Humankind is the new historical 4X strategy game from Amplitude, and the first to really go toe-to-toe with the king of 4X games, the Sid Meier’s Civilization series.
In a lot of ways, given the specific theming of not only historic but spanning the many eras of civilisation/humankind, Humankind plays similarly to the latest Civ game, Civilization VI.
But it’s no Civ clone. There’s many nuanced differences as well as a few big-picture differences that set Humankind apart as being its own unique flavour of historical 4X. Here are some differences to note, in particular for players familiar with Civilization VI.
Culture/Civilization
In Civilization VI (and prior games), you play as one defined civilisation that determines your unique ability, unique units, buildings and improvements. You will play as them from ancient times until the future.
The unique units, buildings and districts are unlocked in different eras based on what civ you play as, and once unlocked should give you the advantage over other players.
Each civ has a leader (some with multiple choices) that have their own personality, AI traits and a unique leader ability.
In Humankind, you play as an empire with an evolving culture as each era pass. Civs in Humankind are referred to as culture, and each era has (in the base game at launch) 10 cultures for every six eras.
Each time you transition into the next era, you get the choice to pick a culture each with a unique passive (Legacy Trait- a permanent bonus to your empire), an emblematic unit and an emblematic district (available only for that era) plus the culture’s affinity ability. You can choose to retain a culture, or switch to a new one each era, allowing a change in playstyle.
The leader of the empire is your own avatar you can customise, with different clothing to reflect their current culture. You can customise your avatar’s AI behaviour, and download other players’ (and even content creators’) for use in your game.
How Culture Works
In Civilization VI, culture is accrued over time and you can use them to gain new civic policies from a different tech tree. These civic policies let you build a deck of specific buffs to your civ to facilitate specific playstyle, or to double down on aspects your civ is lacking at the time (boost military unit production to prepare for war, get cheaper builders to improve a new city’s production quick, etc.)
Culture in Civ VI is also used to win by culture. You can create great works that boost culture and also tourism, the latter is needed to win by culture. Culture also widens your borders. With the Rise and Fall expansion pack, cities have a loyalty system and your spread of culture can influence a city to flip to one side or another.
In Humankind, it’s a lot different. “Culture” is used to call a civ, but there is “cultural influence”, shorten to influence. You can accrue this over time and use it to expand your city (claim outpost, build city, attach territory to existing city). Cultural influence can also spread to other territories. Should another AI player is under your “culture of influence”, it’s easier to do diplomacy.
Also, Humankind also has a civics tree but you spend influence to only unlock one bonus over the other (no cards and deck-building). However, the criteria to unlock them is intentionally hidden but should trigger from natural play. Build enough military units and you will trigger an option to buff all units’ strength, or make them cheaper to produce, for example.
Civic policy choices and choices you make during the pop-up narrative events will change your ideology axis, which offers different bonuses based on how you align your empire. How different empires are in ideology proximity impacts war support and how easy it is to sign treaties with AI players.
Early-Game And Building Cities
In Civ VI, it’s general practice to just plop your first city in the first turn, either settling on place or moving just a few tiles to still settle on turn 1. You can build cities anywhere as long as it’s not too close to another city (4 tiles away from another city centre).
Humankind expands the early game by having everyone spawn as nomadic tribes in the neolithic era. You can uncover the map but must search for either curiosities (goodie huts) to gain enough science, hunt enough wild animals, or gain enough food to produce enough units to move to the ancient era, where you pick your first culture.
Also, the lands in Humankind are divided into territories. A territory can only have one city built on it. To build a city, you need to set an outpost first to claim the territory by spending influence. Once it’s set up, you can spend more influence to turn it into a proper city.
To increase city size, you can also attach adjacent outposts to an existing city using influence. You do not increase border size over time via culture, you own a big chunk of territory from claiming outposts already.
How A City Grows And Sprawls
In Civ VI, you can assign your population (pop) to work on any tile inside your city border and gain yield from that tile (or have them work in a specific building as specialists). In Humankind, you gain yields from the tile that has a district build on it, and its adjacent tiles. Population do not work on a tile, they all work as specialists that directly boost yields from the tiles being work on via district placements.
You can build districts in Civ VI anywhere you like so long it’s on a legal tile (some unique districts have specific requirements). In Humankind, all districts must be adjacent to each other, which will make cities sprawl as the game progresses.
