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Maybe devs wisely kept you from learning the game so that you never realize it doesn't work as a strategy game?
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Nov 2, 2022 08:31
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 01:03 |
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The real reason to research this tech is accessories for heroes giving specific bonuses. Also I might be misremembering it but I think this equipment has a slightly different bonus so if you want a specific stat it can be more useful than generic tier 3 thing?.. But yeah, both in El and ES it pays to have a generic vanilla template for troops. Strategic resources are the bottleneck in the end game, even if your vanilla troops are much weaker you can probably produce 10 times as many of them. ES2 handles this better, I think, as in EL you eventually get dust equipment that IIRC is on par with any resource-based one.
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Nov 7, 2022 09:19
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Finally properly played Endless Legend Community Patch. I played on Hard as a Drakken and it quickly become clear that I should have played on Normal instead. I don't see a lot of changes in terms of balance, just the updated UI, but the AI difference is night and day. They do expand and fight, they're active. In most 4X games nowadays you see AIs stumble after the initial expansion phase, you have to play some semi-4X games like Age of Wonders to witness proper conquerors. In EL it often meant that the game pushed me into a lazy playstyle. I can lose most of early and mid-game Legendary Deeds and be in the bottom of score list, but later AI just doesn't know what to do with their economy, the initial boost from difficulty no longer helps - and you can swarm them or even just sit there waiting for an economic/science/wonder victory. And here it was cool! By the end game only 2 empires existed apart from me, and Mykara was in the lead. I was the third by far, I've only conquered a single city from another empire, and this was because they were greedy and expanded overseas close to me. By the time I've reached Era V they've already researched 1 of the science victory techs! I've started researching alliances thinking I can steal allied victory by concentrating on Influence and forcing them into an alliance. But then as soon as I've researched it Mykara proposed an alliance themselves. And, like, the game let me win. So the AI is more vicious but still feels off. I was prepared to face a glorious obvious loss and I was robbed of the experience! I have to note that I didn't actually see more intelligent decisions from AI. Their army composition and city placement was meh. They were probably better at expansion and resource management, but maybe it was just a matter of luck - I was starved for luxuries throughout the game, only having access to 4 deposits of 3 types, and by the time my cities weren't on the verge of rebelling (even with sewers and the market) I could only expand by conquest. And after all, if the AI was just better in general they'd all survive till the endgame like they usually do, right? So it felt more like AIs were balanced to be more risky and opportunistic. It certainly makes for more interesting games. It feels to me like Humankind's AI is more like that, but it's also willing to just go win the game instead of proposing an alliance that saves the player.
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Jan 13, 2023 12:49
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ELCP is a great addition. I am usually skeptical of mods cause they're often kitchensink garbage, but this indeed feels like a patch. A lot of new useful options. I'm playing on Steam Deck with low resolution so an option to switch to a schematic view at a lower altitude is very useful. But in a way better AI exposes issues with the game. I've heard people describe Endless Legend "a great game, not sure if it's a good strategy game" and less forgiving AI makes me less willing to experiment. This research tree is great but now I'm too scared to research anything apart from old reliable techs. Fiddly parts like juggling heroes make me afraid I'm losing value by not revising hero placement - most bonuses they provide are small but are still important in the grand scheme of things. It constantly feels like I'm playing the game wrong, like it's multiplayer game and others know the meta. And I've played the game from the time of release from time to time. Humankind is a similar but much more tame game in the possibilities it presents to you, but it's certainly a much more boring experience as a whole.
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Jan 13, 2023 14:05
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Sadly this is very true. I play this game and I tell myself I'm supposed to like it. The number juggling is fun. I like historical immersive games, and here there's a lot of art and music to fill you with feels. But it's all off, you're playing a game of green hexes combining to give bigger green number, and bigger number shooters firing at smaller number tank units to get an advantage. It's board game in the worst sense of the comparison. And it deliberately calls for this comparison with opponents who kind of play the same board game with you.
ilitarist fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 17:40
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It's a real loss cause mechanically it's really good. Every culture you take really changes the playstyle. I think they've tried to solve the issue of previous games with every faction just playing their own game and thus it's all very predictable. If you play as a scientific faction then you go for scientific victory no matter what hand you were dealt, and then if you see that someone approaches economic victory you just have to do science more and/or conquer the contender. Humankind really does feel like you select a mode for a stage and your relations with the map and other players change. But it all falls apart in the actual game. You are likely only to remember your first and your last culture choices. The first defines a lot of early important things when you don't yet have a fundament to build upon, and the last will likely spend for half of the game because of how everything is balanced. It's so bizarre that Amplitude of all people drops a ball on the feels side of the game. It's not even that the fundamental idea is bad. Maybe if there were just 3 or 4 eras it would work better. Even the UI doesn't help. AFAIK there's no way to see past cultures and thus abilities of other factions, and it's easy to forget yours. Do these guys have Roman combat bonus? I dunno!
