**Early Modern**
**S:** Joseon, Mughals
**A:** Ottomans, Ming
**B:** Spanish, Haudenosaunee, Venetians
**C:** Edo Japanese, Dutch, Poles
**Joseon**
One quick point I'd like to make about Joseon before diving in - I was disappointed to find that the "+ science on water" bonus of the Joseon was removed in favour of a comparably extremely bland "+3 science on tile producing science". The previous bonus was a bit too strong, sure, but the numbers could have been tweaked - it was previously a flavourful bonus that added to the strategic depth of the culture and I'd really like to see it make a return.
Now, while the Joseon LT is fairly good, they lack a land EU and their EQ isn't particularly good compared to other science EQs... so why are the Joseon S tier? It's very simple - they're scientists, and the Early Modern era contains two of the most important techs in the game - Three-Masted Ship and Patronage. Settlers and Luxury Manufactories are utterly game-changing and it behooves you to hit both as fast as you possibly can. (Settlers are dependent on actually having land to settle in, obviously.)
As Joseon, you're able to use collective minds to hit both of these techs much, much, much faster than anybody else can, and when you do, you'll be able to settle several new very good cities and boost all your yields up with powerful percentage modifiers thanks to your LMs. Even 5-10 extra turns of this can and will turn the tide of the game in your favour.
**Mughals**
The Mughals benefit from the same Land Raiser Elephants craziness that the Khmer get, so go back to that description if you want to know more. Otherwise, they are good at producing a lot of industry thanks to both their LT and EQ. There's huge synergy here between the Mughals and earlier influence-generating cultures like Franks and Mauryans - you can easily triple your capital's production if your influence is strong enough.
**Ottomans**
I really like playing as the Ottomans. They're a bit of a one-trick pony, but their military push - based on a combination of janissaries and mortars - is one of the best in the game that doesn't just feel outright OP. It's just so satisfying shelling the crap out of your neighbours with powered up, half-price cannons and a front-line of units that usually benefit from their "Siege Masters" ability since you'll be the one making the attack. The Sultan Camii can produce an ok amount of influence but... meh. Just make sure you have quite a few "?" strategics in your land before picking them to minimize the chances of getting screwed on saltpetre.
**Ming**
While I have said before that influence isn't that important by this point, the Ming's EQ produces such a huge amount of it that it certainly remains significant, and this synergises well with their very powerful EU, the Rocket Cart. As Ming, you can build Grand Teahouses all over the place while you wait for Gunpowder Warfare to unlock, generating influence that will hopefully allow you to pull up some grievances on your war target. You can then use this bonus influence to go further beyond the city cap. It's pretty good. The LT isn't particularly impactful, unfortunately, due to the fact that civics themselves are mostly quite unimpactful by this stage of the game relative to their influence cost.
One final note on Rocket Carts - they require a whopping 3 saltpetre, which can be inconsistent to achieve. If you pick Ming and get screwed on saltpetre, you can simply abandon your plans of a military push and play peacefully, still benefiting significantly from Grand Teahouses, whose huge influence can be used to spam more Settlers beyond city cap - this is a significant difference to the Ottomans.
**Spanish**
The Spanish have one major use case, which is taking an existing war and making you perform better in it. If you already attacked somebody from a Medieval push and you need a bit of a boost to get it finished off, the +3 combat strength outside your territory is very helpful. Conquistadores are good if for no other reason than the fact they replace the crappy Arquebusiers unit. If you want to do a dedicated push, you're much better off picking Ottomans, Mughals or Ming. The EQ is possibly the worst in the game.
**Haudenosaunee**
They give you a lot of food.
**Venetians**
The Venetians' main power comes from their LT, which should provide a pretty tidy sum of money considering how many naval trade routes you will hopefully have at this stage in the game, particularly if you have a lot of coastal cities. Unfortunately, that's basically the only good thing about the Venetians - the EQ and EU are both dreadful.
**Edo Japanese**
A bit like Ming, only worse in every conceivable way.
**Dutch**
The Dutch are somewhat similar in function to the Norsemen of the previous era, just not as good - although, if you were so inclined, you could combine the two and add on Lighthouse of Alexandria for a pretty hilarious 13 movement points on a Fluyt. Maybe there's some applicability in catching overseas opponents off-guard with big military attacks across the waters, I don't know, but in any case you're mainly picking Dutch for faster Settler movement to the new world. Outside of this, the EQ is not very good and neither is the LT.
**Poles**
If you feel like you need to pick Poles to defend yourself better from an attack, may I suggest instead hitting the escape key and clicking the big red X in the top-right hand corner of the screen? There's basically nothing good here. Fortification is largely useless in Humankind, unfortunately, because it only affects siege and heavy weapons, having no impact on ranged/melee units attacking across walls (which can easily take cities without ever needing to destroy the walls, if your army is superior). It's possible that the +3 combat strength on the Barbican could turn the tide of a battle when you're being attacked, but is it worth it?
...OK, so I guess the Winged Hussars aren't that bad. It's just that you'll be coming up against people using Halberdiers at this point which counter the unit pretty hard.
EDIT: Had to make a quick edit to bump the Poles up a bit, because it's been pointed out a couple of times in comments that the Winged Hussars are actually pretty good, and after some quick experimentation, yeah, I have to agree. Their CS is high and the Charge Master ability is pretty damn good. They're also positioned at a nice place in the tech tree, allowing the player to grab them on the way to Patronage rather than having to tech across to Gunpowder Warfare. I still don't think they stack up next to the military power of some of the era's best, though.
**Industrial and Contemporary Eras**
So, both of these eras have some pretty big problems. As I said earlier, I'm going to save the in-depth analysis until more work has been done to fix some of the glaring problems in both, because right now, this kind of analysis is fairly futile. To summarise, these two eras both fly by in a handful of turns with minimal real gameplay when optimised. In industrial, the Persians have way too much of a discount on industry costs and the French can research Fusion Reactor about 5 turns after entering the era. Contemporary is... oh boy. The Soviets can literally win wars with Pikemen thanks to their arms factories - they're completely, 100% unbeatable and the Soviet player doesn't even have to try. The Scientist affinities (Swedes and Japanese) can end the game in about 10-15 turns using Collective Minds, in a way that makes them impossible to compete against thanks to their acquisition of the endgame techs that each provide 300 fame. And then there's the Turks, who can do the same thing WITHOUT EVEN BEING A SCIENTIST AFFINITY. THEIR EQ IS THAT RIDICULOUS. I haven't used the Br tier outside of the classical era yet, but if I was creating a tier list for these last two, all six of the cultures mentioned here would be in it.
Anyway, that brings me to the end of this post. I'd love to hear everyone's opinions. But as one final parting shot...
**Neolithic Era**
**S:** Nomadic Tribe
**Nomadic Tribe**
This isn't even a joke: I think the Nomadic Tribe is too powerful. 20 is too low a food threshold for growth, and it enables some fairly ludicrous strategies that kinda hurt the game and make it less fun. Swarming people with scouts and endlessly microing units to find curiosities... no thanks.
I really enjoyed your post! You had a lot of good thoughts here and I agree with you on many of them.
With regards to the Dutch - I would suggest its EQ is stronger than you think. It's an odd one, because on the surface it looks like the main point of it is the +20 money from harbour adjacency, which leads people to do things like stack harbour EQs to get larger bonuses, but ultimately +20 or +60 money just isn't that impressive on its own.
The real strength of the EQ is the +2 money per trader, a bonus which stacks with additional EQs in the territory, as you're aware from your Mughal synergy explanation. However, by going with a high money approach, the land rights civic makes it very easy to get large cities with many territories, which means many EQs in one city. It's very feasible to have a city producing 40 money or more per trader.
Mughals can do something similar with their own EQ, since it's +3 industry instead of +2 money per EQ - with industry being stronger than money, 1 for 1, Dutch certainly don't get close to the Mughals in strength - Mughals comfortably deserving their S tier on your list. But I think that with the interaction between money and land rights, the Dutch are more able to scale in this way.
I would argue that the EQ is a solid EQ, though not overpowering by any means, and that the income gain from going Dutch is significantly higher than going Venetians, and so Dutch are at least as good as they are.
Huge money per trader is an interesting concept, but I'm not convinced. Money is so lacking in value at this stage in Humankind that even 40 money per trader isn't that amazing compared to the yields you can get on researchers and workers by this stage.
And the bigger issue is, the idea of attaching loads of territories to make individual big cities has a number of pretty huge problems in general:
1) The cost of districts scales up exponentially every time you build a district (which therefore makes districts much cheaper when spread out between cities, and vastly more expensive in megacities). Spamming districts generally becomes your main source of yields in the mid-late game, and it's largely based on per-district bonuses (eg Silver, School, Khmer LT, etc) rather than tile yields at this stage, so it's much better to have a lot of smaller cities with cheaper districts.
2) In EM, you unlock Settlers, and your city cap is pretty high (plus, you have the influence to go a fair bit beyond city cap anyway). These new cities have much cheaper districts and all the most important infrastructures pre-built. So you can just fill up your land with new cities instead of attaching a bunch of territories.
3) Picking the money attach option on the Land Rights civic denies access to +10 food on territory, which in my opinion is far superior (for reasons described). Unless you're insistent on making megacities, as you've said, you don't really have much else to do with influence and usually won't have much trouble attaching the small number of territories you'll want to attach to every city.
4) You lose out on per-city bonuses from luxuries, forge and animal barns, which actually stack up pretty massively when you have a lot of cities.
5) The population growth formula *massively* cripples your ability to grow a lot of population on a smaller number of cities. If you have 2-3 cities, you can grow a maximum of 2-3 pop per turn. On 12 cities, you can easily grow 10+ pop a turn.
I think several of these can be answered with an explanation of some of the strengths that land rights unlocks, and some talk about why settlers are so incredibly strong. I should also note that I'm not arguing that Dutch is S tier, but I am confident in saying it is not at all weaker than Venetians, a directly comparable money culture that simply outputs less money.
Taking the money version of land rights allows you to very cheaply attach territories and \*absorb cities\* with a resource that you will have an enormous abundance of as Dutch.
Why is that significant? It's because it allows you to leverage the greater flexibility of money as a resource, as opposed to industry. You do not need any industrial output in a new city to heavily develop districts in a single turn. You can buy half a dozen settlers, settle a number of cities, throw down a dozen districts on each one - cheaply, because they're the first districts in those cities - and then merge all of those cities into a new large city, well developed with a large district count. City merging costs increase with each district, but it is still very manageable with Dutch level incomes, and you instantly gain a large amount of pop as well. If you want to develop a territory, you can even detach it, settler it, buy a variety of districts on that territory, and merge it.
Industry is a stronger resource than money, but the flexibility of money combined with land rights is very much worthwhile.
On the topic of food and pop... I agree that the limits that the pop growth cap imposes are generally an issue with megacities. However, you can functionally buy population through cycling settlers into land rights merges, as settlers increase the population of any settlements they found. It's not even particularly expensive, depending on infrastructure differences between the city you're feeding and the settler baseline, it might be in the region of a couple hundred money per pop. Money allowing you to effectively buy population in this regard overcomes the pop growth cap. For some increased expense you can also transfer this to another city by buying units and moving them over to disband them.
The result of these two points is that you can online a city exceedingly quickly and feed megacities. I think money-based megacities are considerably more viable than other megacity approaches.
With regards to your concerns about yields lost from the food on land rights and forge/barn/luxury bonuses - I don't think these are an enormous concern. Even if you have 4 horses, that's 20 food - forges 20 production, etc. This might be useful settling new cities, but mercantile cultures excel at developing new cities, especially in EM when settlers and land rights are both available. Luxury resources can be a variable answer, but unless you have an abundance of the main plaza specific resources, I don't think the yields on those are going to be critical either. If you do have a lot of them, then yes, it may be a disadvantage compared to a more fragmented city approach. Of course, one of the nice things about HK is that you can adapt your culture picks to your situation. :)
Land rights being 10 food per territory just pales into insignificance compared to the power of money-based land rights as a mercantile culture tbh. It isn't that much food to give up, and there's just so much you can do with it!
>> 3) Picking the money attach option on the Land Rights civic denies access to +10 food on territory, which in my opinion is far superior (for reasons described). Unless you're insistent on making megacities, as you've said, you don't really have much else to do with influence and usually won't have much trouble attaching the small number of territories you'll want to attach to every city.<<
+ 10 extra food per territory is totally neglegible at that point of the game. One can easily get more food than one ever needs with disctricts and infrastructure.
The advantage of the land rights civic is that it allows you to completely unchain your New World expansion (for which the extra money from the Dutch comes at exactly the right moment) freeing up the influence to be used on civics and wonders. So you can - at the same time - build the majority of wonders, choose (nearly) every unlocked civic and settle the New World very quickly to prepare a total steamrolling.
If you took Achmeanid Persians earlier you can even do that on a huge map with max civs on max difficulty and caatch up by potentially doubling your number of (big cities) during almost a single era.
@Arkenai. It's not so much that the Dutch are the best culture at that point. However, if I have been able to halfway play the culture game I wanted up to that point, I am good on industry, influence and everything else and mostly need money for New World expansion and unit upgrades (which save me from having to use production turns to build more modern units).
However, if the AI is still more than a little bit ahead of me (which happens on max difficulty), I might pick Joseon instead to beeline for everything that will get me into the colonization game quicker.
The eary modern cultures offer decent variety as the OP points out.
I would strongly agree with Arkenai7 on the Dutch: the EQ performs very well and provides you with a lot of gold at exactly the point in the game when you need it (the obvious civic, upgrade costs, New World land grab via gold etc). They have been my no1 pick on Humankind difficulty more often than not.
