Hey everyone,
We’ve got a nice surprise for you today: A playable beta for the upcoming Humankind update, Achilles.
Since the release of the game, we’ve received a lot of feedback about War Support, War Score, and surrender, and with this update we want to address some of the big frustrations. We want to avoid players feeling surprised by a warm ending with little warning, and create a clearer connection between demands, occupied territory, and available surrender terms. To achieve this, we made the following changes:
- All surrender proposals can be refused now, even if you are at 0 war support
- Both parties reaching 0 War Support no longer forces White Peace
- While at 0 War Support, empires take a Stability penalty scaling with era and number of turns spent without War Support
- While their enemy is ready to surrender (at 0 War Support), empires will take a penalty to their own War Support
- Centralized Power unlocks an empire bonus that reduces the impact of lost and destroyed units on war support, so wars can last longer.
- War Score now only depends on demands and occupied territory, not War Support
- You can now always declare surprise wars
- (Together We Rule) The Placate action is now forbidden during war
- Several new historical personas, like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or Sun Tzu
With these changes, you can keep fighting even if your enemy or your own people are ready to give up. You may have to deal with a few rebels if you push things too far, though.
If you want to see these changes in action, you can already try the beta for this patch through the update_preview branch on Steam.
Just go to the properties of the game, open the betas tab, and select the right branch.
Hotfix [1.28.4599]
Some words from the devs
First and foremost, I wanted to thank you again for the feedback on the beta! We are about to update the Achilles Beta branch with some updates based on what you've told us.
We have tried to make changes that preserve what players liked from the change while addressing the two most extreme behaviors reported: Weaponizing your already low War Support to bring other players down with you, and spamming legit surrender proposals with no consequence.
These are the concrete changes and their underlying design rationale:
Reduced the "My Opponent is at 0 War Support" War support penalty scale to a maximum of -5/turn- This decrease exists to incentivize belligerents with positive war support to send a Surrender proposal before they lose their advantage, however its scale made it a bit too surprising (as a reminder it climbed to -15/turns in 5 turns) and ended up being too easily weaponizable by belligerents with already low War Support.
Reinstated a one-time +10 War Support bump whenever an opponent that is at 0 War Support refuses a Surrender offer.- This is meant to combine with the above change to enable some defense against the dropping War Support, without being a full re-up.
Added a -10% Food, Industry, Money and Science War Weariness penalty on all Settlements for each refused Surrender while at 0 War Support.- This is more an indictment of Stability lacking the oomph to have any meaningful effects once you are deep in the red; Ideally the FIMS hit would be related from the lack of stability, but there was no clear way of implementing this. We believe that tying this penalty to refusing surrender offers when you really shouldn't is clear enough.
I also want to address the other things you reported but that we haven't touched so far.
I've seen the "jettison territories" behavior being mentioned here and there, but at the moment I don't see how this would prevent you from razing the admin center and claiming it as your own without bothering with War Score, bagging all contained districts as well. Maybe my playstyle enables this but not everyone's?
I've also read the woes about the placate action no longer being a "get out of war free" card anymore. I get that for those players against the AI this was ok, but this is a behavior that causes much grief when you're on its receiving end. I'd much rather see players its use as a dissuadant during peace time.
All this to say that while we chose not to act on those feedbacks in this Beta update, this does not mean that we won't keep monitoring those (and other) topics, and enact changes if they become too problematic.
With all this said, I hope the changes put forth improve your Achilles Beta experiences!
Amplified 2025
In case you do not know, we are celebrating our Studio Anniversary.
We have a lot of surprises 🎁
Just announced our new game, Endless Legend 2https://store.steampowered.com/app/3407390
Claim for Free Cultures of Latin America https://store.steampowered.com/app/1819410/
Humankind is FREE TO PLAY until Jan 30th
Free Wallpapers
And many surprises under the Stretch Goals that all the community will unlock!
