Humankind - the Civ killer?

[Syt]

So I gave this one a spin over the weekend, playing two games on "normal" (Metropolis) difficulty, and now in the middle of one on "Nation" (the next difficulty up).

I have all add ons etc., because I'm just that kind of guy. They also still seem to be patching the game, including one just before I picked it up again (which I hadn't noticed), so they keep tinkering on it, I guess, even though Endless Legend II early access has started.

I find it a bit hard to compare to Civ 6 or 7, because the game flow is a bit different, and I feel overall it leans less into the war side of 4X games.

The two big differentiators (IMO) to Civ and similar are:

1. The map is divided into territories.

So instead of expanding hex by hex, you claim a territory by building an outpost and later turning it into a city or attaching it to a city. The game is very harsh on limiting your number of cities (I had a limit of 8 at most in end game), though penalties for going over are fairly mild for one or two cities.

Building outposts, attaching territories etc. costs "Influence", and the costs ramp up quickly. Also, the more territories you attach to a city, the harder it will be to maintain stability in the city (late game offers much better tools to mitigate this than early or mid game).

However, cities are much more malleable. You can transfer territories from one city to another (which is a bit clunky - you need to detach it from city A, then attach it to city B ... more than once I accidentally re-attached it to city A because I hadn't selected city B yet in the UI).

Also, you can have one city absorb another. So you may have some smaller cities at the start, but once you expand out you may merge some of your older cities to free up capacities for new cities overseas or in conquered lands.

City development is similar to Civ 6 or 7 (or, more accurately, the developers' previous title Endless Legend who did it before both Civs). You have two types of buildings: districts (which exist on map) and infrastructure (which exist off map in the city - something to keep in mind if you intend to merge cities: do you want to build infrastructure in a city you want to absorb shortly?). Districts have the usual flavor: science, commerce, farming, production, pluse a few like "commons" (generally to improve stability), "garrison" (fortresses that can also be set as spawn points for units), and some districts that are "one per territory": usually your current culture's "emblematic" district, or harbors. Additionally, you build resource extractors on the map on luxury and strategic resources.

2. I mentioned "current culture". That's because you can change your culture when you enter each age. I know it's a major turn off for many, but I actually like the additional layer of strategy it adds. In the neolithic age you roam as a nomadic people. You explore the map, gather food/hunt animals to grow your tribe, seek "curiosities" that boost your knowledge, and found an outpost or two. Once you have 15 points of those you can choose to move to the ancient era (you can elect to delay progress to a new era) and pick your first culture. In subsequent ages you need 7 "era stars" (out of 24 max) to advance to the next era. They're earned by fighting wars, gaining diplomatic leverage, building stuff, expanding your territory or people, research etc. A reason to stay in an age can be to increase your score in that age (collecting more stars) - regardless of how the game ends, score is the final decider as to who wins.

Each culture has a main focus - expansion, warfare, diplomacy, influence, science, building, agriculture, commerce - that gives them a special ability every ten turns. Expansion allows you to take enemy outposts/territories by parking an army on them for 5 turns. Building lets you have a city covert all their commerce and science output to production for ten turns. Commerce lets you "invest" in a resource in your or foreign territory for an instant gold boost. Etc. Additionally, each culture comes with a special boost - cheaper troop production, better agriculture, bonus gold income or something along those lines. These boosts persist for the rest of the game, even when you switch cultures. Additionally, the culture will have one "emblematic district" that you can build once per territory. Usually a powerful booster to resource incomes on those tiles or adjacent districts. Those bonuses stay on the tile as long as the building is there. E.g. in my current game I am Ghana in the middle ages and the luxury markets boost my income a lot. And each culture has a special unit that is either stronger than others in the same category or have some special ability.

The transition from one culture to another can be jarring (e.g. Aborigines => Greece => Teutonic Knights => Spain => Maori => Singapore is absolutely possible), but you also have more tools to react to how the game plays out, or plan your progression (going all in on one resource, or mixing/matching abilities and bonuses to max them out).

And unlike Civ 7 there's no "reset" for era transitions - you can be in age 5 and an AI can still be on age 3. Though stars do become easier to earn in lower tiers once a faction has ranked up.