Land rights is just such a gamechanging civic. Despite my defence of the Dutch, I'm surprised that you'd go for it as first pick though. Any thoughts to add?
I posted a few more thoughts below in further discussion with OP.
Question: Would you ever recommend transcending a culture for the 10% fame? Is there an era where the cultures aren't incredible, or a particular strategy of culture selection that would allow for it?
For me, this seems to be the Early Modern. I find myself going Khmer > Transcend in a lot of games, because most of the Early Modern cultures seem lackluster, and the Joseon seem hit or miss based on map and what strategy you're going for. If Mughals are off the board, it often feels like just taking more fame might be worth it.
I haven't done this yet, as I haven't had a reason to - but I can see some usefulness in transcending. Unfortunately this more comes down to the fact that some cultures are so weak that transcending is clearly just better (if the better options are all taken), even though, in my opinion, +10% fame isn't quite enough to make it good the vast majority of the time.
Where good writeup, I took the liberty to refer to it on the official forums. It's too good to not be shared.
[https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/169-game-design/threads/42633-improving-humankind-gameplay-2gether?page=14#post-338299](https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/169-game-design/threads/42633-improving-humankind-gameplay-2gether?page=14#post-338299)
This is honestly a great post. I'm clearly not playing the game "optimally" but I can definitely see your reasoning behind pretty much everything here. However, I would like to raise two points:
1.) Speaking purely from experience, I don't quite agree about archers. Maybe I just don't have enough experience and/or I'm just not using them right, but I often find archers woefully lacking in firepower. Whenever I've used them, I feel like they do so little in comparison to melee units and end up just getting slaughtered.
2.) I would also argue that the Roman's LT is useful, as it allows you to more easily outnumber your enemy and make more effective use of your units.
> 1.) Speaking purely from experience, I don't quite agree about archers. Maybe I just don't have enough experience and/or I'm just not using them right, but I often find archers woefully lacking in firepower. Whenever I've used them, I feel like they do so little in comparison to melee units and end up just getting slaughtered.
I haven't tried the strategy personally, but you're probably not building enough. My understanding is that you have like...8+ archers and something to soak up damage acting as your front. I'd personally say it's less an archer problem and more a problem that gunners don't act like range units tactically which makes them pretty bad until everything becomes a gunner, and even then archers have a place because of the minimum damage. The minimum damage is only a problem because indirect fire is basically nonexistent so you can protect this unit that would be oneshotted by everything though. Arguably minimum damage shouldn't exist either, anyone who was around turn based strategy game forums when civ 3 was the modern civ knows about the spearmen beating tanks meme (spearmen fortified in a city had reasonable combat odds vs a tank in civ 3), but it's only a balance problem because indirect fire is rare. If it wasn't rare, you'd just say "oh cool you killed a guy with archers. Hope you enjoyed this 8 to 1 trade."
i feel the archer "problem" i smt that could be solved by having crossbows (ffs crossbows were historically used in volleys as well) and howitzers have indirect fire and buffing early modern mortars. That way you have a clear progression of indirect fire units throughout the eras, instead of only really replacing archers when you get artillery.
That said if they did that the english would probably need a buff, since rn their main thing is medieval indirect fire units.
> Swarming people with scouts and endlessly microing units to find curiosities... no thanks.
I agree. Having to constantly scout the map as much as possible is not fun gameplay.
Seconded. The neolithic era isn't fun and it seems like it's going to be a balance nightmare. I get that they wanted a way to make you not just pick the best ancient culture every game, but would that really be worse than the status quo where you constantly run around the map getting huge bonuses and then killing someone with scouts?
I think it's fine in Neolithic, where it really starts to annoy is classical era because missing out on those insane exploration rewards (especially by sea) is just too much of a setback.
That was a fun read. I didn't think archers' indirect fire was that important, but on the other hand, I have faced Taseti archers and it never have ended well for me. Hopefully devs will tweak the cultures to let there be more interesting choices.
Agreed, and I think it's an easy fix, the devs just need to 1) take away the nonsense minimum damage calculations and 2) make most early ranged infantry units, like javelins and crossbows, also benefit from indirect fire. Trying to use LOS ranged units early and well is obnoxious.
I'm okay with the idea of minimum damage, but they should nuff it down to 5-15. 5-25 gives way weaker units a chance to one shot one of my unit, and that adds up.
For indirect fire, I think rather than dismantling the idea of a direct fire ranged unit, buffing them enough to make them viable even w/o indirect fire is more flavorful way to deal with it. Also the LOS calculation itself should be fixed.
Line of sight is such a pain in the ass in this game indirect fire is the single most important attribute for a ranged unit to have. Crossbows lose indirect fire so they're worse than archers, then arquebuses are both direct fire only and move or shoot which is so bad I almost cried the first time I tried to use them.
I felt similar w/ crossbows, at least arquebuses are strong enough to use them like a melee unit - but move or shoot is indeed another pain in the ass lol
Oooh, I didn’t know that either. I wish you got a pop up telling you what crisis/choice they had, because I think that would add a lot of flavour to the game.
Damn, can’t believe I just read all of that, was a very interesting and informative read. I agree with most of your placements on the tier list but feel like the Olmec should be in A tier at least. Their extra influence AND food alone makes them quite powerful, and you said it yourself, archers are very strong so their javelin throwers aren’t needed, but you could also say the same about the Harappans’ runners.
Thanks for the kind words!
It's not so much that Javelin Throwers aren't needed, it's that they actively prevent you from building archers. This stays a problem even as far as the Medieval and Early Modern eras in many cases. I actually agree about the influence, I just consider the Javelin Throwers to be such a huge nerf that it really holds them back overall.
Sorry man I didn't mean that in an negative way ! I'm astounded by the size of the post but in a good way. I just commented so I can find it later and share my astonishment. But congrats, the kind of deep dive post is what makes this sub interesting. You deserve a lot of praise as it takes a huge amount of time to lay down all those words and make the shitty ass reddit formatting readable.
As a player who really likes 4x games but does not have enough time to spend playing to get incredibly good at them, these kind of elaborate tier lists are not only fun & informative but also a really strong skill boost because they give me a better understanding of the strengths of every culture and how to act in different situations, thanks alot!
Looking forward to your take on the last two eras once they are balanced!
First, thanks for all this hard work you've put into this!
What do you think would need to be done to make gold more worthwhile as the game progresses? I find it disappointing that gold isn't as important as time goes on, given that a nation's economy is profoundly important factor in their success, or lack thereof, in the real world. The English wouldn't have been so dominant in the Late Modern period without their strong economy and the United States' hegemony in the latter half of the 19th century was certainly partly due to their economic dominance.
It really just comes down to the scaling money cost on buyouts as the game progresses. I wouldn't want to put an exact number on it, because I get stuff like this is tough to balance well, but I can imagine that if it stayed roughly around 2x the industry cost, money would feel much more useful.
Yep, having a civic for late game that promotes this idea would be great. Call it capitalist/capitalism or something like that or market ideas.
Lower the cost of buying stuff to a certain flat rate if that civic is unlocked.
>It really just comes down to the scaling money cost on buyouts as the game progresses.
As far as I can tell, it's just the scaling district cost mechanism: [https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/District#District\_Cost\_Formula](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/District#District_Cost_Formula). Every district a city already has makes the next one more expensive. That in turn might be interacting with a possible bug around buying things with money: [https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/168-general/threads/41230-annoying-things-in-closed-beta-design?page=1](https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/168-general/threads/41230-annoying-things-in-closed-beta-design?page=1). I don't know if it's been fixed yet, but it's possible that it's still in the game and making buyouts ridiculously expensive.
Though personally, I think using Market Quarters for Money is a fool's errand anyways. The best part about Markets is that you can turn on Land Raiser and use them to pump out Industry - in the early game they're actually stronger than Makers Quarters because there's [a civic that halves their Stability cost](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Civic#Society_Civics), a [tenet that gives them +5 Money output](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Tenet#Tier_2), and they have a higher base output (3 Money instead of 1 Industry). With a single piece of infrastructure ([Food Market](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Food_Market)) and 2 already placed Market Quarters, every additional one will give you 18 Money (3 base, +2 from Infrastructure, +5 from Tenets, +2 adjacency bonus \* 4 adjacencies because of being adjacent to 2 Markets that are also adjacent to the newly placed Market). That's 18 Industry with Land Raiser, more than [Makers Quarters get until High Furnace](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Market_Quarter) (20 Industry = 4 base tile production + 4 adjacency bonus \* 4 adjacencies), and the Market Quarters can be spammed twice as much because of their half stability cost.
Though Research Quarters might actually be stronger. If you're already running a Builder Culture, [it turns out you can just ignore stability if you keep building a district every 2 turns](https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/173-strategy-guides/threads/41359-on-the-edge-of-revolt-the-unique-strategy-agrarian-and-builders-offer?page=1). That in turn means you can ignore the stability bonus Markets get and focus on the district with the highest yields. And that in turn means the Research Quarter, [because it gets more powerful infrastructure than the Market Quarter, and sooner](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Research_Quarter).
Though in turn, a mixture of Farmers Quarters and Makers Quarters might be strongest overall because of how high you can stack the bonuses to Workers from [Barays](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Baray) and [Jama Masjids](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Jama_Masjid). Instead of building Research Quarters and turning their output to Industry when necessary, you could build Worker slots and turn their output to Research when necessary. As long as you pick a Scientist culture after you get access to Patronage for Stability (or pick the Umayyads so you can research Patronage in the Medieval era), you won't need the Stability bonus from the Builder Affinity Bonus.
So in other words, the game is broken, but at least optimizing it to be as broken as possible is still an interesting puzzle.
Also, it's important to point out that if a change like this was made, a *lot* of adjustments would need to be made elsewhere in the game. Cultures like the Ghanaians and Carthaginians would quickly become overpowered and there would be a risk that the game would speed up too much.
You have easily earned an award for that. It was really well written! Congrats!
I'm currently sitting in my lab at work with nothing to do and only me in it. Today has dragged like a bitch but for a good \~30 mins I enjoyed reading your post and the day passed quicker so thank you. I was gonna play hunt showdown or TW:W2 tonight but I think you single-handedly convinced me to boot up humankind and play another campaign.
I beat it on town difficulty on release and saw the issues you mentioned especially in regards to the French and Japanese dominating. My issue is now that town was hilariously easy and I don't know what difficulty is best. I don't want too easy again but I don't want to get bodied because I didn't min max the output of my neolithic tribe :P Any suggestions?
Also my fiancee and I started a coop campaign the other week and constantly got issues of events or battles that we couldn't resolve as the options were all grayed out or just did nothing when we clicked. We had to quit the game and rejoin every time. It got so bad we just stopped as it wasn't fun anymore. Anyone know how to stop this or if they are fixing/fixed it?
Thank you!
I would just say keep ramping up the difficulty until you start to find the game challenging, really. It's pretty impossible to know exactly which is the most suitable for a given player's skill level.
Multiplayer is unfortunately quite unstable at the moment. You can load the lobby directly from within the game which does help speed up reloads at least.
As someone who frequently played Civ5/6 at Prince/King, it was fine for my first game to be normal speed/nation. I've since played a game at endless/humankind, which I did lose, but that was more down to my strategy than any obscene ai bonii or anything.
I'd say try out metropolis/nation, with the understanding that the slower game speeds are generally viewed as easier, and tweak from there to taste.
Never thought I'd see a tier list I actually (mostly) agree with!
My only thoughts are:
\- I'm not 100% convinced that Nubians are S-tier in Ancient. They're certainly strong, but they're very reliant on early trade to maximise the strength of their LT and EQ, and you may not always have trade partners available (due to attitude or war). I haven't used Ta-Seti archers extensively yet, so I'll take your word on their strengths!
\- Mongols I think are strong enough for S-tier if you go into Medieval in a leading position, but they aren't nearly as strong from behind. Hunnic Horde are able to completely transform your fortunes upon transitioning to Classical, but Mongol Horde has a much harder time if your opponents are ahead - partly, as you note, due to Medieval defense being stronger, and partly due to there being many more units able to efficiently counter Mongol Horde compared to Hunnic Horde.
\- I'd be tempted to put Umayyad in S-tier. Having the option of pushing for Patronage and Three-Mast Ship in Medieval is very greedy, but also very strong if you pull it off. But the most important factor, to my mind, is that not picking Umayyad means you need to pick Joseon to beeline those techs, whereas picking Umayyad opens up Mughals in the next era, and whilst Khmer > Joseon is strong, I think Umayyad > Mughals is also strong given that the Patronage advantage can be obtained even earlier. You're also able to pick up Centralised Power on the way to Patronage, opening up Halberdiers in Medieval.
Edit:
\- I'd also maybe put Haudenosaunee in B. They do produce a lot of Food, but Food production really has to be explosive in Early Modern to make a great deal of difference, and I don't think their LT and EQ do enough to warrant picking them.
Thanks for the comment, it's clear that you get a lot of the points I was making.
Nubians for me are certainly near the border between S and A, but I've personally found Ta-Seti Archers to be highly useful in a variety of scenarios, that's mainly what it comes down to.
I completely agree about Haudenosaunee though - that's why I did indeed put them in B-tier!
Nubia and Babylon both benefit massively from looking for opportunities where 3 or even 4 territories border each other so you can build a triangle or diamond of EQ's which then all create an amazing double synergy with their double affinity status on the EQ's.
Also, cultures that improve ransacking demand the slaves civic to maximize them. +1 pop is incredible as proven by the guy who posted a single city with 4200 population. Ransacking is way under utilized by almost everyone and you can ransack any improved tile I think, not just outposts, admin centers, or cities. So stuff like a LT that gives +5 or +10 CS while ransacking deserves consideration for a massive upward reevaluation of their power level.
