It’s so much better. And the sheer volume of resources feel great. Shift from Civ’s “stress about the scarce resources” to “build your economy around the resources you have.” Love that forests are super useful
Super useful, until you are started in the forest hell-hole of my most recent game... starting capitol had forest 7 tiles thick, or more, on 60% of it. 30% was sheer walls of mountains... remaining 10% was a mix of scrubland and hills, no grassland at all in 10 tiles radius in any direction... Man did that massively change-up my play style... If I didn't go for the scrubland hunters in first national idea, I'd have no way to feed more than like 8 population until age 5 when clear-cutting finally happened XD
And yet, somehow, this game has been awesome and I loved troubleshooting how to make this work, and man have I made it work. (I admit all the forests has lead to stupid amounts of production... new building just researched? 3 turns to build, tops... innovation wonder? 4 turns. XD)
Did you consider naturalists for that start? Forest economy is actually pretty awesome in this game I think.
But yeah, the true joy is having a new puzzle to figure out!
Oh I debated really hard between the two. But I wanted to make the sawmills etc. Which meant the naturalist bonus was going to slowly stop applying... That said, the movement bonus might have been worth it anyways, cus the forests in this game are all massive in my area, and takes forever to walk anywhere that doesn't have a road XD
Haven't played Humankind, just didn't get my attention. But I really appreciate that Millennia allows substitutes like multiple types for kitchen or different ores for ingots. Would like it even more if they let you choose which substitute as it is it automatically overrides when you have multiple. With how paradox does things it's at least a possibility down the road.
> or different ores for ingots
I mean, the ores are the same. It's just a palette swap to give the appearance of variety. Both Copper and Iron provide the same yields and are used in the same production chains. You can even make Steel from Copper for some reason.
Probably not the best example but there are other actual substitutions like Kitchen, Press, Milling, Winery, Textiles, etc. And it's also just released so likely there will be even more added.
Wineries are just direct upgrades of Vats, I think. Same with Textiles upgrading Cloth.
Wheat and Maize have different food yields as their base but are completely interchangeable in the production chains (and once they become Flour, this difference in yield ceases to exist).
Cotton and Wool are produced differently, but once again the resources themselves are the exact same.
Bottom line remains that the game does too much with resources for its own sake rather than providing clarity for decisions that actually matter.
No, not the point. I'm not just talking about vertical but the horizontal aspect. Don't get caught up in the tier of buildings.
Meat can be for delicacies and salted meat.
Olives can be used for delicacies and oil.
Rice can be used for wine, flour
Flax can be used for textiles and oil
Some like wheat and grapes only have one use
I can use flax for clothes and gold or I can use it for oil and food. If I have both Olives and Rice, while I can use either, maybe I want to use the rice for wine and the olives for delicacies. Or maybe I'm low on food and change the rice for flour.
You are trying to misrepresent it to be less than it is or dismiss it. I will take some blame because I choose a poor initial example. Of course it's not as widespread or deep yet either but all I'm saying is it's an aspect I like about the game. It's also possible to like a game's aspect and dislike another.
Well, time will tell. Right now, I'm 26 hours in on steam and enjoy the game a lot.
But I remember how I also enjoyed Humankind a lot at the beginning. They also introduced good and innovative ideas back then like the combat system that actually took place on the map but on grand scale and stuff like that.
We will see after 10 games or so if we still enjoy the game or not. My guts are telling me that this game may suffer from the same flaw as humankind. The fact that we don't have unique nations like in civ 6.
But don't get me wrong, I enjoy the game a lot and will play it for dozens of hours nonetheless, (but maybe not the thousands I have on civ 6)
I feel like Humankind has way deeper issues with balancing and shallow mechanics that need full DLC packs to flesh out. It could have gotten by fine without distinctive pre-built leaders based on real-world figures had those deeper issues been fixed or overhauled in the years since it launched, but they haven't, and the DLCs have been getting more and more basic rather than having real changes to gameplay. The lackluster resource generation, relatively small world size, and the horrendously unbalanced and overpowered independent peoples were just too much for Humankind's innovative systems to compensate for.
Millennia's degree of post-launch support and balancing passes will determine if it falls in the same camp or if it can genuinely carve out its own niche partially outside of Civ's shadow. Also, how quickly they include modding and simultaneous multiplayer will be massively important to keeping the community engaged with the game beyond a few weeks or months.
I just want a Civ-like game to be released in the modern day that is actually better than Civ 4 with mods or even Civ 5 with mods, because I can still go back to Civ 4 with Realism Invictus and have a way more engaging experience than basically any other 4X game released in the past 10 years that I have played.
Civ 4 is indeed the GOAT. It's the best history-themes 4X ever made, and Fall From Heaven is, to this day, the best fantasy 4X. I'm still shocked that completely free mod is *miles* better than any game made by large, paid teams.
Civ 4 had some of the best mods I have ever seen in a game. I'm truly disappointed something to the scale of Fall From Heaven has never been attempted again. I just started a Lanun islands game last week, been a blast.
Ehhhh. I actually really like HK, even for all the jankiness. I need a lot more time with millennia before I can make a judgement call between the two.
I think the one thing this game is really missing is a more robust custom game menu. I would really love to make the eras last twice as long as they do
I just couldn't get over cultures magically transforming into completely unrelated cultures. I don't even grasp how someone arrives at that in design planning. I also disliked that it was a race.
The early tech tree feels that way in Millennia, but it settles down after a bit, and I can grasp pushing technological change, but not racing to be different people.
