r/HumankindTheGame • u/LucidJoshh • 1d ago
Discussion Humankind 2 - Improvements
What improvements are you looking forward to/hoping for the most? I really hope we see better diplomacy systems. Also, something like the demographics interface from Civ 5. I think it's weird you can only see how you're doing in all matters compared to the other civs once the game is over.
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u/Cangrejo-Volador 1d ago
- improved districts, more concentrated cities - no more quarter spam, More emphasis on being able to build tall, and making infraestructure actually matter. by the end of the middle Ages cities were already massive multi regional metropolis, and made building hamlets functionally just another quarter.
- Rapidly scaling building costs- the fact that razing a whole city to plop a new one in the same spot (with old buildings included) was better than dealing with building cost was very dumb.
- Better Era pacing - It just always felt like the game was rushing you along all the time, I have optimism here, seeing how some Cultures seem to be effective for multiple eras.
- War Support - This is a big one for me, and the main reason I stopped playing. The war support system entered these loops of enemies declaring wars on you, then pacing you out inmediately because you had no war support, then declaring war again almost inmediatly, rinse and repeat. No way to rise war support fast enough unless you are militarist, no way to hold on instead of forcing peace.
- Redesigned congress- following that same diplo problems... the game created these weird scenarios once the congress was online, about cultures half a world away trying to force me to change my policies. So, they have a vote to say, FORCE ME to change my policy, I refuse, ok, so then, logically THEY have to come and make me right? fine, let them come....NO, I have to sail all around the world, with the war support ticking against me or else I get auto peaced out...fucking infuriating, again, diplo was the main reason I droped Humankind.
- Extended Neolithic era - and by that I mean a better transition from nomad into agricultural, perhaphs if we manage to get a hold of a good spot we should be able to start building our "pre cities", Gobleki Tepe style? just more things to think about besides maxing pops and cornering Mamoths.
- Better balance of affinities- Just having the one bonus and skill means some affinities can snowball hard early and other can end up feeling unusable. for example, playing Merchant on early cutlures almost felt like a handicap when compared to other affinities, to the point that missing on a couple of Builder cultures ment you fell behind, and that only led to some cultures being must picks, and samey games. Honestly I think civ 7 did this part better with the atribute trees.
Man, it sounds like I hated the game, but I really dropped out out of frustration, I really like a lof of design choices, and the art, and the really cool feeling of exploring the map and building up in the early to mid game. It was after medieval things start to snowball into very frustrating systems, I really hope they turn this around, because Civ also seems to be flailing in the dark, and stumbling on a lot of the same problems Humankind had.
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u/Why_dont_we_spork 1d ago edited 1d ago
This.
I'd also add a better balance to the resources themselves. Money didn't matter enough in the early game.
City sprawl, maybe complexity and additional (visible) changes to districts, getting denser is better than continent-spanning cities we currently get.
I wouldn't mind it a little RPG-esque create a culture through the ages. People love that kind shit.
Maybe trade of resources too, produce lots of industry and sell your expertise (or science etc)
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u/Frylock_dontDM 1d ago
They need to improve the pacing of the mid/late game. I think there's a lot of room to move science to maybe a slightly different scale, so that we actually have the time to truly enjoy different eras and styles of combat.
I would love to see a change using AI to make better AI.
We really need these companies to train AI models so that we can have organic intelligent difficulty for turn based games, rather than just giving them gameplay cheats.
I would also love to see the nomad phase extended to maybe an entire era instead of being so quick, it's infinitely better than civ, but still has so much potential to offer so more gameplay influence
Also, and this is most important, LET US IMPORT AND EXPORT FOOD!!! I should be able to send food from one city to the other or purchase it on contract from other empires
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u/Solnight99 1d ago
fr, they literally call a city the "breadbasket of the empire" in one situation, but the point of a breadbasket is to give bread to other baskets.
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u/PublicLlama 1d ago
Definitely a revamp to the district system. Many be able to slit what 1 district is producing. And more game changing civs, like being able to be full communist and have that change the way you play.
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u/Devour_My_Soul 1d ago
like being able to be full communist and have that change the way you play.
yes please.
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u/Anima4 1d ago
A come back mechanic. If your first major army dies you are very behind, as armies cost a citizen, food and production. Maybe even consider what Age of Wonders 4 does with buildings and units having seperate ques from a city.
