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[Humankind] - Endless Hoomanz
Cantido
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Registered User regular
Uh oh, the Endless Legend / Endless Space folks are trying their hand at humans!
https://youtu.be/nGi00HqpmS0That's right folks, Amplitude Studios, who brought you Endless Space and Endless Legend, have taken a break from exploring the Dust-laden universe of the Endless to tackle a little planet called Earth.
Endless Legend combines the sensibilities of a traditional Civ game with what Amplitude have learned from years of developing the Endless series mechanics. Here are some examples of what Humankind goes from Civilization.
- The Endless series famous FDSII resources (Food, Dust/Money, Science, Industry, Influence) returns. For those unfamiliar with Influence, it is your political power quantified. It is spent on expanding your territory, establishing treaties, enacting domestic policies, and war. "Oh, you're declaring war with me? No you're not."
- Humankind uses Endless Space 2's narrative choices system and amplifies it to the point that your entire civilization is a "shapeshifter" that gains strengths based on choices made at certain points in the game.
- Similar to Endless Legend, you always have a score, and in Humankind, that score (Fame) is the strongest indicator of whether or not you are "winning," and with many ways to gain Fame, with far less "correct" answers to how to win the game than a 4X with rigid economic/military/cultural victories.
- A vast number of achievements that give you paths to more score, laying out a roadmap for what you can and should be aiming for.
More on the "shapeshifting." You don't pick a rigid civilization, you pick "Cultures," and pick several of them as time goes by. As you build Influence through different eras in history, you choose to adopt Cultures based on what you're doing and what you're trying to do. For example, if you're surrounded by rivers and like farming, you'll crave being the first one to be the Harrpians. Then in the Classical Era, lets say you want to become a murdering asshole, so you become the Goths. This continues through five eras (Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Industrial, Contemporary) until you have created an agricultural, warmongering, and moneymaking abomination.
Share your experiences here!
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My first game was kind of a disaster, to be honest. I got boxed in pretty early on and I'm not military-minded enough to try breaking out. Still, I kept up pretty well, until all the AI Empires started warring with each other.
As a result, when the game claimed the year was about 1000 CE, several AIs were already in the Industrial Era, which seems a bit early.
But I think I know how it happened. The AI fought wars, which killed a bunch of units which gave them stars, and gave them cities with attached territories, which gave them stars, and gave them cities with people living in them, which gave them stars. It seems war is the most efficient way of advancing Eras.
Anyway, all this happened on the second-to-Easiest difficulty setting.
So, lessons for attempt 2:
- Don't start completely boxed in in the frozen and barely habitable North.
- Go to war.
- Play on Easiest.
- Maybe play on Peaceful mode.
I can see some balancing issues here and there, but this is a fun game and any problems can be cleaned up with patches. I really enjoy the shifting culture stuff and the "arms race" you're in to move to the next era so you don't lose out on your choice of culture
I dunno, I also think I need to start over and think of it less like Civ. Maybe just play the actual noob tutorial so it breaks it all the way down.
Your cities can also expand at the cost of influence and an increasing amount of instability. I found out last night that I could prevent the AI from forward settling on me by ravaging their outpost, preventing it from being built and letting me plop down an outpost there instead.
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This comes from Endless Legend. In Legend, a city's outputs are listed on a top resource and worker manager, and you just click and drag worker icons on the resources you want.
For example, if all you cared about was short term population growth, you could drag all workers out of Dust (Money,) Industry, Science and Influence and place them all on Food.
Edit: Also can you move the location of one time districts like harbors? I accidentally missed a coral reef in one of my outposts and I'd really like to relocate my harbor next to it to take advantage of it.
Edit2: I like the aspect of customized avatars and modifying the behavior of the AI based on them., and unlocking different aspects by playing differently, it's a fun little incentive to try out different playstyles. I don't know if there's a way to specifically import or export the AI though. Or potentially to play against your own AI, which could be fun.
Edit: Also, not being able to buy trade goods from my vassal because they're upset at me seems a bit odd.
Edit2: I'm dumb nevermind I have access to all of their stuff regardless
I kind of like it! I don't mind how weird it is from a historical perspective, but I like what it does to the gameplay
I don't really understand some of the affinity special abilities. Like the merchant one is to spend some influence to build a resource extractor, but if you can already do that on your outposts before you attach/grow to city. And it seems to cost more? and have a cool down?
I guess you can build extractors for other players? is that good? do you really want to do that? I don't get it.
Also the settler unit is crazy. Just way over the top, it builds a brand new city 3 pop city that has more infrastructure than my cap, all for no influence and only 1 pop.
If someone else has a resource you want, you can build it for them and then import it. It's a way for mercantile empires to get access to resources in other Empires' borders.
I like it. I actually think it's more realistic than Civilization's static cultures. But then, I live in a city that was founded by the Romans, ruled by the Franks, and won its independence from the Spanish. Cultures change.