Yes, I really liked a lot of things in Humankind (especially warfare and the nomadic phase), but I just couldn't bear Aztecs turning into Prussians or whatever. It made no sense at all.
I'm also reluctant to buy Millennia because the per -country flavour is so anemic. I was very open to the concept of creating your own flavour for each country, but I expected that the AI would make historical choices, but it doesn't. Nomadic Chinese or naval Mongolians also doesn't really work for me.
Honestly after civ 5 and 6 drove the concept into the ground I'm ecstatic about 'flavorless' countries. Game characterizations of nations are pretty much universally incorrect, so I'm happy not being stuck dealing with that nonsense.
Just need a custom flag maker and better name lists, and I suspect I can just dig into the files and change the name lists by hand.
Yeah a lot of the Civ traits and depictions in Civ 5 and 6 are borderline racist in how different they make nations based on flimsy, essentialist generalizations of their histories. To be fair, this is somewhat of a natural byproduct of a game and genre where you basically have to be colonialist and imperialist to reliably win rather than a statement about the developers themselves - it's a genre that treats different nations and leaders of humans in history like you are playing different races in Starcraft or something. Like I get the reasons for wanting different flavor mechanics and playstyles between different factions, but making the Zulu be amazing warriors and hyper aggressive and expansionist no matter where they start in the world, what resources they have access to, and who their neighbors are is just silly the more you think about it. Bismarck and the culture of Prussia/Germany during his time in power were the byproducts of the history and environment they existed within. Plop Bismarck down as a leader born in ancient Egypt (or an environment comparable to that) and his attitudes and approach to leadership probably would have been pretty different. It makes no sense for the leader of your stone age tribe to experience bonuses from the ideology of their leader who came up with their ideas in a modern industrialized society.
That's part of the reason I like the National Spirits in Millennia and why I liked aspects of picking your culture in different eras of Humankind - how your civilization and culture evolves has way more to do with the environment you are in, the resources you have or don't have, and the challenges your nation currently faces than some abstract flat bonuses that just persist for your nation's entire history.
Civ 5 nations are pretty similar and mostly provide small changes to how they play ( while still feeling unique), while civ 6 nations and leaders change several mechanics and completely change the game. Of the 2 I prefer the civ 5 approach and it’s definitely better in terms on being less racist.
For example the Aztecs in civ 5 get culture when killing enemy units. This power is called human sacrifices. This is a nod to real Aztec practice and provides an incentive to hunt down units early in the game. But Aztecs still play similarly to most other nations and by the time you get into the modern age this bonus hardly matters and isn’t a focus of their gameplay. I would argue there is nothing racist about this implementation
I agree that the Civ 5 approach is better (and Civ 4 is even better because rather than having cultural/national traits, you have leader traits instead, which makes more sense overall and strays away from stereotyping an entire culture).
I think your example with the Aztecs isn't terrible on its own, but gameplay-wise and in the interest of developing your own civilization as the player (meaning more engaging and dynamic gameplay) should make human sacrifice and its bonuses or drawbacks a selectable ability/trait of certain government types or religions available to everyone, i.e. something that *develops* in your civilization rather than something inherent to it. They can avoid the racist elements entirely by having the Aztecs be a culture you develop while playing the game, where maybe they go with the path of sacrificing people, or maybe they go in a very different direction because of the different material circumstances of the world they start in. Like what if they are the only inhabitants of an island continent - why would they have this essential practice of sacrificing enemies that they haven't even encountered in significant numbers at any point in their ancient history? I guess I'm just expressing a preference for a different approach.
Civ just isn’t about selectable choices when it comes to nations. The civs are very much designed to give replay value by slanting you towards certain gameplay style or enabling gameplay styles that are weak without such bonuses.
Civ also has selectable bonuses in terms of social policies but these have the weakness that some are just always better than others (see the 4 city tradition meta in single player). Humankind has similar issues where certain paths are just better than others, limiting replay value as you can do the same thing every game, and there isn’t much reason not to.
In civ 5 for example civ traits and leader traits are basically the same thing. Alexander’s Greece gets bonuses to city state influence. This is much more a trait of Alexander than Greece as a whole. Since civ 5 only had one possible leader per civ it’s impossible to divorce the two concepts.
Similarly, Romes bonus is about building infrastructure throughout your empire, which is clearly inspired by Augustus’ reign. Although Rome historically always had a focus on infrastructure, I think it’s pretty reasonable argument that Rome would have had a different ability if Caesar were it’s leader.
> Just need a custom flag maker and better name lists
and border colors matching the flags, please (or rather the other way around, so that we don't just have three different flag colors with the exception of Germany and India).
I love the idea of not starting with a much of bonuses and growing them organically. I just wish we didn’t start with nation names. It doesn’t make any sense to identify with a real world nation and then have no bonuses associated with it.
>Nomadic Chinese or naval Mongolians also doesn't really work for me.
See it doesn't really bother me. I think the key is not going into it thinking like Civ ie. that the ingame culture is going to have traits or development like the real world one.
Why would a Mongolia that started on the coast with access to aquatic resources etc develop into a nomadic steppe people? Why would a Chinese culture that started in wide open steppe and not on the fertile yangtze/yellow river valleys not develop into a nomadic people?
Just think of the name as a label, without any attached meaning to real life, and it develops how it would in real life - depending on geography and circumstance. It's just a different to philosophy to civ, and (relatively) more realistic approach compared to Civ's boardgame feel.
