HUMAN KIND
An ambitious new take on the 4X RTS genre!
YOU CAN’T WRITE about historical 4X games without mentioning Civilization, and yes, Humankind is, on the surface, a bit like Civilization. There’s a hex grid you can hide, you start in the stone age, and given half a chance, your neighbor will move its tanks into your capital even though you’ve been trading resources amicably for years.
One major difference, though, is that there’s only one way to win a game of Humankind. Another is that it’s a race. Humankind differs from Civilization in that you don’t play as the same culture all the way through (unless you want to), but pick and choose from available societies depending on what your aims are in the next era. So a good solid foundation in food and population growth in the Ancient era as the Harappans (who get foodgrowing bonuses) can see you pivot to industrial expansionism in the Classical era as you become the Maya.
That is if someone else hasn’t got there first. We said it was a race, and the first to win seven stars in the current era gets to leave it first and has first pick of the cultures available for the next one. No two cultures can be the same, so if you desperately want the Medieval Franks with their influence bonus (useful for founding new settlements) then you have to get there first, or it might not be available when you do.
This is hugely frustrating if you have a plan, but leads to some delicious U-turns and reallocations of resources when you have to settle for second best because the Hittites discovered more curiosities (interesting things scattered around the world to be discovered by mobile units in the early phase of the game) than you did.
War is definitely part of the game, playing out on a small tactical map within the broader world map, and with an autoresolve option. It’s a bit too easy to get into the finer details of your trade treaty with the Huns only to find a Carthaginian chariot sitting in your capital city before you’ve had the chance to build any walls— but a simple military takeover isn’t a way you can win. Nor is sticking up wonders of the world for a cultural victory, nor sending a mission to Mars, nor filling in every gap on the tech tree, not hitting the turn limit of 300. You’ll have to do all of these, somewhere along the line, as the only way to win is by earning fame.
Fame comes as you earn era stars by accomplishing feats with your culture. If you’re getting too far behind, the game will sometimes award you a ‘competitive spirit’ star, a sort of participation trophy that shows it’s taking pity on you. Stars come not only from building and
conquering but also from doing what your culture does, so a culture with an affinity for food growing will get one more quickly for farming than for engineering.
You need seven stars to advance to the next age, but you can hang around for a while if you’re ahead of the competition to harvest more fame. You also get a fame bonus if you ‘transcend’—keep the same culture for more than one age.
THE FAME GAME
There are other resources, such as money, influence, raw materials, but nothing drives the game forward quite like fame. Even if you manage to end the game by blasting off to Mars or reaching turn 300, you may not win if another culture has stockpiled enough fame. It can be tricky to completely wipe out an opposing culture—they always seem to pop up again somewhere—but, with their empire gone, they can’t accrue fame, and that’s the important thing.
Once you’ve got your head around this, the game plays quite differently from Civ. There is never a period when you even think about taking your foot off the gas, no point in consolidating your holdings for a few turns. Losing a city can be devastating to your fame, so battles become mobile skirmishes rather than grinding sieges, the diplomacy window a better place to settle grudges than the battlefield.
Likewise, the city stability number is never far from your mind, as an unhappy population can revolt. The more districts your city has, the larger its population cap and production abilities, but the lower its stability, so you need to build additional infrastructure to compensate. There’s a lot to take in. It’s a bit like Civilization.
Except this is an Amplitude Studios game, and you go in expecting it to be full of personality, like EndlessSpace2, but what you get is a bit too close to the Firaxis template. The screen is covered with pop-up windows, and while you choose from a range of smirking avatars at the beginning of the game, you rarely get a sense of your culture’s personality, even on the diplomacy screen, where the other cultures’ representatives threaten and plead and chew the furniture.
It would be wrong to call Humankind bland. It’s just not as spicy as we expected from the studio that produced Horatio and a society of sentient trees. It also closely resembles something we’ve all seen before, leaving the question of why not play Civilization6 instead. Do that, though, and you’ll miss out on Humankind’s excellent new ideas. There’s enough room in the world for more than one historical 4X, and Amplitude’s decision to pile on the pressure means this one stands out for that alone.