Just bought this, I’ll let you know how it is. But also it’s ONE DOLLAR.
EDIT: Well, this definitely fits the bill of “mobile 4X game built from the ground up for mobile.” Seems to do the trick so far, but there’s definitely some learning to do and the tutorials are thin. It’s a little bit shitty, but it’s ONE DOLLAR so I doubt you can go wrong.
This made me remember, I think there was some kind of 4X space game I got in the early days of iOS app store. We’re talking iPhone 3G. I forget what it was…
Starbase Orion?
I never got it, but I had a friend who loved it.
That’s the one.
Yea I bought that on Rubin’s recommendation and never got into it.
Not sure if anyone has posted elsewhere about this, but closely following Slipways on steam and signed up for their closed beta. An economy only 4x adjacent game about interstellar trade with a quick play time.
Tom Francis did a nice play video of it this past week.
Economy only 4x? Smells like trains.
yeah all the tech is to give you new ways to link up planets into your economic system of inputs and outputs and squeeze out bonuses. SPACE-TRAINS.
Sounds like it is operating rounds only, though. You’re just trying to make your trains the best trains, not playing the 18XX meta-train.
Yes, its single-player only I believe, its really just an economy optimization puzzle game meant to be played in short time frames (vs say a giant civ game), but it looks fun enough for me.
so somehow I missed the boat on humankind(not usually into historical 4x games), but has anyone picked up the open beta? I was watching a stream of it today, and it it looks super interesting. was wondering if anyone had more experience with it.
I humankind played a bit in the open beta, it was a bit like if you took a lot of Endless Legend and made it into Civ. It was pretty limited when I played it so they may have done more to it.
I did preorder it because I love their games.
As much as I love the fictional setting and races in Endless Legends and Endless Space 2, this sounds awesome.
I’m the opposite. For me hearing that Aplitudes new game was just human history again, made me not pay any attention to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer Endless Legends 2 or Endless Space 3, but I’m curious to see what Amplitude can do in the historical setting. Civ needs more competition to force it to innovate and evolve.
I just hope that they come up with more unique ways of playing specific civs than just taking what they did in Endless Legend and picking human civs for each of them
The OpenDev beta was pretty rough, the battle map that expanded whenever you fought out between unit stacks instead of auto-resolving was pure white almost making terrain hard to read and some of the unit interactions were badly flagged in the keywords in the UI so it was a bit of a mess. I included a ton of feedback for them but it was enough for me to decide to wait until after release to pick it up.
Been playing a bunch of humankind and I am enjoying it but it feels like the Eve MMO learning curve meme at times because of how many different subsystems are going constantly and a combination of the game using a log of mechanical Verbs which it explains rather sparsely in its in-game version of civlopedia.
I do feel I have the early-mid game and a lot of the major mechanics understood, and I am looking forward to finishing out my current play-through all the way and starting fresh again, but I have to say if you don’t have a lot of 4x experience and in particular experience with Amplitude’s other games than it may be a steep learning experience.
I’ll definitely have more to say the more I play.
I’ve blown through my first play through of Humankind.
It feels more like a traditional Civ gave with a slight Amplitude spin than what I was hoping for which was Endless Legends with a civ spin.
There are a bunch of systems that I enjoy in the game, but I haven’t spent much time with CivVI so I can’t really compare it with the current “state of the art” of civ games.
I like the idea of being able to pick a new civ as you’re progressing through the game to change your focus. I’m not sure how much that really affects everything.
I was able to push tech all the way through and rapidly outstripped all the other civs, by the end of the game I was in the 6th age and only one other civ made it to age 5, the rest were in the 4th age or earlier.
Even so my troops weren’t able to curb stomp anyways, they were more powerful, but not stupidly more powerful.
I did run into a few things that seemed like bugs, some flavor texts that didn’t display, as well as my first war didn’t end even though we ended it and then started an alliance with each other.
Overall, I feel like Humankind is okay. It’s not revolutionary.
This may change with future patches/expansions?
I definitely feel like it needs more balance patches as they get more community feedback and stats from playing. I’ve seen a lot of the community complain about the “imbalance” of many cultures’ traits in the industrial and final eras and that makes sense given they didn’t get a ton of community feedback for those eras during the open dev with only industrial getting seen just over a month ago and the final era never being playtested by the community.I also think the influence currency/resource needs to be overhauled because early game its scare and makes you make some tough choices about prioritizing capturing new territories vs popping up cities or improvements on unattached territories but by midgame you’re probably drowning in it with nothing to show for it (those stars for generating influence encourage production capacity but there isn’t really an equal spend drive).
I’ve got a stupid amount of playtime in Civ6 (thousands of hours) and I can say the biggest change is that Humankind forces you to do stuff for Fame even in its lulls. With the Golden Age/Dark Age mechanics in 6 via Rise & Fall expansion it was pretty easy to just play a tall, stagnant playstyle and rush up the tech tree to a science victory (or to get late game units to win a conquest victory). In Humankind when I did that for an era it felt more like a euro boardgame where I was watching other players get VPs/achievements while I just tinkered on my economy without any payoff (yet) and that helped push me to colonize a continent to get some stars (I was playing aesthete which I think is the weakest culture archetype in terms of earning era stars).