|
Huh. That's actually the first time I've heard somebody even allude to Humankind having any good features. I don't really think it was any specific repulsion about great person narratives - people love EU4, a game that doesn't even really feature people in any meaningful sense - but that it seems to have just been exceptionally poorly executed. The dominant thing I heard from around release was that it was an amplitude game that didn't use any of amplitude's strengths but used all of their weaknesses. Just a generally incompetent, amateurish 4x.
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2024 11:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 15:56 |
|
|
EU4 is all about people whether it's necessary or not. Every monarch has a name, but also every general, advisor and immortal envoys like diplomats and traders. You may say they don't have agency, you may not even read the names, but EU4 and Paradox in general lean into the individual-centric perception of hisotry a lot. If they can shove an individual into the mechanics they do it. If you look at Metacritic Humankind has a 77 score and a wide range of opinions, from 60/100 to 100/100. Maybe it had launch issues but at the moment it's a very polished and competently made 4X with a decent AI. Again, I'm not saying you should play it but the reasons for its repulsiveness are interesting. It's very conventional on a surface level and very alien to the genre on a deeper philosophical level, which is not what you see very often.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2024 13:34
|
|
|
It's entirely the culture switching. It muddies who you play as, as well as who you play against. Like the ai players are impossible to tell who is who, their clothing switches and they never had a personality so it's lucky if I can remember what color they are. Meanwhile for me I'm never playing a game as any specific faction, just the most powerful bonus I could grab. Maybe poo poo is more balanced now but I remember in every tier there just was a correct choice and everyone else, and it was easy to beeline to the right one like the guys that let you build the overpowered aqueducts and stuff. Also for trying to have environmental themes it was weird that basically there was no reason to not built Mega City One and crush the entire map under the weight of your districts.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2024 17:48
|
|
|
If I had to pin why I haven't played more Humankind despite actually liking the game it's the culture switching. All the cultures just end up feeling the same and you pick one that gives you whatever bonus feels appropriate, there is no real attachment narratively to choosing one because you're just gonna have to pick a new one anyways.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2024 18:00
|
|
|
Picking a mechanically sub-optimal culture for the desired aesthetics is a fulfilling play-act at nationalism. Remaining and prestiging that culture models the gerontocracy and stagnation of culture that refuses to evolve perfectly actually. Humankind is genius and that's why I'm thinking about reinstalling Endless Space 2 to play Horatio again.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2024 18:17
|
|
|
The realism is off the charts
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2024 18:27
|
|
|
Eimi posted:It's entirely the culture switching. It muddies who you play as, as well as who you play against. Naturally. I spoke about lack of individuals because it's not as obvious as culture switching though it does similar damage of making sure you have nothing to remember from a game. And I think culture switch idea could be cool. Paradox player love thier Ulm into Prussia into Roman Empire games. But 5 cultures and start as nobody means it's all a blur. There's no game of Humankind thar was played more than 3 days ago and player can name all their cultures. In that regard it's worse than Stellaris.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2024 19:02
|
|
|
I would describe it as highly resistant to roleplaying.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2024 20:29
|
|
|
The culture switching is an interesting mechanic that I appreciate they tried. I'm not sure if there's an implementation that works, or at least works better, but it felt like it detracted from the replayability in single player and not added to it. I think I'm multiplayer it would be a much stronger feature but I don't play multiplayer 4X much except for Stellaris. Also I second the call for Endless Legend 2.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2024 04:54
|
|
|
It's a fascinating one, for sure. I remember really enjoying the game early on, and then growing to really dislike it, and I'm not totally sure why. Meanwhile, Civ 6 and ES2, for all their many faults, are games I keep returning to. That point about de-personalisation is a good one. You're a colour, not a leader or even a nation. There's a general feeling of vague fogginess. You can't ever zoom all the way out and see the world; the civs consist of a leader whose name you'll never remember; the city states are grey blurs on your borders that come and go; the battles occur in a greyed-out version of the main map. Even all the unit and building effects get listed in Amplitude's terrible house style of "+1 to unit on unit (movement)" or whatever. And the voiceover guy keeps reminding you of how pointless everything is... It is a really un-lovable game. Clarste posted:I would describe it as highly resistant to roleplaying. Or that, yes.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2024 04:58
|
|
|
