Improving Humankind Gameplay Together

[The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales]

Since the launch of Humankind, we've seen many of you eagerly dive into the game, and have received many kind words, but we have also received a lot of constructive criticism (as we expect from a dedicated community like you.) While there is much talk about quality of life and interface, there is just as much talk about gameplay. We want to know what gameplay improvements are most important to our players, so we invite you to share the improvements you would like to see in this thread.

Let us know what you think, so that together we can make Humankind a better game!

[Freik]

1. Population
Population feels a bit to weak even with all the pop boosting buildings and farming cultures.
They don't produce nearly as much as districts or any other sources of fidsi.
Also, only 1 pop can be "produced" per turn making diacritics far more attractive as you can build more than 1 per turn.
This creates a problem where a disctrict produces more than a pop AND can be produced faster limiting play styles and roleplay opportunities.

2. Wolrd Generator
The world generator is in my opinion not giving you enough options, it is has only the bare minimum of features. The map editor should be an addition not a replacement for a good world generator with many options. I think these additions are missing:

- Seeds with only numbers are soulless, it would be much nice if character
where also allowed, they would seeds more memorable making sharing seeds and finding new interesting seeds far nicer for the community

- An option to increase the number of strategic and luxury resources and if possible also independently of each other.

- Increasing the number of strategic resources or at least the number of horse, oil and uranium.

- Extreme options, being able to make the map 100% flat or mountainous like the Himalayas, making a world of thousand rivers or desert like Mars world.

- More World types, now there around 6 which are different flavor of "how my continents do you want?" (sorry for the compression) but CIV 5 had almost 70 different world types (To be fair only around half of them are unique), from different parts of the world like: the amazons, France, Russia, japan to interesting anomalies like a donut/ring world, "east vs west" world, 4 corner world etc.
It would be nice to see some crazy/interesting world types for different playthroughs. This is in my opinion the second most import part of 4X game when it comes to replayability.

3. Pollution
Ability to disable it or a rework/rebalance, in its current form it is boring, there is no way to "fight" it and doesn't add anything to the modern era.

4. balance
Some civs are way to weak and population is useless.

But I think the game will be almost perfect if we will be able to "produce" more then 1 pop per turn and the world gen. gets some love, atleast for me.

[digitalhallucinations]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Freik:

3. Pollution
Ability to disable it or a rework/rebalance, in its current form it is boring, there is no way to "fight" it and doesn't add anything to the modern era.

You can "fight" it, by planting forests, but even with that one mechanism, it feels boring. I think a lot of this game in its current form feels like "It could be better" or more precisely "it could lead to more"

[Oaks]

Love the game so far! Three ideas I suggest:

- City stability, give us what the total is if over 100 so we don't have to crunch numbers.

- Please let us make our own AI avatars to play against.

- Consider changing the star objectives in later eras. Right now we are essentially doing the same thing per era.

[Ocean Man]

I've been enjoying the game so far but have two issues:
1. Pacing, playing a slow paced game I got to the modern era but was still researching gunpowder technology. Also, the turn limits feel too small for the pacing.

2. AI, The AI are brain-dead. 400 plus turns not a single one declared war on me. And when I did declare war they had pitiful armies. On top of this, when taking their cities I found that they had no infrastructure built at all, forcing me to build them as if they were just created.

[Big J 78 caps]

I got two things:
1. Please allow players to change the maximum amount of turns to whatever custom number they want. I've always enjoyed being in control of how long I would like my games to go and I think I would enjoy the game's combat and city management a lot more if I was given that freedom.

2. It would be cool as an added feature to allow a button during the game set up phase, what age they wish to set as the max. In other words instead of having the late game set in the contemporary era, this drop down setting would allow the user to change it to something else like the industrial era or the medieval era...etc. That way it limits the technology making it a challenging experience but also quickens research and allows end game battles to not just be set with tanks and nukes but perhaps with cannons and line infantry or machine guns and bi planes, arbiters and mortars, crossbowmen and knights, etc.

