Nevertheless, for all that economic bonuses aren’t quite the irresistible force they appear to be, the fact remains that they’re by far the easiest way to prosper. Going all-in on the harbours had seemed an unbeatable choice at the time, but it really binned off my flexibility, and set me back hard enough that I actually lost my lead to an AI on the way to the endgame. But then, since I hadn’t yet built up the infrastructure or technology to keep that population content, my growth smashed into a hard ceiling quickly, and my cities were too depressed to build much for a few dozen turns. In another game, the combo of Phoenicians into Carthaginians on a coastal map gave me a swarm of hyper-harbours that basically allowed me to force-feed every citizen four tons of herring a day, exploding my population and making me sickeningly rich. This smooth-voiced fellow has something to say most turns, and he's both charming and genuinely funny. One thing I couldn't leave out of this review is a round of applause for Humankind's narrator. Moderation, it turned out, would have served me a lot better than min-maxing. This meant, however, that I researched every technology available in a flash, leaving me with the option of either rushing an era advance before the optimum point, or continuing on through the ancient era with a load of expensive research districts doing absolutely nothing. In a recent game I played, picking the Zhou in the Ancient slot and spamming confucian schools next to mountains led to my research rate multiplying by a cool 10,000% in the space of a few turns. It feels like bonuses are offset in such subtle ways that you can’t see them being balanced out, leading you to feel like you’re a genius exploiting loopholes in the rules. Having played a few more games, my outlook is brighter on that front. Last time I previewed Humankind, I talked about how the game’s mix-n-match civilisation-building system left it open to the emergence of bonus combos too powerful not to be used, seriously throttling the effective breadth of pathways through the ages. On that front, I really don’t know what to expect. But the real test will be whether I’m still playing it months after that process is done, and the illusion of infinite possibility is dispelled. It’s easy to become infatuated with a game when you’re still exploring what it can do. I’m still at a stage where every session is revealing a whole new seam of potential play experiences to me, and since 4X playthroughs are such glacial things, it’s a pile of thinkbiscuits that will take me a very long time indeed to eat. Every time I see this image, from Humankind's loading screen, I cannot get over just how intensely ready to fuck someone up that astronaut looks.īut honestly, I still need to play way more of Humankind to know for sure whether it’s a classic. As far as I’m concerned, Humankind lives up to a giant slice of the hype which has preceded it, and it should rightly be considered as state-of-the-art for the 4X genre. It is, indeed, the precise sort of magnetism I have felt from Civ games in the past. What I can tell you is that whenever I open up Steam, my brain starts moving towards the prospect of playing Humankind like a tray of nails sliding towards a giant cartoon magnet. But honestly, I can’t think of anything less fun for me, less fair to either game, or less useful to you, than a long set of oblique feature comparisons, ramping up to an arguably worthless “better than/worse than” verdict.
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