New Civilization game currently at a 51% rating on Steam
(store.steampowered.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (64)
sorted by:
They built an entire mainline game to steal Humankind's "your civ changes through the ages" mechanic and its literally one of the biggest reasons why people hate the game.
Like, we can dab on the retarded leaders and how fucking stupid Tubman is, but even if all of those were great the game would still be fundamentally broken, ugly, and terrible on a gameplay fundamental level.
This isn't a game missing crucial features that will be made whole in the inevitable Expansion, like 5 and 6 were. Its bad on such a central level that they will have to swallow their egos and change entire major mechanics they considered good things to make it work, and they won't do that.
its because all these map-painting games encourage the player to make his country great. thats a mindset the globalists don't want to encourage. hence all the clumsy attempts at anti-snowballing balance, "pushing playing tall as a valid playstyle", and now the whole nation-switching schtick.
While I'm OK if Wide is the optimal/meta approach, I will die on the hill that Tall should be a valid playstyle for these games. I like taking over a couple islands or a section of a content with a choke point and focusing on making my cities glorious a lot more than just conquering everyone. (And, well, if there is a later-game resource that doesn't exist in my area, I guess it's time to make a new colony to get it).
The nation-switching thing is complete garbage though. If I'm playing Civ I want an alt-history thing going, and I want to play as a particular nation not just as a numerical bonus. If all I care about is the numerical bonuses, there's much better 4x games out there (I'd highly recommend Age of Wonders 4) for that.
The concept of building tall is great, but it's really hard to execute in a way that forces the player to choose between tall vs wide.
I though MoO3 had an interesting mechanic where new colonies ran a deficit for a long while before being able to produce a surplus.
Wide play definitely becomes tedious, especially from a colonizing perspective.
If you don't continually pump out Settlers to claim every last square of the map, your AI opponents definitely will.
But most of the cities and territory you claim in the latter 2/3 of the game are irrelevant to your actual victory because it is so resource-intensive to make newer cities productive enough to matter.
For me, this reality alone tends to limit me to the smallest map types (the other is hardware performance) so that the race to colonize every last inch ends quicker.
Tbh that's why Civ has never grabbed me such as other games, and i realize I'm crossing genre here, but I've always been drawn towards small, brutally effective vs the encompassing unstoppable legion as a vision. I will without hesitation make a superstar with support before I make a well rounded and balanced team.
Yes your archers support your melee and calvary on the flanks, meanwhile I have no Frontline infantry and have only built stealth snipers.
Point being, I don't think it's actually THAT hard to balance, homm did it pretty well, the roadblock to tall in Civ imo is that you hit a production ceiling for each city where there's nothing useful left to build.
And I'm not even saying I want an non-military victory from it, I just want to build an as effective but different tall based military. Make it possible to have one awesome city, and I raze every other city I conqour.
Well this game harshly limits your ability to settle new cities to a point where Tall is almost the optimal/meta playstyle for a long chunk of it.
But it shows the problem with the Tall/Wide balance. Anything that might make Tall viable either comes by gutting Wide with harsh restrictions or will also apply to a Wide player anyway and keep the gap alive.
The other unbelievable thing is that Humankind itself was dead-in-the-water by 2021.
It's pretty unbelievable that they would copy a failed model 3 years later after being in development forever.
Or that they wouldn't change course when they saw how fast Civ influencers and serious players dropped the Amplitude IP.
Its even worse because Amplitude was already a successful "Civilization at home" company. Endless Legend is a very good game that manages to successfully turn Civ into a fantasy game that its all around pretty enjoyable. Except for the combat, we don't talk about that.
So they clearly knew how to make the game functionally, and something about the unique elements made it fail. Making it even more baffling that Firaxis thought taking one of those was a good idea.
I never played Humankind. I heard it was kind of a meh knockoff of the formula.
Did they actually steal a worse game's mechanic because they are stupid and insecure, or was it actually innovative (or at least wanted) the way that Cities Skylines replaced Sim City.
Humankind released in 2020. It had lots of hype during its pre-release phases that it was going to be a "Civ killer" by innovating on some things that Firaxis had let become stagnant over decades.
But everyone, including all the Civ streamers hungry for a new 4X IP after Civ6 was already 4 years old at that point, got bored and memoryholed it within a few months.
I'm not really sure why it bombed so badly as I never played it either. But it seemed to be a combination of the Civ switching mechanic being too generic and the same system creating irreparable balance issues.
Sounds like now would be the time for them to create a Humankind sale.
Humankind has been on sale for 15-20 bucks a few times the last Steam seasonal sales.
I considered it but ended up buying Old World instead (which I haven't tried).
Humankind is also woke as shit though. They had a tranny as the face of the dev team on their pre-launch dev streams.
The title cards for the game also literally have jogger doctors in lab coats and danger hair girlboss freedom fighters.
Its an innovative idea that everyone can see the potential in. In a way, Civ 3 having your leader "progress" every age from a caveman to a well dressed gentleman is the seed of that idea. But neither Humankind nor Civ7 actually managed to make it work in anyway that feels right.
So in this case, it feels like they arrogantly thought they could take a failed game's call to fame and use it for themselves. And ended up doing even worse. Because afaik Humankind's version was just kinda boring and not impactful enough for how important it was. Which ironically is the opposite of Civ7 which has it so impactful it ruins the game with no ability to mitigate or truly control it.
Yeah, that idea definitely works. Effectively your leader is like the old Assyrian "Gods". Each city-state had a God, and as a result, each God represented the metaphysic of a city & it's people. Your Civ leader would act in the same way, but you'd have to figure out how the personality traits of your Gods would move through time and tech.
The problem I can see is that, from a gameplay perspective, there's almost no way to balance that. Some cultures will be inferior and others will be superior based on the leaders attitudes. Otherwise, you'll have too many and they'll basically all play the same.
"Why is every multiplayer game played with Trump, Bismark, and Aethelred? Why doesn't anyone want to play as Mandela. Wait, why does Mandela get bonus points to light infantry?"
Much like Total War however, the question remains.
Who the fuck plays multiplayer? Basically no one, its a dead empty avenue on the game for a variety of reasons but it remains that way. Nothing they can do will change that fact. The people who play these games play for single player, or coop multiplayer with their friends neither of which need considerable balance and in fact would benefit from hilarious unbalances too.
Its the same forever cycle of chasing an esport scene that doesn't exist, listening to "influencers" that make 1000 videos on your game alone and become sort of brand ambassadors that legitimately mindrape the fandom with their opinions.
Which is a larger problem that I have extreme opinions on, because LTC-niggers have ruined Fire Emblem more than the Woke ever did. A grim reminder that we have more than one enemy at play.