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HUMANKIND - Amplitude's historical turn-based strategy

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,614
Yep. The system in its execution is very counter-productive (unless the devs wanted it to be like this, though whatever the fuck for?). If you want to larp a culture evolving through the ages, or to play a nation you somehow feel attracted to, you're basically forced into a series of suboptimal choices.
They seem big on selling this game as a vehicle for your story, and the system fails in this regard as well, unless your story is a hodgepodge in which you never spend any significant time in a given era to leave a lasting impression. At the most, you build 2-3 unique buildings
and use the special ability once.
Traits would make much more sense and would probably even benefit their progressive agenda (why can't my breed of negroes be scientific in this era? I thought everyone gets a fair shot at edjucayshoon), it's how non-larping people play this game anyways,
ignoring all the cultural stuff and just focusing on what you get from the modifiers.

My biggest grip with it is that it has snowballing problems written all over it and very few tools to alleviate them.
Hence the game is often long over before the endgame screen actually catches on and there's no endgame to speak of.
 

Zarniwoop

Gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
19,329
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Cultures change over time, it could have made sense if your culture evolves like it did in real life, for example Etruscans-Romans- Papal States-Italians with you just picking traits at each step instead of the wildly incompatible Egyptians-Zulu-Japanese-Australian shit we have now.

Or even a branching path with different traits at each level. For example Anglo-Saxon can evolve into English and then English could become Americans or Australians or Canadian etc
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
can't fix zulus transforming into romans changing into japaneses.
That one makes game-sense if you view it as basically just archetypes and class-changing through stages. It's realistically bollocks, but it makes sense if you view Zulu, Roman, and Japanese as classes from a game standpoint, packaged into familiar names for easy consumption, like Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, and Thief.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
9,447
Location
Italy
it still makes no sense starting as paladin, growing into rogue, turning into wizard, then switching to barbarian.
you can't save this crap. no one can. nothing can.
 

Fedora Master

STOP POSTING
Patron
Edgy
Joined
Jun 28, 2017
Messages
32,392
The biggest problem isn't the random culture changing, although that's certainly egregious, it's the weird scoring system that encourages the player to fuck around in an era just to scrounge up a few more stars.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
9,447
Location
Italy
well, that makes some sense to a point. italy is still held in high regard today because it scrounged up all the stars during classical and renaissance era, and then it's been the laughing stock of the world during all the others.
 

Lone Wolf

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 17, 2014
Messages
3,703
it still makes no sense starting as paladin, growing into rogue, turning into wizard, then switching to barbarian.

Ahh, classic 3.5 gestalt, baby.

(I have no point to make.)
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
one of the first screenshots I saw on their store page
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Zarniwoop

Gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
19,329
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
What kind of retard WATCHES someone else play a game?

And then what even smaller subset of retards watches someone play a STRATEGY game?

And then what kind of certified, ocean-going, monumental idiot judges a strategy game by how many retards are watching it being played?

Jesus what's wrong with the world?
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,347
I can't really gauge whether their DLC is worth it or not compared to what they would put out for their Endless games. Only two culture packs since release.
 

Zarniwoop

Gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
19,329
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I can't really gauge whether their DLC is worth it or not compared to what they would put out for their Endless games. Only two culture packs since release.

It's the same as the Paradox games.

Skin/culture/story/whatever packs are shit and you can get better from Steam Workshop.

Full DLC's are usually worth it on deep discount.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,614
Probably nobody cares at this point, but the google creepy crawlies dropped this in my feed:


So, there's an expansion coming and it focuses on diplomacy.
The gist of it seems to be: we get a bunch of agent units to shuffle around when you're turtling,
apart from espinage and sabotage, they'll will be earning diplo-points to be spent to coerce the AI to do stuff.
Not sure if the AIs can do the same to us, but I am 89% sure the devs couldn't be bothered to teach them how to effectively use this system.
Also, someone who still gives a fuck will probably find a way to exploit this and break the game.

There's also a bunch of mutually beneficial contracts to get yourself into through embassies, among others a way to buy unique units via Arms Deal.
I'm guessing this all aims to making alliances actually useful.

There's also the global GENDER-NONSPECIFIC-PERSONKIND(tm) congress we can build, which is a NWO where we enforce global civics
and will most likely be the enabler for a diplomatic victory.

Finally, we also get a bunch of cultures, all specializing in diplomacy. Apparently, among them there are Swiss, Scots, Singapore and :drumroll: Bulgaria.
Because all this is obviously the first thing that comes to your mind when you say: Diplomacy.
(And in all fairness, all the fitting ones had probably been taken and, come on, you expect game developers these days to have foresight?).
 

covr

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Sep 3, 2006
Messages
1,430
Location
Warszawa
lol, after watching this video I though that this is going to be a free expansion, as it basically fixes some major design flaws from the main game: diplomacy & espionage. But apparently they have also added famous bulgarian diplomats and put a price on it - I am not paying 70 potatoes for this shit.

In the meantime, there is a new 4x that got just released, looking interesting: Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim https://store.steampowered.com/app/1768280/Ozymandias_Bronze_Age_Empire_Sim/

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