It's been almost two months since we put Humankind in your hands, but that was only the beginning of our journey together with this game. The response was enthusiastic, but the enthusiastic players are often also the most critical, and we received a lot of feedback through Games2Gether, the Steam forums, and even Steam reviews in the first couple of weeks. This feedback is vital to us, not only to see what you like about the game and what problems you want to see addressed first, but also to get a picture of how you would like the game to grow in the future.
Today, we want to take a look at the improvements we have already made, the feedback we’re seeing, and what we’re working on for the next patch.
Initial Patches
After launch, a few subjects quickly emerged as frequently discussed by the community. Many players found that they were unable to fully experience the Contemporary or even Industrial era, as they could not find enough resource deposits on the map and many times pollution ended their game prematurely. We have since increased the amount of late game resources, raised the limit of pollution, and added some additional options to reduce it, to allow our players to savor the last eras, though we know many of you would like to see further improvements. We also fixed a problem with naval assaults on cities, which led to unassailable island fortresses.
In addition to these frequently discussed problems, we’ve made some improvements to other parts of the game. For example, we’ve started work on the user interface by rearranging the terms in the Surrender Screen to make different territories easier to find. We’ve also been working on the AI, particularly how it handles armies and battles. Furthermore, we’ve added better validation tools to the map editor.
Of course, we have also been working hard to improve the stability and performance of the game and addressed many of the bugs reported by our players.
Ongoing Work
However, we know we have yet to address all of your concerns, and while our team may not be able to respond on the forums as much as they’d like, we watch your discussions with interest. We’ve been following many fascinating conversations about a variety of topics, from Neolithic population growth to end conditions, culture balance and affinities to overall game pace, line of sight and unit balance, religion, and even improved quality of life for personas and the new game lobby, among others.
We have already fixed many crashes and stuck turns, but there a still some major concerns that are among our top priorities — for example the Mac version, multiplayer stability, and the reports of crashes and turns not ending properly. These issues have a wide variety of potential causes we need to tackle one at a time, and similarly, multiplayer connection issues involve a great number of variables that can make it difficult to reproduce them in our testing environment — in other words, these issues have proven more difficult to address than anticipated and as such have slowed down both the investigation and testing phases of some fixes.
We want to apologize to our fans on Mac for the long delay of the official Mac release. While we have made good progress on the Mac version of the game, creating an M1-compatible version has proven surprisingly difficult. Unfortunately, we did not have access to sufficient information and hardware in advance, so we could not start work on compatibility before release. We are sorry that we did not foresee this long delay. We’re currently finishing our examination and will update you with more details next week. In the meantime, we will continue to work on the Mac Beta currently available for opt-in on Steam, and we hope to officially release this version soon.
We hope to address these issues as soon as possible, but we cannot give you an estimate of when they will be fixed yet.
Future Features
We don’t just want to review what we’ve done since the release today, we want to take a look at the future.
We know many of you would like us to expand certain parts of the game, like religion, diplomacy, cultural influence, and pollution, with more options for the player and stronger interactions with the other game systems. While we agree that many parts of the game could be expanded, these are substantial changes and additions that require careful consideration and time to implement. We are working on various improvements we think you will be excited about, but we are not ready to share details about them yet. Additionally, rest assured we are keeping a close eye on your discussions to take into account where and how you would like to see the game grow.
The Next Update
Finally, some news we know many of you have been waiting for: We are aiming to release the next big update on October 28th. This patch will improve your options when creating your game with new settings for resource abundance and end conditions and try to address the rapid increase in the game’s pace in the mid to late game discussed by the community as well as some of the most discussed concerns about balance between cultures, among other things. We’ll talk about this update in greater detail next week.
Thank you for your support
— The Amplitude Team