I only hope they overhauled their entire UI/UX. I can never get into Endless Space because the interface seems overly-designed.
Endless Humanity?
I believe there are only four elephants. It’s the turtles that are endless.
THERE. ARE. THREE. ELEPHANTS.
This Polygon article seems to have the most actual information about the game. Written by someone who has actually seen a demo rather than just the trailer.
One thing I’m curious about is if they completely through away their FIDSI approach or if they tried to adapt it.
From that Polygon article:
So, if I choose Egyptian, I gain advantages from rivers and I build pyramids. My armies rely heavily on chariots. As the classical era begins, I’m offered another 10 new cultures, including Roman. When I make my selection, I keep all my Egyptian stuff, but I tack on the works of the Romans, such as legions, early industry, and efficient roadworks. Each of the game’s six eras offers 10 cultures, right up to the modern age.
Strategically, I’m picking the cultures that fit my needs through history. If I’ve reached the early modern era and I’m running behind on scientific innovation, I need to make a selection that improves my position. I’m also making personal and aesthetic choices. Maybe my culture is crying out for a Mesoamerican influence, or a taste of France.
As the game progresses, my cities, my culture, and my military become a melting pot of different influences. My early charioteers survive through to later ages, but are upgraded and modernized along the way, always keeping that Egyptian feel. Ancient marvels of north Africa sit alongside the beauty of medieval European cathedrals.
I like that Amplitude is trying a different approach than the bog standard pick one faction for the whole game. Amplitude is best-in-class for faction design so I will miss their strong imprint from games like Endless Space, but I am hoping they are taking their strengths and importing them to this newer melting pot system.
The system might also address the oddities of Civ such as starting with the Americans and Teddy Roosevelt in the Bronze age. Perhaps with Humankind cultures will align more directly with their historical period in the timeline.
I’d been playing Civ since the I, and I skipped V and don’t play VI. I think I have one expansion because my sister plays the game. She likes it, and I well like I said, find it unbearable. The AI can’t play the game, or at least couldn’t when I played it.
I’ll keep an open mind with this one. My experience with Endless isn’t bad, better than VI.
I am hoping that at least some of the faction choices involve actually changing up game mechanics and aren’t just limited to bonuses. Amplitude is really good at making different factions actually feel different, but once you’re trying to fill out 60 of those in a space that is already a little more constrained, I worry that those choices become a lot more boring.
Sure, but they had a run of about 700 to 800 years before that bad millennium. And other civilizations had “slumps” too, such as the Chinese, the Persians and the Arabs among many. My point is that civilizations wax and wane throughout history, and picking a single point in time is being rather selective and arbitrary.
Waxing or waning, whichever dynasty ruled China still had a higher GDP than all Western Europe combined any given point for basically all human history prior to the industrial revolution. Same is true for India, which sporadically eclipsed China for top spot, but was never fully unified as we understand it now until the British Raj (Of course, neither was Western Europe).
From the Polygon article:
Each of my armies is a combination of different units that I’ve organized throughout history according to tactical benefit. So I might have medieval cannons alongside ancient horse warriors, supported by classical phalanx and maybe a unit of Renaissance pikemen.
This seems weird to me.
In the main map, each army moves about as a single icon, but when enemy armies engage, the icon unspools upon a secondary battlefield map.
This sounds like the combat in Endless Legend, with the army “unspooling”? The writer says the demo ended right when they were going to dig into a battle, so maybe not.
Oh man, it sounds like combat might take forever in this game if there’s an ‘unspooling’ onto some tactical map. I wish civ-type games would stop trying to be wargames (well, I guess that really only includes Civ and this one). It’s rarely what they are best at.
Perhaps, as estimates from that time period are difficult to make given the lack of economic data. That said, total GDP is only one measurement. It also appears the Roman per capital GDP was significantly higher than that of China, so there’s that data point also.
That’s reasonable considering how massive the Chinese population was, both contributing to the total while bringing down the average, same as the modern day GDP figures. I don’t think there’s solid data for it anyway before 1500 or so, though some economic historians must use something semi-solid to get their stuff peer reviewed and published.
I never knew much about ancient economies (or paid much attention to it for that matter) but recently I was listening to a podcast from a scholar about the Roman economy. It was very fascinating stuff. Because of their excellent (for it’s day) transportation network, the Roman economy was highly specialized along a regional/provincial basis. For example, North Africa specialized in grain/foodstuffs and pottery - their pottery was found all over the empire but especially in places like Gaul, Britain, Italy and Spain, and their grain feed populous Rome and the army throughout the West. Places that could produce goods in bulk and much cheaper would specialize in those items, boosting the economy.
In addition, because the govt need to move food to support urban populations and army, they subsidized a baseline amount of the transportation network (ports, warehouses, ships, roads, etc). This allows producers and shippers to piggyback on that infrastructure and keep shipping costs down, further enhancing regional specialization.
Large estates were “scientifically” run - we have tons of information on the management of large estates, and you can see how they sought to maximize production and how they studied results of various management practices to get better results in the future.
It was also interesting how the presence of the army on the frontier boosted the local economies as the soldiers, paid in coin, then bought stuff locally, which served to build up the monetary economy. (This also serves to explain the economic collapse of certain frontier areas when the army was withdrawn or fell apart during the barbarian invasions of the 5th century - no army, no customers, no money).
It was really fascinating stuff that I was totally ignorant of.
This Ages mechanic sounds alot like a boardgame I played (cardgame really) which I think was 7 Wonders?
Every age you got points, depending on what you had, and extra points for leading in that field, so if you had x military in age one, you got 5 points for that age, but if you were the leader, you got an extra 5 points.
Points were added up at the end of the game, 7 rounds total.
And investing in any one area led to diminishing returns, so you might get an early military lead, but then in age 2, depending on the cards you were dealt, it might have made more sense in that age to try and be the one who built the university etc.
It actually worked quite well, as a board/card game.
It could work well in a computer game.
Picking additional traits sounds like what they are trying to do is break down a typical game session into ten distinct sessions.
And in each part, having 10 factions, which honestly sound like a basic collection of traits as opposed to actual factions, basically means you will play the same race throughout the whole game, but get certain breakpoints to adjust your strategy.
That’s not a bad thing as such, and could work well, but I don’t see how they can justify “1,000,000!” factions.
That’s like me saying my class and tech combo in Planetfall is technically a different faction with each new bit of research, and goodness help the maths if I assimilate another race.
It is technically a different faction (I just got Syndicate with the healing mod from Kirko, basically a never ending mass of almost unkillable Indentured!) but isn’t really…
Still, this one thing is the most positive aspect I am taking away from that article.
I’ll be keeping an open mind and eye on this.
edit:
This takes us to a turn-based battle that looks to be influenced by X-Com. Amplitude’s Gamescom demo ended as the battle commences, so I don’t know exactly how this plays out, but I’m told that each player is given up to nine turns to try to crush the enemy.
This sounds almost exactly like Endless Legends’ combat, in which case ugh.
By the way, art style is extremely similar to 7 Wonders, which is superb boardgame and has this element of forging abstract ancient culture.
I’m very curious to know what this podcast was
To be fair, gamejournalist use “like XCOM” to explain anything remotely tactical to wide audience. Just like open world is like Skyrim and higher difficulty means it’s like Dark Souls.
It is a podcast called the “Fall of Rome”. The author had one episode describing the Roman economy to give a baseline along with another describing the impact of the fall of the empire on the economy of the successor states/kingdoms.