Sure, geographically it may not make a whole lot of sense that the Nubians become the Celts become the Aztecs, but historically that kind of thing makes a whole lot more sense to me than Americans showing up during the stone age and staying Americans throughout all those thousands of years until the modern day.
The Hun and later Mongol unique cavalry units are cool - they count as nomads so they can accumulate food to make more of themselves! Also being able to make them using outposts (ordu's or whatever) is really handy.
There's a Civ 6 youtuber I used to watch who I really liked, I need to see if he's covering it.
PotatoMcWhiskey I think his way.
Irish guy, really great player with a very soothing Irish accent
He has two videos out on it so far (probably a 3rd today), and is as awesome as ever.
I'll watch then tonight on my iPad, while playing Grounded on my Xbox, building my mushroom tower.
Hopefully I'll geting into Humanity this weekend.
I might actually start over, as I realised well into the second era you can just plop down settlements anywhere, for Influence.
The whole thing of making outposts and attaching them to cities is cool. For a lot of my game I've been above the city cap? It allows you to keep conquered cities even if you are above the cap, with a penalty to influence.
I unlocked being able to merge cities but i couldn't afford to do so.
Its kind of hard for me to tell at this point since im still learning but i bet a lot things will need a balance pass
As a way to try out the military gameplay, I've also gone Egyptians into Huns.
I was very surprised when my outpost churned out a full four-unit army of Huns. I'd thought I'd just get a single unit, but nope. Full stack. If you've got the influence, and fully populated outposts, the Huns can instantly conjure a massive army out of nothing.
I'm gonna assume the same will be true for the Mongols.
On the one hand, I think allowing these Cultures to instantly will giant armies into existence might be slightly unbalanced. On the other hand, steppe nomads showing up out of nowhere and wrecking everybody's faces is kind of historically accurate.
So far it's going okay, but will feel bad when my first game results in me getting crushed eventually.
Edit: or maybe it's not? i might be reading the start up screen wrong. It looks like difficulty are giving settlement size names.
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I've been trying out the babylonians and they're pretty fun!
Also if you find a natural wonder, build an outpost on it immediately. 5 influence per turn is a ridiculous amount.
The normal size map feels a bit small as well from a game mechanic standpoint. It seems like the game kind of wants you to have a couple of cities and lots of outposts everywhere but on my map I have 2 good cities that I placed, 1 I captured from an enemy (not a great spot, they had no industry) and 2 okay one from independent cities that I assimilated with influence (which felt like it was way cheaper to do than just organically build a city). Each city has 1 additional territory attached, and most designed to supplement a weakness in food/industry from the city placement. So my starting continent has just one more empire who I can probably crush very easily since they have just 2 cities in 3 territories and are fully reliant on me for horses, copper and iron. We are friendly though so it would take a lot of work to degrade relations short of a surprise war. I actually really like this mechanic because the mercurial board game style moods from Civ were incredibly frustrating: "we've been friends for 3000 years but now I see you're winning the game and we must become mortal enemies."
Wonders feel like a newb trap because my capital had a TON of production on it and despite putting all my industry in 2 cities towards building the pyramids it still took a long time, and the benefits didn't seem to outweigh the costs.
I've only run into a couple of bugs, one was a visual one where some of the battle tile coloration (out of bounds and starting tile coloration) persisted after the battle was over, and a "culture osmosis" that I think is supposed to give me a prompt but does nothing? All in all, it's been a fun and refreshing take on 4X with Amplitude's quirky spin on things and I one-more-turned myself to a 1 am bedtime last night. :biggrin:
You can. There's a little eye icon on the UI next to End Turn they you can place on anything I guess. The game will sometimes place then for you or maybe it's the AI doing it.
I actually like this. Forces you to REALLY invest in civics and Cultural Wonders that generate war support. Like you can't just be a tech civilization and all of a sudden unleash Hulkamania on your enemies. Your civics, tech and religious tenets all have to be aligned around domination to really earn the War Support bucks.
And that is so utterly thematic.
Hmm. I'm not a high enough level player to be able to tell if things are unbalanced. They're are definitely some quirks (like one culture being toe to toe with me in eras but woefully behind in fame) but overall has been an enjoyable experience.
That said balance patches are inevitable; I don't know any game of this type they hasn't had them.
The game is still at that very early release stage where "Is this unbalanced or do people just not know what to do about it yet?" Isn't a question that can be confidently answered for some things.
People whine about the Harrapans being unstoppable but the trick is to not leave them alone in the early game.
It's still a lot of fun, but it is missing some QoL elements that Civ does really well. Also, the Turks are hilariously broken in the late game, I went from 5000 science a turn to 70k, in under 10 turns, just from placing public schools and research labs. I did nothing else but that, and got through the rest of the modern tech tree in under 20 turns to win the game.