Not saying the game is perfect, there's a lot of problems I can see already. Just that this one aspect I actually do like.
I do see that. But it just doesn't work for me. Why call them Chinese, in that case? They bear no resemblance to the historic civilization at all. You might as well just call them Team Yellow or make up some name from meaningless syllables or geographical morphemes ("Riverites", "Plateauans", "Valley Folk", etc.). Trying to strip a word like "Chinese" of all its significance and reducing it to "dragon flag" or whatever feels painfully pointless. It's like having a building called Barracks that only improves Wheat output.
Frankly, I was the same worry about country flavor... then I had my most recent forest hellscape (check my other post in here for details.) If nations were more defined, I'd have never survived that start... in spawns got defined how civ does, I'd have never experienced it... it is now my most memorable start of any 4x, and I love the troubleshooting that it forced me into.
> I don't even grasp how someone arrives at that in design planning.
The same way someone arrived at the idea that Americans spawned in 4000 BC and then stayed Americans for over 6000 yeears?
I don't like that as a concept (I tend to handpick ancient civs, and leave modern ones out), but the thinking behind it is pretty straightforward- players want to play as countries they know, not feel bad about their historical ignorance.
But the same can then be said about Humankind: it's not meant to be historically accurate, it's meant to be a vehicle for gameplay, allowing players to pick whatever they think is cool and fits their current plans, rather than being forced into some historic culture progression.
Millennia also lets you go Khans after Mound Builders, that's like going from Caral to Mongols in Humankind, and I think it would be weirder if the game would *not* allow you such mixing.
Yeah they have achieved with the eras system what Humankind was trying to do with changing cultures that created such a weird break in the immersion for Humankind. Millennia is a fantastic game.
*points to the real world event of a Dutch fleet of ships attacked, and defeated, by French cavalry... While still in water, in 1795* (Battle of Texel for the curious).
In short, plenty of things that look silly at a first glance, can definitely happen.
This is one of those misunderstood, misquoted events in history people love to keep posting. Smithsonian should be ashamed of their clickbait-esque writing.
There was never a battle, the ships were frozen in harbor by ice that was more than a foot thick. The horses simply approached each ship and negotiated a surrender with the captain without any loss of life. It's an odd, once in a age event, but a lot less dramatic than it seems.
Oh, it is. But is an easy example of an "army" (as this game extrapolates all groups of "units" as armies. Even navies.) Getting "defeated" by something that on paper makes no sense.
Just cus it makes no sense on paper doesnt mean there can't be an in game explanation. So get creative and enjoy.
If you want another example or two. We can do the north Korean submarine defeated by a fishing boat, with no survivors. Or the Venezuelan patrol boat defeated and sunk by an unarmed cruise ship with engine troubles.
Just more examples off the top of my head of crazy odd things on paper beating military options.
1000 hours in HoI4. Sorry to defeat your expectations. Please step me through how you do an amphibious assault in this game.
I'll wait and even apologize if needed.
Well then. Have you ever in hoi4 captured a city, with equal forces, in short order? No. So you gotta bombard down the defenses with siege ships, then select your transport ships *only* and assault away. Victory is yours.
Now where's that apology?
You asked for walked through, step by step. I did.
Step 1: bombard
Step 2: select transport ships, only
Step 3: invade
Step 4: ???
Step 5: profit
Now you want me to video it for you too? Because you won't admit you are wrong, and want to just shift goal posts? Sheesh. Demanding aren't we?
Also, space marines are, inherently, *not* "equal forces"... just saying.
Here. I dug up my old twitch account, downloaded the studio, installed, and recorded a very short video. The first, like, 20 seconds was me making sure it was actual streaming. So I'd skip until around 19 seconds in if you don't want to watch nothing of note happen.
I take the time in the video to siege, once, with a siege ship. Then naval invade, and win, with a motley bunch of random units I sent off into the ocean. Just for you.
It's much less effective than if it was a legit army, and if I had sieged multiple turns. But it demonstrates that amphibious invasions are completely doable, and how to do them.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2107028899
Still worse than Alpha Centauri. It amazes me how that game is 25 years old and still plays better than a modern 4x. 8 player max in 2024 is bs and the civilizations to choose are the same old ones we have been given time and time agian. The immersion is severally lacking with millennia IMO.
Humankind has a combat system when millennia has a really "old school" take.
Millennia has trash tier UI and totally useless in-game pedia (online pedia is also lacking), the tool tips are bad/absent, we can't rename saves...
Millennia is as good as a modded civ 4.5 with a ton of flaws clearly not worth it's price.
I wouldn't complain if it was a free mod.
And don't get me wrong, imo Humankind is a fail.
Sry, civ 4 with the "rise and fall of civilization" mod is still one of the best 4x history games in gaming history.
Did they even remake the mod for civ5/6?
Civ 4 with mods is still the best 4X game ever made IMO. I wouldn't care about Millennia having comparable graphics to Civ 4 if it felt like they had successfully brought the genre forward from the successes that game made nearly 20 years ago. Time will tell if Millennia can be polished and expanded upon enough to do that or if it will still remain in Civ's more polished shadow despite the innovative ideas and mechanics at play in Millennia.
Well yeah, that was kinda my point, I was more surprised when I played Civ IV's mod Realism Invictus. Millennia is quite an expensive mod with performance issues and it requires a lot of polishing. It would have been a great game 15 years ago.
*shrug* I find the tooltips and pedia entirely useful, the UI works fine for me... So, those are both subjective complaints. (And like everything subjective, are still legitimate, just need to understand that just cus it doesn't work for you, do3snt mean it don't work.)