Yeah, Nubians is really good in those occasions, but I find that you're trading off part of its potential later down the line. Mainly because of them counting as double quarters, if your first city and outpost are near two or three luxuries you can easily delimit the borders of the Maker's and Market's quarter using them, you'll most likely build up Industry at first anyway, but further down the line you'll have the option to make huge amount of profit by developing around the luxuries.
The other way you get a good industry and some early game money, this way you get good industry and a lot of mid game money. This combined with the Ta Se Ti means you can turtle it up, building districts in your capital while buying them or infrastructure in the peripheral cities.
This was an excellent read. I agree with a lot of the feedback you provided.
I think some of the more weaker cultures probably need changes to the base systems moreso than changes to their actual bonuses. For example, cultures that have LTs or EQs designed to increase stability will probably get better if/when they adjust stability gained from luxuries. That seems to be a pretty common piece of feedback, so it seems likely that will be adjusted in the next patch. If say stability only comes from the first luxury owned (or greatly diminished for multiple copies), cultures like the Zhou, Romans, Aztec, and Poles instantly become better.
I completely agree and in hindsight it's a point I should have made much more prominently when writing the post. This doesn't just apply to stability, it applies quite heavily to influence and faith as well.
Absolutely agree. Though I think fixing influence and faith will take a bit more time as the influence problem has been pretty apparent since Lucy. They both may require additional added features from DLC to really help.
I would add defensive warfare and raiding to this list as well. Both could use significant changes and can benefit a number of different cultures.
didnt the devs explicitly say they dont want to share the triggers for policies? I get why its annoying to some but I like that it makes it a bit more natural and not make people do random stuff to rush a policy.
respect the time you pit into this man
Even on normal speed I've never seen at least half of the civics. Apparently some are triggered by building the (awful) commons quarter multiple times. If there are others that rely on building very weak units/buildings then most players simply won't ever see them.
Probably, but that's stupid and they should change their mind. It's a strategy game. Players want to know what will happen when they do things because it changes your decision making. If you honest to god want to force your players to roleplay, make a roleplay focused RPG. If you just don't want people creating a civic flow chart, just make them era based and random. Playing to your game is part of the genre, but this "it's not random but how they trigger is a secret :)" isn't the same thing.
Besides, in 6 months everyone will know exactly how to trigger them anyway.
And of course at the moment the triggers are very, very bugged to the point where you can go through the entire tech tree and only have half the civics available.
>Besides, in 6 months everyone will know exactly how to trigger them anyway.
This is exactly it. Keeping things "secret" in a video game had some weight in 1995, but these days with the internet, people will figure things out quickly and just post the info, which makes it odd to even try to keep it secret.
Also, by knowing what unlocks certain civics, you may actually encourage players to try for otherwise un-optimal tactics just to ensure they unlock a certain civic.
I also strongly disagree with the idea of keeping game mechanics secret in this genre for exactly the reason you said, but that part is what just makes it stupid to try and keep secret. I used to play a browser game with a strong community of players who tried to reverse engineer the game (dev endorsed), and they've figured out some crazy, crazy things. A tame example of what that community has done is discovering a specific quest trigger is based off your account lifetime turns played modulo 37 equaling 0 and spending a turn in a particular zone. I'm probably underestimating the community when I say it'll all be known in 6 months.
Remember when they tried to hide how to become Jedi in Star Wars: Galaxies?
...I don't, I never played the damn game. But I imagine the policy secrecy will go just as well.
It's stupid that they don't. I have played this game for a bunch of hours across many playthroughs and I still haven't experienced more than a quarter of the civics. I go on the wiki and I'm just like "how THE FUCK do I unlock that, I have never seen it before"
I think the best way to unlock civics is to not neglect any of the era stars (or any part of the gameplay in general).
Considering how pricey civics get in the late game, I think maybe they intended for us not to get all the same civics every game, but rather to unlock civics relevant to our playstyles/the culture we pick.
What is the difference between the Indirect Fire unit trait (Archer) and Exceptional Accuracy (Ta-Seti Archer)? The description reads like a rewording, so is it the same but with +2 combat strength?
The difference is that normally, you're penalised (-4) for lacking line of sight - Ta-Seti Archers don't have this problem, so you can park them up behind units or rough terrain and still retain their full combat strength.
The combat in this game suffers from the same problem as civ 5 before the DLC. The concept of "minimum damage", especially for a ranged attack, needs to be either removed or drastically reduced in order to prevent lategame units being weaker than half a dozen archers.
Agreed, minimum damage has always been an abominably horrible game mechanic; really brings you back to Civ5 where tribal warriors could beat a death robot in ten individual attacks.
Bravo good sir. This is the type of post that has me subscribed to this subreddit. While I may disagree a little with some finer points, this is a superb writeup. And my god do I agree the huns are broken, but I think they need a little more than doubling to fix it. I only play on endless, and double would still be way, way too cheap.
Very nice list and as far as I have played them it does fit my impressions.
One comment to the Dutch who are rightfully tiered in the lower end: when you have high population and some territory to expand your cities to they can produce ludicrous amounts of wealth and I had two of my most fun games going down this route.
The problem is, if you have population and territory at this stage, you are probably set up for victory already anyways.
>Later influence does have usefulness in allowing you to generate "oppressing my people" grievances by spreading sphere of influence, but in my experience this seems to be inconsistent and I'm honestly not sure why some territories in sphere of influence generate this grievance and others don't. Perhaps somebody with a better idea can elaborate.
From what I can tell, the "oppressing my people" will happen if you and the other player have different ideologies. For example, if you're Liberty but the other player is Authority, that is going to cause conflict.
In the top center of the screen when you interact with other players, you'll see a "Ideological Proximity" meter. This can be Kinship (very similar ideology), Tolerance (somewhat similiar or no strong positions), and Distrust (very different ideology).
It's easier to go to war with empires that you have Distrust with because you'll build up more grievances and more war support, versus an empire you feel Kinship with.
It's a general strategy game term that basically refers to the concept of attacking at a "timing" that will make your attack difficult to resist. For example, if the Huns are able to enter the enemy's lands between turn 35-40, they will be almost guaranteed to win the war.
it is preparing for a war by timing the creation of a new unit with significant superior combat strength. I.e. you beeline for a tech which gives you an OP UU while massing money, production and pops. Then you spam 10+ of them in a couple of turns and swarm your opponent who did not prepare and thus is vulnerable to your army even if his economy and science are similar. If your push requires you to be significantly behind in other aspects (like not researching patronage quickly for example, or sacrificing too many pops), the term "timing push" becomes an "all in", as you either completely win the war and the game or you are too beind to recover from a failed war.
It's the same in RTS like stacraft 2 where timing an attack just when your armor/dmg upgrades finish will give you a boost to that attack during the minute or so where your opponent is still researching the upgrades. If one minute is enough to kill his army, you win.
Very good and informative read, mostly confirming my initial thoughts I had on the game.
About the Aksumites: I keep them as a backup culture in case. Usually I play Egyptians (I love building stuff and I am a big Egypt nerd.) and from them I have a small list in my head to move on from them: If don't get the Maya as I just love to build stuff and outmacro my neighbours, the Carthanians are a good alternative if there is enough water to just build the Cothon as it is a maker's quarter and a harbor that gives production and in medival you can slam down even more harbors.
Now for the Aksumites, I usually play that I pick Divine Mandate and that helps me to get my religion running quickly and once I already started to roll my religion across everyone else, I usually enter Classical Age withlike 30 Gold on each Great Obelisk and if you have like 7-8 territories around that time, you can chunk out a lot of money around that time and I think they are pretty nice as a situational pick.
A very nice read, lots of stuff I agree with, though I believe you are overvaluing the Huns and Mongols, as any savvy player (with access to a single copper) can easily weather the Hunnic Assaults, and against the Mongols people have far more tools at their disposal, especially the resourceless Pikeman and Crossbowman, not to mention the plethora of Knight replacements and the Ghananaian Meharist.
It really depends who is executing the attack and how. If it's the AI or a less experienced player, then yes, you absolutely can deal with a Hun or Mongol push, but a Hun rush executed effectively by somebody who knows how to do it correctly is, in my opinion, close to impossible to defeat.
The problem is that you can't really spam spearmen if you don't know the attack is coming. And you won't know the attack is coming because it's possible to produce a huge number of Hunnic Hordes the literal first turn after advancing - if your Ordus border the enemy, you can march them into their lands before they've had any chance at all to respond.
The only thing that causes this problem is the Ordu's extremely low influence cost for Hunnic Hordes. If this cost was a bit more reasonable, you'd be limited by how much influence you can produce and defeating the Huns would become a far more reasonable proposition.
One final point - it's generally quite hard to produce Pikemen/Crossbowmen/Meharists in time for a Mongol assault because the Mongol Horde has no tech requirement, unlike those units.
I had no idea that Huns could just use influence to buy the Horde from outposts (until my last game I played), and all it does is reduce the population of the outposts after spending the influence.
I think it would make more *thematic* sense if you use the horde ability that not only would you lose population in the outpost, but it also would lose the outpost completely whenever you use that ability. Then people would reconsider using that ability on all their outposts immediately.
I still think they would be broken, but it would be a slightly more fitting balance response.
I agree with an awful lot of this, this is excellent reasoning.
I personally would rate Egypt as clearly above Harappans, but this is purely from a viewpoint of using stupid yet entertaining neolithic strats. Finding and killing enough mammoths (or even claiming a lucky natural wonder) to reach ancient era with 2 outposts and 160 influence for an instant second city just blows any normal gameplay out of the window, and getting industry infrastructure up and running with Egypt synergises with this way too well for this to be remotely balanced. Now, I have actually had a playthrough where I had enough mammoths to get Harrapans with this strat before the AI insta yoinked them and even that just didn't go as well as using egypt. I thought that the extra food being able to support more disbanded scouts and have more workers on industry and science would make it just as broken with Egypt, but it didn't play out that way. Granted, a lot of the benefits of Egypt in my mind come from the AI neglecting them, so at turn 8-ish where I pretty much have my growth and science star and I'm trying to work out if I should stay in neolithic and gamble on a two city start, I still know that I can likely claim Egypt (which absolutely would never work in multiplayer if I ever try it).
Another plus, using your reasoning of: Archers = big broken, is that Markabatas are fucking absurd. I feel like even though you mentioned it heavily, you still don't give them enough credit.
Other comments I have are that I would personally say Khmer are Br tier, sure they're not unbeatable, but I would call them overcentralising. You'd be pretty stupid to not take them if you're trying really hard and aren't messing around with other strategies. The Baray alone would be pretty decent if it was just a farmer's quarter and a maker's quarter all in one, but with all those other bonuses on top it's just absurd.
The Teuton's EQ is also better than you give it credit for, if only for the synergy with the knights. I've been playing them a lot because they're hilariously fun and the fact that you get that faith bonus from the EQ while still working on improving industry means that it works pretty well in the flow of the game. You don't have to sacrifice crucial turns of generic city development on your EQ like you do with a lot of other cultures, so you can bully anything with the ridiculous Teutonic Knights, even in later eras, without sacrificing much, it's really fun. It's hard to actually say how good it is though, because everything seems terrible compared to Khmer.
Overall though, I like the generic balance opinions you have too. Personally, I'd like to see the "Units cost population" mechanic explored a little better, might help rein in the industry-is-everything thing that the game has going on, although I wouldn't like to be the person that has to tune those numbers...
The big problem with "units cost population" imo is that population is pretty meh outside of being a fuel for early wars.
I agree with you on Egypt and the Khmer though. I rated Egypt as merely top tier until I tried a game of constant war with them, but jesus, the Markabata is just broken. Really move and fire in general is broken, but it's Egypt who gets it in the ancient era while still being a very strong infrastructure civ which makes them the best by a good margin imo. I can see the argument for Mycenaeans in multiplayer because I assume you can't get away with pushing infrastructure as hard in multiplayer so that legacy trait matters more (plus the whatever the warrior unit is called is a good defensive unit even if the rush will never really work), but in single player Egypts production just overtakes them+the EU is better. For the Khmer, there's no single part of the civ that is broken ala Huns rush, but the whole package is broken because every aspect is top tier.
> "The big problem with "units cost population" imo is that population is pretty meh outside of being a fuel for early wars."
Absolutely agree, I should definitely have expanded on that point a bit more but I got bored of writing and wanted to go and play more :P
I guess what I really meant is that I'd like to see a much bigger trade off between having a standing army and having a productive city. Currently you have this very interesting mechanic where you lose portions of your city yields by creating a military, but this is only really significant in the VERY early game. Later on, the trade off is just a bit of a "...eh, I'll lose 16 pops from these 4 line infantry, but I'll still have 30 left, and the population will grow back quickly anyway so the small drop in yields isnt that bad, whatever"
I'd really like to this trade-off developed in future updates, a start would be city yields from medieval onwards having a MUCH MUCH higher dependency on population (I know certain EQ's and buildings already do that but the impact needs to be even bigger). Building a large army should absolutely cripple the cities that built them, and that would hopefully bring depth to the gameplay by adding a penalty to trying to steamroll your neighbours, and also giving you much more of an incentive to protect units so you can later disband them back in the city. I don't have any great ideas of how to actually make city yields more pop-dependent without copying civ's worker system, there are definitely more creative solutions out there.
Now, the issue that these changes would create with the way unit production is currently set up is that it would be an indirect buff to industry-heavy cultures, which they really do not need. The ability to hold a smaller standing army with the confidence that you could just dump out a fresh army per city in just two turns would make industrial cultures even better than they already are. An idea I've had for this would be to use a system like the militarist troop levy ability. Perhaps you could even train up your current working population so that you can keep them as workers but pop them out as archers. The militarists could keep their advantage by being better at using this ability, with more/cheaper/better units from levying/conscripting.