[Osnauticus]

Lots of good suggestions here. Echoing a few:

1. End game tech goes way, way too fast. I felt like eras I-IV are good; you research stuff and have a chance to build it in productive cities before you research the next one. As soon as you get to early modern (especially if you pick a research civ) you're suddenly researching a new tech every 2 turns. This was with just one city devoted to research; no other city had any research quarters.
2. Please let me turn off some notifications! Especially population increase and decrease. When cities get high pop you end up fluctuating between something like 45->44->45 every few turns and if you have 5+ cities you basically get 5 notifications a turn. Drives me crazy.
3. For surrender options, let me pick which territories I want from the map view. I hate having to crawl around selecting each enemy territory to figure out which ones I want.
4. I love that you made vassalization much more expensive, but now I have to manage a ton of enemy territories after a big war and micromanagement gets crappy. Let me turn those cities into mini vassals (independent cities you get vassal like benefits from?) or give me the option to absorb those cities into my cities at a cheaper cost, maybe like have a surrender option that is "absorb ____" that costs double war point cost and some influence?
5. Maybe make a war surrender option that forces the enemy to trade you a strategic resource (maybe for a time limit). I found most of my wars were to get that one extra gunpowder I needed for cool units (see low strategic resource density everyone's concerned about).
6. Influence is extremely scarce and useful early and totally useless later. Maybe allow you to force events on cities via influence? Like a carbon tax event that costs influence but lowers pollution on the city for X turns. Or a public bonds\infrastructure project event that could give a newer city an industry bonus for X turns at the cost of influence.

[Funges]

Im really exiting whats comming to this game, it feel not finnished yet to be honest. its incredable and it seem to has a lot of potential. maybe adding a workshop where people can mod is just always a nice thing. because everybody can get stuff to put in thier game what they want. also you can see insperation and good insight of what people like and dislike about the game. last thing i understand it may be technigly difficult ( i dont know ) but get rid of the rules. if i want to play a map on tiny with 6 people. then why not?

[Church]

I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere, but the lack of an option for no turn limits is disappointing.

[Bolesting]

Hot seat if there any chance, Im playing on nation difficulty and AI doesn't make units at all, just independent cities create units, I can finish whole game with couple of units. Also after latest patch I have FPS drop.

[Carl]

A few things:

1:
You have to go to your cities every few rounds and tell them to do the 5-6 ceremonies and this gets really annoying, I would wish that you can just go and tell a city to make the ceremonies forever so that is much more rewarding to be in the late game.

2:
Science, after you're done with the main research, there is nothing left to do... maybe something as temporary buff or something like that might help. Perhaps even that some events require you researching for a few rounds. Also, the late-game techs are way too cheap, took me like 3 rounds to get each one done.

3:
Pollution, there is no real way to get rid of it even when you're in the late game, the only thing you can do is plant trees but they also don't help really. I wish there was a research that would allow you to bind pollution and get it out of the air permanently, which could also be repeatable.

4:
Nuclear Weapons, the idea that you don't have any fallout is good and something refreshing but I think it's rather unrealistic that you can fire a thermonuclear missile at a city with zero to non-consequences for the future. Also, it happened to me quite often that I moved the cursor during the animation of the rocket being shot, and therefore the animation was offset, I'd like it that you wouldn't be able to move the screen during such events.

5:
Unit movement, it seems rather weird, that you cant use airports for unit movement and that you have them to walk all the time. I think a transport plane would be a great addition, where you could create an army with one plane and add 7 units of your choice.

6:
Resources, I would like to see a map setting where you can change the frequency of them. Same with Luxury goods.

7:
Luxury goods, their bonuses seem rather overpowered if you look at the whole game. If you buy in the late game a few of them, you get enormous buffs. Like 2k more gold per turn or a huge spike in industry. I can see that you would think it's okay because you need to find and "mine" them or trade them. But still, then it's just a little too much.

8:
Military, I once had it that I had a multi-purpose-aircraft unit with EIGHT planes and it costs me 80k gold per turn upkeep, but 8 modern battle tanks cost like 500 gold upkeep. Rather this is a bug or just greatly unbalanced.

9:
Population, please make an option where you can set a setting where a city won't grow anymore, the notice of a city growing and then decreasing every round is just annoying

10:
Turn limitation, I would really enjoy a mode where there is no limitation to the turns you can make and just an infinite game.