i really dig some of the early era vibes you get in Humankind that you don't get in Civ 5 though. lot of great Second Century Warlord kind of poo poo with the loose territories and various horse-warrior cultures.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2024 06:01
|
|
|
In 2nd era you can see what were they going for with culture switching. If your friendly neighborhood Egyptians switch to Huns (or Mongols in the third era) you know that's something is going to happen. It's similar to Civ5 ideology divide. But, again, this happens in the early game, and you have most of the game ahead of you, and you will switch culture four more times. Games like that are the most infuriating. It looks like it was 1 design meeting away from being great, some balancing like changing the number of culture switches and/or making culture switch just one of the options (make every 1st era culture selectable in later eras with a full set of bonuses) could have completely transform it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2024 12:09
|
|
|
I was thinking that the culture switching mechanic seemed good if it was independent of the Age mechanic, so changing cultures was something you only did once or twice and was a more meaningful gameplay decision. Like how in Endless Space 2 the Empire can pick between 3 different specialties later in its storyline, but more dramatic. At any rate I definitely agree the idea has the potential to be great but needed something more...or less. More testing and cooking at least.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2024 12:51
|
|
|
Perhaps it would work better if you switched fewer times per game. I always felt like I never really got enough time as each culture before it was time to switch.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2024 16:42
|
|
|
That's a great idea. Two or three cultures per game would feel so much more meaningful.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2024 08:22
|
|
|
TBH the single thing I hate the most in many strategy games is the creepy cultural essentialism, and the way the culture switching in Humanity was framed pushed it to the level of just completely repulsive to me. I don't know that having fewer of them would have helped. Perhaps it would have been better to functionally reverse it: instead of the cultures having essential bonuses, the cultures are blank slates, and every age or so you make a choice about what path your country is going to pursue and that makes the modifiers. This would make it possible for you and your rivals to feel consistent and coherent across any individual playthrough, would make it less historically gross, and would make it less jarring when you make those decisions.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2024 11:28
|
|
|
I know what you mean but this would probably make the game feel even blander. Right now you're playing against some guy named Beowulf who is wearing Egyptian clothes, oh wait now it's Cathagenian clothes, oh wait now it's Frankish clothes. At least you have a general idea of what the French are good at in this game. It's kinda like a tactical game with class switching: maybe this heavily armored dude with a spear and a shield has some levels in clerical spells but at a glance, you can guess his role is a tank. A "classless" system you describe is harder to grasp, it's more like what Stellaris does, and while many people love this game no one can deny its world is filled with bland random races. Millenia, a historical 4X in development, does something similar to what you describe, but even they try to add historical names to traits, e.g. "Spartan Discipline". A proper 4X game is very complex already and making other factions have subtle differences depending on traits is just asking for people to ignore them. Amplitude hoped to have a flexibility you've described and approachability by slapping a culture name and a lot of art on every "trait" but it didn't work well enough. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Jan 8, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2024 11:42
|
|
|
TBH I think no small part of this is that I've read too much actual history and the way strategy games present history is just utterly infuriating to me to the point where I massively prefer fantasy settings because then I don't have to go "what the gently caress is wrong with you shitbags Mongolians are perfectly capable of making good art why did you give them a penalty to art." Humankind just felt like the furthest extent of it to me. And IDK I think my idea is salvageable but would need workshopping. Part of what I'm thinking about is cultural stereotypes around Germans. In the 20th and 21st century, Germans are stereotyped as efficient and martial. But I have absolutely read older works (18th and 19th century) where the common stereotypes about Germans were that they were lazy and happy. This stereotype isn't 100% dead in the current day - we still think of the silly goofy Bavarian oktoberfest - but I can definitely think of times over the last few hundred years that a culture has functionally "class switched." De Tocqueville's portrait of Americans as collaborative and collectivist feels like a fever dream today, Japan has gone from a total technological backwater to an expansionist military terror to the leader of exporting computers and cartoons, the British have gone from durable colonialists to whiny isolationists. By contrast I can't think of a single instance where Civilization's style of cultural essences made any loving sense, and that's even with the sometimes choosing a "culture" that was a specific diplomatic treaty that lasted less than 100 years. All of which is to walk back to the incredibly cold take of "man I can't wait for ES3 and EL2."