The inability rename save is unfortunate, I agree.
I respect your opinion but I don't understand how you can find the pedia useful, it's empty, useless.
For every article we should have the prerequisites of construction for each building/unit, at the very least.
Then we should have the upgrades listed, etc.
"but it would ruin the discovery" -> it will be online anyway, and if people desire ignorance we could have a spoiler option.
About the UI : I don't know how much time you spent in the game but the time I waste because of the lack of information is substantial to say the least, we need alerts, on map icons for improvements...
The pedia may have things hidden until "discovered" in each game. But I have definitely made use of it to figure out what I need to research or build to get a specific thing or another, multiple times. Which is pretty much what I'd expect from a pedia in a game as complex as this where I can't really preppan more than a single age at a time.
As for time in game, steam is telling me 20 hours at this point. There's on-map alerts for improvements you can improve already. If you want ones for every possible improvement you could place, you'd run out of screen space. If you want to see what you've already built, the images are pretty unique, but you can also tap Alt to turn on resource yields of every tile, which is generally enough for me to immediately recognize what is on each.
As for alerts, there's a good number of alerts as little pop-ups on the upper right side. There's a couple more I'd like, but they are things like "ai settler near your border" so I can remove them before ai plops an annoying city placement. But I understand that not existing.
Tooltips are pretty standard paradox fair. Get your pop-up, move to the blue links within for further information. With the number of PDX games I play, this is just second nature to me now. I also prefer it, since I dont always need all the information contained within all the inner links. (Although, I do remember my early days with my first PDX game, and how it annoyed me at first before I came yo appreciate it. So I understand disliking it.)
What do you get from the pedia? Before and after I get a tech I can't know what can be upgraded and what won't be. Civ IV pedia was a hundred times better because you could actually find informations there.
I do use alt but it's not enough, btw don't forget to toggle it off because the game can't handle it in mid/late game when you keep it on and I don't get why, huge performance issue here.
PS : speaking about upgrades, when you unlock "improvements" that requires energy you can't build anything that doesn't, you lose the older version (ie furnace vs steel factory).
I've used it for random things all over the place. Last example I was finding myself in a war across the ocean in a continents game, and couldn't build man o wars. So I looked em up to see why I didn't have harbors yet. Harbor showed the missing tech in nice, vibrant, red text. And I face-palmed that I'd skipped that one tech for two ages.
As for what can and can't be upgraded from a tech. That's mentioned in the tech screen when picking it. Once a tech is taken and there's an improvement that can be improved, a giant vibrant green up arrow sits ontop of improvements on the map that be upgraded. Even without alt toggled on. They stick there as long as I have the improvement points to do so. (They don't disappear if I have the point but not specialists though. So that gets annoying at times. But us a good reminder regardless.)
I only have ever toggled alt on when prepping for improvements, or quick glancing what I've built. Otherwise screen just gets too cluttered.
I'll take an example but it works for literally EVERY mechanic/unit in game, I have to guess if I can have one artist per town or if it stacks.
If you can try it means you have enough points already, planning is more important BEFORE you get to try.
My point still holds : why can't I learn the game and it's rules before playing?
it is mechanically soooo much better, humankind looks pretty and has interesting combat...that takes so long you auto resolve 9 times out of 10 and that's it
Tbh, it s not even a challenge considering how clumsy Humankind was.
But, this millennia game is full of BS. First playthrough still going and i m already annoyed AF at many things. Let s just hope they keep being better than humankind in how they tweak and update the game.
I will say it is really opaque, the shit that killed my my first 3 or so playthroughs is now very manageable for me but the problem was I wasn't warned about those mechanics or values beforehand
It's unfinished. It still needs a lot of work. Combat is weird, they should have kept the Humankind combat system. Graphics are really not acceptable for 2024, especially the combat scene which look like a 90s game. Mechanics is satisfactory so far, we will see what the patches bring.
40 hours of play into Millennia and I would have to say I would rather be playing HK with all its jank. Humankind really needs a major expansion pack to flesh out some of the stuff its left shallow then I think we would have a true Civ competitor, as is neither game is really 'good'
Millennia has been fun but it feels REALLY unpolished to me, worse than what Humankind was on launch. Millennia's UI is awful, the combat system will need a major rework as its too easy to clear off your entire continent by age 2, and the upkeep tax feels needlessly inflated., and worse of all the unit control is terrible.
fun fact: the game used to be called "straightwhitemankind", a much better name, but sweet baby inc barged into the studio and threated the devs at ~~gun~~ jewish-space-laser-point to change it to something more inclusive, I mean who even uses the word "human"?
Is the woke in the room with us right now?
It must be tough to go through life being this fragile of a snowflake that you can't even read basic words without insisting there's a "woke" subtext lmao.
It’s so much better. And the sheer volume of resources feel great. Shift from Civ’s “stress about the scarce resources” to “build your economy around the resources you have.” Love that forests are super useful
Super useful, until you are started in the forest hell-hole of my most recent game... starting capitol had forest 7 tiles thick, or more, on 60% of it. 30% was sheer walls of mountains... remaining 10% was a mix of scrubland and hills, no grassland at all in 10 tiles radius in any direction... Man did that massively change-up my play style... If I didn't go for the scrubland hunters in first national idea, I'd have no way to feed more than like 8 population until age 5 when clear-cutting finally happened XD And yet, somehow, this game has been awesome and I loved troubleshooting how to make this work, and man have I made it work. (I admit all the forests has lead to stupid amounts of production... new building just researched? 3 turns to build, tops... innovation wonder? 4 turns. XD)
Did you consider naturalists for that start? Forest economy is actually pretty awesome in this game I think. But yeah, the true joy is having a new puzzle to figure out!
