#Update 2 Public Beta

1 messages · Page 2 of 1

fathom cipher
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Well he went crazy with spice merchants which isn't possible any more at least to that degree.

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Really to truly spam vassals now you gotta conquer.

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As you get limited settlers with the 15 turn cooldown.

nova meadow
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To spam vassals all I need to do is conquer half an AI, let it resettle and conquer more.

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Let the GM AI donate them

fathom cipher
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Yep

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The difference between aggressive gameplay and peaceful is pretty drastic.

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I mostly find peaceful games more fun.

nova meadow
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I roleplay... so I go to war for special NS goods etc.

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Do we need 40 more spice? No. But we want it.

noble wave
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I’ll update more of the balance suggestions when I get the time.

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Just wanted to get those thoughts out of my head

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There were a lot of reasons I got annoyed with that particular game lol

normal swift
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The more I think about influence and border growth in this game, the less I like it.

Its too unintuitive, too far removed from player agency.

You technically can block border growth in certain directions, using borders of another region/vassal/outposts... But.. having this as the only tools to mitigate border growth, is that really OK? There are so many cool designs in this game and then there is influence...

I like the town system and how towns reduce nearby influence costs but overall, border growth really grinds my gears.

nova meadow
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In Civ you have ZERO control. It grows towards what the game feels is useful, unless you buy tiles

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Yes, I'd prefer to get an "influence" bank and use it to buy tiles I want directly. The game doesn't work like this though.

normal swift
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I'll not rant on it further here, but the lack of ctrl over influence feels more punishing than in civ, i guess because min/maxing the tile use is so important

nova meadow
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In civ you pay money, which is far less of a loss than bleeding 200 points into a mountain

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Since the normal growth wouldn't go for said mountain in Civ

normal swift
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indeed. You always bleed influence on unwanted tiles, often many. and the only way to mitigate it is to use claim territory (scaling it's cost) or build a town without regard for its specialization.

This has nothing to do with the beta i guess, sorry.

cunning skiff
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I think the general idea is fine. We just lack additional tools to have control over direction of expansion. Even a kind of a slider or checkbox to decide that for example more influence should be designated to specific direction or specific kind of terrain.

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Plus something that would prevent progress of influence only because you or AI has built an oupost for one turn on a given tile.

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Btw. Some means to active rivalry over control over a tile would be nice addition too...

fathom cipher
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Suggestion: I'm actually alright with the influence system, I think the 3 issues right now are:

  1. Influence doesn't scale well as you have more border tiles and into later ages. I would buff the influence buildings to be something like 5 > 10 > 20 instead of 3 > 6 > 10. Maybe also give a 1-2 influence per age for each region. Have a few more ways to increase influence. Maybe some of the luxury goods could give 1 influence?
  2. Rough terrain modifiers are too high especially for desert, jungle, swamp, and mountain. They take forever to expand in which makes starts that are next to them really brutal in terms of getting enough tiles.
  3. Claim territory costs scales too fast and should probably be 1.1 instead of 1.2 scaling.
cunning skiff
# fathom cipher Suggestion: I'm actually alright with the influence system, I think the 3 issues...

True. Although as for 1, in later ages, after one improvement often has more workers than one, I find out that it's not territory I lack, but workers. So I'm not sure if it didn't result in taking probably too much unneeded territory.
As for 2 true too. Although at least with regard to jungle and swamp from certain moment it can be helped a bit with establishing for a turn an oupost, clearing the area, removing oupost and waiting for just a grassland expansion.

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As for claim. That's something that also bothers me. But still I understand that possibility to buy tiles with for example money would make expansion too trivial.

nova meadow
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The game isn't made to minmax. Realistically towns are your cost reduction for influence growth, powerplayers just like to make them perfect unless they do a 200 pop city run and then make them 7 distance grids.

The main issues is the lost influence in the "point sinks". Especially if you are near a mountain ridge, you are forced to go aether or see your midgame points evaporate into nothingness. Same issue with deep sea just wasting your expansion points.

The influence we get per se is big enough. In Civ you can't even grow outside a certain range, here you can which is open enough. I do agree with more influence options for NS spirit, innovation or tech, but not literally doubling it for the buildings. If I want double influence, I can go monument.

The main issue is the inability to chose what tile types to expand into and how much. Obviously no one wants 10 desert and 15 mountain tiles to eat 50% of their influence generation.

