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!