In each Era – from the Ancient to the Contemporary, you have a set of stars that can be earned by performing feats, all to increase your empire's Fame score - a sort of meta-number that ranks you with other nations. Where things start to get a bit different is how you progress through the Eras. These main mechanics are pretty much identical to the Civilization experience.
HUMANKIND MULTIPLAYER UPGRADE
With your first city, you can begin to build structures within, upgrade the nearby resource tiles for food and industry, and start your science tree progress. You can also fight some animals and ransack their lairs for added bonuses. Within a few turns, you can found your first settlement, and a few turns later you can spend Influence again to turn it into your first city.
discovering bits of resources and info to expand their Influence score). You can set your units to auto-explore, and they will begin to roam the map picking up Curiosities (i.e. With all settings adjusted to your liking, you step out into the world with your sole tribe clan in the Neolithic Era. As such, you barely even get to experience the late-game aspects of Nukes and global pollution, unless you play past the turn limit. It seems that the game's pacing is in need of some strong adjustment, because 9 out of 10 times the turn limit is what ends the game even the AI opponents cannot reach their goals in time. We've played a multitude of games across a variety of speed and difficulty settings, and this problem arose every time. Even if you have multiple nations, playing at normal difficulty, and are gunning to get a specific victory conditions, the turn limit still seems to be the first thing to end the game. But no matter the speed you pick, it seems to always be a struggle to actually reach any of the end-goals before the turn limit runs out. The speed affects how quickly the world develops, from production to science research. You can choose to play a game that ends at as few as 75 turns, or last as long as 600 turns. The last key element to set before starting the game is the speed. You can thankfully keep playing afterwards, but still it's a bewildering choice, especially considering the game has odd pacing issues. This means that the game will end even if nobody actually reached the set goals. However in another strange design choice, the game enforces a turn limit no matter what victory condition you pick. Or, you can choose to set the win condition as one of those specific goals. You can choose to play a standard game where the first nation to reach any of the usual goals wins – be that having the highest Fame at the turn limit, going to Mars, annihilating/vassalizing everyone else, or making the planet uninhabitable due to pollution. It's a bit surprising there's no option to randomize opponents and/or hide them, so you don't know who you'd face in the game. Before starting the game, you also select the opposition, which are also some pre-made avatars with their own traits and personalities. The avatar creation process is fairly flexible, but the end result always looks a bit frightening, like your character is underweight and the fake facial lighting makes it look even worse at times. You also get to create an avatar for yourself, by choosing facial features, hair, and so on. The maps that the game generates seem to work out well for the most part, though occasionally you will see some oddities, such as deep Ocean water tiles directly alongside the coast. So far, so standard, for the genre.Īt the start of the game, you get to choose the size of the map as well as many typical variables, such as resource scarcity, terrain types, the number of continents, and so on. The game is played as a turn-based strategy on a hexagonal grid map, and every turn you can perform a certain amount of unit movements, actions, and decisions. Humankind is a 4X strategy game, which means you play on a randomly generated map that represents Earth, and try to guide your civilization of people to historical glory. The end result is a decent diversion that does enough things differently from Civ, but in facing many of its own challenges, it's unable to break out from the shadow of the genre's behemoth. The developers have clearly tried to thread the fine line between copying, "being inspired by", and adding some new elements to the mix.
In actuality, the games are so similar in setting, gameplay, and even the UI, that it's difficult to ignore. The many comparisons that will be drawn between Civilization and Humankind are not simply because they are both 4X games and Civ happens to be the dominant force.