Humankind - Amplitude takes on Civ

[rho21]

Amplitude (Endless Space, Endless Legend) has announced a new historical 4X. Not that I hold out great hope for deep strategy, but it can't be bad for Civ to have a direct competitor.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/08...humankind/

[T-hawk]

I like that idea of fame as a unified victory condition. It sounds like a Euro board game with "point salad" scoring, so there is precedent.

[yuris125]

Endless Legend isn't a bad game. It's a bit too quest-driven for my liking, and tactical combat becomes tedious quickly, but the core mechanics are solid imo. I'm curious to see what they can do with the Civ's genre

(ES2 isn't bad either, obviously Sirian gave it a lot of praise in this forum, and while I didn't really get into it, I do think the devs made a lot of good choices. But if we're talking about a Civ-style game, Endless Legend is a more immediate comparison)

[Alhazard]

hard pass if the combat is anything like EL. so tedious.

[antisocialmunky]

Looks cool but not that interested since their AIs are always garbage fire.

[Blake00]

Very excited to hear this news! Amplitude have reimagined Master of Orion to Endless Space, Master of Magic to Endless Legend and now they’re taking on the big one that started them all, Civilization to Humankind.

I for one welcome our new TBS overlords, and I would like to remind Amplitude that as a retro gaming youtuber and promoter I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their forums and store pages.
(Simpsons joke  )

So this of course makes me think that theres only one Micropose 90s 4x TBS great left unconquered, Sid Meiers Colonization!

I would love to see what those guys could do with that formula. The original of course is a great game and many times I found it even more addictive than some of the other greats. I recently replayed the original in HD thanks to the old Windows 3.1 version being resizable, and even to this day it is ridiculously addictive.


The Firaxis Civilization IV Colonization sequel/remake took advantage of some of Civ4s cool features like upgradable units with lots of cool skills encouraging you to look after your armies and develop them up RPG style!



Obviously Amplitude would need to twist their version into something new and different to make it their own game (and not get sued lol) and theres plenty of interesting ideas from other games that could add to the experience.

For example you could tell that the Age of Empires 3 guys at Ensemble were big Colonization fans as they were able to take Colonizations good old Home port city and turn it into a big home city with numerous upgrades and specials that could change the outcome of a Age3 RTS match (call in a second fort card, yes a please!). A TBS Colonization game with RPGish heavily upgradable & expandable home city would be a very cool and addictive thing. Obviously that leads to some interesting things when the time comes to rebel against the crown (eg do you benefit or suffer from a upgraded European home city), so maybe it could instead be your home capital in the new world that you upgrade to get cool bonuses?



The brilliant (& still active) fan made FreeCol project has also taken the original Colonization in some interesting directions too such as adding multiplayer, more colonization era nations (Russians, Swedish, Danish and Portuguese) bringing the original measly total of 4 up to 8 players, much better Indian trading, and maps of other Colonization era maps such as Australia & Africa. If you expand the era dates you could add even more colonizing nations (eg fans have been adding more to FreeCol such as Italian, Belgian, Prussian/German and Otoman).



Another area where they could totally go in a different direction is combat. Colonization had simple Civ1 style combat so why not expand that into zoomed in tactical combat mode. Amplitude certainly have plenty of experience in that area with Endless Legend. The often forgotten about Colonization style game called Conquest of the New World had a very Heroes of Might & Magic style chessboard tactical battle mode that they could take and expand into something way better!



Theres plenty of other examples and cool enhancement ideas out there from good Colonial era strategy games like Imperialism series, Anno 1404, Settlers series, and more...

Hope those guys make this dream a reality one day!

[TheMeInTeam]

I like that idea of fame as a unified victory condition.  It sounds like a Euro board game with "point salad" scoring, so there is precedent.

I certainly don't mind a unified VC, but does this address the elephant in the room regarding VCs in Civ games?  Namely, I'm guessing that having your nation eliminated is literally or functionally game over, as this would at minimum prevent further scoring.

