So this part of the marketing sounds really interesting, and perhaps a fresh/unique take on historical strategy:
Create your own civilization by combining 60 historical cultures from the Bronze to the Modern Age. Each culture brings its special gameplay layer, leading to near-endless outcomes.
What civilization will you shape?
Hmmm. Well, Amplitude has a lot of goodwill from me, so I’m in for it.
It can’t be worse than Civ VI right, but here’s me crossing my fingers.
Amplitude games are usually good for at least a try with each faction. Once you understand the game it usually is obvious the AI is lacking. I prefer reality based 4Xs so this has promiss for me, but like @tomchick said, reality may not play to their strength.
Gorgeous screenshots, but they dropped the ball on both the AI and the post-release support for ES2. I love this genre, but I’ll be watching this one from a distance until the AI is evaluated, and the slew of bugs fixed (another Amplitude staple).
Is Civ VI really that bad?
True.
EL combat was terrible. ES2 slightly better.
I’m not intrigued by this at all, except to see how it makes Civ change.
El had decent art style and cool intro cinematics, but their racial design was strait jacketed and boring and one dimensional, having 3 units per race. Like… No.
So I wonder what they’ll do for actual humanity.
Precisely.
And it’s usually pretty straight forward what the optimal strategy is.
Do it once, go to next race.
As much as this sounds promising , I think I’m too burned out on the genre to try it.
Interesting to me.
I liked Endless Legend a lot, particularly the part of the game where you are developing regions. The overall storyline got old pretty fast, though. From what I can see, they are keeping the former and replacing the latter.
Tactical combat was poor, and it sounds like they are upgrading that. Personally, I wish they would just ditch it – I have nothing against tactical combat games and have played many, but have little desire for other kinds of games to include tactical combat.
As to the Civ-style formula, this game certainly is addressing one of my pet peeves. A faction should not be born in ancient times as forever mountain-oriented or production-oriented… Rather they should become oriented in a given direction as an adaptation to their situation. And these adaptations should then be semi-permanent parts of their culture going forward. It seems as though that is what Humankind is going for.
On the other hand, nothing makes me think they have a formula for overcoming the mid-game slog and the impossibility of writing AI for competitors of this kind of game. Maybe they have a solution, but if they did, I suspect they would be talking about it.
If I were designing such a game, I would definitely be thinking of a cross between the Civ setup and RPG mechanics, where your opponent was the world, rather than parallel-to-human-player entities. Opponents and other challenges would exist out in the world, some predictable like RPG bosses, some unpredictable like RPG spawns. But from what I can see, this will be another game where your goal is to defeat AI factions playing the same game you are, and that really puts a ceiling on what the game can accomplish.
I already see all kind of unrest because of it. Some people say they don’t want to switch civilizations because it’s dumb if Egyptians become Vikings. Some others say that it might be offensive to switch Egyptians to Vikings because nowadays everything should be checked through “is this probably Nazism?” filter.
I like the idea, my only concern if you still need some constant personality for convinience sake. So that you remember that those Moldavians of today are the same Koreans that were there 1000 years ago and not some new invaders. I suspect they’ll do it through some sort of leaders so you’ll see Napoleon starting as Babylonian and making his way to become American. Also it’s important for all the bonuses to be interesting and impactful, I want to care about which faction out of million possibilities am I playing against, they shouldn’t all be just a blur.
Indeed. ES2 is one of those games that causes strong feelings from me. It’s gorgeous and game mechanics are interesting and inventive but it’s all moot: the difficulty is absent, you can win the game on highest difficulty no understanding the mechanics and so the joy mastering the game is never there. Mind you, it’s not about AI being stupid, it’s about difficulty balancing - Civ6 AI may be even dumber but he can make you sweat by throwing big armies at you.
So it’s a great game and huge disappointment at the same time. They’ve produced several DLCs without adressing this problem at all. EL didn’t have that problem, while not being especially difficult it was far from being an easiest strategy game. Played it for a longer time, never beaten hardest difficulty. Hope Humankind will be more like that.
no…but you need all the xpacs to say that
I still like what Ak_icebear says
But we already have a perfect realtime 4X, it’s called Rise of Nations, no point in trying to surpass it.
