War in the Pacific Scenario Beta

At Amplified a few weeks ago, we gave you a first glimpse of a new Humankind scenario our designer Noah has been working on: War in the Pacific.

We chose this theme because the Community Vote had picked the Contemporary as their preferred era, and we could create a situation in which you’d get to use all three types of units together, land, naval, and air. This scenario pushes some aspects further than we did with previous scenarios, like custom personas, custom narrative events, and a unique end game condition.

Additionally, in the course of working on this scenario we made several more general improvements to the game:

AI

• Better AI management of Embarked Units: they deploy in the rear, will avoid engaging naval forces, try to disembark on ground, and avoid seeking naval forces in a naval engagement.

• Better AI Air Strike management:

  • AI will account better for anti-air before striking, avoiding too high casualties.

  • AI will spread out strikes (note : While this is slightly less optimal in theory than focusing a single tile, but avoids "overstriking" which it was prone to do, i.e. sending more than the required amount of squadrons to hit a tile)

• AI will include more infantry in their later era armies to avoid having to rely entirely on tanks.

Gameplay Changes and Fixes

• Land tiles are properly included in a battle if embarked units are present in a naval engagement

• Reduced Terrain / POI destruction chance from 25% per air / arty strike to 5%

• Added possibility to buyout some specific Extensions with Influence in Occupied Cities (Extractors, Train Stations, etc), like Outposts.

• Fixed an error with air strikes.

Now we’re ready for you to try it yourselves and share your thoughts to guide any final tweaks we might want to make before we release it fully.

Just go to the properties of the game on Steam, and in the Game Versions and Betas tab select the update_preview branch. Once it’s updated, you’ll be able to access the scenario directly from the menu.

While you’re giving feedback, there are a few topics Noah is particularly interested in:

• Did you finish the scenario?

• How many turns did you play?

• Which side did you play?

• Thoughts on the difficulty of the scenario?

• Thoughts on the AI's behavior?

• Thoughts on the military aspect?

• Thoughts on the economy?

• Any other / free feedback

If you see any weird behavior from the AI, please let us know about it and include a save if you can.

We look forward to reading what you think about this scenario.