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2024 11:55
|
|
|
Tulip posted:TBH I think no small part of this is that I've read too much actual history and the way strategy games present history is just utterly infuriating to me to the point where I massively prefer fantasy settings because then I don't have to go "what the gently caress is wrong with you shitbags Mongolians are perfectly capable of making good art why did you give them a penalty to art." Humankind just felt like the furthest extent of it to me. I know what you mean. I think it's true for many people and one of the reasons Total War Warhammer is so popular is that it's very strange to see modern technology used to portray history in such a reductive way. It was OK back when having anything resembling reality on a computer screen was magic, but for quite a long time we've had image quality you can mistake for being a photograph, yet at the same time realistic army/city sizes are not there at all, and any sort of simulation still feels like a boardgame. This might not be a technology issue but rather with game design but it's another story. This might also be another reason we see more tightly focused historical games like Old World and every historical Total War game since Rome 2: it works much better when a faction is defined by a specific ruler, their decisions and maybe their immediate heir, instead of having inherently smart Greeks and inherently piratish Illyrians. And sadly it's quite obvious that Humankind would work much better as EL2. EL and ES2 are both great games and poor strategy games (I still from time to time launch ES2 beta patches hoping they did something to AI so that I have to interact with the mechanics to win on max difficulty), and, sadly, the best strategy game Amplitude ever made is relatively unimaginative game I can only recommend to someone who is already bored by a hundred other empire building games.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2024 12:11
|
|
|
Oh yeah I'm 100% on train "Total Warhammer is the best Total War because it doesn't even try to be historical." Nothing about how Total War has modeled things has ever made sense for the historical periods its portrayed (Napoleonic Style regiments for medieval armies? Centuries worth of casualties every year? No military operation is ever shorter than multiple years???), but if its demons summoned from the aether into a universe where there's no people no culture only war, sure lets go. And to pivot to other Amplitude projects - Endless Dungeon is sitting on a miserable "Mixed" on steam reviews. I am generally OK with waiting for games to be out for a while to 'settle' so to speak, has ED gotten good or is it really just worse DOTE?
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2024 12:30
|
|
|
Negativity on Endless Dungeon came not from technical problems, so it's unlikely you see much improvement unless they release some sort of enhanced edition.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2024 12:39
|
|
|
Regarding Humankind, one of Amplitude's core strengths in ES1+2 and EL was designing absolutely amazing worlds filled with crazy things. An empire made out of a guy, armor possessed by money ghosts, etc. Then from those things grew interesting game mechanics with divergent win conditions like dragons who could declare that you were at peace and win that way or roving merchants who could move their cities around. So of course it only made sense that they would produce a game with absolutely none of the things they're good at.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2024 04:25
|
|
|
Tulip posted:And to pivot to other Amplitude projects - Endless Dungeon is sitting on a miserable "Mixed" on steam reviews. I am generally OK with waiting for games to be out for a while to 'settle' so to speak, has ED gotten good or is it really just worse DOTE? It's a pretty big disappointment to me and I'm not sure how they can fix it short of a huge overhaul of core systems. Most of your meaningful decisions are made before and when you start a run - which heroes and passive buff modules for them you pick - and the decisions you make in-run are a lot less important. Most of the guns you find are sidegrades to upgraded default guns, there's very very few pieces of equipment that are actually exciting, most of the turret types are elemental palette swaps or there are clear winners that are taken 100% of the time, dust/door management has been minimized as a mechanic heavily). The removal of melee is understandable from a twin stick shooter standpoint but it also homogenizes the cast heavily, since you've got small guns and big guns and that's it. It's very different from DotE, which forced you to juggle resources and constantly make decisions on the fly that had huge ramifications for the success of your run and the items you found and research you were offered could completely pivot your gameplan in a way that kept the game both interesting and challenging.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2024 10:57
|
|
|
Spanish Matlock posted:Then from those things grew interesting game mechanics with divergent win conditions like dragons who could declare that you were at peace and win that way or roving merchants who could move their cities around. So of course it only made sense that they would produce a game with absolutely none of the things they're good at. It is absolutely possible to do imaginative and varied historical games. With abstracted mechanics they could do all of this and more using historical cultures, they just chose not to. Look at Old World - compared to Humankind it's a game very limited in scope. It's just about Mediterranean Antiquity, and it manages to allow for very unique playstyles and very customizeable factions. It even does some of the Humankind-style culture-switching by tying it to a ruler and allowing for massive changes in playstyle depending on a current ruler. E.g. unless you have a ruler with Diplomat specific personality you basically can't initiate an alliance, the Commander can hurry the production of units (hurrying production is not available in general), Scholars can reliably get techs they want (normally you're given the limited choice out of available technologies). Like look at a technology tree. There's nothing historical about copying a mechanic from Civilization 1, it makes no more sense than what they did in EL/ES2, but they did it for some reason. Let's not pretend the historical setting is to blame.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2024 11:21
