Games

[icycalm]

Turns out I never made a thread for this, so here it is. I'll start it off with the two must-watch videos.

Feature Focus: Late Game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LplhmQItsIY



The Scale of Humankind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drsS2CrIidk



More details on the late game here (actually it's the same details as the video, just in writing; watch the video instead, it's stunning):

Humankind Feature Focus 12: Late Game
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 9682892421

The above is the great news. The game sounds insane. The late-game especially takes 4X to a whole new level. The bad news however is this:

Real World Map?
https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude- ... -world-map

In short, there won't be one, and we may have to wait for the modders to rectify the situation.

This guy knows what's up: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude- ... ost-324136

If in humankind wont be real world map and real world religions its not civilization game its just some random strategic game which will definitely disappoint fans of civilization game most of us was hoping that this game will stop monopoly of the CIVILIZATION Games from Firaxis Games studio, as i bought game when it was announced first time i was hoping to try the game which will give me more fun and joy (of course by saying joy and fun means to play the game with real world map and true start location). I still hoping that developers will think about it and add to the game real world religions, true start location, more cultures and real world map, it should not be done at the beginning (on release date) it can be added as DLC to the game later.

At the end I don't think those ideas are really bad which cant be done, as I am also software developer I know that it can be added to the game if the developers want it, and it definitely attracts more players to play the game and it brings profit to the company that's why its not bad idea to think and work on it.

I have never played Civ on a random map. Never. Except a couple hours once to see how it is, and I hated it. Random maps in Civ go against the entire point of the game, they are a travesty. Every Civ game has had an Earth map, and it's very worrying that Amplitude doesn't get its importance.

Their peculiar culture-building system however does mess up the true start locations. For I sure as fuck wouldn't want to start with the Greeks in Japan. That would probably be even more immersion-breaking than starting with the Greeks on an alien planet. You see they don't give you all the cultures from the start. You unlock them through play, and you mix and match them. So that would mess with the true start locations, unless you could choose the starting cultures. So on the one hand their approach seems to solve the stupidity of Civ where you can start with the "Americans" in 4,000 BC, but on the other hand you are restricted to a handful of ancient starting cultures.

It's tough dealing with the spacetime continuum. Just ask Marty McFly. But I think it could have been handled better than both Civ and Amplitude have done, all the while recognizing the primacy of playing on an Earth map.


P.S. If there is any kind of choice, I have dibs on the Greeks in every game I play. I never play without the Greeks outside of a couple of occasions I've played with the Americans (they are too easy: they start out on a continent essentially by themselves, compared to the Greeks who are attacked from Europe, Asia and Africa from the get-go).

[icycalm]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1124300/ ... 5521728006

[icycalm]

Official Launch Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGi00HqpmS0



Funny trailer lol, watch it.

[icycalm]

I have impressions coming up, but let me say now in case I forget, this game has one of the best soundtracks ever, and certainly the best 4X soundtrack. Insomnia Mix material definitely.

[icycalm]

So our plan to play 10-player at launch didn't work out because this game is built entirely for simultaneous turns and doesn't work like Planetfall's pure turn-based mode that you can play via email notifications. Planetfall could switch between the two modes depending on whether you had all your friends online or not, but it doesn't seem like any true 4Xs are built this way. And it kinda makes sense, since 4Xes are way more complex than Planetfall, and it'd thus take a lot more work to offer both modes of play for them.

So I ended up doing a single-player run.

Humankind (9xAI Huge Endless Humankind) with icycalm 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc4qQ7qhuoo

Excuse the static noise, it's Shadow mic issues. But at least the music comes through nicely, and as I said above, it's gorgeous. One of the best soundtracks ever, for sure. Massively increases the enjoyment of being in this world. Even though after three hours my game was pretty much shot, as I was ninth in the ranking, I kinda didn't want to stop playing because of how good the music was.

As for the rest of the game...