I take the opposite view. In my mind, the Civ franchise (along with a lot of games) proceeds from a worldview supportive of the far right: they seem to say that an ethnic group intrinsically is a certain thing, and they always will be that thing. This group is highly intelligent but frail. That one is brawny and over-the-top religious. Those are traders. Essentially, it is in their DNA.
Whereas in real life, groups of people adapt, sometimes more effectively than other times. Culture is an outgrowth of conditions, including the land and the technologies and so on. And it is ever-changing.
If I am understanding the information about this game correctly, it is not that Egyptians become Vikings. It is that during each age, you add attributes. You might have started with a set of attributes that the game is calling Egyptian, for the sake of being accessible, but it is a set of tendencies for your group. Then in the next age, you add on some further attributes, maybe the ones labeled Viking. True, in real life no one decides on your group’s direction, it happens organically. But this is your group adapting to their changing situation. Apparently you make these additions six(?) times allowing for a total of 1,000,000 possible combinations.
In my mind, this directly contradicts far right philosophy. So-called western civilization sure has done great over the past 500 years. But it was actually a total loser as of 1400AD. But then they made a helluva cultural adaptation (I’d call it the printing press, but this game might call it adopting Civ VI Korea) and that, not their DNA, catapulted them to world dominance.
Doesn’t mean it will necessarily be a good game, but I really, really think that this critics have it exactly wrong if they are worried about Nazi philosophy.
Games say a lot through their mechanics. Civ in general is guilty of wig history - presenting it as a march of progress mostly revolving around linear technological progression. Also focus on great people decisions while people at large are supposed to be appeased at best.
But in any case, I don’t like everything being compared to bigoted ideologies and if it can be used to reinforce them. Too much focus on that.
Humankind still seems to be saying that there’s a special nationalist way of life. Like Civ or other game make you chose between republic or monarchy, capitalism or communism or, ahem, “autocracy”. But here it happens again and again. If it says anything about today it may be that even if today we’re all Americans, we’re also Americans who were a lot of different nations some time ago.
I think the Macedonians and Romans had a good run somewhere in there :)
Agreed.
This is not a far-fetched comparison. It is a matter of a false worldview that strongly supports bigotry. If one ethnic group is and always will be a certain way, then the white nationalists have a point. Northern Europeans whites dominated the world, and they are northern Europeans. So why should they allow pollution of their perfection?
Except that the entire premise is false. Europeans did terribly for centuries, they were being overrun from the south and the east. Then they got good and conquered much of the world. Their DNA did not change, so white nationalists have no basis for thinking physical evidence of their descent from that group proves superiority. That DNA they are so proud of had centuries of failure.
Rather, it was cultural adaptation that served Europeans so well. (Adaptations that, by and large those white supremacists reject.)
Of course it’s not just Civ, but large number of games proceed from the entertaining but dangerous view that it’s mostly DNA pools, not mostly cultural adaptations.
Well, France and Korea and Russia and England really do have different cultures, not to mention different governments. I don’t see what is wrong with representing it as such. They change over time, and it has little or nothing to do with DNA, but what the heck.
Of course I haven’t seen this game yet, so I don’t know what I will think of its representation. But I sure don’t mind that a nation has its strengths and weakness, as long as it does not come across as inherent for all time.
About a thousand years slump in between… I guess anyone can have a bad millennium, though. :)
Seriously, though, most of the white superiority stuff looks to northern Europeans as having the magic DNA. Comparing the civilization level of the people from what is now England and Germany and France… to say China?
Great post. And yes, this always bothered me about Civilization as well. But it is what it is, and Civ has been that way since the beginning, so that’s one that never changes in the series. So it’s nice to have a different series handling this genre for once, so they can try this different way. Hopefully it will make for an interesting way to play, and hopefully they’ll have the Earth map to play on.
The only way I personally found a way to avoid the mid-game slog in Civ/Civ2/Civ3 (I haven’t played the others yet) is to really work at it as a player. In all 3 games, that’s why I loved playing on the Earth map. It lets me play on a higher difficulty because of the inherent advantage of already knowing the map, and it lets me setup a civilization clash for the mid-game and end game. My ideal game would have me starting in Asia or Africa, and one civilization starting in isolation in North/South America. That way I always had to fight for supremacy in Africa/Europe/Asia in the mid-game, and then that setup an awesome final confrontation for the end-game against the North/South American civilization who had been isolated until the end game.