Looks like I have mine on my nvme drive(although an old pci-e 3 one) and don’t recall loading being particularly frustrating. It definitely pushes my old 980ti and matching 2015 CPU if I turn the settings too high, especially as the game goes on. My unwillingness to turn the graphics too low despite the performance does stop me from playing this more.
It’s still on Gamepass so I could try and play it there, but it’s getting cheap enough where I wouldn’t be against it being in my Steam library. I wonder if it will ever leave Gamepass. It’s been there forever. I don’t think I’d want to put money into any DLC for a Gamepass game though. I guess I’ll think about it, it’s not like it won’t ever go on sale again :-)
So this actually runs very well on an M-series Mac, now that it has native binaries released.
But sadly I think i’ve finally concisely pinned down the game’s root problem (for me) - a pretty dreadful midgame.
Nutshell version, it’s very hard to get off your starting continent, but by the 4th Era your continent has been filled up. But that there are also substantial penalties for having too many cities.
So you can’t really expand anymore, and you can’t go anywhere else for a long time, so you spend the game allied to everyone left, building things for 150 turns until the late game. I guess you could always play on huge sized maps to kind of make up for this, but it’s an underlying balance issue.
I don’t see this at all. By the midgame you get techs that expand city limit and settlers that allow creating cities with a lot of buildings in them at once. Getting over the city cap by 1 means just - 10 influence which is nothing after the early game. Conquering cities on the other continents is appropriately hard, true, but certainly possible.
The easiness of the allied victory is an issue, yes, and it’s written in the rules. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma only there’s literally no reason for people not to go for allied victory.
So… what are the big bullet, key differences from Humankind, in the context of what makes it different from the Civ series?
Going one over is -10, i think going two over is -120. Now… that’s still doable, but it means that you need to direct away from influence based Victory Point conditions, which sure, you can do, but then you might as well conquer the world, which really isn’t that hard either. But if you play the way the game intends, so that you don’t go too much over your city cap, you’re probably going to allow a civ or two to survive on your continent sort of by default.
(Sorry in advance for any typos or autocorrect shenanigans, I didn’t have time to proofread)
The Culture system that replaces Civ choice. In Civilization as you know, you pick your Civ at the start and you get some bonuses as well as a unique unit and unique building that will come into play at a certain era related to your Civ.
In Humankind, you start out as neolithic hunter-gatherers. This gives you a chance to explore the map and get a lay of the land before choosing your starting location. So you’ll know if you’re in the middle Siberia or not before choosing to play a seafaring culture like the Phoenicians. While you explore, you gather food, grow your population, and gather little science/discovery hut thingies that all progress you towards getting “Stars” (I can’t remember the exact name). Once you have enough Stars, you’ll be able to choose your initial culture. I think this is actually a great addition to the genre as makes the early exploration phase of the game even more interesting.
The Stars mechanic is the key to why I enjoy the game. Each era has 3 available stars in each category (Building, Science, money, culture, military stuff, etc.). Earning stars progresses you towards the next era but also gives you Fame (extra Fame for getting stars in the category that is aligned with your culture, like Science for Babylonians), which is your score to determine the winner at the end of the game. You need something like 9 stars to progress an era, but if you leave that era without collecting the other stars you forfeit them, limiting how much fame you can accumulate in the game.
So there is very real tension for me when figuring out when to pull the trigger. If I don’t advance the era fast enough, someone might grab a particular Culture that could potentially be HUGE for my strategy. On the other hand, if I forfeit too many stars then I might find myself losing at the end despite being the dominant superpower of the world. That is a big gamechanger for me compared to Civ games, where the game is always a foregone paint-the-map exercise at the end. They haven’t completely eliminated that, but there are games where I’ve been by far the dominant power but end up coming in second place because I couldn’t quite catch another player on Fame.