|
|
|
Dungeon of the Endless is significantly better than Endless Dungeon and that's quite sad. Amplitude are going backwards.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2024 12:42
|
|
|
ilitarist posted:It is absolutely possible to do imaginative and varied historical games. With abstracted mechanics they could do all of this and more using historical cultures, they just chose not to. Look at Old World - compared to Humankind it's a game very limited in scope. It's just about Mediterranean Antiquity, and it manages to allow for very unique playstyles and very customizeable factions. It even does some of the Humankind-style culture-switching by tying it to a ruler and allowing for massive changes in playstyle depending on a current ruler. E.g. unless you have a ruler with Diplomat specific personality you basically can't initiate an alliance, the Commander can hurry the production of units (hurrying production is not available in general), Scholars can reliably get techs they want (normally you're given the limited choice out of available technologies). Is it to blame? I don't know, who can say. I'm just saying that if you had to choose a project that played to exactly zero of Amplitude's strengths, Humankind would be it. Neither EL or ES have groundbreaking combat systems or anything. Is it possible to make a really cool historic 4x game? Sure. Is Amplitude the studio that I would have chosen to do it? Not in a million years.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2024 05:56
|
|
|
Yeah, Amp's worldbuilding skills are sorely wasted in a real-world setting. Roleplaying as aztec space-parrot samurai or chivalrous money vampires is fun; give me more of that! Anyway I can't quite put into words why I dislike Humankind. So, I've started replaying ES2 instead. (I'm suuuure the Lumeris and Vodyani names got switched at some point in development. Vodyanoy is a slavic water spirit- let's give that name to the glowing guys! Lumeris sounds like luminous- let's give that to the fish people! Hmm. For more fascinating theories, ask me about the pantograph and preserved insect in Slay the Spire.)
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2024 11:43
|
|
|
Excuse me, this is happening? Endless Space 2 is getting updated fr? Will I be able to reinstall the game without having to shut down my OneDrive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzx8WxzlyEY
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 02:16
|
|
|
It got updated, the patch was in the finished-but-beta stages for a few months now. It mostly focuses on fixing the mostly negative reviews of the latest DLC, but has some combat balance stuff thrown in. I posted about it, no idea why I didn't post in here. In a nutshell: -Nakalim Reworked. I didn't buy/play them before so I can't say if they're better, but they're certainly unique in the way they expand. Seems functional. -DLC Academy Nerfed. poo poo must have been crazy before, but the acad is still the most major force in the game, to the point where other factions really don't matter. If one of them attacks you, you just press a button and buy an uber-fleet from the acad. poo poo's still bad. -Combat reworks for the base game: Is GREAT. Shields now hard counter energy guns, carriers slightly nerfed so the focus is on medium ships for shooting, fighters/bombers now work well, and medium support ships have a pile of cool toys to buff their flotilla (not fleet!), making building intricate specialized ships totally valid and fun. Its kinda academic as the computer players are still bad at the game and you'll win regardless, but the combat changes in particular are great fun.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 03:06
|
|
|
Serephina posted:Its kinda academic as the computer players are still bad at the game and you'll win regardless, but the combat changes in particular are great fun. Yep. I've been enjoying it, and I've been able to stave off the inevitable "this AI is dumber than a box of potatoes" feeling that always derails me in the end. I've started thinking of ES2 as a star-empire-shaped city builder; I love colonising and seeing number go up and dissecting the speedbump AI empires. I gave up on diplomacy after the patch that makes AI always reject your trade offers.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 05:42
|
|
|
Serephina posted:
I've started a max difficulty game with this patch. I even installed a mod that improves difficulty. And still it plays and feels like a normal difficulty in any other 4X. I know there's a multiplayer in this game but I can't imagine any serious percentage of players plays 5+ hour game in MP. Why bother tinkering with the mechanics when victory is so trivial you might ignore the mechanics?
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 08:47
|
|
|
I really love how much this company takes care of its games.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2024 09:22
|
|
|
I'm still waiting for them to take care of Endless Dungeon. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2024 16:44
|
|
|
KirbyKhan posted:Excuse me, this is happening? Endless Space 2 is getting updated fr? Will I be able to reinstall the game without having to shut down my OneDrive? well this is great news!
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2024 21:08
|
|
|
Wasn't there a disguised salt post on Reddit from Brad Wardell about Civ4 Fall From Heaven modder Derek Paxton moving from Stardock to Amplitude recently? Seems like a good fit to me.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2024 15:01
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 15:56 |
|
|
Oh poo poo, Kael got out of Stardock? Good for him, maybe he can get back to making good stuff instead of trying to make dogshit like Elemental War of Magic work
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2024 15:10
|
|