This is a feature I've wanted in basically every Civ-style game, and I notice that was floated but declared out-of-scope for Endless Legend. But watching the Diplomacy Feature focus today I realized that Humankind is almost made for pre-made teams. Fame as the sole victory condition means that there's no weirdness about joint win conditions - it's just the highest point totaled team. And because the alliance features are just native in to the system instead of technologies (as an aside, I really like this decision after watching videos about how much gift-giving and strategic marriage alliances were happening in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago), it feels like nothing is really broken if you start with a turn one alliance.

This is a really nice feature to play with friends; we're not going to stab each other and just want to work together, but we want the AI to have the same mutual safety of a trusted friend so it's not our pair bullying one individual at a time. Any chance we could get premade teams options for lobbies where team size evenly dividies lobby size? Ideally with an additional selector for teammate proximity that works something like:

Close: Spawn locations will try to minimize the average distance to teammates.

Far: Spawn locations will try to maximize the average distance to teammates. 

Random: Starting positions will not respect teammate status.

(There's also probably a use case for a "medium" distance, with something like "I want one enemy between me and my ally so I have a guaranteed frontier to push but we're not across the map from each other. But that seems programmatically a lot harder than the close/far definitions that can just optimize a naive distance metric.)

hito wrote:

This is a feature I've wanted in basically every Civ-style game, and I notice that was floated but declared out-of-scope for Endless Legend. But watching the Diplomacy Feature focus today I realized that Humankind is almost made for pre-made teams. Fame as the sole victory condition means that there's no weirdness about joint win conditions - it's just the highest point totaled team. And because the alliance features are just native in to the system instead of technologies (as an aside, I really like this decision after watching videos about how much gift-giving and strategic marriage alliances were happening in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago), it feels like nothing is really broken if you start with a turn one alliance.

This is a really nice feature to play with friends; we're not going to stab each other and just want to work together, but we want the AI to have the same mutual safety of a trusted friend so it's not our pair bullying one individual at a time. Any chance we could get premade teams options for lobbies where team size evenly dividies lobby size? Ideally with an additional selector for teammate proximity that works something like:

Close: Spawn locations will try to minimize the average distance to teammates.

Far: Spawn locations will try to maximize the average distance to teammates. 

Random: Starting positions will not respect teammate status.

(There's also probably a use case for a "medium" distance, with something like "I want one enemy between me and my ally so I have a guaranteed frontier to push but we're not across the map from each other. But that seems programmatically a lot harder than the close/far definitions that can just optimize a naive distance metric.)

I for one would be willing to tolerate a fair chunk of diplomacy/AI weirdness in teammate games as long as a.) I'm perma-allied to my teammate, b.) we win based on the sum of our stars and c.) I know every AI in the game has a perma-ally. Just something to bring up after watching the diplomacy feature focus!

That would actually be really neat :3 and would make team games much more enjoyable.
Alliances only go so far when you play with friends after all.

I'd really appreciate that.

Loading into a game already within an alliance would be quite interesting as more information would be known sooner such as the proximity and available terrain. 

Without shared technologies, resources, or gold, alliance members can only gain so much advantage early game working together. 

From what I noticed in Lucy, resources and gold cannot be directly transferred (or "sling") to another player on-demand. After watching a couple competitive civ games, resource/money slinging between team members is a really big deal and heavily influences how players interact with in-game systems. If a team member is being attacked, an entire team can sling each other their entire bank to purchase defenses or units. I think Humankind's trade system cleanly addresses such tactics and incentives players to be more self sufficient. 

I'd love to see this too!! It's a lot more fun to play in multiplayer when me and my friend can both win (or lose) together!