Humankind - a Historical 4X by Amplitude (Endless Space, Legend, etc.)

They’ve been doing lots of changes they should have done before leaving Early Access: UX improvements, balancing, feature tweaking, and more game options. Whether or not it results in a significantly better game I can’t answer until I spend more time with Bolivar. It’s my first time back since launch.

Yes. I’ve only first played it last patch and I’ve liked it very much. A lot of people had issues with how the wars work (you have to finish the war even if you want to go on fighting) and they made it closer to what people want.

Both DLCs look like the right kind of DLCs: I’ll definitely get them when I buy the game (been playing through gamepass) but they don’t feel like a mandatory update to mechanics that is sold separately.

Good to know. Thanks!

Got up to the medieval era last night. The game doesn’t feel strikingly different than the launch version, but does feel a bit more smoothed out. I saw fewer obviously broken cultures, although that Khmer Baray improvement still seems way better than a bunch of the other cultures in that era. The yield previews for infrastructure buildings are definitely great(new with this patch). Can’t speak to the peace changes as I started alone on the north of my continent with two opponents way in the south. So far I’ve only fought minors.

So I’d say if you tried Humankind already and hated it, it’s probably not going to change that now. But if, like me, you largely liked what was there and just found too many annoyances to keep playing, I’d say it’s worth revisiting now.

Hmm, thanks. I wouldn’t go far as to say I hated it. I think I felt it very mediocre.

That seems like a very good change.

Well, this is a new one for me

That’s a single territory.

Ha! I’ve never seen a territory even close to that shape. What’s the white line, though, connecting the two white dots on the left side? Can’t recall ever seeing such a line.

I think it’s just the path for the selected unit to the neighboring tile.

Some of the landscapes in this game can be really neat. Elsewhere on this map I found a desert canyon with a river running through it and a very cool snowy mountain valley. Shame most of the biomes are a very similar looking grassland. So much of the terrain just ends up feeling less impactful than in Civ even though this has real elevation.

Huh. I don’t recalling see move-to lines when zoomed out that far. Maybe I just never had a unit selected with a move-to order while zoomed out!

I’m away from the game now but that’s all I can figure. Granted, what they do and don’t show while zoomed out to that view still seems almost entirely random to me.

People in that blue province drink wine, people to the North drink vodka, and people to the South drink beer.

Confirmed that it was just a path marker at the most zoomed out level. Also confirmed you can even issue units new orders at that zoom level if you’ve already got them selected even though units aren’t visible at that zoom level.

Announced their first expansion today. Diplomacy focus isn’t what I would have picked, but hopefully they are good additions for that side of the gameplay. I recall expansions for the Endless games weren’t overly expensive but I’m sure this will be a significant increase over the $9 culture packs.

Oh, awesome, I am so in for an expansion. Thanks for the link!

EDIT: Yes yes yes, this is great:

I play this game with a friend and that’s been on our wishlist, I didn’t think it would actually happen. Especially not in a diplomacy-themed expansion!

Humankind has previously been listed to come on Xbox Console Game Pass a few months ago, but when i checked for its release date last night i noticed it had been pulled. Apparently mid-October Amplitude announced that Humankind’s console port had been “delayed indefinitely” for undisclosed reasons.

As apparently their M1 Mac port was also “delayed indefinitely” and then buried, reading the tea leaves seems to indicate they may be redirecting resources away from Humankind and toward their new game.

I hope that’s not the case. Humankind still has a lot of promise that I think they could realize with some additional work. Hopefully the expansion this fall sells well enough that they keep producing content for it. There is room in this world for more than just Civilization when it comes to that style of 4x. I’d take 50 fewer space 4X games if it meant 3 more human history 4X games.

And then hopefully for their next game they try a new UX paradigm rather than what they’ve been doing since ES1.

Same. I really like Humankind, it’s my favorite Amplitude game. And no one else does Civ aside from Firaxis and the last entry of theirs I enjoyed was Civ4.

I’m looking forward to the Paradox pop-based full history grand strategy, which Vicky 3 is basically a big tech demo for.

More seriously I wish a big company would do a 4X with focus on the AI being good. Given the success of recent Civs, I don’t think that’s where the money lies though.

Oh yeah, sign me up for a 4X game where the AI is the showcase. Game devs (or publishers) don’t seem to think the ROI isn’t there, but I hope they’re wrong and someone puts it to the test.

Sadly it never seems to be a priority. You don’t actually sell the game on AI, and it takes dozens if not hundreds of hours to learn the game enough to know if AI is bad, at which point you probably can’t complain about the game being bad.