On the other hand, it's a mechanism that could be used to end games that are effectively over (one person's accumulated points are so high that they can no longer be caught).  At minimum, I don't see it being significantly worse than what Civ's been doing, which has been a concern voiced on CFC.

I welcome competition to Civ, we'll see if this particular competitor is up to the task, if so it'll be great for 4x/TBS in general but that's a big if.

[dtay]

Thread necro - but there's now a open demo of Humankind available (until the 28th) if you've pre-ordered.

Based on 1.5 playthroughs, I'm actually pretty excited - while I suspect nothing can defeat civ4 in my heart, a lot of the twists they're putting on the classic (or at least, civ5/6) formula are I think really promising. For instance, super interested in pop as a real expendable resource (bit of a call-back to civ4 slavery and drafting, but more central to the game as a whole).

Don't think I'll play it much more as just an open demo given the AI is uhh, not good, but has anyone else taken a look?

[Mr. Cairo]

I've been playing the opendev the last few days. I like some of the mechanics, although a some of it is kinda counterintuitive. For example, it doesn't take long before population becomes more or less useful only for generating science and for building units. Food, Industry, and Money all end up coming from attached outposts and most importantly districts. I'm ~50 turns in, and most of my cities can 1-turn any building/unit/district without needing any citizens as artisans, and growth is always at its max without needing any citizens as farmers.

It does however epitomize my biggest problem with most "modern" 4x/turn-based-strategy game: unresponsiveness. When I click on something, it should happen immediately, whether it's a move, an attack, opening a new window, or changing map views. I shouldn't have to wait, but in Humankind it just takes so much time for things to happen. There's no quick-move or quick-attack like in Civ4, and while maybe they'll add that, I doubt it, since it's not present in any of their other games. Endless Space I didn't mind it as much, but in this case, just transitioning between views/windows is so slow. I click on something and have to wait, and that is just aggravating.

It's taken my a while to realize how much this bothers me, but this game is so bad for it that it made it so obvious. Playing this game, and other like it (Age of Wonders: Planetfall, Civ6 come to mind immediately), stresses me out. And not in a good way because it's a challenge or anything like that, but because it's just such a pain to actually play.

[suboptimal]

I've played around with the current opendev, mainly on the lowest AI setting for now. A lot of the mechanics are intriguing but I'm with Mr Cairo on the city builds - after a while it seems like you're just picking things for the city to do without any real thought to it and their impact on the current game state seems inconsequential (build a 1 turn improvement for 3 gold per trader when you're pulling in several hundred gold per turn). I don't mind the slowed animations though you can always put on auto-resolve if you don't want to deal with the minutiae of combat (but that's just me). The unique abilities for each civilization and accumulating multiple civilizations is a nice twist to things. Learned in my second game you can't create cities or join outposts to cities as the Mongols, for example. Unlike the Civ series there's no score to look at (other than fame) to see where you stand against your opponents. The diplo screen is the only real way to figure out where you stand against your opponents and even then you're not completely sure.

My main gripe is the UI's lack of information/explanation, though that could be that 100 turns in I started closing tutorial popups without reading them (). The city displays also take up a lot of screen real estate. Likewise the notifications aren't always fully explained. If you get a trade notification you'll be taken to the map location of the resource that was purchased but you need to go through the diplo screens for each opponent to see who made that purchase (and you can't see the trade route that results). When collecting curiosities it'll take you to the location but if you miss the reward flag (that's onscreen for literally a second or two) you won't find out what you actually got from it. Likewise, the era star and world achievement notifications don't tell you what happened and only take you to the appropriate display screen.

There's also some things that are (remain?) poorly described - when you unlock civics, for example, seems to be based on in-game events but is also random. In my first game (peaceful builder) I had way more civics points than civics. In my second (warmongering as the Mongols) I had more civics than civics points. Influence mechanics are something else - in the first game I had over 90% influence in most of a neighbor's cities but couldn't figure out what that got me (if anything). There wasn't any city/outpost flipping due to influence. Don't know if that would have been different if I went on a conquering spree or not.