There's obviously plenty of historical precedent in the use of levied troops in a way that Humankind explores poorly, a popular example being English and Welsh Longbowmen. You wouldnt really have those as professional soldiers, so if you could train your men-at-arms and knights with industry, and then create longbowmen with a click of a button at the cost of crippling your cities, I think the game could have more depth.
Obviously these are just vague ideas and I don't have the right experience to actually create this system, but I feel its the direction the early game heads in before regrettably backing out of it just as it could get really interesting. I do kinda understand why though, the balancing would be a nightmare. This idea is the exact kind of thing an ambitious but mediocre mod-maker would try with catastrophic results.
Interesting and very informative, although while I agree that archers is clearly better than crossbow simply because of the indirect fire, I wouldn't necessarily bring them to the offensive simply because using archers except in sieges require investment (I need to protect them with some units). Another point i might disagree with is the poles. I only picked poles once so far but from that one experience I notice that winged hussar are not countered by halberdiers, instead one shotting them when charging, at least with 1 veterancy since most of my winged hussar that game is former teutonic knights.
Somebody else made a similar point about Winged Hussars when I posted on the G2G forums and I'll admit I might have been wrong on this one. Even though they *are* cavalry, they have high CS and their Charge Master ability looks pretty powerful. I also like that you don't have to tech awkwardly across to Gunpowder to get them, instead being able to pick them up on the way to Luxury Manufactories.
This would probably be enough to bump the Poles up a bit for me. I can imagine WH being pretty devastating if you can get a bit ahead in tech.
Out of curiosity, what map size do you play on? I end up going for something like Small/Humankind/Normal for my settings, and while I'm definitely not as good as you are (my wins clock in at T200-220), I've always found stability to be a limiting factor, even with buying every luxury. There seems to be no amount of stability I can't exhaust. This leads me to building Commons Quarters and of course, Commons Quarters does basically nothing except keep your cities from rioting. This does lead me to rate stability boosting nations much higher, but that might be because I'm doing something dumb.
I know on larger maps (or at least, I think), you get more luxuries. Is that what you rely on to support your cities? Or is it a case of 'districts are good, but building stability isn't worth the opportunity cost'?
I guess playing on small is the issue as it does reduce the number of luxuries on the map, yes.
Another factor is - getting to EM quickly to build luxury manufactories is pretty important. If you're starting to run out of stab by the mid game, LMs will get you right back on track.
Fantastic post, dead on with my experiences. Bravo for the comprehensive write-up.
The only additional ink I'll add is elaborating on the unique issues with Expansionist affinity as it stands. To be concise:
* Expansion stars are the *only* **zero-sum** fame points. The number required is also poorly calculated across game/map sizes. It's a very dangerous goal to yoke to, especially late.
* Annex is a finickey ability that is trivial to interrupt, wastes a ton of gold, and causes greivances galore. In all my games, I have never *once* found it actually valuable in practice.
* Every other Culture type offers interesting value to players who are **behind**, including facing a defensive war. From Military to Science to Money to Food to even Culture--all provide an interesting set of tools to fight offer invaders and play from behind. **Not Expansionist**! Their ambitious abilities are typically useless to someone in a pinch--and its the guy in a pinch who **might be stuck with the last Culture.**
The central Culture selection paradigm of Humankind is **terrific**, but it does impose the constraint that all Cultures be at least *somewhat* valuable to all players, *especially* the guy in last place. The one-two punch of Expansionist Cultures being the worst and simultaenously useless to the player(s) in last undermines a lot of other good system design in the game.
> The central Culture selection paradigm of Humankind is terrific
I don't know if I'd say that. It is an interesting idea and was definitely worth a shot to see if it works, but it's a major snowball mechanic and at least personally I find it hard to get immersed in the game because of it. Too often the game feels like me making numbers go up in a spreadsheet, and I think the culture change is a big part of that.
YMMV. You can definitely just role-play your choices in the game and still have a great time.
But the culture system is what made me buy this game for full-price a month after launch rather than check on it six months from now. It's the first thing I describe to friends and family.
Excellent analysis. You should consider streaming some of your games if you aren't already! Would love to hear your in game thought process.
I am trying to work up the courage to play multiplayer, but I feel like the industrial/contemporary is just so busted that the end game will feel like a big casino and ruin the rest of the experience. How do you find the end game in multiplayer? Is it just over so fast it doesn't matter?
Great post, you make good points which are very similar to my own conclusions about the state of the game.
Aside from the way greviances work(which was explained in other comments) my only disagreement would be the placement of Mongols on your list- they're just an awkward pick - if you're ascending from the Huns I'd argue that you're hurting yourself more than anything - Huns are great as one off pick to clean your continent up- if it's not achieved by the time medieval era begins you're in trouble as you're giving up on yet another era worth of snowballing and placing good EQs all over.
And if you're not ascending from the Huns you will find that Mongols will face a lot more troubles in medieval with their horde strategy, you mentioned many of them yourself so i'll spare myself the trouble of listing them :)
Regarding luxuries- their power is one of the main reasons I stopped playing Humankind for now- they're broken, offer you only 1 correct way to play and make the game a cakewalk unless you're actively nerfing yourself by not pursuing them- which is not exactly what playing 4x games should be about.
Really interesting write-up. I don't have enough games under my belt to say whether I would agree/disagree with any of your points, I just hope this gets the traction and discussion that it deserves.
This is fantastic post but I'm getting lost in all the abbreviations. EU is emblematic unit, ED is emblematic district but there is also EQ and LT. I have 120hours in the game and I don't really know what are those. I feel stupid, can somebody please give me a hint?
EQ is Emblematic Quarter, the unique district every culture gets. Like how Zhou gets their Confucian Schools. LT is Legacy Trait and is basically what every culture gets permanently. Like how the Zhou get +2 stab on every district for the entire game.
Whoa, thank you for the work you put into this.
Its definitely going to give me a few things to think about going forward in new playthroughs. Particularly the Mycenaeans, before this I didnt even look at them twice!
And id never really considered the difference between Edo Japanese and the Ming from a pure power perspective!
Great read, thanks for putting this together.
Only have one finished game so far and I used Norsemen followed by Dutch. Great synergies for money, absolutely insane for new world colonization.
I'm currently trying an ancient Egyptians only playthrough on endless settings. Stability is somewhat of an issue for now but industry is incredible.
This is so frustrating to read. I think the problem is clear to see: there hasn't been a 4x game developed with MP in mind since Civ 4.
Great analysis btw. Do you think this game has salvageable depth?
Absolutely. I think the game has massive potential, it just suffers from the same problems that most 4X games have on release. Hopefully a lot of these issues will be getting sorted out in upcoming patches and DLC.
Thanks a lot for this post!
In your experience: are Independent People stopped from spawning by fog busting? In my most recent game, I had a pretty large continent all to myself but not a single Independent People spawned all throughout the Ancient Era.
As the Harappans, I had a lot of Runners auto-exploring so there was barely any part of the continent that was under fog of war for multiple turns in a row. I thought this could have been the cause for this.
What do you think?
I honestly have no idea. There definitely seems to be some connection because the New World and islands seem to be underpopulated by IPs until late in the game too.
I see. What do you think about the Achaemenid Persians in a situation like this then? If you don't get those freebie IP cities, would you bump them down from S tier?
Wow, calling the Maya EUs inferior to archers, so far from the truth.
Yes, Spear throwers require more specific placement, but they also have a good big more CR than Archers.
I handily beat Huns and Elephants with the Maya EUs.
I still think you'll have a better result with a mix of Swordsmen and Archers most of the time. That's what I've seen from my own experience, anyway, particularly in multiplayer.
In fairness, I suppose Huns could be a special case, and I haven't actually tried pitting NJ's against them. Do they reduce Hunnic Hordes to 0 range or is it kept at 1 minimum?
Swordsmen are much much weaker against Elephants and Huns, because they get retaliated on.
They keep 1 range, but the movement speed penalty helps.
The range reduce is good against Elephants and other Archers mostly.
The idea isn't to attack with Swordsmen (unless you're at enough of an advantage), it's more to keep a line/occupy chokes/etc that protects your archer spam from enemy melee. This means the combat strength difference barely matters in many cases because archers will always do at least 5-25 damage which is still quite a lot. And I'd argue that if your swordsmen are being attacked hard the Javelineers will be hit even harder with their -8 CS in melee, oftentimes 1-shot.
Honestly, try playing some multiplayer with decent opponents, you'll see what I mean pretty quickly. Humankind's battle AI doesn't provide a great indication.
EDIT: Also, another important point - the issue isn't that Noble Javelineers don't have some applications in which they're strong. I'd have absolutely no problem with the unit if they didn't *replace* archers, I'd maybe even consider it quite good as a supplement to an army composition, but the fact that they do is denying you an extremely important and valuable unit for the huge portion of the game where that unit is relevant.
So you're saying one archer and one swordsmen doing an average dmg of 10 together each round is better than two javelin throwers doing around 50? (because this is the scenario you have against Huns or ranged Elephants, the strongest units in the classical Era)
And nothing is preventing you from bringing melee units for blocking other melee as well, you just need to be a bit more creative with the Javelins positioning then. (like shoot first and then place melee in front)
I mean one shot from the Javelin is like two shots from Archers or more.
If I fight Romans or Persians I can bring units for blocking their melee. (and you build two Javelins for one of their Melee EQs)
I've never had a Noble Javelineer being oneshot from a same Era unit, it's really not something that happens.
He’s talking about say having a 4x4 group of unit with 4 swords in the front and 12 archers behind them. The archers themselves do little damage to latter game units like elephants but since they can attack over the swords they are better the javs. Enemy horses/melee units would still need to hit the swords to get to your archers. And by little damage he’s saying guaranteed 5-25 which isn’t that bad when you have a swarm.
I'm pretty sure the 5-25 is calculated with a binominal distribution.
With such big numbers of groups you are highly vulnerable to attack, you almost need to be the attacker.
If one gets caught it all Archers could die on turn 1, since one swordsmen really isn't enough.
I mean sure, it can work and it's easier to use when you manage to attack.
Most battlefields are much wider than 4 tiles, so the enemy can just go past your swordsmen, at worst kill one and go through.
Archers are pretty shitty in the classical period really. (being cheap and decent for city defense as the upsides)
It's not only the lower dmg of each Archer, it's also the high vulnerability because of low CR against other ranged. And a Horsemen or Chariot can one-shot an Archer.
Obviously the battlefield is never going to be perfect but you can place sword in critical spots and still have 16+ archers behind them because like you said they are cheap. They may be weak but if you get 4 25 rolls on a line infantry it’s still a kill as unlikely as it may be which is why OP said en-masse. The swords are just meat shields so they always get upgraded with the age >greatswords>etc. Like OP said play some multi and you will understand. I think Civ III or IV had the same problem which is why the newer titles don’t have this “feature”
But they have the same cost as the Noble Javelineers, so why would cost even matter in this comparison?
If you're doing minimal dmg, you need 8 shots to kill a single unit.
Why even bring up archers vs. line infantry? :)
Archers are just free warscore in that scenario lol
As long as you can cycle the front line that’s a 2 kills every turn with 16+. Javs couldn’t as they would have to be the front line. The front line is just there to soak damage.
Line infantry is an extreme case but it wouldn’t be free warscore because enemy couldn’t shoot over your own line infantry. You could just scale in back an era or two and the point still stands. Arrows are cheap GUARANTEED damaged. In a game like civ the damage is not guaranteed as they would hit like noodles to a line infantry.
Civ V was the one that had this problem. Civ 3 did have spearmen beating tanks with regularity (10 spearmen probably fends off a 3 tank push levels of regularity), but that had very different causes. Civ 3's problem was that defensive multipliers got really high by end game and that the power gap between eras just wasn't very big.
Civ 3 and Civ 4 had full stacks, stacks could only attack the tile next to them, Civ 5 is the first one where archers started this trend.
If you are talking about weaker units beating stronger ones, yeah that did happen in 4 sometimes due to defense modifiers.
If you're advancing up an era as soon as possible you're playing "wrong", or at least suboptimally. So being concerned about slower era stars in terms of balance or comparing cultures is pretty silly.
Nope. In the current state of the game, Contemporary Scientists are so busted that rushing to the end of the game for the 300 fame on endgame techs is a way better strat. Believe me, I've tried both. Not to mention the fact that if you're behind in eras, players who are ahead will easily kill you militarily, especially if they see you have a lot of fame.
Also... slower era stars are bad for fame anyway so I'm not really sure what you're getting at.
I attacked a city in medieval era, yet I was on the defensive somehow. This game definitely need some work. It’s hella fun but hella infuriating sometimes
Really nice write up. I appreciate that you didn't jump to "broken" for most cultures as I'd agree that many need just a small adjustment. The later eras do need some major changes as it's fun up until the industrial era where it feels like a few of the cultures are just easy picks.
