Besides gold, you also have Influence as a primary global currency, used for myriad stuff like evolving outposts into cities, bribing independents, and paying the price for societal policy changes. Some elements, such as dealing with independents, are much simplified and currently feel like a placeholder for some future expansion. There are many differences between Humankind and Civilization, and also many similarities – for example, the city district model introduced in Civ VI is also present here, and delegating the population for the targeted city production is pretty much the same as well as rushing it with gold expenditure. Speaking of fighting, the developers sort of made it optional – in the setup phase, you can enable the pacifistic option and never have to worry about violence. Combat AI is pretty solid, so you’ll be motivated to skip auto-resolving combat in most battles, thus investing yourself in a more meaningful way in the fate of your empire. The system works much better than “one hex-one unit” antics from the two latest Civilization titles. Here you can join individual units into combined arms squads, benefitting from their synergy during tactical battles. One thing that Humankind does better than Civilization VI is warfare. I mean, you don’t need to do that, you can decide to stick to your earliest choice and even earn a higher score modifier as a reward for your persistence, but your opponents will constantly surf through multiple cultures, breaking any kind of historical immersion derived from your shared history. This is… I don’t know how to say it politely enough… supremely stupid idea. You can, entirely unrealistically, abandon your previous identity by chasing some better-fitting civilization-wide bonuses and perks. You can, for example, embrace Egyptians after neolith, change into Huns in the classical period, then Aztecs in medieval times, having a stint as Poles in the industrial era and ending up as Chinese in Contemporary times. So, what about the civilizational choice? In Humankind, that category is very fluid as you can pick, chose, and replace civilization, or “culture,” as the game calls it, at the start of every era. This design philosophy is derived from dialectic materialism, and in that regard, Humankind feels like it was crafted with the input of Советский секретарь просвещения, студенческих дел и тракторов (Soviet secretariat of education, student affairs, and tractors, which obviously never existed). Those stars are earned by racking up the quantity of this and that, such as the number of city districts built or units destroyed in battle, with requirements increasing as the game progresses. You will quickly realize that progress through history is not tied to reaching some major scientific milestone but depends on a series of mini-achievements called Era stars. You will soon establish an outpost that will evolve into your first proper city when you reach the new era. Instead of picking Germans, Russians, Japanese, or some other major empire in its infancy, you’ll start the game as a neolithic tribe of hunter-gatherers, roaming the lands in search of hot spots with food and other resources. Humankind dares to be different from the beginning, opting to exclude the initial choice about the civ you’ll lead through history. Most of those, unfortunately, weren’t great. It was high time for something new, and Amplitude studios had an epiphany of ideas about that. This ridiculous, clumsy, and inefficient take on the United Nations can be compared only to the actual UN by uselessness, bloat, and gasbaggery. For me, World Congress, implemented in the second DLC (The Gathering Storm), was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It overextended itself by introducing system after system by its two expansions, needlessly complicating everything. Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (2016) is the most recent Civ game, and it’s getting a bit long in the tooth by now.
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