Overall the game made a really good first impression, but some things bothered me a lot and some even greatly reduced fun (mostly the late game). But overall the game is a very pleasant and nice experience.

[jamsrule]

Replace the starting competitors screen with a checklist rather than cycling characters, or let someone "lock" the character in place so it won't cycle. It's impossible to get to who you want to play against in a game of 10 because as you click through characters they all switch places and get replaced with each other.

[Titus Caesar Vespasianus]

An option to remove the turn cap, please. 300 turns to victory seems artificial and haphazard for a 4X strategy game.

[Titus Caesar Vespasianus]

When a pop dies, you click on the city screen, and notice the pop is still physically working on the FIMS, but this dead pop only truly disappears when you attempt to move him to another section of the FIMS UI.

[LibraZero]

Overall, my experience has been pretty great so far, having beaten the tutorial game and started two more. However, I abandoned my second game because of a rather glaring issue: Stability.

I have no idea how a city's Stability percentage is calculated, as the game merely lists Stability gains and losses without explaining how those are then plugged into the formula that calculates a city's Stability. Also, the Encyclopedia mentions that not having enough food can cause Stability problems, but doesn't clarify whether those problems start as the city begins to actually starve or if they start earlier than that. And while it makes sense for Industry, Science, and Money districts to cause Stability losses, I'm unsure as to why more food for everyone from Farmer's Quarters somehow leads to the same level of unrest as those districts.

This would've been more noticeable had some of the cultures in the game not been so immensely powerful. I stuck with the Khmer for two Ages straight because Barays were insanely powerful, and then went for the Turks in the Contemporary Age since Public Schools supercharge your Science within a few short builds. Meanwhile, some of the other Cultures are barely worth considering since their UDs are woefully underpowered compared to the ability to cut build times down by 60-80%. The Romans are a good example of this, considering that their UD provides a small amount of Influence and Stability compared to the output of most other UDs.

Religion seems a bit underdeveloped, as it just kinda ends after you hit your fourth Tenet, and then you get the Irreligious civic wiping out any and all benefits you could get from it. Your options after that are Atheism, which acts as a sort of pseudo-religion without any benefits (other than potentially wiping out other religions), and a seperation of Church and State, which not only seems to be worse (causes your religion to die off VERY quickly), but actively causes the game to glitch out whenever another Culture tries to slap you with a Religious Greivance (which is just about every turn in the mid-to-late game) by basically deleting the Crisis/War Resolution tab in the Diplomacy screen. This happened in my first game, and I was forced to switch to Atheism to fix it, which kinda defeats the purpose of making a choice like that.

Given that the other two problems are likely already on your radar, I'd say that the Stability issues are more problematic to me right now. Hopefully they (and the other issues) get solved relatively soon.

[Gorbash]

Am having a blast sofar, so thanks to the devs:)
Have started one game (resigned in classical, after finding out that going tall was NOT feasible) and am right now on second playthrough (Nation level, huge world) and having fun with Ming right now.
My advice: price for extra areas attachment should be priced lower, if its only one city, and total number of attached areas should also count somehow, not only number connected to this city

Am loving the mechanic, of being able to choose a new civ or keeping the old one, this means that you can choose what fits your environment/have to maybe adapt playstyle with whats left.
My advice: But can you PLEASE make it so, that the old civs stay in the new name? Like Ming of Aztec and Zhou and Goth etc. descent? The old history should somehow still show up, not be erased (I get that old districts and units cannot port, but the name should be no issue).

And found that going wide mindlessly like a weed on steroids is seriously op, IF you have the room. Was starved for influence, but then got the option to expand with cash (new outposts), only needed influence for city upgrade.
This leads to me making 2 or 3 stars on agri every era, with no effort.
I put a few cities on the borders (also by integration of tribe) and have a large area with only outposts in the middle...but every area has an outpost. There is NO downside to outposts, it allows you control of the resources there, gives free science/faith/influence, and you can integrate it into the closest city once the pop has grown to max 4 and the landgrab is finished.
My advice: I think people outside of cities should not be counted as full citizens for mechanics like 1 Science and 1 faith per pop, or for agri fame, but as maybe 25% or max 50%....villages are not connected properly to cities and they have no cost (that I'm aware of)