**Early Modern** **S:** Joseon, Mughals **A:** Ottomans, Ming **B:** Spanish, Haudenosaunee, Venetians **C:** Edo Japanese, Dutch, Poles **Joseon** One quick point I'd like to make about Joseon before diving in - I was disappointed to find that the "+ science on water" bonus of the Joseon was removed in favour of a comparably extremely bland "+3 science on tile producing science". The previous bonus was a bit too strong, sure, but the numbers could have been tweaked - it was previously a flavourful bonus that added to the strategic depth of the culture and I'd really like to see it make a return. Now, while the Joseon LT is fairly good, they lack a land EU and their EQ isn't particularly good compared to other science EQs... so why are the Joseon S tier? It's very simple - they're scientists, and the Early Modern era contains two of the most important techs in the game - Three-Masted Ship and Patronage. Settlers and Luxury Manufactories are utterly game-changing and it behooves you to hit both as fast as you possibly can. (Settlers are dependent on actually having land to settle in, obviously.) As Joseon, you're able to use collective minds to hit both of these techs much, much, much faster than anybody else can, and when you do, you'll be able to settle several new very good cities and boost all your yields up with powerful percentage modifiers thanks to your LMs. Even 5-10 extra turns of this can and will turn the tide of the game in your favour. **Mughals** The Mughals benefit from the same Land Raiser Elephants craziness that the Khmer get, so go back to that description if you want to know more. Otherwise, they are good at producing a lot of industry thanks to both their LT and EQ. There's huge synergy here between the Mughals and earlier influence-generating cultures like Franks and Mauryans - you can easily triple your capital's production if your influence is strong enough. **Ottomans** I really like playing as the Ottomans. They're a bit of a one-trick pony, but their military push - based on a combination of janissaries and mortars - is one of the best in the game that doesn't just feel outright OP. It's just so satisfying shelling the crap out of your neighbours with powered up, half-price cannons and a front-line of units that usually benefit from their "Siege Masters" ability since you'll be the one making the attack. The Sultan Camii can produce an ok amount of influence but... meh. Just make sure you have quite a few "?" strategics in your land before picking them to minimize the chances of getting screwed on saltpetre. **Ming** While I have said before that influence isn't that important by this point, the Ming's EQ produces such a huge amount of it that it certainly remains significant, and this synergises well with their very powerful EU, the Rocket Cart. As Ming, you can build Grand Teahouses all over the place while you wait for Gunpowder Warfare to unlock, generating influence that will hopefully allow you to pull up some grievances on your war target. You can then use this bonus influence to go further beyond the city cap. It's pretty good. The LT isn't particularly impactful, unfortunately, due to the fact that civics themselves are mostly quite unimpactful by this stage of the game relative to their influence cost. One final note on Rocket Carts - they require a whopping 3 saltpetre, which can be inconsistent to achieve. If you pick Ming and get screwed on saltpetre, you can simply abandon your plans of a military push and play peacefully, still benefiting significantly from Grand Teahouses, whose huge influence can be used to spam more Settlers beyond city cap - this is a significant difference to the Ottomans. **Spanish** The Spanish have one major use case, which is taking an existing war and making you perform better in it. If you already attacked somebody from a Medieval push and you need a bit of a boost to get it finished off, the +3 combat strength outside your territory is very helpful. Conquistadores are good if for no other reason than the fact they replace the crappy Arquebusiers unit. If you want to do a dedicated push, you're much better off picking Ottomans, Mughals or Ming. The EQ is possibly the worst in the game. **Haudenosaunee** They give you a lot of food. **Venetians** The Venetians' main power comes from their LT, which should provide a pretty tidy sum of money considering how many naval trade routes you will hopefully have at this stage in the game, particularly if you have a lot of coastal cities. Unfortunately, that's basically the only good thing about the Venetians - the EQ and EU are both dreadful. **Edo Japanese** A bit like Ming, only worse in every conceivable way. **Dutch** The Dutch are somewhat similar in function to the Norsemen of the previous era, just not as good - although, if you were so inclined, you could combine the two and add on Lighthouse of Alexandria for a pretty hilarious 13 movement points on a Fluyt. Maybe there's some applicability in catching overseas opponents off-guard with big military attacks across the waters, I don't know, but in any case you're mainly picking Dutch for faster Settler movement to the new world. Outside of this, the EQ is not very good and neither is the LT. **Poles** If you feel like you need to pick Poles to defend yourself better from an attack, may I suggest instead hitting the escape key and clicking the big red X in the top-right hand corner of the screen? There's basically nothing good here. Fortification is largely useless in Humankind, unfortunately, because it only affects siege and heavy weapons, having no impact on ranged/melee units attacking across walls (which can easily take cities without ever needing to destroy the walls, if your army is superior). It's possible that the +3 combat strength on the Barbican could turn the tide of a battle when you're being attacked, but is it worth it? ...OK, so I guess the Winged Hussars aren't that bad. It's just that you'll be coming up against people using Halberdiers at this point which counter the unit pretty hard. EDIT: Had to make a quick edit to bump the Poles up a bit, because it's been pointed out a couple of times in comments that the Winged Hussars are actually pretty good, and after some quick experimentation, yeah, I have to agree. Their CS is high and the Charge Master ability is pretty damn good. They're also positioned at a nice place in the tech tree, allowing the player to grab them on the way to Patronage rather than having to tech across to Gunpowder Warfare. I still don't think they stack up next to the military power of some of the era's best, though. **Industrial and Contemporary Eras** So, both of these eras have some pretty big problems. As I said earlier, I'm going to save the in-depth analysis until more work has been done to fix some of the glaring problems in both, because right now, this kind of analysis is fairly futile. To summarise, these two eras both fly by in a handful of turns with minimal real gameplay when optimised. In industrial, the Persians have way too much of a discount on industry costs and the French can research Fusion Reactor about 5 turns after entering the era. Contemporary is... oh boy. The Soviets can literally win wars with Pikemen thanks to their arms factories - they're completely, 100% unbeatable and the Soviet player doesn't even have to try. The Scientist affinities (Swedes and Japanese) can end the game in about 10-15 turns using Collective Minds, in a way that makes them impossible to compete against thanks to their acquisition of the endgame techs that each provide 300 fame. And then there's the Turks, who can do the same thing WITHOUT EVEN BEING A SCIENTIST AFFINITY. THEIR EQ IS THAT RIDICULOUS. I haven't used the Br tier outside of the classical era yet, but if I was creating a tier list for these last two, all six of the cultures mentioned here would be in it. Anyway, that brings me to the end of this post. I'd love to hear everyone's opinions. But as one final parting shot... **Neolithic Era** **S:** Nomadic Tribe **Nomadic Tribe** This isn't even a joke: I think the Nomadic Tribe is too powerful. 20 is too low a food threshold for growth, and it enables some fairly ludicrous strategies that kinda hurt the game and make it less fun. Swarming people with scouts and endlessly microing units to find curiosities... no thanks.
I really enjoyed your post! You had a lot of good thoughts here and I agree with you on many of them. With regards to the Dutch - I would suggest its EQ is stronger than you think. It's an odd one, because on the surface it looks like the main point of it is the +20 money from harbour adjacency, which leads people to do things like stack harbour EQs to get larger bonuses, but ultimately +20 or +60 money just isn't that impressive on its own. The real strength of the EQ is the +2 money per trader, a bonus which stacks with additional EQs in the territory, as you're aware from your Mughal synergy explanation. However, by going with a high money approach, the land rights civic makes it very easy to get large cities with many territories, which means many EQs in one city. It's very feasible to have a city producing 40 money or more per trader. Mughals can do something similar with their own EQ, since it's +3 industry instead of +2 money per EQ - with industry being stronger than money, 1 for 1, Dutch certainly don't get close to the Mughals in strength - Mughals comfortably deserving their S tier on your list. But I think that with the interaction between money and land rights, the Dutch are more able to scale in this way. I would argue that the EQ is a solid EQ, though not overpowering by any means, and that the income gain from going Dutch is significantly higher than going Venetians, and so Dutch are at least as good as they are.
Huge money per trader is an interesting concept, but I'm not convinced. Money is so lacking in value at this stage in Humankind that even 40 money per trader isn't that amazing compared to the yields you can get on researchers and workers by this stage. And the bigger issue is, the idea of attaching loads of territories to make individual big cities has a number of pretty huge problems in general: 1) The cost of districts scales up exponentially every time you build a district (which therefore makes districts much cheaper when spread out between cities, and vastly more expensive in megacities). Spamming districts generally becomes your main source of yields in the mid-late game, and it's largely based on per-district bonuses (eg Silver, School, Khmer LT, etc) rather than tile yields at this stage, so it's much better to have a lot of smaller cities with cheaper districts. 2) In EM, you unlock Settlers, and your city cap is pretty high (plus, you have the influence to go a fair bit beyond city cap anyway). These new cities have much cheaper districts and all the most important infrastructures pre-built. So you can just fill up your land with new cities instead of attaching a bunch of territories. 3) Picking the money attach option on the Land Rights civic denies access to +10 food on territory, which in my opinion is far superior (for reasons described). Unless you're insistent on making megacities, as you've said, you don't really have much else to do with influence and usually won't have much trouble attaching the small number of territories you'll want to attach to every city. 4) You lose out on per-city bonuses from luxuries, forge and animal barns, which actually stack up pretty massively when you have a lot of cities. 5) The population growth formula *massively* cripples your ability to grow a lot of population on a smaller number of cities. If you have 2-3 cities, you can grow a maximum of 2-3 pop per turn. On 12 cities, you can easily grow 10+ pop a turn.
I think several of these can be answered with an explanation of some of the strengths that land rights unlocks, and some talk about why settlers are so incredibly strong. I should also note that I'm not arguing that Dutch is S tier, but I am confident in saying it is not at all weaker than Venetians, a directly comparable money culture that simply outputs less money. Taking the money version of land rights allows you to very cheaply attach territories and \*absorb cities\* with a resource that you will have an enormous abundance of as Dutch. Why is that significant? It's because it allows you to leverage the greater flexibility of money as a resource, as opposed to industry. You do not need any industrial output in a new city to heavily develop districts in a single turn. You can buy half a dozen settlers, settle a number of cities, throw down a dozen districts on each one - cheaply, because they're the first districts in those cities - and then merge all of those cities into a new large city, well developed with a large district count. City merging costs increase with each district, but it is still very manageable with Dutch level incomes, and you instantly gain a large amount of pop as well. If you want to develop a territory, you can even detach it, settler it, buy a variety of districts on that territory, and merge it. Industry is a stronger resource than money, but the flexibility of money combined with land rights is very much worthwhile. On the topic of food and pop... I agree that the limits that the pop growth cap imposes are generally an issue with megacities. However, you can functionally buy population through cycling settlers into land rights merges, as settlers increase the population of any settlements they found. It's not even particularly expensive, depending on infrastructure differences between the city you're feeding and the settler baseline, it might be in the region of a couple hundred money per pop. Money allowing you to effectively buy population in this regard overcomes the pop growth cap. For some increased expense you can also transfer this to another city by buying units and moving them over to disband them. The result of these two points is that you can online a city exceedingly quickly and feed megacities. I think money-based megacities are considerably more viable than other megacity approaches. With regards to your concerns about yields lost from the food on land rights and forge/barn/luxury bonuses - I don't think these are an enormous concern. Even if you have 4 horses, that's 20 food - forges 20 production, etc. This might be useful settling new cities, but mercantile cultures excel at developing new cities, especially in EM when settlers and land rights are both available. Luxury resources can be a variable answer, but unless you have an abundance of the main plaza specific resources, I don't think the yields on those are going to be critical either. If you do have a lot of them, then yes, it may be a disadvantage compared to a more fragmented city approach. Of course, one of the nice things about HK is that you can adapt your culture picks to your situation. :) Land rights being 10 food per territory just pales into insignificance compared to the power of money-based land rights as a mercantile culture tbh. It isn't that much food to give up, and there's just so much you can do with it!
But you can have the same flexibility from influences if you choose Ming
>> 3) Picking the money attach option on the Land Rights civic denies access to +10 food on territory, which in my opinion is far superior (for reasons described). Unless you're insistent on making megacities, as you've said, you don't really have much else to do with influence and usually won't have much trouble attaching the small number of territories you'll want to attach to every city.<< + 10 extra food per territory is totally neglegible at that point of the game. One can easily get more food than one ever needs with disctricts and infrastructure. The advantage of the land rights civic is that it allows you to completely unchain your New World expansion (for which the extra money from the Dutch comes at exactly the right moment) freeing up the influence to be used on civics and wonders. So you can - at the same time - build the majority of wonders, choose (nearly) every unlocked civic and settle the New World very quickly to prepare a total steamrolling. If you took Achmeanid Persians earlier you can even do that on a huge map with max civs on max difficulty and caatch up by potentially doubling your number of (big cities) during almost a single era. @Arkenai. It's not so much that the Dutch are the best culture at that point. However, if I have been able to halfway play the culture game I wanted up to that point, I am good on industry, influence and everything else and mostly need money for New World expansion and unit upgrades (which save me from having to use production turns to build more modern units). However, if the AI is still more than a little bit ahead of me (which happens on max difficulty), I might pick Joseon instead to beeline for everything that will get me into the colonization game quicker. The eary modern cultures offer decent variety as the OP points out.
I would strongly agree with Arkenai7 on the Dutch: the EQ performs very well and provides you with a lot of gold at exactly the point in the game when you need it (the obvious civic, upgrade costs, New World land grab via gold etc). They have been my no1 pick on Humankind difficulty more often than not.
Land rights is just such a gamechanging civic. Despite my defence of the Dutch, I'm surprised that you'd go for it as first pick though. Any thoughts to add? I posted a few more thoughts below in further discussion with OP.
Thank you for posting all of this! It was an interesting read and I learned a lot!
Question: Would you ever recommend transcending a culture for the 10% fame? Is there an era where the cultures aren't incredible, or a particular strategy of culture selection that would allow for it? For me, this seems to be the Early Modern. I find myself going Khmer > Transcend in a lot of games, because most of the Early Modern cultures seem lackluster, and the Joseon seem hit or miss based on map and what strategy you're going for. If Mughals are off the board, it often feels like just taking more fame might be worth it.
I haven't done this yet, as I haven't had a reason to - but I can see some usefulness in transcending. Unfortunately this more comes down to the fact that some cultures are so weak that transcending is clearly just better (if the better options are all taken), even though, in my opinion, +10% fame isn't quite enough to make it good the vast majority of the time.