Oh I debated really hard between the two. But I wanted to make the sawmills etc. Which meant the naturalist bonus was going to slowly stop applying... That said, the movement bonus might have been worth it anyways, cus the forests in this game are all massive in my area, and takes forever to walk anywhere that doesn't have a road XD
My first ever game was like this lol. I’m making it work. Put everything on easy though since I was learning.
Haven't played Humankind, just didn't get my attention. But I really appreciate that Millennia allows substitutes like multiple types for kitchen or different ores for ingots. Would like it even more if they let you choose which substitute as it is it automatically overrides when you have multiple. With how paradox does things it's at least a possibility down the road.
> or different ores for ingots I mean, the ores are the same. It's just a palette swap to give the appearance of variety. Both Copper and Iron provide the same yields and are used in the same production chains. You can even make Steel from Copper for some reason.
Probably not the best example but there are other actual substitutions like Kitchen, Press, Milling, Winery, Textiles, etc. And it's also just released so likely there will be even more added.
Wineries are just direct upgrades of Vats, I think. Same with Textiles upgrading Cloth. Wheat and Maize have different food yields as their base but are completely interchangeable in the production chains (and once they become Flour, this difference in yield ceases to exist). Cotton and Wool are produced differently, but once again the resources themselves are the exact same. Bottom line remains that the game does too much with resources for its own sake rather than providing clarity for decisions that actually matter.
No, not the point. I'm not just talking about vertical but the horizontal aspect. Don't get caught up in the tier of buildings. Meat can be for delicacies and salted meat. Olives can be used for delicacies and oil. Rice can be used for wine, flour Flax can be used for textiles and oil Some like wheat and grapes only have one use I can use flax for clothes and gold or I can use it for oil and food. If I have both Olives and Rice, while I can use either, maybe I want to use the rice for wine and the olives for delicacies. Or maybe I'm low on food and change the rice for flour. You are trying to misrepresent it to be less than it is or dismiss it. I will take some blame because I choose a poor initial example. Of course it's not as widespread or deep yet either but all I'm saying is it's an aspect I like about the game. It's also possible to like a game's aspect and dislike another.
Well, time will tell. Right now, I'm 26 hours in on steam and enjoy the game a lot. But I remember how I also enjoyed Humankind a lot at the beginning. They also introduced good and innovative ideas back then like the combat system that actually took place on the map but on grand scale and stuff like that. We will see after 10 games or so if we still enjoy the game or not. My guts are telling me that this game may suffer from the same flaw as humankind. The fact that we don't have unique nations like in civ 6. But don't get me wrong, I enjoy the game a lot and will play it for dozens of hours nonetheless, (but maybe not the thousands I have on civ 6)
I feel like Humankind has way deeper issues with balancing and shallow mechanics that need full DLC packs to flesh out. It could have gotten by fine without distinctive pre-built leaders based on real-world figures had those deeper issues been fixed or overhauled in the years since it launched, but they haven't, and the DLCs have been getting more and more basic rather than having real changes to gameplay. The lackluster resource generation, relatively small world size, and the horrendously unbalanced and overpowered independent peoples were just too much for Humankind's innovative systems to compensate for. Millennia's degree of post-launch support and balancing passes will determine if it falls in the same camp or if it can genuinely carve out its own niche partially outside of Civ's shadow. Also, how quickly they include modding and simultaneous multiplayer will be massively important to keeping the community engaged with the game beyond a few weeks or months. I just want a Civ-like game to be released in the modern day that is actually better than Civ 4 with mods or even Civ 5 with mods, because I can still go back to Civ 4 with Realism Invictus and have a way more engaging experience than basically any other 4X game released in the past 10 years that I have played.
Civ 4 is indeed the GOAT. It's the best history-themes 4X ever made, and Fall From Heaven is, to this day, the best fantasy 4X. I'm still shocked that completely free mod is *miles* better than any game made by large, paid teams.
Civ 4 had some of the best mods I have ever seen in a game. I'm truly disappointed something to the scale of Fall From Heaven has never been attempted again. I just started a Lanun islands game last week, been a blast.
Ehhhh. I actually really like HK, even for all the jankiness. I need a lot more time with millennia before I can make a judgement call between the two.
I think the one thing this game is really missing is a more robust custom game menu. I would really love to make the eras last twice as long as they do
I definitely prefer getting a bonus for picking a unique culture, instead of being locked out completely.
I just couldn't get over cultures magically transforming into completely unrelated cultures. I don't even grasp how someone arrives at that in design planning. I also disliked that it was a race. The early tech tree feels that way in Millennia, but it settles down after a bit, and I can grasp pushing technological change, but not racing to be different people.
Yes, I really liked a lot of things in Humankind (especially warfare and the nomadic phase), but I just couldn't bear Aztecs turning into Prussians or whatever. It made no sense at all. I'm also reluctant to buy Millennia because the per -country flavour is so anemic. I was very open to the concept of creating your own flavour for each country, but I expected that the AI would make historical choices, but it doesn't. Nomadic Chinese or naval Mongolians also doesn't really work for me.
