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SpaceTroll

SpaceTroll

2 years ago Oct 15,2021, 13:29:40 PM

October Progress Update

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It’s been almost two months since we put Humankind in your hands, but that was only the beginning of our journey together with this game. The response was enthusiastic, but the enthusiastic players are often also the most critical, and we received a lot of feedback through Games2Gether, the Steam forums, and even Steam reviews in the first couple of weeks. This feedback is vital to us, not only to see what you like about the game and what problems you want to see addressed first, but also to get a picture of how you would like the game to grow in the future.

Today, we want to take a look at the improvements we have already made, the feedback we’re seeing, and what we’re working on for the next patch.



Initial Patches

After launch, a few subjects quickly emerged as frequently discussed by the community. Many players found that they were unable to fully experience the Contemporary or even Industrial era, as they could not find enough resource deposits on the map and many times pollution ended their game prematurely. We have since increased the amount of late game resources, raised the limit of pollution, and added some additional options to reduce it, to allow our players to savor the last eras, though we know many of you would like to see further improvements. We also fixed a problem with naval assaults on cities, which led to unassailable island fortresses.

In addition to these frequently discussed problems, we’ve made some improvements to other parts of the game. For example, we’ve started work on the user interface by rearranging the terms in the Surrender Screen to make different territories easier to find. We’ve also been working on the AI, particularly how it handles armies and battles. Furthermore, we’ve added better validation tools to the map editor.

Of course, we have also been working hard to improve the stability and performance of the game and addressed many of the bugs reported by our players. 


Ongoing Work

However, we know we have yet to address all of your concerns, and while our team may not be able to respond on the forums as much as they’d like, we watch your discussions with interest. We’ve been following many fascinating conversations about a variety of topics, from Neolithic population growth to end conditions, culture balance and affinities to overall game pace, line of sight and unit balance, religion, and even improved quality of life for personas and the new game lobby, among others.

We have already fixed many crashes and stuck turns, but there a still some major concerns that are among our top priorities — for example the Mac version, multiplayer stability, and the reports of crashes and turns not ending properly. These issues have a wide variety of potential causes we need to tackle one at a time, and similarly, multiplayer connection issues involve a great number of variables that can make it difficult to reproduce them in our testing environment — in other words, these issues have proven more difficult to address than anticipated and as such have slowed down both the investigation and testing phases of some fixes.

We want to apologize to our fans on Mac for the long delay of the official Mac release. While we have made good progress on the Mac version of the game, creating an M1-compatible version has proven surprisingly difficult. Unfortunately, we did not have access to sufficient information and hardware in advance, so we could not start work on compatibility before release. We are sorry that we did not foresee this long delay. We’re currently finishing our examination and will update you with more details next week. In the meantime, we will continue to work on the Mac Beta currently available for opt-in on Steam, and we hope to officially release this version soon.

We hope to address these issues as soon as possible, but we cannot give you an estimate of when they will be fixed yet.



Future Features

We don’t just want to review what we’ve done since the release today, we want to take a look at the future.

We know many of you would like us to expand certain parts of the game, like religion, diplomacy, cultural influence, and pollution, with more options for the player and stronger interactions with the other game systems. While we agree that many parts of the game could be expanded, these are substantial changes and additions that require careful consideration and time to implement. We are working on various improvements we think you will be excited about, but we are not ready to share details about them yet. Additionally, rest assured we are keeping a close eye on your discussions to take into account where and how you would like to see the game grow. 


The Next Update

Finally, some news we know many of you have been waiting for: We are aiming to release the next big update on October 28th. This patch will improve your options when creating your game with new settings for resource abundance and end conditions and try to address the rapid increase in the game’s pace in the mid to late game discussed by the community as well as some of the most discussed concerns about balance between cultures, among other things. We’ll talk about this game update in greater detail next week. 