Cities with attached territories in Humankind can also build districts that start sprawling from the main outpost.
Civ VI won’t let you build duplicate districts in one city. In Humankind, you need to build duplicate districts, a lot of them, but not too quickly. A stability system will stop you from expanding a city too fast with districts.
In Civ VI, there’s a soft cap on how much population a city can have. This is determined by the number of housing. In Humankind, the cap is based on how many specialist slots you have in a city.
Building Wonders
In Civ VI as well as prior Civs, you can build a World Wonder by unlocking them through the tech tree. World Wonders cost a lot of production, and you can only have one copy of it per game. Building one grants you some bonuses (some more powerful than others), and the satisfaction of denying others the wonder, wasting their time for a fruitless endeavour.
Humankind is a bit more kind in regards to building wonders. Instead of a production race, it’s a race to accrue enough influence to be able to claim one, with each era adding more choices to the wonders you can call dibs.
Once you pick a wonder, you’re under no obligation to build it immediately. You can take your time should you need it. However, this means that you can’t claim another wonder while still having the one you claimed earlier not built.
City-States
City-states in Civ VI spawns during the start of the game just like every other player. Meanwhile, independent cities in Humankind will spawn in unclaimed territories over time.
Combat
In Civ VI, combat happens directly as what you see on the map. Strategically placing units to block passages is a legitimate strategy. Civ VI brings back unit stacking (removed in Civ V), but nothing as crazy as the stack of death seen in Civ IV.
In Humankind, combat units are supposed to be stacked (but with a limit that grows as the game progresses). Battles happen in a turn-based arena– blocking off parts of the map while the battle is ongoing. During each turn, the battle lets each player take three turns to fight. If the combat hasn’t been resolved, the battle continues to the next turn. You can win by wiping out the enemy, or securing the objective.
War and Sieges
A war in Humankind is fueled by war support– a meter showing how your citizens feel about the conflict. Should it drop to 0, you are forced to go into negotiations. Depending on how much war support you’ve gained during the war (gained by winning battles and taking over cities), you can enforce more demands. You can only take cities you are currently occupying. If there are not enough war support points, you are forced to declare white peace.
Capturing a city in Civ VI involves whittling down the HP of the city defences (preferably with siege weapons) until you have a unit strong enough to walk straight into the city centre. In Humankind, you need to siege a city– blocking all production of the city as a result. You can take your time to whittle down the defence, or assault the city. City capturing/defending will also be a turn-based battle, with the city having specific city-defence units at their disposal.
Winning A Game
Civ VI allows for various ways to win a game. You can do so by science via winning the space race (the first to build a colony in Mars in vanilla and Rise And Fall, sending a spaceship to travel 50 light-years in Gathering Storm), by culture (have more tourists from other civs than their own domestic tourist count), religion (have your religion be predominant in all civs), domination (control each civ’s first capital), and in Gathering Storm, diplomacy (earn enough Diplomatic Points). Should none of the victory types is achieved by the end of the game, the winner is determined by score.
In Humankind, the only to win is by score, called Fame. Each era you can gather era stars, achieved by doing the seven different play archetypes available, which are growing population (Agrarian), building districts (Builder), killing units (Militarist), researching tech (Scientist), accruing cultural influence (Aesthete), expand and hold more territories (Expansionist) and accruing enough money (Merchant).
There are also competitive deeds. The first to achieve the deed will get fame points. This range from the first to discover a certain tech, to the first to circumnavigate the globe.
There is a space race that you can “win”, and you can wipe out all the empires, or even render the world uninhabitable through pollution (or too many nukes), but achieving this before the game’s final turn will only end the game early, not guarantee you a win. There will be a score tally at the end to determine who wins Humankind.
Vanilla Humankind Versus Vanilla Civilization VI
Lastly, a lot of features and mechanics that comes in the base game of Humankind are not present in the base game of Civilization VI, and only added through the Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm expansions.
For example, Humankind has a pollution system, and a fleshed out score system (Fame) in the base game. While Civ VI only introduced an overhaul in their score system with Rise And Fall, and a global climate change system in Gathering Storm.
This list isn’t complete but should give Civ players an idea of how Humankind has a different feel, despite carrying a lot of familiar elements you would see in Civilization.
Humankind is out now on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store) and also available on Xbox Game Pass For PC. Read our first impressions of this beautiful and good 4X game here.