I played the Humankind demo and found it to be genuinely awful and borderline unplayable. I’m surprised it’s caused this much panic amongst 2K, unless Humankind has gotten a lot better since the demo.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
puts on flame resistant hazmat suit
… Civ 7 is the Civ series shitty attempt at copying Humankind, Humankind is currently $12.50 USD, $25 for all DLC + base game, and is a way better deal than Civ 7 at $70, if not just actually a better game than Civ 5 or Civ 6 + all their existing DLC/expansions.
Pregnenolone@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
I never played the demo, started with the full game… maybe a couple weeks after launch.
As I said in another reply, yeah, it absolutely was rough on a technical level for the first few months, a good number of actually fairly common edge cases where the game’s systems would break, things wouldn’t actually work as intended, as described by the game itself.
But, after about 6 months, they fixed basically all of these… and didn’t really even have to do like major tweaks to the balancing of the game… the problems were technical implentations of the designed game, and once they got those ironed out, the game as envisioned was now actually the game as it performed.
Go pull up the steam store page right now: Overall score is still ‘Mixed’ it did indeed have a rough launch… but Recent Reviews are ‘Very Positive’.
The people that bothered to stick with it… well they seem to very much like where the game is now.
So, I’d say yes, the general consensus of people still playing it is that it did indeed improve significantly.
Also, its pretty undeniable that 2K, Civ 7, very much did try to ape some, but not all, of the changes that Humankind put on what is basically the Civ formula, that just never occured to them.
The entire concept of you and other players basicslly just having the avatar of your civilization remain the same for all time, but the civilizations themselves change, with historical eras?
Thats one of the most obviously visible differences between Humankind and any Civ game that existed … prior to Civ 7.
It is also, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons those initial reviews of Humankind were ‘Mixed’: a whole lot of Civ fans just thought the whole idea was stupid, and were vocal about it.
… And then Civ 7 does the same idea, but more watered down, with only 3 eras, 3 different civs per playthrough, as opposed to Humankind’s … well basically 6 + 1, where that + 1 represents your pre-civilization nomadic tribe/culture, basically playing a fairly different kind of game, prior to building your first real city and thus advancing to your first choice of civilization.
Also, worth throwing in here I guess: Advancing through eras works with a similar mechanic as to racing to build wonders in Civ: You can only have one player as each civ at a time, so if you really want to have first dibs and the full range of civs to choose from, you have to be the first to era advance, otherwise another player may beat you to it and pick the one you were planning on.
But, it also works differently than wonders: Wonders are just built by a city in Civ. Eras in Humankind are advanced by earning points for completing basically era specific mini objectives… and you have a range of different options to choose from, maybe you go for numerous easier objectives, or focus on a few, more difficult ones.
46_and_2@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It may have not caused that much panic, but Amplitude consistently put out interesting ideas and enhancements to the Civ-likes in their games, so no wonder Firaxis might use these as templates and negate any unique features their competition might have over them. Plus, the Civ genre has to move in some way, anyway.
DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Thanks for the tip, any chance it runs natively on Linux?
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Natively? I don’t think so.
But I’ve been running it via proton on my steam deck for… over a year now, only real problem is the HUD is a bit smallish.
DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I mostly play on a Linux computer, buy that should work. Thanks!
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
np! =]
moonburster@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I’m having a hard time getting into humankind. Any tips for someone that loved civ 5 and liked civ 6?
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Err… well, without any mentions of specific gripes or difficulties you are having… entirely seriously, actually play through with the tutorial enabled.
There are 3 different tutorial settings:
No tutorial
Moderate tutorial (ie, you’ve played some Civ games and want to mainly focus on what is different in Humankind)
Full tutorial (baby step you through everything like you’ve never played any kind of turn based 4x before)
The middle of the road tutorial does a pretty good job of highlighting and explaining systems and actions that work differently from Civ, or are just entirely not present in Civ, but doesn’t hold your hand through every single basic concept that you would be familiar with as an experienced Civ player.
moonburster@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That’s a huge reply! Thanks so much for the write up, but I meant it’s not civ /s ofc
I did play with the tutorial and on my last run I actually did the prestige thing too! I think that I got lost in the urban planning and just really screwed that up, I didn’t think when placing let alone ahead of time. I got some stellaris vibes from the difficulty level, harsh when making stupid decisions. I got slapped a few times early game for getting baited into attacking and then immediately overrun.
Your write up inspired me to try again, I think I just made the same bogus mistakes I made with stellaris first time. Play it too casual and get bitten in the ass for it.
Thanks for your reply, you’re too kind a soul
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Aw, been a while since someone’s complimented me, thank you!
Yes, I too fucked up the city planning stuff a good deal until eventually… it clicked.
It isn’t the same game as Civ, a lot of the sort of ingrained ideas you don’t even realize are baked into your subconcious from playing Civ a lot… will lead you to knee jerk, make the kind of ‘well obviously i do this in this situation’ decisions…
and yeah, then get slapped with ‘nope, no workey’.
But… if you stick with it… just like you probably did, many moons ago, with Civ, you can absolutely get much more skilled.
Its funny you bring up stellaris… i spent like a month just utterly failing until that ‘click’ moment.
Then, a few months of ‘i am actually decent at this’ and then a few more months till ‘actually this is boring because i win by stupid margins every time on anything but the most absurd difficulties, and in those games its pretty much a completely random dice roll of surviving early game or not due to the absurd early game ai bonuses… and then by mid to late game, the AI is just literally too stupid to engage in 80% of the micromanagement strategies i am using to snowball’.
46_and_2@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Haven’t played Humankind, but Amplitude’s previous Civ-like “Endless Legend” was amazing and very fresh take on the genre. And it looked like Firaxis were already trying to copy some of it in Civ 6, so I’m not surprised if this trend continues.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Civ peaked at Civ 4 and all its expansions for me.
Yes, doomstacks were a problem, but hard pivoting all the way over to Civ 5’s only one unit per tile led to a whole bunch of other bullshit in the opposite direction.
Humankind … just has better inter game system synergy, and those individual systems seem better thought out, more engaging and less… cheesable, exploitable, to a great extent due to how everything meshes together.
The first few months after launch absolutely were rough, with some pretty significant bugs in specific, but often crucial scenarios… but they got ironed out, and the result is great.
Also a lot of the initial backlash was from the pollution / global warming mechanic… they quickly added an option to just turn most of its effects off, but to me the entire thing read as a bunch of people being used to massively colonizing, industrializing and war mongering and then being angry that … that has consequences.
Guess those people have trouble grasping the concept of an externality.
Oh well, they’ve all been filtered, recent steam reviews are ‘very positive.’