I was surprised at how much I liked this. I’m not a high score type of player and typically either like a sandbox or clear win objectives. Beating a high score never did much for me, which is probably why I never got into arcade games back in the day.
In any case, I went into it thinking Fame was just going to be that and it wouldn’t be something that clicked with me but I really like how it’s implemented in the game. In Civ or pretty much any 4X game, you want to tech up as quickly as possible. In Humankind, I like the tension of being able to advance to the next era but not necessarily wanting to pull the trigger, since it means you lose out on all the fame stars you haven’t picked up yet in your current era. You might race to the end and beat everyone to the space race but you might also find yourself short on stars and lose to another player who took the time to pick up some extra stars along the way.
On the flip side of that, there’s the tension of wanting to pull the trigger on advancing to the next era because culture X is really important to your strategy and you don’t want another civ to nab it first!
It’s surprisingly not bad, and I like it more than either Endless Legend or Endless Space’s attempts at combat.
Yeah, I didn’t even get into some of the smart things they did with Fame like the tradeoffs with moving ages quickly or the fame bonuses for whatever your culture’s theme is. I just like it thematically for a game about the sweep of human history. Having to laser focus your civ on a certain victory condition from the iron age on doesn’t feel very epic. Humankind gets that and encourages a bit of a reset each age as your people evolve and change.
Jumping cultures is a really cool idea that doesn’t work for me at all in practice. Or it half-way works. I think switching my culture up each era is a fun way to build my civ. On the other hand, having the other civs do the same thing means that I build no connections with my friends/rivals in the game. Rather, I’ll look up and think Wait a minute - where the hell did England come from? Oh, that’s just the red team. and that’s really dissatisfying.
I should really give Humankind another chance. I was real excited that the Endless Legend people were taking a shot at a civ-like, and ended up feeling like other than a few small things here or there, they played it way too safe and basically made a civ game. Which is fine – I like Civ – but Civ already exists and I’ve played way too much of it at this point. Amusingly, the 4x that released last year and was designed by an actual ex-Civ designer was the one that had the most interesting new ideas in it.
I haven’t played recently, but I believe they attempted to address this in one of the patches this fall. They were working to better connect the AI player and the names you see on the map or something like that. Pretty sure they fixed the notifications to also not just refer to the culture name. Honestly, I don’t know how that one made it all the way to release and then lasted another 12 months. Seems like something that would have been brought up by damn near anyone who played the game for multiple ages.
But yeah, Civ hit on something with recognizable leaders that fairly prominently feature as the representative of their faction. Humankind has generic AI avatars that really had no relation to what you were seeing in the game.
Sadly I agree. I love all the pieces but they somehow don’t come together into a cohesive whole that keeps me engaged.
Endless Legend is a game I have owned for years and finally gave it an earnest go. After I had defeated my only opponent on my continent there was no pushback from the AI, no tension simply hitting next turn as the remaining AIs and I raced for highest victory condition scores. I understand that you can ignore the turn limit and continue on but I dislike having a turn limit in my games.
I have the game on Gamepass, but haven’t played it much.
It’s on sale on Steam, does the expansion improve the game enough that the expansion plus the sale make it worthwhile? Being able to play on my Mac is a bonus as well.
That was not intended as a serious comment or prediction, though I would love if it were true. In fact I started the next sentence with “More seriously”.
Pretty big price drop everywhere right now for this. I still haven’t circled back again and played this since release, where i thought it was pretty mediocre. I even preferred Civ VI to this and Civ VI wasn’t really that great. It looks like on Steam people are still saying this is really buggy too. It doesn’t seem like it has improved much either through patches or DLC.
I know @KevinC thought this was pretty good. Any comments on how this has improved since release?
Humankind is a weird one for me. I don’t think it’s a particularly good strategy game per se. I compare it to something like Old World and it falls short almost everywhere. Old World has such a tight design, it has so many clever things that impress the hell out of me… and yet I still had more fun with Humankind. I love being able to pick cultures through the ages and the tension of deciding when to advance an age or hold back to collect more fame/stars. It’s probably the only strategy game I’ve ever played where I actually like the score mechanic and play with it in mind (it’s usually the first thing I turn off in games). It gave it a totally different focus for me where I wasn’t worried about painting the map or expanding so big that the game became a slog which is a common problem I run into with 4X games.
In terms of how it’s improved since release (caveat: I haven’t tried the latest DLC), I would say that if you didn’t care for the game at release then that will probably remain the case now. There have definitely been improvements made, but it’s adding to or refining the existing design, not making any sort of radical changes. The game is fundamentally the same game it was at 1.0, it’s just been iterated on a bit more, had more cultures added, bugs fixed, etc.
EDIT: To summarize, if someone didn’t care for the game before I don’t think there have been any changes that would change their mind and get them into the game. For people that did like it before, there have been improvements and additions since release. They’ve added more scoops of the same flavor of ice cream so if you didn’t care for the taste before that’s probably not very appealing and you may want to spend your calorie budget elsewhere. :)
I feel like Humankind is probably dead at this point so getting it hoping it will get better is probably a bad idea.
I agree with everything KevinC wrote. I think what’s off is the sense of proportion, timing and scale. How fast ages progress, the size of maps, how fast units are built and move, research and construction times, ect. All that stuff. It feels like they tried to squeeze in too many ages into too little bread. You advance in each age by gaining little mini achievements - but you literally get those by playing normally, so why bother? There’s some polish and love in the game, but Amplitude games have problems with the gears fitting together rather than the gears themselves.
There was just a decent-sized patch released today! We’ll see if they do another expansion. I hope so, as I still think the promise is there, but I also don’t think Amplitude games have ever actually lived up to the promise they’ve all had. I think you’re right, they can never quite get the systems to fit together right.
I’d really love for them to really lean into the ages and make each one feel more unique in some way vs just the culture you picked for that age.
Because that’s the primary way to increase your victory score. I think the actual design here is solid but they maybe just don’t communicate it very well? There is often good reason to stick around in an age longer to try to get some more stars rather than just blast through as fast as possible. But the UI really really pushes you to move to the next age the first turn you’re able to. I’m also a big fan of the fact that you get more points for the stars related to your culture that age, encouraging you to adjust focus each age.
No what I mean is that I rarely feel like I’m intentionally seeking out stars, I pretty much get them for playing the game. Most of the time it feels like I’m actually advancing faster than I “want” (relative to the number of decisions I’ve made regarding advancing). In other words when I’m out exploring and settling I know I’m foregoing focusing on upgrade stars, except oops, I just went up faster than any other civ, unintentionally. In fact in most early ages things advance so fast I can’t find time to build both UU and Unique buildings reliably before I’m aging up again.
If I focus on growth, and earn growth stars, the world is fine. If I’m fighting the whole time but earn many growth stars anyway, just for playing the game, it doesn’t feel well tuned.
Ah gotcha. At beta and release I felt this same way. But the couple of games I played over the past summer felt like that had changed. I had to work to get a lot of the stars. And the first game I played over the summer I just aged up as soon as I could and lost the game by a pretty wide margin to an AI player because they had way more score than me.
It sounds silly but one reason I don’t play this as much is because of how horribly it’s optimized. It takes 5+ minutes to get into a game using an SSD… When I had it installed on a “lesser game” external spinny disk it took 10-15 minutes to load. On anything less than a 1080 it lags badly, textures popping, barely able to load beyond medium settings. I think even TW Atilla, the king of badly optimized strategy games, loads faster.
