borders or anything, just completely deleted from the game. This is very early game so this is a massive setback for me, it's about a quarter of my pops give in one go.
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Sep 10, 2021 23:01
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a pipe smoking dog posted:I've just found an infuriating bug. I had a stack of four Mycenaean warrior dudes ransacking an outpost of a player I wasn't at war with, but the AI turned the outpost into a city as i was about to finish the ransack and that just automatically wiped my stack. I think I've heard other people having issues with this bug too, it looks like a known thing
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Sep 10, 2021 23:11
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Xarbala posted:I think I've heard other people having issues with this bug too, it looks like a known thing It's happened to me several times before as well.
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Sep 11, 2021 00:11
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Just finished a game where I focused almost exclusively on influence to help with fast expansion. Thanks to having almost every luxury resource upgraded and stealing wonders it was doable without ever having to worry about stability and I was super OP at the end. Mongol hoard is such a good unit for like half the game. Also I lost my first game unexpectedly because I thought doing the Mars colony meant you WIN the game. Win and end mean different things. PhoenixFlaccus fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Sep 11, 2021 |
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Sep 11, 2021 00:40
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PhoenixFlaccus posted:Mongol hoard is such a good unit for like half the game. They can take out a tank, easy.
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Sep 11, 2021 00:59
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Anything that can shoot THEN move is busted as hell
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Sep 11, 2021 01:15
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Tom Tucker posted:Anything that can shoot THEN move is busted as hell The move until all move points are gone is crazy. You can create a pocket of mongols and get +3 or 4 strength on most attacks.
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Sep 11, 2021 01:26
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Tree Bucket posted:Yeah, watching a new player grapple with HK is agonising. Please just build one Industry district or building, please, your science districts will take less than 80 turns to complete this way, aaaghhh Eh you don't really need industry districts, I did one game where I built no non-emblematic industry districts (the only non-emblematic districts I built were research quarters for the public schools) and still finished turn 135 or so. Every district increases the cost of further districts, luxuries go a long way, and the game is currently over pretty quickly because of the Turks (though maybe you could get a pollution win early too), so not building makers quarters isn't that inefficient. Though you should still build them.
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Sep 11, 2021 04:26
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So I'm getting into this game a bit late, are there any recommended strategies for getting better. I'm definitely seeing that the more production I have, the better I'm doing. Should I care about religion? How much should I be focused on Influence, particularly for grabbing a lot of territory early? Should I be trying to aggressively conquer my neighbors completely or just nibble away at territories?
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Sep 11, 2021 04:55
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Copper and horses are the two pre-industrial era strategics you can't get enough of because it gives you industry and food respectively. Later on there's coal, aluminum, and uranium that are super good to have because those three all have technology that gives all district types (Farmer/Maker/Market/Research) a boost to yields per each instance of the resource (i.e. 4 coal, 4 aluminum, 4 uranium will give +12 to the district yields).
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Sep 11, 2021 05:03
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