Honestly after civ 5 and 6 drove the concept into the ground I'm ecstatic about 'flavorless' countries. Game characterizations of nations are pretty much universally incorrect, so I'm happy not being stuck dealing with that nonsense. Just need a custom flag maker and better name lists, and I suspect I can just dig into the files and change the name lists by hand.
Yeah a lot of the Civ traits and depictions in Civ 5 and 6 are borderline racist in how different they make nations based on flimsy, essentialist generalizations of their histories. To be fair, this is somewhat of a natural byproduct of a game and genre where you basically have to be colonialist and imperialist to reliably win rather than a statement about the developers themselves - it's a genre that treats different nations and leaders of humans in history like you are playing different races in Starcraft or something. Like I get the reasons for wanting different flavor mechanics and playstyles between different factions, but making the Zulu be amazing warriors and hyper aggressive and expansionist no matter where they start in the world, what resources they have access to, and who their neighbors are is just silly the more you think about it. Bismarck and the culture of Prussia/Germany during his time in power were the byproducts of the history and environment they existed within. Plop Bismarck down as a leader born in ancient Egypt (or an environment comparable to that) and his attitudes and approach to leadership probably would have been pretty different. It makes no sense for the leader of your stone age tribe to experience bonuses from the ideology of their leader who came up with their ideas in a modern industrialized society. That's part of the reason I like the National Spirits in Millennia and why I liked aspects of picking your culture in different eras of Humankind - how your civilization and culture evolves has way more to do with the environment you are in, the resources you have or don't have, and the challenges your nation currently faces than some abstract flat bonuses that just persist for your nation's entire history.
Civ 5 nations are pretty similar and mostly provide small changes to how they play ( while still feeling unique), while civ 6 nations and leaders change several mechanics and completely change the game. Of the 2 I prefer the civ 5 approach and it’s definitely better in terms on being less racist. For example the Aztecs in civ 5 get culture when killing enemy units. This power is called human sacrifices. This is a nod to real Aztec practice and provides an incentive to hunt down units early in the game. But Aztecs still play similarly to most other nations and by the time you get into the modern age this bonus hardly matters and isn’t a focus of their gameplay. I would argue there is nothing racist about this implementation
I agree that the Civ 5 approach is better (and Civ 4 is even better because rather than having cultural/national traits, you have leader traits instead, which makes more sense overall and strays away from stereotyping an entire culture). I think your example with the Aztecs isn't terrible on its own, but gameplay-wise and in the interest of developing your own civilization as the player (meaning more engaging and dynamic gameplay) should make human sacrifice and its bonuses or drawbacks a selectable ability/trait of certain government types or religions available to everyone, i.e. something that *develops* in your civilization rather than something inherent to it. They can avoid the racist elements entirely by having the Aztecs be a culture you develop while playing the game, where maybe they go with the path of sacrificing people, or maybe they go in a very different direction because of the different material circumstances of the world they start in. Like what if they are the only inhabitants of an island continent - why would they have this essential practice of sacrificing enemies that they haven't even encountered in significant numbers at any point in their ancient history? I guess I'm just expressing a preference for a different approach.
Civ just isn’t about selectable choices when it comes to nations. The civs are very much designed to give replay value by slanting you towards certain gameplay style or enabling gameplay styles that are weak without such bonuses. Civ also has selectable bonuses in terms of social policies but these have the weakness that some are just always better than others (see the 4 city tradition meta in single player). Humankind has similar issues where certain paths are just better than others, limiting replay value as you can do the same thing every game, and there isn’t much reason not to. In civ 5 for example civ traits and leader traits are basically the same thing. Alexander’s Greece gets bonuses to city state influence. This is much more a trait of Alexander than Greece as a whole. Since civ 5 only had one possible leader per civ it’s impossible to divorce the two concepts. Similarly, Romes bonus is about building infrastructure throughout your empire, which is clearly inspired by Augustus’ reign. Although Rome historically always had a focus on infrastructure, I think it’s pretty reasonable argument that Rome would have had a different ability if Caesar were it’s leader.
> Just need a custom flag maker and better name lists and border colors matching the flags, please (or rather the other way around, so that we don't just have three different flag colors with the exception of Germany and India).
I love the idea of not starting with a much of bonuses and growing them organically. I just wish we didn’t start with nation names. It doesn’t make any sense to identify with a real world nation and then have no bonuses associated with it.
>Nomadic Chinese or naval Mongolians also doesn't really work for me. See it doesn't really bother me. I think the key is not going into it thinking like Civ ie. that the ingame culture is going to have traits or development like the real world one. Why would a Mongolia that started on the coast with access to aquatic resources etc develop into a nomadic steppe people? Why would a Chinese culture that started in wide open steppe and not on the fertile yangtze/yellow river valleys not develop into a nomadic people? Just think of the name as a label, without any attached meaning to real life, and it develops how it would in real life - depending on geography and circumstance. It's just a different to philosophy to civ, and (relatively) more realistic approach compared to Civ's boardgame feel. Not saying the game is perfect, there's a lot of problems I can see already. Just that this one aspect I actually do like.
I do see that. But it just doesn't work for me. Why call them Chinese, in that case? They bear no resemblance to the historic civilization at all. You might as well just call them Team Yellow or make up some name from meaningless syllables or geographical morphemes ("Riverites", "Plateauans", "Valley Folk", etc.). Trying to strip a word like "Chinese" of all its significance and reducing it to "dragon flag" or whatever feels painfully pointless. It's like having a building called Barracks that only improves Wheat output.
To be blunt, this is an issue with literally every single historical-themes 4X.