Another thing that I really enjoy about the Culture system is how dynamic it is. It really makes me feel like my civilization is changing and evolving as the game goes and the circumstances change, which feels more authentic to me than an initial Civ choice that you’re stuck with throughout a game. For instance, maybe I start in a huge desert and choose Egyptians at first, but as the game progresses I discover some really valuable coastline and found several cities there. Naval suddenly becomes much more important to my strategy, and maybe my Culture techs reflect that. Perhaps I pick the Vikings or the Dutch or other people that excel in the sea. It makes it feel like my civilization has grown and changed through the eras.
Anyway, all that and especially the tension with choosing when to advance in an era for fear of losing out on a Culture you might want really makes the game for me. Each culture also has some pretty incredible bonuses and you can make some real amazing combos out of them (you don’t lose the advantages of your previous Culture as you advance eras, if that wasn’t clear). It’s the kind of thing that people liked about Master of Magic, coming up with some crazy powerful strategies. Probably not the greatest in a competitive MP environment but for this genre, who cares?
One thing i wish the game would do is change the name of your cities to your current culture if / when you decide to upgrade the main city center to look like your current culture’s architecture. Pretty must most of the game the cities are named Ur and Harappa and similar.
Sure, second city above cap is scary for a long time. City merging tech appears quite late and it’s probably necessary for large-scale conquest, but I think unless you have more than one opponent on the starting component you can comfortably own the whole continent with like 3 cities. I do think that the game intends you to start spreading to other continents after the medieval era.
Plenty of cities large and small in the US maintain their French and Spanish names, I just look at it in a similar light. A historical record of what cultures founded what cities, regardless of who I’m playing now. I don’t think it would be any better to transform Babylon into Seattle.
I’m pretty sure you can manually change the name of your cities at any time if you want something culturally relevant.
But it’s like all cities in the world were founded in 3000 BC. That’s the only issue - even if the city remains the same in real life, the name evolves. Since trying to create a whole network of AI driven ‘name evolution’ driven by real life grammar about the city name is just way, way too much effort for effectively 0 interest and value, just allowing the player to have a new name to pick from would be nice (imo).
Otherwise we’re playing with Luteria, Londinium, and Treuorum. And the whole point of Humankind is cultural evolution!
In the game? That hasn’t been my personal experience, but I do play on huge maps. Given the early city caps, there’s always been room for new cities to found as the game goes on, then more as I get access to the oceans and establish on larger islands and the like.
EDIT: Okay, not “always”, but what I mean is that I’m still founding cities in the industrial era.
EDIT2: I do think a 'Pick from these city names if you’d like" would be a nice-to-have little feature!
Depending on placement, it’s often possible to raze several of the captured cities and just reincorporate the territories as part of your existing cities. At least on the maps I’ve played it always seems like I wish most of my cities could add one or two extra territories before the cost gets too ridiculous. This gives you that room to grow.
The other big thing is that it uses a version of the territory system they created for Endless Legend. So there are defined territories on the map that can’t contain more than one city each. In addition to that, cities can add neighboring territories into them rather than founding new cities on top(as mentioned above, the city cap is pretty tight for much of the game). You’ll be building a lot of districts on the map(like in Endless Legend, not really like in Civ 6) so incorporating the territory allows a city to expand districts into those territories to exploit whatever resources.
Free DLC if you grab it by May 10.
Thanks for the heads up! Not sure I’ll ever play it but I may as well grab it :-)
Sucks that this game is in console limbo.
Thinking of picking this up but it has mixed reviews and giving me pause. Seems like mostly good posts in this thread though. Quite a big discount going right now so I’m tempted.
I think it’s definitely worth it at that price! Go for it! :)
What do you mean by console limbo?
Wow, thanks. I’ve just bought it on Steam to play on Steam Deck. Previously I’ve played it on gamepads and it was probably the most fun I ever had with 4X game. It seems to be in continuous development, right now there’s a beta patch where people say AI is greatly improved. Sad that reviews are so bad, don’t really get it. I understand a lot of people feel it misses the mark because of player sides being indistinctive, but does it justify so many bad reviews?
For me (playing the free weekend they had a while back), my only significant complaint was the AI was very weak. Which is my main problem with all Amplitude 4X games (and to be fair those of many other companies too). So I’m very pleased to hear there might be AI improvements on the way.