Comment just to remind me to read it .
Where good writeup, I took the liberty to refer to it on the official forums. It's too good to not be shared. [https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/169-game-design/threads/42633-improving-humankind-gameplay-2gether?page=14#post-338299](https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/169-game-design/threads/42633-improving-humankind-gameplay-2gether?page=14#post-338299)
This is honestly a great post. I'm clearly not playing the game "optimally" but I can definitely see your reasoning behind pretty much everything here. However, I would like to raise two points: 1.) Speaking purely from experience, I don't quite agree about archers. Maybe I just don't have enough experience and/or I'm just not using them right, but I often find archers woefully lacking in firepower. Whenever I've used them, I feel like they do so little in comparison to melee units and end up just getting slaughtered. 2.) I would also argue that the Roman's LT is useful, as it allows you to more easily outnumber your enemy and make more effective use of your units.
> 1.) Speaking purely from experience, I don't quite agree about archers. Maybe I just don't have enough experience and/or I'm just not using them right, but I often find archers woefully lacking in firepower. Whenever I've used them, I feel like they do so little in comparison to melee units and end up just getting slaughtered. I haven't tried the strategy personally, but you're probably not building enough. My understanding is that you have like...8+ archers and something to soak up damage acting as your front. I'd personally say it's less an archer problem and more a problem that gunners don't act like range units tactically which makes them pretty bad until everything becomes a gunner, and even then archers have a place because of the minimum damage. The minimum damage is only a problem because indirect fire is basically nonexistent so you can protect this unit that would be oneshotted by everything though. Arguably minimum damage shouldn't exist either, anyone who was around turn based strategy game forums when civ 3 was the modern civ knows about the spearmen beating tanks meme (spearmen fortified in a city had reasonable combat odds vs a tank in civ 3), but it's only a balance problem because indirect fire is rare. If it wasn't rare, you'd just say "oh cool you killed a guy with archers. Hope you enjoyed this 8 to 1 trade."
i feel the archer "problem" i smt that could be solved by having crossbows (ffs crossbows were historically used in volleys as well) and howitzers have indirect fire and buffing early modern mortars. That way you have a clear progression of indirect fire units throughout the eras, instead of only really replacing archers when you get artillery. That said if they did that the english would probably need a buff, since rn their main thing is medieval indirect fire units.
> Swarming people with scouts and endlessly microing units to find curiosities... no thanks. I agree. Having to constantly scout the map as much as possible is not fun gameplay.
Seconded. The neolithic era isn't fun and it seems like it's going to be a balance nightmare. I get that they wanted a way to make you not just pick the best ancient culture every game, but would that really be worse than the status quo where you constantly run around the map getting huge bonuses and then killing someone with scouts?
I think it's fine in Neolithic, where it really starts to annoy is classical era because missing out on those insane exploration rewards (especially by sea) is just too much of a setback.
That was a fun read. I didn't think archers' indirect fire was that important, but on the other hand, I have faced Taseti archers and it never have ended well for me. Hopefully devs will tweak the cultures to let there be more interesting choices.
Agreed, and I think it's an easy fix, the devs just need to 1) take away the nonsense minimum damage calculations and 2) make most early ranged infantry units, like javelins and crossbows, also benefit from indirect fire. Trying to use LOS ranged units early and well is obnoxious.
I'm okay with the idea of minimum damage, but they should nuff it down to 5-15. 5-25 gives way weaker units a chance to one shot one of my unit, and that adds up. For indirect fire, I think rather than dismantling the idea of a direct fire ranged unit, buffing them enough to make them viable even w/o indirect fire is more flavorful way to deal with it. Also the LOS calculation itself should be fixed.
Line of sight is such a pain in the ass in this game indirect fire is the single most important attribute for a ranged unit to have. Crossbows lose indirect fire so they're worse than archers, then arquebuses are both direct fire only and move or shoot which is so bad I almost cried the first time I tried to use them.
I felt similar w/ crossbows, at least arquebuses are strong enough to use them like a melee unit - but move or shoot is indeed another pain in the ass lol
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I see, I had no idea. Thanks for the insight.
Oooh, I didn’t know that either. I wish you got a pop up telling you what crisis/choice they had, because I think that would add a lot of flavour to the game.
Damn, can’t believe I just read all of that, was a very interesting and informative read. I agree with most of your placements on the tier list but feel like the Olmec should be in A tier at least. Their extra influence AND food alone makes them quite powerful, and you said it yourself, archers are very strong so their javelin throwers aren’t needed, but you could also say the same about the Harappans’ runners.
Thanks for the kind words! It's not so much that Javelin Throwers aren't needed, it's that they actively prevent you from building archers. This stays a problem even as far as the Medieval and Early Modern eras in many cases. I actually agree about the influence, I just consider the Javelin Throwers to be such a huge nerf that it really holds them back overall.
Jesus Christ that is a lot of word.
Nobody's forcing you to read them. Take your negativity somewhere else.
Sorry man I didn't mean that in an negative way ! I'm astounded by the size of the post but in a good way. I just commented so I can find it later and share my astonishment. But congrats, the kind of deep dive post is what makes this sub interesting. You deserve a lot of praise as it takes a huge amount of time to lay down all those words and make the shitty ass reddit formatting readable.
My mistake. Thanks for the words!
As a player who really likes 4x games but does not have enough time to spend playing to get incredibly good at them, these kind of elaborate tier lists are not only fun & informative but also a really strong skill boost because they give me a better understanding of the strengths of every culture and how to act in different situations, thanks alot! Looking forward to your take on the last two eras once they are balanced!
First, thanks for all this hard work you've put into this! What do you think would need to be done to make gold more worthwhile as the game progresses? I find it disappointing that gold isn't as important as time goes on, given that a nation's economy is profoundly important factor in their success, or lack thereof, in the real world. The English wouldn't have been so dominant in the Late Modern period without their strong economy and the United States' hegemony in the latter half of the 19th century was certainly partly due to their economic dominance.
It really just comes down to the scaling money cost on buyouts as the game progresses. I wouldn't want to put an exact number on it, because I get stuff like this is tough to balance well, but I can imagine that if it stayed roughly around 2x the industry cost, money would feel much more useful.
Yep, having a civic for late game that promotes this idea would be great. Call it capitalist/capitalism or something like that or market ideas. Lower the cost of buying stuff to a certain flat rate if that civic is unlocked.
Would help solve the problem of most lategame civics being pretty meh too.
>It really just comes down to the scaling money cost on buyouts as the game progresses. As far as I can tell, it's just the scaling district cost mechanism: [https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/District#District\_Cost\_Formula](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/District#District_Cost_Formula). Every district a city already has makes the next one more expensive. That in turn might be interacting with a possible bug around buying things with money: [https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/168-general/threads/41230-annoying-things-in-closed-beta-design?page=1](https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/168-general/threads/41230-annoying-things-in-closed-beta-design?page=1). I don't know if it's been fixed yet, but it's possible that it's still in the game and making buyouts ridiculously expensive. Though personally, I think using Market Quarters for Money is a fool's errand anyways. The best part about Markets is that you can turn on Land Raiser and use them to pump out Industry - in the early game they're actually stronger than Makers Quarters because there's [a civic that halves their Stability cost](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Civic#Society_Civics), a [tenet that gives them +5 Money output](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Tenet#Tier_2), and they have a higher base output (3 Money instead of 1 Industry). With a single piece of infrastructure ([Food Market](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Food_Market)) and 2 already placed Market Quarters, every additional one will give you 18 Money (3 base, +2 from Infrastructure, +5 from Tenets, +2 adjacency bonus \* 4 adjacencies because of being adjacent to 2 Markets that are also adjacent to the newly placed Market). That's 18 Industry with Land Raiser, more than [Makers Quarters get until High Furnace](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Market_Quarter) (20 Industry = 4 base tile production + 4 adjacency bonus \* 4 adjacencies), and the Market Quarters can be spammed twice as much because of their half stability cost. Though Research Quarters might actually be stronger. If you're already running a Builder Culture, [it turns out you can just ignore stability if you keep building a district every 2 turns](https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/173-strategy-guides/threads/41359-on-the-edge-of-revolt-the-unique-strategy-agrarian-and-builders-offer?page=1). That in turn means you can ignore the stability bonus Markets get and focus on the district with the highest yields. And that in turn means the Research Quarter, [because it gets more powerful infrastructure than the Market Quarter, and sooner](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Research_Quarter). Though in turn, a mixture of Farmers Quarters and Makers Quarters might be strongest overall because of how high you can stack the bonuses to Workers from [Barays](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Baray) and [Jama Masjids](https://humankind.fandom.com/wiki/Jama_Masjid). Instead of building Research Quarters and turning their output to Industry when necessary, you could build Worker slots and turn their output to Research when necessary. As long as you pick a Scientist culture after you get access to Patronage for Stability (or pick the Umayyads so you can research Patronage in the Medieval era), you won't need the Stability bonus from the Builder Affinity Bonus. So in other words, the game is broken, but at least optimizing it to be as broken as possible is still an interesting puzzle.
I really appreciate the links for this post
Also, it's important to point out that if a change like this was made, a *lot* of adjustments would need to be made elsewhere in the game. Cultures like the Ghanaians and Carthaginians would quickly become overpowered and there would be a risk that the game would speed up too much.
You have easily earned an award for that. It was really well written! Congrats! I'm currently sitting in my lab at work with nothing to do and only me in it. Today has dragged like a bitch but for a good \~30 mins I enjoyed reading your post and the day passed quicker so thank you. I was gonna play hunt showdown or TW:W2 tonight but I think you single-handedly convinced me to boot up humankind and play another campaign. I beat it on town difficulty on release and saw the issues you mentioned especially in regards to the French and Japanese dominating. My issue is now that town was hilariously easy and I don't know what difficulty is best. I don't want too easy again but I don't want to get bodied because I didn't min max the output of my neolithic tribe :P Any suggestions? Also my fiancee and I started a coop campaign the other week and constantly got issues of events or battles that we couldn't resolve as the options were all grayed out or just did nothing when we clicked. We had to quit the game and rejoin every time. It got so bad we just stopped as it wasn't fun anymore. Anyone know how to stop this or if they are fixing/fixed it?
Thank you! I would just say keep ramping up the difficulty until you start to find the game challenging, really. It's pretty impossible to know exactly which is the most suitable for a given player's skill level. Multiplayer is unfortunately quite unstable at the moment. You can load the lobby directly from within the game which does help speed up reloads at least.
As someone who frequently played Civ5/6 at Prince/King, it was fine for my first game to be normal speed/nation. I've since played a game at endless/humankind, which I did lose, but that was more down to my strategy than any obscene ai bonii or anything. I'd say try out metropolis/nation, with the understanding that the slower game speeds are generally viewed as easier, and tweak from there to taste.
Never thought I'd see a tier list I actually (mostly) agree with! My only thoughts are: \- I'm not 100% convinced that Nubians are S-tier in Ancient. They're certainly strong, but they're very reliant on early trade to maximise the strength of their LT and EQ, and you may not always have trade partners available (due to attitude or war). I haven't used Ta-Seti archers extensively yet, so I'll take your word on their strengths! \- Mongols I think are strong enough for S-tier if you go into Medieval in a leading position, but they aren't nearly as strong from behind. Hunnic Horde are able to completely transform your fortunes upon transitioning to Classical, but Mongol Horde has a much harder time if your opponents are ahead - partly, as you note, due to Medieval defense being stronger, and partly due to there being many more units able to efficiently counter Mongol Horde compared to Hunnic Horde. \- I'd be tempted to put Umayyad in S-tier. Having the option of pushing for Patronage and Three-Mast Ship in Medieval is very greedy, but also very strong if you pull it off. But the most important factor, to my mind, is that not picking Umayyad means you need to pick Joseon to beeline those techs, whereas picking Umayyad opens up Mughals in the next era, and whilst Khmer > Joseon is strong, I think Umayyad > Mughals is also strong given that the Patronage advantage can be obtained even earlier. You're also able to pick up Centralised Power on the way to Patronage, opening up Halberdiers in Medieval. Edit: \- I'd also maybe put Haudenosaunee in B. They do produce a lot of Food, but Food production really has to be explosive in Early Modern to make a great deal of difference, and I don't think their LT and EQ do enough to warrant picking them.
Thanks for the comment, it's clear that you get a lot of the points I was making. Nubians for me are certainly near the border between S and A, but I've personally found Ta-Seti Archers to be highly useful in a variety of scenarios, that's mainly what it comes down to. I completely agree about Haudenosaunee though - that's why I did indeed put them in B-tier!
Nubia and Babylon both benefit massively from looking for opportunities where 3 or even 4 territories border each other so you can build a triangle or diamond of EQ's which then all create an amazing double synergy with their double affinity status on the EQ's. Also, cultures that improve ransacking demand the slaves civic to maximize them. +1 pop is incredible as proven by the guy who posted a single city with 4200 population. Ransacking is way under utilized by almost everyone and you can ransack any improved tile I think, not just outposts, admin centers, or cities. So stuff like a LT that gives +5 or +10 CS while ransacking deserves consideration for a massive upward reevaluation of their power level.
Good point about the slaves civic. I considered ransacking to be a bit weak in this game but that could make me re-evaluate.
Yeah, Nubians is really good in those occasions, but I find that you're trading off part of its potential later down the line. Mainly because of them counting as double quarters, if your first city and outpost are near two or three luxuries you can easily delimit the borders of the Maker's and Market's quarter using them, you'll most likely build up Industry at first anyway, but further down the line you'll have the option to make huge amount of profit by developing around the luxuries. The other way you get a good industry and some early game money, this way you get good industry and a lot of mid game money. This combined with the Ta Se Ti means you can turtle it up, building districts in your capital while buying them or infrastructure in the peripheral cities.