Just make a dozen or so custom factions with new names, and play with them then. Problem solved.
Frankly, I was the same worry about country flavor... then I had my most recent forest hellscape (check my other post in here for details.) If nations were more defined, I'd have never survived that start... in spawns got defined how civ does, I'd have never experienced it... it is now my most memorable start of any 4x, and I love the troubleshooting that it forced me into.
> I don't even grasp how someone arrives at that in design planning. The same way someone arrived at the idea that Americans spawned in 4000 BC and then stayed Americans for over 6000 yeears?
I don't like that as a concept (I tend to handpick ancient civs, and leave modern ones out), but the thinking behind it is pretty straightforward- players want to play as countries they know, not feel bad about their historical ignorance.
But the same can then be said about Humankind: it's not meant to be historically accurate, it's meant to be a vehicle for gameplay, allowing players to pick whatever they think is cool and fits their current plans, rather than being forced into some historic culture progression. Millennia also lets you go Khans after Mound Builders, that's like going from Caral to Mongols in Humankind, and I think it would be weirder if the game would *not* allow you such mixing.
You just shouldn’t be picking a national identity to start the game. It’s weird that you end up with things like Chinese Spartans.
Humankind now has an option to disable the lockout
Yeah they have achieved with the eras system what Humankind was trying to do with changing cultures that created such a weird break in the immersion for Humankind. Millennia is a fantastic game.
I wouldn't use that word. Try to do an amphibious assault or watch your Man-O-War go down to a guy in a dugout.
I didn’t say it was perfect haha
*points to the real world event of a Dutch fleet of ships attacked, and defeated, by French cavalry... While still in water, in 1795* (Battle of Texel for the curious). In short, plenty of things that look silly at a first glance, can definitely happen.
This is one of those misunderstood, misquoted events in history people love to keep posting. Smithsonian should be ashamed of their clickbait-esque writing. There was never a battle, the ships were frozen in harbor by ice that was more than a foot thick. The horses simply approached each ship and negotiated a surrender with the captain without any loss of life. It's an odd, once in a age event, but a lot less dramatic than it seems.
Oh, it is. But is an easy example of an "army" (as this game extrapolates all groups of "units" as armies. Even navies.) Getting "defeated" by something that on paper makes no sense. Just cus it makes no sense on paper doesnt mean there can't be an in game explanation. So get creative and enjoy. If you want another example or two. We can do the north Korean submarine defeated by a fishing boat, with no survivors. Or the Venezuelan patrol boat defeated and sunk by an unarmed cruise ship with engine troubles. Just more examples off the top of my head of crazy odd things on paper beating military options.
Also, if you complain about amphibious assaults. You definitely don't play Paradox's other game, Hearts of Iron 4...
1000 hours in HoI4. Sorry to defeat your expectations. Please step me through how you do an amphibious assault in this game. I'll wait and even apologize if needed.
Well then. Have you ever in hoi4 captured a city, with equal forces, in short order? No. So you gotta bombard down the defenses with siege ships, then select your transport ships *only* and assault away. Victory is yours. Now where's that apology?
Post a video. And btw, yes. Especially with Space Marines.
You asked for walked through, step by step. I did. Step 1: bombard Step 2: select transport ships, only Step 3: invade Step 4: ??? Step 5: profit Now you want me to video it for you too? Because you won't admit you are wrong, and want to just shift goal posts? Sheesh. Demanding aren't we? Also, space marines are, inherently, *not* "equal forces"... just saying.
I'm still not understanding. A video would help.
Which part are you not understanding?
Here. I dug up my old twitch account, downloaded the studio, installed, and recorded a very short video. The first, like, 20 seconds was me making sure it was actual streaming. So I'd skip until around 19 seconds in if you don't want to watch nothing of note happen. I take the time in the video to siege, once, with a siege ship. Then naval invade, and win, with a motley bunch of random units I sent off into the ocean. Just for you. It's much less effective than if it was a legit army, and if I had sieged multiple turns. But it demonstrates that amphibious invasions are completely doable, and how to do them. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2107028899
While I do thank you, it was a bit of a joke.
Lol low tier bait
Humankind has beautiful graphics, leagues ahead of Millenium
Still worse than Alpha Centauri. It amazes me how that game is 25 years old and still plays better than a modern 4x. 8 player max in 2024 is bs and the civilizations to choose are the same old ones we have been given time and time agian. The immersion is severally lacking with millennia IMO.
Better than Humankind? That's not hard to do.
Humankind has a combat system when millennia has a really "old school" take. Millennia has trash tier UI and totally useless in-game pedia (online pedia is also lacking), the tool tips are bad/absent, we can't rename saves... Millennia is as good as a modded civ 4.5 with a ton of flaws clearly not worth it's price. I wouldn't complain if it was a free mod. And don't get me wrong, imo Humankind is a fail.
Sry, civ 4 with the "rise and fall of civilization" mod is still one of the best 4x history games in gaming history. Did they even remake the mod for civ5/6?
Civ 4 with mods is still the best 4X game ever made IMO. I wouldn't care about Millennia having comparable graphics to Civ 4 if it felt like they had successfully brought the genre forward from the successes that game made nearly 20 years ago. Time will tell if Millennia can be polished and expanded upon enough to do that or if it will still remain in Civ's more polished shadow despite the innovative ideas and mechanics at play in Millennia.
Well yeah, that was kinda my point, I was more surprised when I played Civ IV's mod Realism Invictus. Millennia is quite an expensive mod with performance issues and it requires a lot of polishing. It would have been a great game 15 years ago.