Better UI with ending wars so you dont accidentally trade the wrong city.
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u/Fey-Mood 1d ago
Better communication of information. This is a common problem with amplitude games - they have very complex systems that aren't always intuitive or even easy to see.
Diplomacy is a good example, actually - the leverage system and the way demands can be used to subtly apply and relieve pressure is actually quite clever, but how it functions is not obvious, and you don't necessarily see direct consequences of your actions so it is difficult to learn even if you are going out of your way to pay attention to it.
Resources and building modifiers are another example. There are some extremely complex bonuses being applied to cities and districts, but it's not at all easy to see in action. A screen that broke down a city's production by different sources of modifiers would do wonders on communicating how a city is actually working.
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u/Zephyr_CZ 23h ago
The civ switching is a big topic for me. In H1 the player was just chosing any new civ from a shopping list, there wasn't any deeper meaning or story behind it. Sice the civ combinations ended up being so different, and so mismatched, it often felt like 6 mini-campaigns instead of one long story of an evolving civ.
I would personally love it if your actual game decisions and actions are what defines your civ evolution - You've spent an entire age just farming? Well then you can't suddenly just click a button and become a full militaristic civ. But if during your farming era you were also focusing on manufacturing tools, then at least you can evolve to figure out how to now produce tools or war, even though you might not have the skill to actually use those weapons on a level that a previously aggressive civ would.
Basically I want a natural evolution of your civ, instead of those abrupt changes from one type of civ to a completely different one with no satisfactory reason as to WHY such a change happened.
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u/conflei_sabroso 1d ago
Mejor inteligencia de la IA, definitely
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u/Frylock_dontDM 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yea, I feel like an TBS is a perfect place for a machine learning system to shine.
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u/mamamackmusic 1d ago
Humankind isn't an rts
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u/Frylock_dontDM 1d ago
My bad TBS, Chess with extra steps and chess gets mastered by machine learning pretty solidly these days
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u/mamamackmusic 1d ago
But Chess is a fixed game with a set number of pieces that can only move in finite and predictable ways, whereas Humankind has infinite procedurally generated dynamic battlefields with dynamic numbers and types of units involved in every battle. It's a lot more complex for a machine to learn to adapt moves to than chess is.
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u/Frylock_dontDM 21h ago edited 21h ago
Depends on how you think of the system, due to the nature of the game you can break it's various systems up to be trained as compartmentalized systems.
So you could possibly train the battle AI very quickly just using battles, you could train the exploring and navigation AI as it's own plug-in, etc.
With the point we're at now, you only need to train this model once, then again for updates.
Or even better, just rent some time on a neural network as what you really need is scale for a short period to master board games like this using reinforcement on a neural network.
Rent a 1,000 GPU cluster for a few hours and then ship a model that's going to be better than most of humanity. Then just tweak the model as you update the game.
Ultimately we should be trending towards this anyway for all games as this is what most of us have always wanted, actual intelligence based difficulty, not just giving the computer cheats.
The fact we have alphaGo gives me hope.
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u/Vratislavian 1d ago
Three things.
Diplomacy. Currently, it’s very limited, and commitments are not very binding. For example, there are no consequences for breaking an alliance. It’s not possible to negotiate things like the release of a vassal as part of a surrender, etc. I hope we can strike a balance between simplicity and engagement. Introducing diplomacy like in Europa Universalis probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
Pace and management in the late game. I’m currently configuring the game so that it can be finished fairly early, because managing cities and units simply becomes boring and repetitive.
War outcomes and territorial annexations. It makes absolutely no sense and ruins the experience that one faction can take over an entire territory belonging to the other side (even if it’s an entire continent) without any serious consequences. This is extremely unrealistic and ruins the experience.
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u/Curious_Technician52 1d ago
Stop the trains from leaving their tracks.
Since everything I like to have as improvements has already been noted here.
Just stop the trains running wild in the countryside.
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u/Illustrious_Syrup_11 22h ago
Performance improvements. HK1 was horribly optimized. I was surprised how well the team solved that at Endless Legend 2. So I'm hopeful here.
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u/DryAd4543 13h ago
Religion needs to matter, diplomacy needs to matter more, alliances and vassals need to matter more
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u/Ok_Management4634 12h ago
I'd like to see some more customization of difficulty level.