It's definitely a 5/5 game, even though it's much inferior to Civ due to mostly pacing and scale issues that can probably be fixed by modders down the line (advanced modding tools are coming). Also no Earth map, which renders the game basically unplayable to me, but again mapmaking is coming, so that will be fixed too. Finally, the new culture system is controversial, but I like it, and even if it ends up being inferior to Civ, it was still worth trying as it definitely complexifies the game, and if they can't get it right with the first title maybe they can get it right for the sequel, or some other company can get it right. It does seem to be the future of the genre to me, even if it means I can't pick my beloved Greeks from the start—if ever. It's basically a race against your opponents for who can grab the best cultures first, and e.g. the Soviets don't appear until pretty much the end of the game. It's a brand-new approach for sure.

And yes, the game is gorgeous. I'd love to see it at 8K. Apparently it has picture-in-picture option too? Sounds nuts.

We'll have more coverage of the game on Insomnia soon, including possibly half a review from me. There's a lot to discuss and analyze. It has the potential to be the best 4X ever some years down the line, but it could also end up a nice but ultimately inferior Civ challenger like the Call to Power games from 20 years ago. We'll just have to wait and see.

As for the big CULT game, we're postponing this for when the game's development has reached certain milestones that I'll explain when I write my half-review.

[ChevRage]

Earth map spotted!

It's just a mod, but still: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ ... th.672470/

I'll check it out once I get home.

[icycalm]

Dude, look at the modder's signature. He's a developer on Age of Decadence and Colony Ship. Not the director, whom I have friended on Steam, but the director has been playing Humankind since launch, and it looks like he got his buddy to make the map. Well, his buddy has been a member of CivFanatics since 2004, so he probably needed no prodding.

At first I was confused because the pics in his OP show only part of the globe, but further down he has the proper pics.













That's the good news. The bad news however is that: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ ... t-16141982

gotta say, the map size is disappointingly small :(

It's the biggest one there is, with 150x88. While it doesn't reach the same level as the games of old, at least its bigger than then 106x66 "huge" of Civ VI :-P

That said, if the game is as moddable as the devs say, I don't see why we wouldn't be able to raise the map limit to whatever we want at some point down the line.

[icycalm]

Pretty cool idea for a mod: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ ... t-16141894

I have a mod idea, I don't know if it can be done or not, but it would fit with the Earth Map - let me put it in here:

Mod idea – Historic Culture Change


So:

One could change culture only within an approximate historic reality frame, so you cannot change from Zhou (Asian) to Celts (European), as they are „far” from each other. You can change only to cultures that are in a historically realistic “distance”.

Each culture would have a given set of possible choices for the next era culture to choose from.

Method:
Each culture would be put into regional pools: Like “African”, “Western European”, “Mediterranean”, “Middle Eastern”, “Meso-American”, etc. One culture can be in more than one pool, if needed. A culture can change only to another culture of the same pool it is in.

An example:

Egyptians (Ancient) could change to: Aksumites, Achaemenid Persians, Carthaginians – like in “African” pool.

If none of the above is possible for the player, player has to stay Egyptians, and in the next era change the Egyptians can change to medieval Umayyads or Ghanaians (again, “African pool”).

I guess it would also require some balance changes of the cultures, too…

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ ... t-16141898

we don't know the real modding capabilities of the game yet, but I'm pretty sure if it can be done that will be one of the first gameplay mod out there, I think that mod idea was posted everywhere the minute after they announced how cultures were chosen :D

so as they can't be unaware of this, I do hope they've made it moddable.

Pretty cool that all these guys have been there since 2004.

This Gedemon guy has modded Civ to take account of "Revolutions, Supply Lines, Front Lines, Resources stockpile and much more".

Gedemon's Civilization, a total overhaul project
https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/g ... oject.576/

These are my kind of people. We should try to get them into PA. Or D&D for that matter. Especially the Colony Ship devs. They like RPGs and they like Civ. That's precisely my Ultimate Edition.