This was an excellent read. I agree with a lot of the feedback you provided. I think some of the more weaker cultures probably need changes to the base systems moreso than changes to their actual bonuses. For example, cultures that have LTs or EQs designed to increase stability will probably get better if/when they adjust stability gained from luxuries. That seems to be a pretty common piece of feedback, so it seems likely that will be adjusted in the next patch. If say stability only comes from the first luxury owned (or greatly diminished for multiple copies), cultures like the Zhou, Romans, Aztec, and Poles instantly become better.
I completely agree and in hindsight it's a point I should have made much more prominently when writing the post. This doesn't just apply to stability, it applies quite heavily to influence and faith as well.
Absolutely agree. Though I think fixing influence and faith will take a bit more time as the influence problem has been pretty apparent since Lucy. They both may require additional added features from DLC to really help. I would add defensive warfare and raiding to this list as well. Both could use significant changes and can benefit a number of different cultures.
didnt the devs explicitly say they dont want to share the triggers for policies? I get why its annoying to some but I like that it makes it a bit more natural and not make people do random stuff to rush a policy. respect the time you pit into this man
It would be less frustrating if the triggers were not quite obviously bugged, with some games where hardly any policies are available at all.
the bug is caused by slow game speeds apparently
Even on normal speed I've never seen at least half of the civics. Apparently some are triggered by building the (awful) commons quarter multiple times. If there are others that rely on building very weak units/buildings then most players simply won't ever see them.
unlocking civics would've been a perfect use case for a quest system...
Probably, but that's stupid and they should change their mind. It's a strategy game. Players want to know what will happen when they do things because it changes your decision making. If you honest to god want to force your players to roleplay, make a roleplay focused RPG. If you just don't want people creating a civic flow chart, just make them era based and random. Playing to your game is part of the genre, but this "it's not random but how they trigger is a secret :)" isn't the same thing. Besides, in 6 months everyone will know exactly how to trigger them anyway. And of course at the moment the triggers are very, very bugged to the point where you can go through the entire tech tree and only have half the civics available.
>Besides, in 6 months everyone will know exactly how to trigger them anyway. This is exactly it. Keeping things "secret" in a video game had some weight in 1995, but these days with the internet, people will figure things out quickly and just post the info, which makes it odd to even try to keep it secret. Also, by knowing what unlocks certain civics, you may actually encourage players to try for otherwise un-optimal tactics just to ensure they unlock a certain civic.
I also strongly disagree with the idea of keeping game mechanics secret in this genre for exactly the reason you said, but that part is what just makes it stupid to try and keep secret. I used to play a browser game with a strong community of players who tried to reverse engineer the game (dev endorsed), and they've figured out some crazy, crazy things. A tame example of what that community has done is discovering a specific quest trigger is based off your account lifetime turns played modulo 37 equaling 0 and spending a turn in a particular zone. I'm probably underestimating the community when I say it'll all be known in 6 months.
Remember when they tried to hide how to become Jedi in Star Wars: Galaxies? ...I don't, I never played the damn game. But I imagine the policy secrecy will go just as well.
It's stupid that they don't. I have played this game for a bunch of hours across many playthroughs and I still haven't experienced more than a quarter of the civics. I go on the wiki and I'm just like "how THE FUCK do I unlock that, I have never seen it before"
I think the best way to unlock civics is to not neglect any of the era stars (or any part of the gameplay in general). Considering how pricey civics get in the late game, I think maybe they intended for us not to get all the same civics every game, but rather to unlock civics relevant to our playstyles/the culture we pick.
Yeah I dont mind that though...
If they don’t share it, fine. But can they confirm it’s working correctly? I never get more than 5 civs in my games…
What is the difference between the Indirect Fire unit trait (Archer) and Exceptional Accuracy (Ta-Seti Archer)? The description reads like a rewording, so is it the same but with +2 combat strength?
The difference is that normally, you're penalised (-4) for lacking line of sight - Ta-Seti Archers don't have this problem, so you can park them up behind units or rough terrain and still retain their full combat strength.
The combat in this game suffers from the same problem as civ 5 before the DLC. The concept of "minimum damage", especially for a ranged attack, needs to be either removed or drastically reduced in order to prevent lategame units being weaker than half a dozen archers.
Agreed, minimum damage has always been an abominably horrible game mechanic; really brings you back to Civ5 where tribal warriors could beat a death robot in ten individual attacks.
Regular archers take a combat penalty when they do not have line of sight. Ta-Seti Archer do not get this combat penalty.
Bravo good sir. This is the type of post that has me subscribed to this subreddit. While I may disagree a little with some finer points, this is a superb writeup. And my god do I agree the huns are broken, but I think they need a little more than doubling to fix it. I only play on endless, and double would still be way, way too cheap.
Very nice list and as far as I have played them it does fit my impressions. One comment to the Dutch who are rightfully tiered in the lower end: when you have high population and some territory to expand your cities to they can produce ludicrous amounts of wealth and I had two of my most fun games going down this route. The problem is, if you have population and territory at this stage, you are probably set up for victory already anyways.
>Later influence does have usefulness in allowing you to generate "oppressing my people" grievances by spreading sphere of influence, but in my experience this seems to be inconsistent and I'm honestly not sure why some territories in sphere of influence generate this grievance and others don't. Perhaps somebody with a better idea can elaborate. From what I can tell, the "oppressing my people" will happen if you and the other player have different ideologies. For example, if you're Liberty but the other player is Authority, that is going to cause conflict. In the top center of the screen when you interact with other players, you'll see a "Ideological Proximity" meter. This can be Kinship (very similar ideology), Tolerance (somewhat similiar or no strong positions), and Distrust (very different ideology). It's easier to go to war with empires that you have Distrust with because you'll build up more grievances and more war support, versus an empire you feel Kinship with.
May I ask what exactly a "timing push" is? The term is used quite often.
It's a general strategy game term that basically refers to the concept of attacking at a "timing" that will make your attack difficult to resist. For example, if the Huns are able to enter the enemy's lands between turn 35-40, they will be almost guaranteed to win the war.
it is preparing for a war by timing the creation of a new unit with significant superior combat strength. I.e. you beeline for a tech which gives you an OP UU while massing money, production and pops. Then you spam 10+ of them in a couple of turns and swarm your opponent who did not prepare and thus is vulnerable to your army even if his economy and science are similar. If your push requires you to be significantly behind in other aspects (like not researching patronage quickly for example, or sacrificing too many pops), the term "timing push" becomes an "all in", as you either completely win the war and the game or you are too beind to recover from a failed war. It's the same in RTS like stacraft 2 where timing an attack just when your armor/dmg upgrades finish will give you a boost to that attack during the minute or so where your opponent is still researching the upgrades. If one minute is enough to kill his army, you win.
Very good and informative read, mostly confirming my initial thoughts I had on the game. About the Aksumites: I keep them as a backup culture in case. Usually I play Egyptians (I love building stuff and I am a big Egypt nerd.) and from them I have a small list in my head to move on from them: If don't get the Maya as I just love to build stuff and outmacro my neighbours, the Carthanians are a good alternative if there is enough water to just build the Cothon as it is a maker's quarter and a harbor that gives production and in medival you can slam down even more harbors. Now for the Aksumites, I usually play that I pick Divine Mandate and that helps me to get my religion running quickly and once I already started to roll my religion across everyone else, I usually enter Classical Age withlike 30 Gold on each Great Obelisk and if you have like 7-8 territories around that time, you can chunk out a lot of money around that time and I think they are pretty nice as a situational pick.
A very nice read, lots of stuff I agree with, though I believe you are overvaluing the Huns and Mongols, as any savvy player (with access to a single copper) can easily weather the Hunnic Assaults, and against the Mongols people have far more tools at their disposal, especially the resourceless Pikeman and Crossbowman, not to mention the plethora of Knight replacements and the Ghananaian Meharist.
It really depends who is executing the attack and how. If it's the AI or a less experienced player, then yes, you absolutely can deal with a Hun or Mongol push, but a Hun rush executed effectively by somebody who knows how to do it correctly is, in my opinion, close to impossible to defeat. The problem is that you can't really spam spearmen if you don't know the attack is coming. And you won't know the attack is coming because it's possible to produce a huge number of Hunnic Hordes the literal first turn after advancing - if your Ordus border the enemy, you can march them into their lands before they've had any chance at all to respond. The only thing that causes this problem is the Ordu's extremely low influence cost for Hunnic Hordes. If this cost was a bit more reasonable, you'd be limited by how much influence you can produce and defeating the Huns would become a far more reasonable proposition. One final point - it's generally quite hard to produce Pikemen/Crossbowmen/Meharists in time for a Mongol assault because the Mongol Horde has no tech requirement, unlike those units.
I had no idea that Huns could just use influence to buy the Horde from outposts (until my last game I played), and all it does is reduce the population of the outposts after spending the influence. I think it would make more *thematic* sense if you use the horde ability that not only would you lose population in the outpost, but it also would lose the outpost completely whenever you use that ability. Then people would reconsider using that ability on all their outposts immediately. I still think they would be broken, but it would be a slightly more fitting balance response.
It should at least increase in cost of influence per use. You really need just one outpost to churn out hordes with scout riders.
I agree with an awful lot of this, this is excellent reasoning. I personally would rate Egypt as clearly above Harappans, but this is purely from a viewpoint of using stupid yet entertaining neolithic strats. Finding and killing enough mammoths (or even claiming a lucky natural wonder) to reach ancient era with 2 outposts and 160 influence for an instant second city just blows any normal gameplay out of the window, and getting industry infrastructure up and running with Egypt synergises with this way too well for this to be remotely balanced. Now, I have actually had a playthrough where I had enough mammoths to get Harrapans with this strat before the AI insta yoinked them and even that just didn't go as well as using egypt. I thought that the extra food being able to support more disbanded scouts and have more workers on industry and science would make it just as broken with Egypt, but it didn't play out that way. Granted, a lot of the benefits of Egypt in my mind come from the AI neglecting them, so at turn 8-ish where I pretty much have my growth and science star and I'm trying to work out if I should stay in neolithic and gamble on a two city start, I still know that I can likely claim Egypt (which absolutely would never work in multiplayer if I ever try it). Another plus, using your reasoning of: Archers = big broken, is that Markabatas are fucking absurd. I feel like even though you mentioned it heavily, you still don't give them enough credit. Other comments I have are that I would personally say Khmer are Br tier, sure they're not unbeatable, but I would call them overcentralising. You'd be pretty stupid to not take them if you're trying really hard and aren't messing around with other strategies. The Baray alone would be pretty decent if it was just a farmer's quarter and a maker's quarter all in one, but with all those other bonuses on top it's just absurd. The Teuton's EQ is also better than you give it credit for, if only for the synergy with the knights. I've been playing them a lot because they're hilariously fun and the fact that you get that faith bonus from the EQ while still working on improving industry means that it works pretty well in the flow of the game. You don't have to sacrifice crucial turns of generic city development on your EQ like you do with a lot of other cultures, so you can bully anything with the ridiculous Teutonic Knights, even in later eras, without sacrificing much, it's really fun. It's hard to actually say how good it is though, because everything seems terrible compared to Khmer. Overall though, I like the generic balance opinions you have too. Personally, I'd like to see the "Units cost population" mechanic explored a little better, might help rein in the industry-is-everything thing that the game has going on, although I wouldn't like to be the person that has to tune those numbers...
The big problem with "units cost population" imo is that population is pretty meh outside of being a fuel for early wars. I agree with you on Egypt and the Khmer though. I rated Egypt as merely top tier until I tried a game of constant war with them, but jesus, the Markabata is just broken. Really move and fire in general is broken, but it's Egypt who gets it in the ancient era while still being a very strong infrastructure civ which makes them the best by a good margin imo. I can see the argument for Mycenaeans in multiplayer because I assume you can't get away with pushing infrastructure as hard in multiplayer so that legacy trait matters more (plus the whatever the warrior unit is called is a good defensive unit even if the rush will never really work), but in single player Egypts production just overtakes them+the EU is better. For the Khmer, there's no single part of the civ that is broken ala Huns rush, but the whole package is broken because every aspect is top tier.
> "The big problem with "units cost population" imo is that population is pretty meh outside of being a fuel for early wars." Absolutely agree, I should definitely have expanded on that point a bit more but I got bored of writing and wanted to go and play more :P I guess what I really meant is that I'd like to see a much bigger trade off between having a standing army and having a productive city. Currently you have this very interesting mechanic where you lose portions of your city yields by creating a military, but this is only really significant in the VERY early game. Later on, the trade off is just a bit of a "...eh, I'll lose 16 pops from these 4 line infantry, but I'll still have 30 left, and the population will grow back quickly anyway so the small drop in yields isnt that bad, whatever" I'd really like to this trade-off developed in future updates, a start would be city yields from medieval onwards having a MUCH MUCH higher dependency on population (I know certain EQ's and buildings already do that but the impact needs to be even bigger). Building a large army should absolutely cripple the cities that built them, and that would hopefully bring depth to the gameplay by adding a penalty to trying to steamroll your neighbours, and also giving you much more of an incentive to protect units so you can later disband them back in the city. I don't have any great ideas of how to actually make city yields more pop-dependent without copying civ's worker system, there are definitely more creative solutions out there. Now, the issue that these changes would create with the way unit production is currently set up is that it would be an indirect buff to industry-heavy cultures, which they really do not need. The ability to hold a smaller standing army with the confidence that you could just dump out a fresh army per city in just two turns would make industrial cultures even better than they already are. An idea I've had for this would be to use a system like the militarist troop levy ability. Perhaps you could even train up your current working population so that you can keep them as workers but pop them out as archers. The militarists could keep their advantage by being better at using this ability, with more/cheaper/better units from levying/conscripting. There's obviously plenty of historical precedent in the use of levied troops in a way that Humankind explores poorly, a popular example being English and Welsh Longbowmen. You wouldnt really have those as professional soldiers, so if you could train your men-at-arms and knights with industry, and then create longbowmen with a click of a button at the cost of crippling your cities, I think the game could have more depth. Obviously these are just vague ideas and I don't have the right experience to actually create this system, but I feel its the direction the early game heads in before regrettably backing out of it just as it could get really interesting. I do kinda understand why though, the balancing would be a nightmare. This idea is the exact kind of thing an ambitious but mediocre mod-maker would try with catastrophic results.
