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The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales

2 years ago May 05,2022, 15:00:44 PM

Quality of Life Improvements (Part1)

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After taking a look at the changes to Surrender and War Support last week, we want to focus on some quality of life improvements this week, ranging from AI and tooltips to eye candy and wonders. With such a grab bag of improvements, we’re sure there’s something for most players here!



Urban Planning Made Easy

Developing your cities is a core part of playing Humankind. But while expanding your cities with new districts would give you immediate feedback and even suggest good spots, the benefits of improving your cities with Infrastructures were less obvious. Many times, you’d act on a gut feeling about how many relevant tiles like forests or rivers the city already had. No more guessing, though: With the Bolivar update, the game will do the counting and math for you and display a preview of the yields a new infrastructure will give you. You can also check what an existing infrastructure is giving you at the moment.




(Un)Stable Beyond Measure

Speaking of city management, keeping an eye on your stability is important if you want to expand your cities instead of constantly fighting rebels. Yet when your cities were doing particularly well or badly, it could be difficult to judge how much room you had for further expansion, or how much effort it would take to fix the situation. In the Bolivar update, you can tell at a glance, as we have added a dedicated space for stability outside the 0-100 range to the tooltip.




Clean Pollution

There’s no denying that before launch, we severely underestimated the industrial powerhouses our players would create in the late game, so the pollution system was more restrictive for these players than intended. While we have already tweaked the balance to stop the game from ending too soon, some players still have problems with the local and global penalties for pollution. With the next update, you will be able to disable the penalties for pollution, so that you can build your cities without worrying about pollution limits.



A Modern Coat of Paint

Don’t you just hate it when your seat of power is literally the oldest building in your empire, while the far-flung cities have fancy, modern main plazas? Well, good news! You can now get your architects and engineers to renovate your Administrative Centers to a more modern appearance. Since some players may want to preserve the heritage of their earlier cultures at least in part, this action will be done manually from the city screen, allowing you to choose which administrative center to renovate.


 



The Modding: Reloaded

Even with the modding tools still in beta, we have already seen some great mods from our community. Unfortunately, with mod support not fully integrated yet, using more than one mod at a time used to be a little inconvenient. Luckily, after the next update, the game will reload the mod configuration of your latest save automatically when you relaunch the game.



We hope you found something exciting in this varied mix of improvements. There’s even more to look forward to, so come back next week for Part 2 of our look at the Quality of Life improvements in the Bolivar Update!

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 3:09:50 PM

Some great changes there, including the QoL for pollution and refurbishments. I'm most relieved to have a hang with eyeballing stability, as I had some issues with it during my DaVinci challenge games.

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 3:27:32 PM

Great to hear all the quality of live improvements 


Although im missing the word "ballance" that is the most pressing issue for vanilla Multiplayer 







Updated 2 years ago.
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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 3:32:05 PM

Awesome changes. Qol changes and the new coat of pain are definitely appreciated steps in the right direction. Acknowledging pollution as an issue is noted, I still feel pollution in a whole needs to be more fleshed out. Maybe something like combining pollution and global warming in larger fix. 


I would personally like to see the introduction of a new playable tile with rivers. Typical rivers in the game don't take a tile and are more of put in for resources and obstacles. There can still be typical river tiles for small rivers, but adding a river that as a dedicated tile(maybe thin tile) for larger ones could play into Pollution, rising water levels, and global warming; As well as introducing Canals & Dams to alter the terrain for trade or military purpose. Just my 2cents, <3 the changes

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 3:41:42 PM
bobcatlion wrote:
Acknowledging pollution as an issue is noted, I still feel pollution in a whole needs to be more fleshed out.

We do want to return to pollution and flesh it out more, but it is one of several very big topics we want to overhaul/expand, so it may take us some time to get to it (or a lot of time, depending on which order we tackle the big topics in). That's why we decided to add this option to disable the effects in the meantime.

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 3:46:17 PM

The mod change is OK, but can we get a big, scary warning somewhere in the main game UI that warns when achievements have been disabled by mods?

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 3:47:30 PM
The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
bobcatlion wrote:
Acknowledging pollution as an issue is noted, I still feel pollution in a whole needs to be more fleshed out.