Ability to grant an AI player X% of food, influence or whatever. Maybe even a way to customize it to give the AI less for beginning players.
The early version of the original game would have the AI players pillage your outposts if you didn't guard them with a scout. This was a nice game balance that prevented the human player from over expanding too fast. Now, that almost never happens. IT would be nice to have a toggle on/off for this (I am sure it annoys some players).
AI should expand it's population more aggressively. Last game I played, Humankind level, I had over 1000 population. None of the AI even had 200. I didn't wage war with any of them (they did wage war on each other)
AI in the current game will buy patronage from Independent people, but will sometimes never assimilate them. AI should assimilate them when they get 100 patronage and the 60% needed. Instead, I click on Independent people late in the game, there's over 600 patronage on them..
If a human player attacks a "friendly" independent people (Takes over their city), the rest of the friendly Independent people should treat the human as a potential enemy. There needs to be a balance on Independent people defending themselves. One patch was absurd, the IP would create 3 additional troops almost every turn if the human player had troops parked nearby. That was too much. But now, the IP are just too passive. If the human has a group of 13 troops just conquering all the IP in area, have them step up troop popluation, but in a realistic way.. Not 3 troops/turn.. maybe one every 2-3 turns, like a normal city is supposed to create (although it might be able to create a warrior or archer every turn if it's big enough).. but that's different than just randomly creating a stack of 3 units.
Main thing I want is to be able to customize the game to make it more challenging, but make it customizable so that it doesn't annoy people that don't want it harder.
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u/Ok_Management4634 12h ago
Also, it might be a good idea to have the Neolithic era be pretty "fertile" (lots of stuff to find) in turns 1-10, but then get stingier after turn 10, then have things get even more scarce every 10 turns. It will stop people from staying in the neothetic era until they get 20+ scouts. I don't play that way, but it is a cheesy loophole.
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u/eXistenZ2 10h ago
Quite a few. I loved endless legend and endless space 2 despite being a history nerd but I playtime for HK is really low in comparison
Independent people: make them more unique and worthwhile to actually add to your empire. A one region city in the midgame is pointless. Or give them some other interest stuff
combat. Please dont make the same system where movement speed suddenly doesnt matter and the attacker has all the advantage. I really liked the endless legend system (havent played enough endless legend 2 yet), but it felt very wrong units could basicly cross an entire battlefield untill they met an enemy unit
Make religion more interesting and something worth investing to. Same for diplomacy. picking up leverage from the ground? Diplomats being combat units? I really didnt enjoy that
Put more emphasis on the aspect of cultures in terms of scoring. A star in your affinity should be worth double than a regular star. If you want to keep the scoring system (which im not a fan of)
no more district spamming
and probably some i forgot
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u/sjtimmer7 1d ago
Hopefully builders, and less of that unrest or whatever with everything you build. Maybe a better warsupport system.
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u/L444ki 1d ago
I think the hybrid builder military system in humankind one is good. I hate needing to micromanage dozens of workers in the lategame, but negin able to use your idle military units to chop is nice.
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u/sjtimmer7 1d ago
I really hate building loose farms and lumber mills to not be able to build stuff in my city center.
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u/L444ki 23h ago
Not quite sure what you mean, but I do wish humankind 2 had a bit more freedom in where you can plop down districts, but still have strong synergy so in most cases you would want tp have your districts connected. Replacing districts should be cheaper than building new one and I wish we got multiple tiers of districts so you could choose to build up instead of wide.
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u/sjtimmer7 22h ago
It's mainly building stuff on tiles. Technically it's called a district, but you can build several of those, like lumbermills in forests, so you have to wait 40-50 turns to finish those. That always pisses me off. Civrev had that. 200 turns for a wall to be build.
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u/Lost_Paladin89 1d ago edited 1d ago
Three major improvements.
One. Trade. Having greater emphasis in not just raw goods, but actual industries. Wines, Perfumes, Pottery, etc.
Two. Culture. Have more consequences for our choices. We know they make great narrative events in the endless games. Having the choices create questlines as professional armies rebel or as we levy troops from the population are all great ways to shake up the game. Especially late game as the concepts of caste, class, and social order are upended by industrialization.
Three. Faith. Have it be a more reactive system. Schism and Syncretism should be things that happen based on the intersections between faith, trade, culture, and technology.