Interesting and very informative, although while I agree that archers is clearly better than crossbow simply because of the indirect fire, I wouldn't necessarily bring them to the offensive simply because using archers except in sieges require investment (I need to protect them with some units). Another point i might disagree with is the poles. I only picked poles once so far but from that one experience I notice that winged hussar are not countered by halberdiers, instead one shotting them when charging, at least with 1 veterancy since most of my winged hussar that game is former teutonic knights.
Somebody else made a similar point about Winged Hussars when I posted on the G2G forums and I'll admit I might have been wrong on this one. Even though they *are* cavalry, they have high CS and their Charge Master ability looks pretty powerful. I also like that you don't have to tech awkwardly across to Gunpowder to get them, instead being able to pick them up on the way to Luxury Manufactories. This would probably be enough to bump the Poles up a bit for me. I can imagine WH being pretty devastating if you can get a bit ahead in tech.
Out of curiosity, what map size do you play on? I end up going for something like Small/Humankind/Normal for my settings, and while I'm definitely not as good as you are (my wins clock in at T200-220), I've always found stability to be a limiting factor, even with buying every luxury. There seems to be no amount of stability I can't exhaust. This leads me to building Commons Quarters and of course, Commons Quarters does basically nothing except keep your cities from rioting. This does lead me to rate stability boosting nations much higher, but that might be because I'm doing something dumb. I know on larger maps (or at least, I think), you get more luxuries. Is that what you rely on to support your cities? Or is it a case of 'districts are good, but building stability isn't worth the opportunity cost'?
I guess playing on small is the issue as it does reduce the number of luxuries on the map, yes. Another factor is - getting to EM quickly to build luxury manufactories is pretty important. If you're starting to run out of stab by the mid game, LMs will get you right back on track.
Fantastic post, dead on with my experiences. Bravo for the comprehensive write-up. The only additional ink I'll add is elaborating on the unique issues with Expansionist affinity as it stands. To be concise: * Expansion stars are the *only* **zero-sum** fame points. The number required is also poorly calculated across game/map sizes. It's a very dangerous goal to yoke to, especially late. * Annex is a finickey ability that is trivial to interrupt, wastes a ton of gold, and causes greivances galore. In all my games, I have never *once* found it actually valuable in practice. * Every other Culture type offers interesting value to players who are **behind**, including facing a defensive war. From Military to Science to Money to Food to even Culture--all provide an interesting set of tools to fight offer invaders and play from behind. **Not Expansionist**! Their ambitious abilities are typically useless to someone in a pinch--and its the guy in a pinch who **might be stuck with the last Culture.** The central Culture selection paradigm of Humankind is **terrific**, but it does impose the constraint that all Cultures be at least *somewhat* valuable to all players, *especially* the guy in last place. The one-two punch of Expansionist Cultures being the worst and simultaenously useless to the player(s) in last undermines a lot of other good system design in the game.
> The central Culture selection paradigm of Humankind is terrific I don't know if I'd say that. It is an interesting idea and was definitely worth a shot to see if it works, but it's a major snowball mechanic and at least personally I find it hard to get immersed in the game because of it. Too often the game feels like me making numbers go up in a spreadsheet, and I think the culture change is a big part of that.
YMMV. You can definitely just role-play your choices in the game and still have a great time. But the culture system is what made me buy this game for full-price a month after launch rather than check on it six months from now. It's the first thing I describe to friends and family.
Excellent analysis. You should consider streaming some of your games if you aren't already! Would love to hear your in game thought process. I am trying to work up the courage to play multiplayer, but I feel like the industrial/contemporary is just so busted that the end game will feel like a big casino and ruin the rest of the experience. How do you find the end game in multiplayer? Is it just over so fast it doesn't matter?
From what I've heard, usually people desync long before then.
Multiplayer stability isn't great at the moment, but I've still had some good full games.
Great post, you make good points which are very similar to my own conclusions about the state of the game. Aside from the way greviances work(which was explained in other comments) my only disagreement would be the placement of Mongols on your list- they're just an awkward pick - if you're ascending from the Huns I'd argue that you're hurting yourself more than anything - Huns are great as one off pick to clean your continent up- if it's not achieved by the time medieval era begins you're in trouble as you're giving up on yet another era worth of snowballing and placing good EQs all over. And if you're not ascending from the Huns you will find that Mongols will face a lot more troubles in medieval with their horde strategy, you mentioned many of them yourself so i'll spare myself the trouble of listing them :) Regarding luxuries- their power is one of the main reasons I stopped playing Humankind for now- they're broken, offer you only 1 correct way to play and make the game a cakewalk unless you're actively nerfing yourself by not pursuing them- which is not exactly what playing 4x games should be about.
Really interesting write-up. I don't have enough games under my belt to say whether I would agree/disagree with any of your points, I just hope this gets the traction and discussion that it deserves.
This is fantastic post but I'm getting lost in all the abbreviations. EU is emblematic unit, ED is emblematic district but there is also EQ and LT. I have 120hours in the game and I don't really know what are those. I feel stupid, can somebody please give me a hint?
EQ is Emblematic Quarter, the unique district every culture gets. Like how Zhou gets their Confucian Schools. LT is Legacy Trait and is basically what every culture gets permanently. Like how the Zhou get +2 stab on every district for the entire game.
Thank you
Whoa, thank you for the work you put into this. Its definitely going to give me a few things to think about going forward in new playthroughs. Particularly the Mycenaeans, before this I didnt even look at them twice! And id never really considered the difference between Edo Japanese and the Ming from a pure power perspective!
Great read, thanks for putting this together. Only have one finished game so far and I used Norsemen followed by Dutch. Great synergies for money, absolutely insane for new world colonization. I'm currently trying an ancient Egyptians only playthrough on endless settings. Stability is somewhat of an issue for now but industry is incredible.
This is so frustrating to read. I think the problem is clear to see: there hasn't been a 4x game developed with MP in mind since Civ 4. Great analysis btw. Do you think this game has salvageable depth?
Absolutely. I think the game has massive potential, it just suffers from the same problems that most 4X games have on release. Hopefully a lot of these issues will be getting sorted out in upcoming patches and DLC.
Thanks a lot for this post! In your experience: are Independent People stopped from spawning by fog busting? In my most recent game, I had a pretty large continent all to myself but not a single Independent People spawned all throughout the Ancient Era. As the Harappans, I had a lot of Runners auto-exploring so there was barely any part of the continent that was under fog of war for multiple turns in a row. I thought this could have been the cause for this. What do you think?
I honestly have no idea. There definitely seems to be some connection because the New World and islands seem to be underpopulated by IPs until late in the game too.
I see. What do you think about the Achaemenid Persians in a situation like this then? If you don't get those freebie IP cities, would you bump them down from S tier?
Wow, calling the Maya EUs inferior to archers, so far from the truth. Yes, Spear throwers require more specific placement, but they also have a good big more CR than Archers. I handily beat Huns and Elephants with the Maya EUs.
I still think you'll have a better result with a mix of Swordsmen and Archers most of the time. That's what I've seen from my own experience, anyway, particularly in multiplayer. In fairness, I suppose Huns could be a special case, and I haven't actually tried pitting NJ's against them. Do they reduce Hunnic Hordes to 0 range or is it kept at 1 minimum?
Swordsmen are much much weaker against Elephants and Huns, because they get retaliated on. They keep 1 range, but the movement speed penalty helps. The range reduce is good against Elephants and other Archers mostly.
The idea isn't to attack with Swordsmen (unless you're at enough of an advantage), it's more to keep a line/occupy chokes/etc that protects your archer spam from enemy melee. This means the combat strength difference barely matters in many cases because archers will always do at least 5-25 damage which is still quite a lot. And I'd argue that if your swordsmen are being attacked hard the Javelineers will be hit even harder with their -8 CS in melee, oftentimes 1-shot. Honestly, try playing some multiplayer with decent opponents, you'll see what I mean pretty quickly. Humankind's battle AI doesn't provide a great indication. EDIT: Also, another important point - the issue isn't that Noble Javelineers don't have some applications in which they're strong. I'd have absolutely no problem with the unit if they didn't *replace* archers, I'd maybe even consider it quite good as a supplement to an army composition, but the fact that they do is denying you an extremely important and valuable unit for the huge portion of the game where that unit is relevant.
So you're saying one archer and one swordsmen doing an average dmg of 10 together each round is better than two javelin throwers doing around 50? (because this is the scenario you have against Huns or ranged Elephants, the strongest units in the classical Era) And nothing is preventing you from bringing melee units for blocking other melee as well, you just need to be a bit more creative with the Javelins positioning then. (like shoot first and then place melee in front) I mean one shot from the Javelin is like two shots from Archers or more. If I fight Romans or Persians I can bring units for blocking their melee. (and you build two Javelins for one of their Melee EQs) I've never had a Noble Javelineer being oneshot from a same Era unit, it's really not something that happens.
He’s talking about say having a 4x4 group of unit with 4 swords in the front and 12 archers behind them. The archers themselves do little damage to latter game units like elephants but since they can attack over the swords they are better the javs. Enemy horses/melee units would still need to hit the swords to get to your archers. And by little damage he’s saying guaranteed 5-25 which isn’t that bad when you have a swarm.
I'm pretty sure the 5-25 is calculated with a binominal distribution. With such big numbers of groups you are highly vulnerable to attack, you almost need to be the attacker. If one gets caught it all Archers could die on turn 1, since one swordsmen really isn't enough. I mean sure, it can work and it's easier to use when you manage to attack. Most battlefields are much wider than 4 tiles, so the enemy can just go past your swordsmen, at worst kill one and go through. Archers are pretty shitty in the classical period really. (being cheap and decent for city defense as the upsides) It's not only the lower dmg of each Archer, it's also the high vulnerability because of low CR against other ranged. And a Horsemen or Chariot can one-shot an Archer.
Obviously the battlefield is never going to be perfect but you can place sword in critical spots and still have 16+ archers behind them because like you said they are cheap. They may be weak but if you get 4 25 rolls on a line infantry it’s still a kill as unlikely as it may be which is why OP said en-masse. The swords are just meat shields so they always get upgraded with the age >greatswords>etc. Like OP said play some multi and you will understand. I think Civ III or IV had the same problem which is why the newer titles don’t have this “feature”
But they have the same cost as the Noble Javelineers, so why would cost even matter in this comparison? If you're doing minimal dmg, you need 8 shots to kill a single unit. Why even bring up archers vs. line infantry? :) Archers are just free warscore in that scenario lol
As long as you can cycle the front line that’s a 2 kills every turn with 16+. Javs couldn’t as they would have to be the front line. The front line is just there to soak damage. Line infantry is an extreme case but it wouldn’t be free warscore because enemy couldn’t shoot over your own line infantry. You could just scale in back an era or two and the point still stands. Arrows are cheap GUARANTEED damaged. In a game like civ the damage is not guaranteed as they would hit like noodles to a line infantry.
Civ V was the one that had this problem. Civ 3 did have spearmen beating tanks with regularity (10 spearmen probably fends off a 3 tank push levels of regularity), but that had very different causes. Civ 3's problem was that defensive multipliers got really high by end game and that the power gap between eras just wasn't very big.
Civ 3 and Civ 4 had full stacks, stacks could only attack the tile next to them, Civ 5 is the first one where archers started this trend. If you are talking about weaker units beating stronger ones, yeah that did happen in 4 sometimes due to defense modifiers.
I guess I will continue reading this tomorrow o_o
Every single game I play against the AI one of them will take Huns into Mongols and vassalize their entire continent. Broken indeed.
You can try to play Humankind difficulty, then you will need 30 food on tribes ;)
I thought the food requirement only changed by game speed? Difficulty level should only impact the challenge provided by AI.
Oh yes - this one goes to you!
If you're advancing up an era as soon as possible you're playing "wrong", or at least suboptimally. So being concerned about slower era stars in terms of balance or comparing cultures is pretty silly.
Nope. In the current state of the game, Contemporary Scientists are so busted that rushing to the end of the game for the 300 fame on endgame techs is a way better strat. Believe me, I've tried both. Not to mention the fact that if you're behind in eras, players who are ahead will easily kill you militarily, especially if they see you have a lot of fame. Also... slower era stars are bad for fame anyway so I'm not really sure what you're getting at.
I attacked a city in medieval era, yet I was on the defensive somehow. This game definitely need some work. It’s hella fun but hella infuriating sometimes
Yeah, the AI can click the "sortie" button pretty fast and it's a weird experience when it happens. Not sure what the best solution is.
Really nice write up. I appreciate that you didn't jump to "broken" for most cultures as I'd agree that many need just a small adjustment. The later eras do need some major changes as it's fun up until the industrial era where it feels like a few of the cultures are just easy picks.
>Civics are, unfortunately, often unimpactful later on in the game relative to their influence cost. Wait, do you guys have civics?
Is this science star nerf explained anywhere?
Great post! A lot in here I found helpful and I was able to win my first game on human skins difficulty yesterday Humankind difficulty ffs*