I am not sure how I feel about diplomacy. There's the usual stuff - open borders, non-aggression treaties, trade etc. - but it seems a lot less rigid somehow? You can of course go to war as usual, but there's additional levers there. The game has the concept of "grievances". Culture spreads out automatically (as does religion, no religious on map units). If a territory is culture or religion converted, the owner of the culture or religion gets a grievance against the owner of the territory. You then have two options - press your demand, or let it go. Letting go gives you some leverage over the other player and some goodwill. Pressing your demand will either have them yield the territory to you (if they like you a lot or are afraid of you) or refuse your demand. You can then hold onto the demand (maybe getting more), press this in a war (or bring it in front of the World Congress once it's been established), or choose to let it go. On lower difficulties I found the AI way too willing to yield territory this way, so I could blob easily and quickly outpace them in the early game. However, one difficulty up I found myself quickly boxed in by more powerful factions, so I guess I'm trying to build tall now?

Alliances are also more malleable. If you're allied with a player and they're at war you're not automatically getting called in. However, if you don't join, it will give your ally a grievance. But it doesn't immediately invalidate the alliance. In my current game I'm struggling but I'm allied to King Midas - his AI is forgiving, so he keeps forgiving my grievances (not joining his wars, my country being dominated by his culture/religion).

Wars are a bit "meh". Not sure the AI is good at them - on Normal difficulty they were too much of a cakewalk. Have yet to fight them on higher difficulty. Armies are stacks of 4 (later more units as you unlock techs), and battles can be fought in little tactical battles on the map (or auto-resolved). What I don't like is that if you take all enemy cities in a peace deal, then faction will hang around till all units are dead.

There's a few more things - "civics" which is usually a binary decision that costs (a scaling amount of) influence. Do you want to punish or rehabilitate criminals? How is your chief legitimized etc. Though through "osmosis" (e.g. strong influence by neighbors) some of those decisions can be triggered for you and you can accept them (free civic) or reject them (at a cost - might be worth it especially if you already had the opposite choice selected).

Trade, esp. of luxuries, is very important. The first instance of each luxury in your empire gives +5 stability to every city, and every additional one gives either a flat bonus to production/science/money/food or a 1% boost. This can really stack up. Trade creates trade nodes in neutral territory (by end game this will be oceans only) that you can pilfer from/destroy if desired.

Independents can rise and fall in neutral territories. You can befriend them by bribing them with money/influence and trade with them, and make them your vassals or assimilate them. Rebelling territories can also become independent (in one game I took an AI's main cities, and their other territories turned to revolt, going independent and eliminating them from the game).

Religion is just based on how much faith you produce. The more you produce, the stronger your religion. You can level up your religion and choose a tenet each time, but afaict those are not cummulative, so you override your old tenet with a new one. Not sure I like this. I'd rather nerf the tenets and have them accumulate. But in the final ages you will move to secularism/atheism anyways, so ...

The game has some narrative events based on game triggers, some with multiple options to react. Nothing huge, but still fine, I think.

There's World Wonders, of course, 7 per age. You can use influence to claim one. Until you have built it you can't claim another, but also no one else can try building it. As a mechanic it's fine, I guess. Once you have built an embassy you can have a "monument contractor" agreement with other factions. It lets you use your cities to help build their wonders (and vice versa), at the end of which you get a paycheck of gold or influence.

Overall, I think the game is much better than at launch. I think it is a bit linear? Also, while I like that it leans into a more diplomatic overall gamestyle (you can even activate peaceful world ), it also means there's less to do in terms of moving things around on the map. A lot of the time I found myself just building stuff, managing trade/diplomacy and moving to next turn. So it can feel like not much is happening turn to turn, at least the way I mostly play it (i.e. defensively).

There's ways to accelerate things, of course. The game on default is built around 300 turns per game, but this can be brought down to 75 or ramped up to 600. You can tweak the size of territories - making them larger or smaller; I imagine making them smaller means more action as it will take longer to claim the map. I wish there was a setting that required you to occupy enemy lands territory by territory. As it stands, once you take the city, you occupy its entire area, including all attached territories.

The interface overall feels a bit clunky at times. It's too easy IMO to accidentally move/split an army (select an army, select a unit you want to upgrade, right-click to move ... realize that you only moved the one unit you had selected, then move the rest of the stack).

So yeah. Overall enjoying my time with it, but three games in I feel the progression is a bit inflexible? And I haven't looked into mods yet; I first want to get a feel for the vanilla experience. I find it hard to recommend, though, as some of its idiosyncracies (culture swapping, territories, the diplomacy system) will turn some people off, I guess.

P.S.: For what it's worth, it's sitting at "Very Positive" in recent Steam reviews (same as Ara- History Untold following its 2.0 patch), though I assume it's also a bit of a fallout from the Civ7 reception.