[icycalm]

For lols:

Gigantic Accurate Earth Map (232 x 112)
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ ... 12.478799/

Warning: This truly is a gigantic map in size and will strain your PC. At 232 x 112 = 25984 plots, it is significantly bigger than Genghis Kai's Giant Earth Map (210 x 90 = 18900 plots) and slightly bigger than Carter's Earth Map (192 x 120 = 23040 plots). In other words, you will need a good amount of RAM to run this map!

Rather than a boast of perfect accuracy, calling my maps "Accurate Earth Maps" is simply a declaration of intention and design philosophy. Unlike many other Earth maps for Civilization IV (including the official one), mine do not feature an artificially enlarged Europe and Japan or an artificially reduced Pacific ocean. Instead, I went for as much geographical accuracy as possible, within the limitations of the game. The result are some Earth maps that, in my view, are very interesting and unique. And while they don't allow you to cram half a dozen civilizations into Europe, they make for a great game in other ways.

Because cities and the plots they occupy are in many ways the core of the game, I decided that preserving area was the most important aspect of geographical accuracy in Civilization, rather than preserving shape or distance. I used a cylindrical equal-area projection with standard parallels at 37.3 degrees north and south of the equator (sometimes known as the "Hobo-Dyer projection"). All continents and oceans are depicted with their correct areas relative to each other. Australia really is three quarters the size of Europe, Africa really is 14 times the size of Greenland, and so on.

I did a lot of research on terrain, river and natural resources placement. I used a vegetation map from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) for the biomes, and The World Ultras Homepage for a list of all the mountains with a prominence of more than 1500 meters (which in my map became mountains instead of mere hills). For resources, I used essays like Forecasting Coal Production Until 2100 by Evans and Mohr to get figures of worldwide coal reserves at the beginning of the industrial age, and then distributed that resource accordingly. I placed oases at geographically appropriate locations like Tafilalt in Morocco or (a bit of an inside joke, but accurate nonetheless) Las Vegas in the US.

I created the map using Civ 4 Map Editor and MapView 2.0. As a basis for the map, I primarily used the maps from the Natural Earth III website, which I converted to the cylindrical equal-area projection with a map projection program called Geocart 3 and overlayed one on top of the other with Adobe Photoshop Elements.

As you can see, a lot of work went into this map. I hope that you like the result. Have fun, and don't hesitate to send feedback and comments!

This image is about 4K and you still can't see the individual squares to play. I reckon with an 8K TV you might just be able to play while seeing the entire map lol. That's it: I am delaying playing Civ4 until I have a 75-inch 8K TV, and from my very first game I'll use this map. And when I beat it, I'll start over with the cavemen to sci-fi mod and beat that too. Then we'll play 100-player games (as many players as we can find) on the giant map WITH the sci-fi mod (and fill the empty slots with AIs).

It will be biblical.

The modder is almost certainly Greek. "Laskaris" is as Greek as they get.

[icycalm]

For more lols: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... d=98560373

>100% geographically accurate earth map, everything is exactly the right size
>no attention paid to balance or playability
Great map!

This is an Earth map for Civ5. The funny thing about it is everyone in the comments complaining about their countries.

ok so this mod would be epic if you would make at least one of the mountains a hill in between AZ and CA, also between CA and Nevada, also between to Colorado, like seriously you should realize that you made it so that if im in AZ i now have to drive just under if not over 2k miles just to get to LA when in real life its only 3 to 400 miles away. what were you thinking??? that ruins trying to play in america. please change that and this mod would be epic.

Spain is a maggot!!

The UK is like 5 tiles xD

yea denmark is way to small

I too have had a complaint about Greece since Civ1: they depict it like an amorphous blob, whereas the country has extremely complex and subtle contours. Granted, they couldn't get anywhere near them in Civ1, where the country is basically two squares, but by Civ4 I was expecting much better than we got. Even the Humankind modder shortchanges it. The Greek guy's ultimate map for Civ4 gets it reasonably right for the first time.