We do want to return to pollution and flesh it out more, but it is one of several very big topics we want to overhaul/expand, so it may take us some time to get to it (or a lot of time, depending on which order we tackle the big topics in). That's why we decided to add this option to disable the effects in the meantime.

Thanks for the response @The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales! Definitely understand and appreciate the read. Lookin forward to seeing what else you guys have planned for the game 

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 3:54:37 PM

I appreciate a lot of these changes. QoL in general for me is important.


I generally agree with the consensus though, pollution deserves a bit more fleshing out.


On the topic of QoL, could we perhaps have the option to turn View Constructibles Only option on at all times alongside larger numbers for the yields overlay on the map? The latter is especially important for people with slightly poorer eye-sight.

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 4:06:25 PM

Some quick comments before my main concern:

  1. Preview of infra yields — long needed, critical improvement.
  2. Stability display — not as big a deal, but still a big improvement.
  3. Disable pollution — feels like something of a "supereasy" mode...
  4. Renovate Admin Centers — I'm not likely to use this personally, but I see the appeal. More empire customization is good.
On the mod configuration reload point, I'm concerned this may interact poorly with the pre-existing issue with changing mod configurations. Unless I missed something, players can't currently exit to menu, change from mod configuration A to B, then load a save that used config B, but rather must exit to desktop, relaunch, then load config B before loading the save using config B. I'm concerned that autoloading the mod config of the latest save may result in a scenario where the latest save used mod config A, but you want to play a previous save using config B, but you get that same issue as with exiting to menu and swapping mod configs. If this does turn out to be an issue, this could of course be mitigated by going into the save folder and removing all saves more recent than the save you want to play, but that's extra work for the player.
Updated 2 years ago.
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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 4:25:56 PM

please hide territory boundary lines when we toggle ui off. this will make our humankind pic much more beautiful. thx very much.


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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 5:44:08 PM

Awesome! Especially the Infrastructure and pollution.


I recently found out that in complicated sieges it's next to impossible to tell where the walls inside a city are. There is no graphical indication there is a wall.

Overall the graphics of the terrain during battles could use a rather deep overhaul. Now it's still beta quality. It's ugly and uninformative. Plus all my friends complained they have trouble understanding how ranged units work. Can't blame them. I had to go through several ragequits until i got it.

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 8:39:57 PM

The Pollution disable could bring back some players who were put off by this system, it's a good decision. The urban planning improvement is long-awaited and so I welcome it!

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 9:15:36 PM

A lot of long-awaited and very welcome QoL improvements, very good. Also nice to hear that overhaul of some of the mechanics is something you keep in your mind, fingers crossed HK will keep selling well enough for this to happen on large scale. The way I see it Bolivar has a very decent chance at putting game back on tracks, hopefully there's enough coal for long journey once we're there.

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2 years ago
May 5, 2022, 9:30:51 PM

I love what I read.

Good job, can't wait to see when this content will be available :)

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2 years ago
May 6, 2022, 9:40:27 AM

I really like the announced changes. The pollution disable seems like a quick fix, though. Personally, I would like to see futher balancing – especially the fast progression from 0% to -50% to -100% penalty discourages me from using all the infrastructure. A slowdown would be nice e.g. -25% for light pollution to -50% to -75% etc.

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2 years ago
May 6, 2022, 3:50:44 PM

Great. I am very happy to see those! Was really waiting for all infrastructure bonus preview and the stability surplus view. Thanks for the improvement

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2 years ago
May 6, 2022, 4:35:08 PM

The "modern coat of paint." In the future, it would be nice to add some additional revenue to cities which haven't been modernized, representing tourism. And also, ruins could add either science or gold, depending on how they are exploited after the discovery of a tech such as archeology. This would encourage players to not always "bulldoze" ruins sites.

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2 years ago
May 6, 2022, 4:35:59 PM

6, 2022, 12:25:56 AM



please hide territory boundary lines when we toggle ui off. this will make our humankind pic much more beautiful. thx very much.

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2 years ago
May 6, 2022, 6:35:25 PM

Could we please have tooltips about requirements to unlock civics too? That would improve quality of life greatly.

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