Thank you for your support

— The Amplitude Team 

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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 1:42:11 PM

"some of the most discussed concerns about balance between cultures, among other things"

This worries me, since this sounds like only a minimal amount of balancing has been done

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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 2:59:49 PM
komodowaran wrote:

"some of the most discussed concerns about balance between cultures, among other things"

This worries me, since this sounds like only a minimal amount of balancing has been done

We'll be doing as much balancing as we can, with a focus first on the late game pace, balance between cultures, and combat balance. However, just to set reasonable expectation: We will probably not be able to address all balance concerns of the community at once in this patch, especially not concerns that may require major systematic changes rather than just numerical changes.

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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 3:45:50 PM

Thank you dev team! I can't wait to see the full patch notes but it sounds like you listen to the community and that you're "growing" in a direction that is going to make it more fun and immersive.

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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 4:00:51 PM

Sounds good, but really, don't leave us Stadia players. I notice we are already missing updates that are shared here and in communities.

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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 6:08:07 PM

Look forward to seeing patch note details. Here's hoping a good chunk, if not all, multiplayer issues get resolved.

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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 7:06:44 PM

count me apprehensive

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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 8:50:08 PM

Happy to hear some feedback and approximate date of the next patch/release. Thanks Humankind team for your work. The game is just an excellent piece of artwork and I am sure it will become only better and better overtime.

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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 10:14:04 PM
komodowaran wrote:

"some of the most discussed concerns about balance between cultures, among other things"

This worries me, since this sounds like only a minimal amount of balancing has been done


That's not what 'most' means, jefe.


The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

We'll be doing as much balancing as we can, with a focus first on the late game pace, balance between cultures, and combat balance. However, just to set reasonable expectation: We will probably not be able to address all balance concerns of the community at once in this patch, especially not concerns that may require major systematic changes rather than just numerical changes.

Can't you just hook everything up to a random number generator and see if that works?  It'll only take like, a few million tries at most.

Updated 2 years ago.
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2 years ago
Oct 15, 2021, 10:35:03 PM

All around good news. :)


Something make curious however :

SpaceTroll wrote:
Unfortunately, we did not have access to sufficient information and hardware in advance, so we could not start work on compatibility before release.

Sega was not able to help with it in some way ? Or was it really more of a resource and time constraint to et your hands on the data ? I was not concerned (Windows user) but it's unfortunate and seems to be quite a hassle. Hang in there I suppose.


SpaceTroll wrote:

The Next Update

Finally, some news we know many of you have been waiting for: We are aiming to release the next big update on October 28th. This patch will improve your options when creating your game with new settings for resource abundance and end conditions and try to address the rapid increase in the game’s pace in the mid to late game discussed by the community as well as some of the most discussed concerns about balance between cultures, among other things. We’ll talk about this game update in greater detail next week. 

I can wait to get back to Humankind. I have to admit that make me a bit impatient though. ^^


Bon courage, I do hope it all end up working out.

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2 years ago
Oct 16, 2021, 12:24:14 AM
Thanks developers for your hard work to make Humankind into a better game.
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2 years ago
Oct 16, 2021, 12:44:50 AM

Please don't forget to fix Mars Colony bug and consider introducing recurring Future Technology, because getting to Mars is a good Science victory example in itself, with finished tech tree as a byproduct. With snowballing science in the late game one cannot even CHOOSE to win by finished tech tree, it will happen, which is no fun...

Updated 2 years ago.
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2 years ago
Oct 16, 2021, 2:40:04 AM
It's nice to see clear communication about the game, and I'm hopeful that the validation changes make my map of Ireland playable!
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2 years ago
Oct 16, 2021, 3:28:07 AM

Awesome news, thanks for all the hard work and looking forward to see this game grow to its full potential. Pitty the update is on the same day AOE IV is released hehe.

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2 years ago
Oct 16, 2021, 4:10:13 AM

Waiting Update.

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2 years ago
Oct 16, 2021, 8:06:55 AM

So instead of small and frequent updates you are gonna do small and rare. Not what I was expecting. No wonder less then 6% players are still playing since release just two months ago.

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