Improving the Encyclopedia Together

[The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales]

Since the launch of Humankind, we have seen a great deal of enthusiasm, but we have also seen discussions and feedback about many aspects of the game. The encyclopedia is one of these aspects that we have seen a lot of discussion about.


We want to invite you to share your thoughts about and experience with the encyclopedia in this thread! Let us know what you think is missing or could be improved. For example:

• What information would you like to see added to the encyclopedia?
  
• How easy or difficult is the encyclopedia to navigate?
  
• Did you encounter any bugs?

Please, share your feedback so that together we can improve the Humankind encyclopedia!

[Khiou]

Some quick thoughts from my first games :

• I wish I could open the Encyclopedia outside the game e.g. in my browser, so I can have it open beside the game.
  
• I would like for the Encyclopedia to remember the page I'm at, so I don't have to navigate to it again when I reopen the Encyclopedia after my turn.

[Coma Berenices]

- loads and works slowly, for a page with text too slow,
- highlights are not links which is VERY misleading

[NoName]

While the availability of an ingame encyclopedia is always helpful in 4X games, and today most of them have one, the current implementation could need some minor improvements.

Just for reference and based on my experience with several (different) 4X games, i consider the Civ IV encycolpedia the best. And maybe X4 Foundations one of the worst.

What I'm missing the most is an explanation of game concepts and in-depth informations about them. For example, if you type in "Pollution", you won't find any article about it. Also nothing about events.
And when I wanted to find out why and when I have access to certain ideological civis, I had to frequent the fandom wiki for it: https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Civic

Basically the fandom wiki already helped me alot more then the current ingame wiki because mostly I was searching about not explained concepts and prerequisites.

[The Former]

I'd like to know about certain more nuanced mechanics, as with NoName, or an improvement of the search function that would have a search for "invest" take me to the page on the mercantile culture focus.

[airgamer]

I play on a 4K tv from about 4 ft away and the encyclopedia is unreadable. Text needs to be bigger or a way to zoom.

[gPaskal]

• Keywords with links to other pages of the encyclopedia
  
• Unit upgrade tree
  
• The cost of maintaining units in gold (not only in production and population)
  
• The flight radius of aircraft and missiles
  
• Information about the possibility of obtaining an inherited trait at the tribal stage

[Rick]

Originally posted by airgamer:

I play on a 4K tv from about 4 ft away and the encyclopedia is unreadable. Text needs to be bigger or a way to zoom.

Agreed +1

[Alexspeed]

I was going to look up information on wonders... Not even that is included.
This Encyclopedia is sadly a very poor effort.

An Encyclopedia should add useful and additional information to the game. You need to have at least all the game concepts/mechanics and things in the game covered and explained.

- How does pollution work?
- How does the City Limit work?
- What was the Temple of Artemis and how does it work in the game?

This Encyclopedia wont tell you, sometimes even the popup text is more helpful then this thing.

The poor quality of this Encyclopedia is an embarrassment for the game. I was expecting something complete and helpful, like the civ games have.

Please get to work improving this, all of it needs more work. In it's current state it is pretty much worthless, you could remove it completely and no one would even miss it or loose out on any information.


Edit; wording, spelling.

[Athenaflow]

I really like the Encyclopedia, thanks for that feature ! Could we have an option to have a dark background ? I tend to put luminosity always at the lowest and that screen hurts a little to look at...

[Garak]

Originally posted by Kiou:

Some quick thoughts from my first games :

• I wish I could open the Encyclopedia outside the game e.g. in my browser, so I can have it open beside the game.
  
• I would like for the Encyclopedia to remember the page I'm at, so I don't have to navigate to it again when I reopen the Encyclopedia after my turn.

Here : https://humankind-encyclopedia.games2gether.com/
French : https://humankind-encyclopedia.games2gether.com/fr-fr

[Cythal]

Please take some inspiration from the Civ 6 Encyclopedia (layout) and CK3 (pop ups of linked keywords)

But you have done well already. Some History insights for each culture is always essential for us non history experts. Excellent read. Add some more. I think Civ 6 writes more history than you have done.

Here are some suggested improvements.

- Show some real transitions between cultures using the culture cards. ie Zhou - Ming
- Add a small map of where each culture (separately not all together) was in the world and the dates of when they were around
- Some inspiration : See the discussion about culture evolution through the eras as well as the map.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HumankindTheGame/comments/mr636b/humankind_cultures_30/

- Background colour is too white sometimes
- Navigation improvements
- Much more detailed game mechanics explanations
- The navigation links to the left and at the top to have some surrounding textures to differentiate them individually from the background and not just text (like a tab in a web browser
- Bookmarked pages if possible

[Fenris]

+1 to upgrade tree. It's really needed, it's impossible to guess what upgrades to what.

[Fletchard]

The things I looked up over the course of my first game and didn't find a good answer to:

1. What makes a city's population cap and how to increase it? Overall, not just for the worker slots for the different sectors. I never figured this out exactly even though I have a guess after sleeping on it. The article only explains how food works and how to grow your population.
   
2. When they were at their cap, my cities would grow a population, then immediately starve a population unit, over and over. Was I doing something wrong?
   
3. Liege. The unique building for the British really threw me. That term isn't used anywhere else in the game except for when I won a war and saw the option for vassalage.
   
4. I searched for "district fortification" at some point because of the way some upgrade was worded. Is that for the whole city overall or just for that hex?
   
5. Influence and control over foreign provinces. What makes the percentage go up and down specifically?
   
6. Faith is = the population that supports it. So when the stone circle and wonders say +20 faith, what does that mean? The same as having twenty new followers? Or is that the metric by which the religion spreads across the map? I admit I'm not as interested in religion but I did watch the tutorial video even if I was distracted!
   
7. Sea transit. This is worth a video, because each civ game is different and so even as someone who has played a bunch of others I didn't know how it worked here.
   
8. Rail transit. I figured it out, but tried to look it up first.
   
9. Airlifting units across the map using airports, or rather that you can't do that yet hehe.
   
10. Air combat is also worth an article and a video, though I admit I didn't try to look this up but just experimented by building units. My first game hardly had any combat. Still, I don't want to get that far in my next game and then screw it up because I didn't understand new mechanics introduced that late.

The in-game context menus are very good and answered most of my questions, plus the descriptions of the different cultures was good for whenever I made it to a new era. I just read through them and made my choice. But I feel like the encyclopedia mostly has those lists. All my searches failed me trying to use the encyclopedia in-game to learn about something in-depth.

That said, I greatly appreciate that it is accessible out-of-game so I can reference the different cultures without having to look up a third-party wiki. Major props.

[Saglac]

i like to have historical facts to relate to our own history

[Knob Jockster]

• Dark mode please my eyes
  
• Keywords, definitions of the keywords, (What is a calm city [Taj Mahal])
  what does +20 Fortification mean for me/my units etc.
  
• Upgrade tree
  
• Clickable links and able to change font size etc.