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Jan 17, 2023 15:47
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This is a general issue with 4X games. They usually have very complex internal management, but the fantasy you're playing is a geopolitical simulation. So you're supposed to be a puppetmaster, prepare for the fights against a specific enemy, predict their actions, know who's who. And Amplitude was better than most at it. I've mentioned how it's boring for you to play as a very specialized faction but it also means that everyone you meet in Endless Legend or Endless Space are real characters. Here you have good AI personas. But what is their strategy and situation? What is their build? I know who they are now but it's a very small part of it all. I know their "values" but not their policies which are much more important. They all become a blur like a randomly generated empire from Stellaris or something.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:22
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Note that the other (better) recent 4X, Old World, has a similar approach with strategy switching. And their design goal was too making the player strategy less set in stone from turn 1 to 500. But there the ruler switches while the culture remains the same. Which is more how it works in reality and it feels natural. It's not just Crusader Kings thing cause there aren't that many characters to interact with and ruler stats are more important. As in only ruler with a Diplomat trait can propose alliances, basic stuff like that.
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Jan 18, 2023 09:26
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Both Stellaris and Humankind give you millions of combinations. But you only care if they're aggressive or not and if they're stronger than you or not. Stellaris has (mostly DLC-gated) exceptions like maybe you care if someone is a mega corporation but that's still it. If I break into your house and set up a mod that turns of random species generator and instead chooses on of 10 pre-mades with random name and skin you won't notice for hundreds of hours. With Humankind I find it that you care much more about ruler personality and their geography (or rather which resources can they sell you) but the whole idea of a million combinations of cultures is moot because even the game UI doesn't care about these combinations.
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Jan 21, 2023 08:56
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I've like to know that myself. There is Enhanced Space but it has red flags like proudly stating it has a lot of new content which is not something you expect from a balancing patch. Also EL vanilla never was as bad as ES2 - AI might have it's issues but on higher difficulty level it will throw huge armies at you and will advance on peaceful victories fast enough. ES2 AI is just impotent and I'm not sure patches can do anything with it
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Apr 15, 2023 07:40
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toasterwarrior posted:I like endless space 1 and 2 but it is insanely hosed up there is some merit to your statement in that the dungeon games are the only games in the endless universe I would call wholly good and not just carried by amplitude's legitimately outstanding skill at aesthetics Very true. DotE still has a lot of amateur stuff IIRC, like the humour is hit-or-miss and there's too much of it. Like Normal and Hard difficulties are renamed as Too Easy and Easy. Also there's Team Fortress 2 crew in there for some reason. But other Endless games (and even Humankind) are technically strategy games but really more of an experience rather than a strategy game, they're unbalanced in a fun way. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Oct 20, 2023 |
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Oct 20, 2023 08:26
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Serephina posted:I swear to god ES2 has such an amazing in-depth naval combat system, and it's totally wasted with the weak computer players and aggressive obfuscation It was similar in Endless Legend: units had more stats and traits than you expect from a decent wargame as well as a WEGO system, but you never cared because in the late-game you just gave dust weapons to your dudes and outswarmed the enemy. ES2 is worse in that regard because you're probably the first person I saw making sense out of replay. Humankind combat is made very simple but it is also very clear, you can see strategic considerations like army composition and geography influencing the outcome, and AI shows some competence. The game deserves praise for being a rare 4X with tactical combat done right.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:35
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Rhjamiz posted:I just wish Humankind wasn't just... a slightly weaker Civ-like. Give me Endless Legend with Humankind's combat. I could go on about how it's good, actually - mechanically. Great visuals and sound are given for Amplitude. AI right now is very good, especially after a poor aftertaste of ES2. But it's all moot cause it doesn't grab people for one reason or another. Culture switching and deliberate anti-Great People narrative are probably more repulsive than the devs expected. Plus if you want to play a historical 4X nowadays there's Old World. Plenty of people would argue it's the best empire-building game ever, but few will do so for Humankind.
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Jan 5, 2024 10:06
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In short, it de-personalizes history. Player characters are the only named persons in the game and they're there to give some consistent face to AIs, they're not "real" historical people like the ones in Civ. There's also a narrator who is also not an in-world character, he's your buddy watching you play and wisecracking about it. Compare it to Civ more: even in the first game you had advisors pop up all the time, and there was civilopedia talking about people. Later Civ games got literal Great People like prophets and generals, quotes from historical people, and governors. And Civ is not the wildest in this regard, Paradox games and Old World are all about the actions of individuals. This looks like a very deliberate approach to me, nothing in the game is about any person, there are only other players who mirror you in not being a part of this world. The game has a unique feel because of it, but there are also few things for your mind to cling to, no names to remember, and there's no human touch in there, it's all about speaking unto nations.
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Jan 5, 2024 10:44
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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.
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Jan 5, 2024 13:34
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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.
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Jan 5, 2024 19:02
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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.
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Jan 6, 2024 12:09
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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 |
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Jan 8, 2024 11:42
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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.
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Jan 8, 2024 12:11
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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.
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Jan 8, 2024 12:39
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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.
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Jan 10, 2024 11:21
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 01:03 |
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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?
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Mar 16, 2024 08:47
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