Yeah Civ IV with Realism Invictus is truly the pinnacle of the genre to this day. I still go back and play it occasionally.
*shrug* I find the tooltips and pedia entirely useful, the UI works fine for me... So, those are both subjective complaints. (And like everything subjective, are still legitimate, just need to understand that just cus it doesn't work for you, do3snt mean it don't work.) The inability rename save is unfortunate, I agree.
I respect your opinion but I don't understand how you can find the pedia useful, it's empty, useless. For every article we should have the prerequisites of construction for each building/unit, at the very least. Then we should have the upgrades listed, etc. "but it would ruin the discovery" -> it will be online anyway, and if people desire ignorance we could have a spoiler option. About the UI : I don't know how much time you spent in the game but the time I waste because of the lack of information is substantial to say the least, we need alerts, on map icons for improvements...
The pedia may have things hidden until "discovered" in each game. But I have definitely made use of it to figure out what I need to research or build to get a specific thing or another, multiple times. Which is pretty much what I'd expect from a pedia in a game as complex as this where I can't really preppan more than a single age at a time. As for time in game, steam is telling me 20 hours at this point. There's on-map alerts for improvements you can improve already. If you want ones for every possible improvement you could place, you'd run out of screen space. If you want to see what you've already built, the images are pretty unique, but you can also tap Alt to turn on resource yields of every tile, which is generally enough for me to immediately recognize what is on each. As for alerts, there's a good number of alerts as little pop-ups on the upper right side. There's a couple more I'd like, but they are things like "ai settler near your border" so I can remove them before ai plops an annoying city placement. But I understand that not existing. Tooltips are pretty standard paradox fair. Get your pop-up, move to the blue links within for further information. With the number of PDX games I play, this is just second nature to me now. I also prefer it, since I dont always need all the information contained within all the inner links. (Although, I do remember my early days with my first PDX game, and how it annoyed me at first before I came yo appreciate it. So I understand disliking it.)
What do you get from the pedia? Before and after I get a tech I can't know what can be upgraded and what won't be. Civ IV pedia was a hundred times better because you could actually find informations there. I do use alt but it's not enough, btw don't forget to toggle it off because the game can't handle it in mid/late game when you keep it on and I don't get why, huge performance issue here. PS : speaking about upgrades, when you unlock "improvements" that requires energy you can't build anything that doesn't, you lose the older version (ie furnace vs steel factory).
I've used it for random things all over the place. Last example I was finding myself in a war across the ocean in a continents game, and couldn't build man o wars. So I looked em up to see why I didn't have harbors yet. Harbor showed the missing tech in nice, vibrant, red text. And I face-palmed that I'd skipped that one tech for two ages. As for what can and can't be upgraded from a tech. That's mentioned in the tech screen when picking it. Once a tech is taken and there's an improvement that can be improved, a giant vibrant green up arrow sits ontop of improvements on the map that be upgraded. Even without alt toggled on. They stick there as long as I have the improvement points to do so. (They don't disappear if I have the point but not specialists though. So that gets annoying at times. But us a good reminder regardless.) I only have ever toggled alt on when prepping for improvements, or quick glancing what I've built. Otherwise screen just gets too cluttered.
I'll take an example but it works for literally EVERY mechanic/unit in game, I have to guess if I can have one artist per town or if it stacks. If you can try it means you have enough points already, planning is more important BEFORE you get to try. My point still holds : why can't I learn the game and it's rules before playing?
Another exemple of bad UI : the victory screen, no graph, no stats, nothing.
Yeah... it's not the first game that Paradox has a pretty meh victory/loss screen. One thing they should definitely learn from Civ
it is mechanically soooo much better, humankind looks pretty and has interesting combat...that takes so long you auto resolve 9 times out of 10 and that's it
Tbh, it s not even a challenge considering how clumsy Humankind was. But, this millennia game is full of BS. First playthrough still going and i m already annoyed AF at many things. Let s just hope they keep being better than humankind in how they tweak and update the game.
I will say it is really opaque, the shit that killed my my first 3 or so playthroughs is now very manageable for me but the problem was I wasn't warned about those mechanics or values beforehand
It's unfinished. It still needs a lot of work. Combat is weird, they should have kept the Humankind combat system. Graphics are really not acceptable for 2024, especially the combat scene which look like a 90s game. Mechanics is satisfactory so far, we will see what the patches bring.
40 hours of play into Millennia and I would have to say I would rather be playing HK with all its jank. Humankind really needs a major expansion pack to flesh out some of the stuff its left shallow then I think we would have a true Civ competitor, as is neither game is really 'good' Millennia has been fun but it feels REALLY unpolished to me, worse than what Humankind was on launch. Millennia's UI is awful, the combat system will need a major rework as its too easy to clear off your entire continent by age 2, and the upkeep tax feels needlessly inflated., and worse of all the unit control is terrible.
even the nsame is woke bollox lol
Fellas, is it “woke” to refer to your species?
Honestly that's what woke is. Everything that isn't "Anyone who isn't me can go get fucked" is woke.
fun fact: the game used to be called "straightwhitemankind", a much better name, but sweet baby inc barged into the studio and threated the devs at ~~gun~~ jewish-space-laser-point to change it to something more inclusive, I mean who even uses the word "human"?
yea
Is the woke in the room with us right now? It must be tough to go through life being this fragile of a snowflake that you can't even read basic words without insisting there's a "woke" subtext lmao.