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And no, founding vassals "for the lols" is not good, they will expand and take nearby tiles I might actually want. So it mostly binds pioneers.

fathom cipher
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Suggestion: Move selecting your nation's starting perk to after the game is started and you see your starting location. This makes selecting your starting perk more strategic as you can consider your starting location. Otherwise you tend to just pick whatever you think is the "strongest" before the game starts.

nova meadow
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This would debuff the AI as the AI can't judge it either.

fathom cipher
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It could if you added some logic 🙂

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But honestly the starting perks aren't strong enough to really matter that much compared to the AI bonuses anyways.

nova meadow
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Yet, you want to minmax it. Either it is important or it is not important enough.

fathom cipher
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Well right now its the awkward of not really that meaningful and you don't have anything to base your seelction on. But my take is either remove starting bonuses or move them to after you see your starting location.

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But I'd also vote for less options that are more meaningful.

nova meadow
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In no 4X do you switch your national bonuses after seeing your start. You just restart if you dislike it with a new seed.

There is a "preferred biome" system in Civ sure (Desert nation starting near desert etc.) but that's it. And there the bonuses matter much more.

fathom cipher
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Yeah but I'd argue Millennia is taking a different approach. Its about building your nation's identify/bonuses through the ages instead of picking before the game starts.

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So making starting perks almost like an minor age 1 NS fits better into the game approach.

nova meadow
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In that vein... before we do something so minor and change starting bonuses, let's first argue to get actual religious tenets for our religion.

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So they influence our culture

fathom cipher
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Eh that is an entirely different issue IMO.

nova meadow
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It's about building your nation's identify/bonuses through the ages

fathom cipher
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That is adding content to the game. Moving starting perk selection is just adjusting the game experience.

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Oh I agree with the idea of adding religious tenets, I just realize its probably a DLC as you are adding content.

nova meadow
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The thing is, removing the national abilities to be an ingame "live" decision for player and AI makes the nation designer short of graphic, name and flag pointless. It is the miniscule amount of determined difference we have.

fathom cipher
nova meadow
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Look if the Devs move it to a Turn 1 decision, so be it. I don't really care.

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I just feel this is time spent in a region you could invest better

fathom cipher
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Well you can always argue priorities and its hard for us to judge since we don't know the time/effort for changing something.

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I figure if we make suggestions that would improve the game, its up to the devs to pick and prioritize them.

nova meadow
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I can roughly gouge the minimum effort. Like an ingame selection UI, the actual execution code of selecting it ingame and not being a static national value etc. It's not nothing. It depends how the classes are designed too.

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Aside of savegame incompatibility

fathom cipher
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Suggestion: Add starting terrain bias to start game options so you could choose between something like grasslands, plains, water, forest, hills, etc. This greatly reduces having to reroll starting locations if you are looking to play a specific age 2 NS.

charred mesa
normal swift
nova meadow
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No matter what you claim, you can NOT change your characters bonus traits AFTER starting the game in Humankind

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They are literally tied to the character.

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(Yes those bonuses are as an AI enemy, but they can't change their terrain to fix those)

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We talk about base nation bonuses, in Humankind those are for the AI and the AI can't change them after game start just because their terrain is bad.

normal swift
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This is something to look at when implementing some way to pick your starting region location (witch is on roadmap)

nova meadow
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By that logic you'd move the nation designer to INGAME turn 1. That makes no sense.

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Sure you could demand people build their flag and nation "while playing" but that would be annoying.

normal swift
nova meadow
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That's the point, it is not pre-historic. One of your first techs is literally "oral history" in the elders hut. You don't start in the nomadic era like Humankind.

You start already seditary.

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There is a reason people asked to start with a settler to move to a better terrain on game start.

normal swift
nova meadow
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That was red's point. It would be purely cosmetic for flag and border and name.

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Which is fine...

normal swift
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I doubt the devs would like to reduce the nationbuilder to that, especially as adding new nations is something they put on the roadmap.

Doesnt really matter to me though

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The mian point i wanted to make was that it would make sense to consider choice of starting bonus ingame, in conjunction with the choice of starting location.

nova meadow
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Your NS is supposed to be the choice based on location

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Like the culture in humankind

fathom cipher
fathom cipher
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Suggestion: A short term solution to address the main issues with roads without having to add in mechanics to build roads or additional improvements could be:

  1. Range too short - increase road range from 5 to 6-7 either by default or using techs/ages
  2. Avoid disappearing roads - make outposts capturable and have roads persist to destroyed towns
ember perch
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i dont mind roads being short in early ages

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but having a forest between 2 cities making you unable to properly move armies in later eras feels so crap

fathom cipher
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Suggestion: Make hills forage 1 food + 1 prod just like forests to balance out starting locations that have hills.

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Suggestion: Make water forage 2 food just like grasslands to make water tiles useful early game.

nova meadow
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Next you want Tundra to give +2 food and desert to give + 1 production and scrubland to also give +1 food so all have 2 resources?

fathom cipher
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Suggestion: Buff plantation goods and/or plantations so they are worth improving.

fathom cipher
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Tundra and desert are pretty rare in your starting city.

nova meadow
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Forests are as much a hindrance later as an advantage early, you need to cut them down.