[icycalm]

Some notes on our biblical Civ4 game so people interested in it can start preparing.

1. It will be open only to people who know the game. We’re talking about a game where we’ll be passing the save file back and forth probably for a year or more. It makes no sense to come in and try to learn the game while playing. You’ll get slaughtered by the first guy next to you, even the AIs, and then he’ll have an unfair advantage over the rest of us. So the players must play at least a few dozen hours before, and the more the better. That shouldn’t be a problem if you like the game enough to join a year-long biblical war.

2. All players get dibs on their nationalities. If two or more players have the same nationality, they roll for it. Losers just pick another civ. E.g. Japan. We don’t have any Japanese.

3. Spawns are random. In SP I always play with real starting locations, but that isn’t workable in a large MP game between largely white people. We’ll all be in Europe and then whoever isn’t there will have free rein and win the game.

4. If you have friends who are interested, get them to read this. We’ll need a lot of people who love the game and have fast computers and much patience.

[icycalm]

https://twitter.com/culturevg/status/14 ... 5837080577



You should see the Wonders.

It would be better for “African cultures” if the goodwhites stopped trying to highlight them. For some things, the less said the better.

At any rate the African who plays Humankind will be thrilled. Hooray.

[icycalm]

Sounds like in a year or two the game will be ready for a huge war. Until then, we'll play Civ4 (and I'll have more news on this later this week).

https://steamcommunity.com/games/112430 ... 7486370962

What's Next for Humankind?

During Amplified, we shared a brief glimpse of the improvements planned for Humankind in the next few months. Today, we want to take a closer look at that glimpse to provide some additional context and details for some of the items on the list.

The first months after release were focused on addressing some of the biggest issues raised by our community and affecting many players. In addition to fixing many bugs reported by our players, including many causes of multiplayer desyncs and pending turns, we’ve improved map generation to ensure there are always enough strategic resources on the map, rebalanced pollution values so it no longer ends games prematurely (your industries were far more powerful than we anticipated!) and added options to customize the game’s end conditions and turn off the turn limit. We’ve also been constantly working on the AI, have done a first balancing pass on military units and a few cultures, and released a beta of the mod tools so you can experiment with adding your own content.



Of course, balancing, AI improvements, bugfixes, and game stability both in single and multiplayer are subjects we are always working on, but there are some improvements coming in the next few months that we want to highlight:

• War Support: Many players have expressed frustration with wars coming to a sudden and sometimes premature end, often denying them the gain they were aiming for. However, some people have also spoken out in support of the war resolution system. So, while we will maintain the war resolution and surrender system, we want to implement an option that allows the winner to continue pressing the war at a certain cost or risk.
• Multiplayer hotjoin: While we are constantly working to fix any causes of multiplayer desyncs we identify, there may always be cases when a game desyncs or a player disconnects. To help you get back into your games with your friends as quickly and easily as possible, we are implementing a hotjoin system.
• Immersive Empire Names: Another common point of feedback from our players was that they have trouble identifying with their own empire and keeping track of their opponents, which pulls them out of the experience. We are working on a new way to refer to empires in game that should help players immerse themselves in their games.
• Affinity Balancing: While balancing is an ongoing process, we find that the strong power imbalance between the different affinities (Builders and Scientists coming up particularly often) skews the feedback we get not only about the power of culture, but also about the game pace and many other aspects, so we will focus on rebalancing affinities first.
• Sieges and sorties: Sieges often come up in criticism of the battle system. While we have received much feedback on how the AI handles them and are working to improve that, we have also seen people raise the issue that halfway through the game, you lose access to siege equipment built on site by your sieging forces, denying you one of your options in those cases when you need or want to destroy enemy fortifications. We’re looking into ways to close this “siege gap.

We hope these improvements will make the game more fun for you, and look forward to hearing from you what you think about them.

[icycalm]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1124300/ ... ts_detail_