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HUMANKIND is a 4X strategy game set throughout all of human history. Its many in-depth features can be a little jarring at first, however the game does a great job explaining every detail of gameplay and what effect they have on the player. If you are new to strategy games I would recommend making HUMANKIND your first.
When starting a new game of HUMANKIND the very first thing to do is to create your avatar. I was pleasantly surprised with the level of detail in the character creator and it is a welcome addition to any strategy game. Having a character creator in the game makes it feel like you are commanding your own armies and building your very own empire. At this stage, you also create an emblem for your empire and select a colour scheme. That colour scheme is used in place of choosing clothing as what your avatar wears is directly affected by the period of history you are in, as well as the cultures you chose.
From the ancient Neolithic tribes to the sprawling modern mega cities, HUMANKIND offers a total of up to sixty different historical cultures to choose from. Throughout each age you will be able to change your empire’s culture to fit whichever age you are moving into, however, the choice to evolve your current culture is available as well.
Starting out in the world you are tasked with exploring with your first settlers. At this very early stage, you will hunt roaming animals as well as gather resources and find natural wonders, all to aid your future growth. Eventually, you will then find an appropriate place to create your first settlement which will be your capital city. After this stage, you can also change which city is your capital but chances are that you will stick to your first city, continuing as the focus.
From this point, your main goal is getting to the next age, gaining stars from various acts such as earning money, influence or religion. Getting stars and progressing to the next age before anyone else greatly helps in earning fame. It is this fame that is the main “score” among players and is the only winning factor; the player with the most fame at the end of the game is the winner.
This makes HUMANKIND more interesting because each player has to accomplish various deeds rather than just being the first to destroy everyone or finish the science tree.
Whilst playing you may find yourself in the midst of battle. In this case, you have a few options, battles start with the option to auto-resolve or to allow you to manually do battle. The turn-based manual battles – on the surface – seem to be quite strategic however after completing a few it becomes evident that is more or less a sort of rock paper scissors level of strategy. For example, anti-cavalry beats cavalry.
Most of the battles come down to a numbers game, at which point the auto resolution becomes the optimal choice. In fact, halfway through my first playthrough of the campaign I was more or less forced to only use the auto resolution as my camera broke. It’s fair to say that this camera breaking was by far the most infuriating thing about my experience with HUMANKIND as after every move I made that camera would move to a tile halfway across the map. Sieging cities was more or less the same, however you set your invading army to siege mode and then select auto resolution after a few turns.
When selecting an opponent to battle you are also presented with a sort of power level; mostly helpful, this does sometimes seem slightly off. During my campaign playthrough I became more technologically advanced than some of the AI so at times I could do things like battle enemy pikemen with my attack helicopter, which goes as well as you may expect. However, the power scaling suggests that in an auto resolution, I have a 50/50 chance of winning. I should say that the auto-resolution does not solely rely on this suggestion and each battle with the attack helicopter had a 100% success rate.
The main gameplay loop of HUMANKIND is to create cities and outposts, gathering resources and generating growth for each sector – money, science, influence, industry, religion, food and more. This mostly consists of placing sectors and upgrading the city. You can also trade with neighbouring empires that you discover as well as create alliances, break alliances and start wars.
For my first playthrough, I wanted to achieve complete domination over the planet but this was cut short after my first war went far too well. I captured a few enemy territories without realising I had massively gone over my city cap. This artificially made my money and influence growth each turn plummet. This meant that I had to get rid of some cities which I did using the option to liberate them. This option states that the city will have good relations with me as I have freed them (this is a lie). Each liberated city also instantly produced a sizable army out of nowhere and was technologically on par with me, as they were my cities. The rest of the game was mostly a battle with myself.
The player that ends the game is not always the person that wins the game. HUMANKIND ends when a player meets certain conditions such as a story-driven event or something more simple like maxing out the science tree. In my case I could have ended the game when I sent people to Mars however instead I opted to keep playing in exchange for more resources. I eventually finished by completing the science tree, but even then you can still keep playing. I kept playing for some more turns as it was my goal to nuke every other city off the face of the earth.
Overall I enjoyed my time playing HUMANKIND and would recommend it to both strategy game veterans and beginners. It can be extremely enjoyable however it is held back by some bugs and half-baked gameplay mechanics.