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Desert is NOT rare. It tends to appear 1-2 tiles outside of your border

fathom cipher
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Having 1-2 forests in your starting city ring is very strong.

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Jtech was pretty much rerolling starts til he got at least 1 forest.

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Otherwise your early production is terrible.

nova meadow
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That's due to woodcutting camps being good, not because it gives food initially.

fathom cipher
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Nah the main reason is the early 1 food and 1 prod

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You can use your first town to get forest for woodcutters.

nova meadow
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If that 1 forest is the only forest (or maybe 2) in that ring you definetly do not make a woodcutting town there unless you are desperate.

fathom cipher
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Literally your 6 starting tiles.

nova meadow
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There is a reason forests and grasslands have 2 resources. One is to signify wood as a resource and forest as a living area for game to be hunted. The other is for fertility of grasslands and the food.

Fishing if done with primitive tools is really horrible to cover your daily needs. Feel free to do it. The calories you get likely won't cover you.

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Yes the game goes with realism here... but by that logic you could just argue to remove the food from forests instead of buffing everyone else

fathom cipher
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Removing the food from forest would be better than what we have now.

nova meadow
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Then go with that. because if you buff everything else, what the hell is grassland.

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Argue to remove forest food

fathom cipher
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Well the issue with grassland is its the best at most things. Good for early food. Good for building flat improvements. Good for MB.

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But generally most early civilization was along rivers or coasts.

nova meadow
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Not civilizations, just big city-states with influence or territory due to being able to feed an army to conquer others or to intimidate them.

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Rivers help make food. Humans like food to not need to work to make food 18 hours a day. That's why we settle on rivers.

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(Aside of needing it to drink)

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Rivers already give +1 food for farms

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Regardless of territory

fathom cipher
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Anyways we are getting off topic. My point is to try to balance out the starting tile forage a bit.

nova meadow
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If you want to equalize hill and forest by pure game balance, remove the forest food. That's it. Let people trade production for growth then.

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It makes no sense to buff water with more food, they already got ancient seafarers for "too much" water. They will never lack food or wealth

fathom cipher
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I think the issue with going that direction is wheat good being too strong then.

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They lack food before you get age 2.

nova meadow
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If you want to remove any chance for any starting town to be next to wheat, go ahead.

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It's RNG right now

fathom cipher
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Could go that direction as well.

nova meadow
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Look 4X was never Starcraft. Not everyone starts curated with 1 hill, 1 forest, 1 grassland, 2 scrubland and 1 water tile.

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The point is to work with your situation and adapt. That's the genre

fathom cipher
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Agree it doesn't have to be perfectly balanced but the gap of start locations right now can be pretty massive.

nova meadow
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They could just allows us to settle our first town ourselves.

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It will solve 90% of the issue

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(Losing 1-2 turns)

fathom cipher
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Yeah not starting with a settler is the main reason this is an issue.

ember perch
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that should be in the free update with the nomad DLC

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if I recall

fathom cipher
ember perch
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fair

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but they did confirm it at least

fathom cipher
fathom cipher
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Suggestion: Scale capture cost based on population rather than a flat 20 chaos for all cities. Something like 5 + 2 * pop so that small vassals are much cheaper to capture while core regions are more costly. This would align better with the scaling razing costs as well.

fathom cipher
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Suggestion: Buff most buildings in the later ages as they usually aren't worth building given the high production cost. Much better to just convert your production to IP or research.

ember perch
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On the other hand potentially nerf the production to IP or research conversion. Just makes production so powerful

fathom cipher
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Yeah I honestly think you need some of both and suggested nerfing pretty much all the prod conversions already.

fathom cipher
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Suggestion: Update the power score formula to better represent higher age units. It should probably be about 50% more points per age for each unit so age 1 = 4, age 2 = 6, age 3 = 9, etc so that it scales better for later ages. Currently the difference between an age 7 unit (28 pts) and age 8 unit (32 pts) is way too low.

charred mesa
fathom cipher
charred mesa
fathom cipher
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Yeah that is what it is right now that I think is too low.

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Right now its just +4 per age so 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, etc

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I'm suggesting instead do a +50% per age so 4, 6, 9, 13.5, 20.25, etc

fathom cipher
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Suggestion: Buff on-map land siege attacks as they often do very little damage or the time and XP it takes to use them.

plush dock
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I just wish we could refine fish it like you get fish and can’t do anything with em outside of a minor food buff

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Like the Swedish in olden times use to pickle them

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And modern industry can fish

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Heck fish are bred in the modern era to mass produce them in some places