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Hands-on preview: Humankind is an open ended 4X that lets you build civilisations your waySelf-replicating caveman swarm.
Self-replicating caveman swarm.
After a year of speculation, I’ve finally had a chance to playHumankind,AmplitudeStudios' much-anticipated competitor to theCivilizationseries, and while I only got to play through the very first era of the game on a single map, I can say for sure we’ve definitely got a contender here. I’m hesitant to say how strong a contender until I’ve seen more of the game, since I thinkHumankind’s brand of satisfaction is going to lean heavily on the way the outcomes of your decisions stack across thousands of simulated years. But the fact that I could see, even in the early game, how the calls I made might have ramifications for centuries to come, was a promising sign.
It’s probably worth starting at the beginning. Which, for Humankind, is earlier even than Civ’s - rather than opening the game on the imminent foundation of your first city, it starts you in the neolithic, before cities or the agriculture that made them possible were even a thing. You begin with a bunch of nomads, who blunder around a world full of forests and mammoths and that, collecting dinners and knowledge of their surroundings until they’ve got enough stacked up in either category to settle down and start a civilisation. And it’s in the neolithic that I discovered the first example of what would become a running theme in my notes - that is, just how far Humankind is prepared to go to let you play according to your own preferences.
Having a nice ancient wander.
When I eventually did found a city and kick off the Ancient era, eight or nine turns in, my Von Neumann swarm of cavemen all levelled up into scouts, and had the rest of the map explored in no time. Sure, I’d lost crucial development time in my late-blooming capital, but the many gains I acquired through my scout horde more than made up for it. And according to Amplitude, you can push the Flintstones life even further, staying in your state of arrested development for as long as sixteen turns or so without incurring a serious competitive disadvantage.
You can get a lovely sprawl going.
And yet still, there are alternative ways to go about the claim game. In one playthrough, I focused on getting down as many outposts as I could, securing vast tracts of land, but costing a lot of the gold I might have otherwise used to level up outposts into cities. The next time, I relaxed a bit, putting down a handful of outposts in surrounding territories, but preserving the bulk of my gold for upgrading a trio of cities. It’s a variation on the classic 4X quandary of building wide versus building tall, of course, but I think it’s an elegant one.
Seriously though, isn’t that gorgeous?
Looks like commerce is back on the menu, boys.
But what if we don’t want anyone to fight? :(
