Humankind - Amplitude takes on Civ

[BRickAstley]

I just saw this game with the latest OpenDev period and I'm interested even though I don't know anything about it. I'd be really interested to hear people's updated opinions on any changes they've made since the last open beta you posted about.

[TheArchduke]

I will probably take a deepdive, I like the progressive cultures idea. It switches things up and makes ancient less silly.

And Evidenzbureau agents, hell yeah.

[Kurumi]

Anybody interested in some screenshots and random talk about the game? I'm pretty bad at analysis and I can't compare builds much between each other (besides the glaring differences).

I'll gladly try to answer any questions too if you have some!

[naufragar]

I know nothing about the game but am always down to hear people's takes on strategy games. I enjoyed Amplitude's Endless Space 2, so I'm interested in this. No specific questions, however.

[Amicalola]

I know nothing about the game but am always down to hear people's takes on strategy games. I enjoyed Amplitude's Endless Space 2, so I'm interested in this. No specific questions, however.

[pindicator]

This has been on my radar but I haven't really dug into how it plays. If you're proposing doing a playthrough I'd love to see how it goes.

[Kurumi]

This round of OpenDev is open till the very last hours of 21st so I'll try my best, in the vein of OpenDev I'll pilot a short post to see how you like my way of reporting and whether I should change something.

I haven't played Civilization VI at all, I have moderate experience in Civilization V and I guess a lot more than that in Civilization IV but that doesn't mean much - I think the hardest game I ever done in IV was Immortal if not Emperor. I have played multiplayer in both and have watched pretty good amount of Civilization V multi content and also read a good deal of Civilization IV stuff here so I hope my understanding will be good enough I am also familiar with Amplitude's other games - I have played something we should call a precursor to Humankind, namely Endless Legend and I must say that Humankind has done well with mechanics introduced in that game.

As you can see, this is the current main menu in the Closed Beta build of June 2021. This build provides you with one map with one starting position that you’re going to see soon. As such, you can’t change the number of AIs but you can change their portraits and I think through this also their personalities somewhat (on that I guess later, we'll try to figure this out together because I didn't care for it - there are reasons).

There are seven difficulty levels currently in the game. They are described somewhat picturesquely with keywords like “normal” that I have underlined for Metropolis. I’m going to play on Nation for this showcase with “basic” leaders (not youtubers) and I might jump between saves so I can show off other stuff.

The cog at the bottom-left takes you to settings which govern the usual visual-audio stuff together with UI, mouse&keyboard settings (controllers are supposed to be supported in future builds) and accessibility options.

This is what we are greeted with at the very Turn 1. So what's obvious from this screenshot is that we don't seem to have the regular Settler x Scout / Warrior pair - and that is true. We are met with a Tribe unit - we are currently in Neolithic era and cities aren't exactly our kind of thing. We could set up an outpost if we had enough influence - the violet star resource seen in top right but we seem to be pretty bad at getting it. We'll get back to it soon.

So what are outposts? Let's call it a tile improvement that works tiles neighbouring it, which also claims a territory for you. What's a territory you ask? Well, that's what's delineated by these dashing lines! Those outposts can turn into cities or be attached to cities in the future. Outposts in most cases will not recruit units nor build buildings. They can build some tile improvements instantly for influence - like ones that get you access to luxury or strategic resources (I am not sure whether they're called this in this game but their functionality translates well I think.) You can also relocate an outpost from one place to another in their particular territory for influence although you are motivated not to do that by game suggesting you tiles with best yields - honestly that's the way to go, the other way is looking at defensiveness - since you start at a cold war with everyone your outpost could be ransacked and thus lost and the territory would be lost with it - letting your enemy claim it for themselves provided they can build their own. I hope that's not too much about outposts, especially since we're not building one this turn. We'll come back to it later. We'll be coming back to many things.

This is how that first turn looks like when we turn on yields and hex borders. The grain is food, the cogs are industry, the blue atom thingy is science, the yellow coin-like is commerce and the yields will get even crazier/more diverse the longer the game goes on. Pretty much everything can land on a tile provided proper districts and buildings are built. Influence? It's on the tile. Faith? It's on the tile. And so on.

So maybe this is the right moment to maybe elaborate on that "you can look at the outpost as a tile improvement that works its neighbouring tiles". In Humankind pops do not work the terrain. The terrain is worked by tile improvements or districts that do not come from workers but from city production. Cities and outposts do have pops but those pops work jobs. I have no idea how they choose jobs in outposts (you can't see or change their jobs) but in cities they can work Food, Industry, Commerce and Science. So cities' output is pop jobs and tile yields which you extract thanks to improvements or districts. You can have a 0 pop city be a powerhouse provided its terrain is well developed. This should make a lot more sense in the future.

So this is what happens when we hover over some of the things in the game. We learn that the weird plant in the north is called Sage and provides Stability (its icon you will also see on tiles as a yield in the future or listed as an effect in buildings and so on). The actual tooltip is longer but I cut the part that's the most important. Maybe what's important is to say that you don't build your own roads in Humankind and you also do not connect your resources.


Okay, I'll stop at this point because I want to get feedback from you whether this kind of posting is good enough and whether I'm anticipating questions well enough. If you have particular interest in some parts of the game that might not come quickly chronologically (I'll try to do a playthrough from the start till the end basically) just shoot me a question and I'll load a save to try answer it.

[civac2]

Works well enough.

[naufragar]

Wow, the Endless Space influence is very visible. Neat. So when you settle a city, you're basically choosing 7 tiles out of an entire region to use? Do you do anything with the tiles after founding a city or is every city basically a seven-tile entity?

(If it's not too much trouble, would you mind using jpegs instead of pngs for screenshots? My poor rural internet doesn't handle high fidelity images too well. Not a huge deal either way. I just have to wait a few more seconds in eager anticipation.   )

[Kurumi]

Wow, the Endless Space influence is very visible. Neat. So when you settle a city, you're basically choosing 7 tiles out of an entire region to use? Do you do anything with the tiles after founding a city or is every city basically a seven-tile entity?

(If it's not too much trouble, would you mind using jpegs instead of pngs for screenshots? My poor rural internet doesn't handle high fidelity images too well. Not a huge deal either way. I just have to wait a few more seconds in eager anticipation.   )

Those 7 tiles are your starting tiles. The city-tile is called Main Square and it I think has set yields of adding +2 Food +2 Industry. You are going to build districts so the city exploits more tiles depending on the district type you're building. For example some only exploit food, so whatever other yields are on tiles neighbouring it are lost. Some exploit two resources, some exploit all of them. Basically your city is an actual developing one that gets to sprawl more and more the longer game goes. Attaching outposts lets the city exploit those seven tiles for itself and serve as a starting point for developing districts as well. 

Hope that clears -some- of the confusion at this moment - we should arrive at at point where I can drop playthrough-related screenshots shortly.
And alright, I'll mostly do .jpegs now with some .pngs thrown in for showing off scenery which is really beautiful.

Works well enough.

Let's get back to it!

As you can see, we have moved two tiles east to grab that glowing thing with the same symbol as the science one. Those are called curiosities - this kind provides science and influence as per event notification in the bottom right (it also pops up the moment you grab it on the map for a while). What I've done immediately after that is hover over an animal unit next to us - a Deer. This opened up this preview mode on the map which shows the terrain the battle is going to take place on - those dark grey tiles, the white-ish tiles are out of battle, the blue ones are the tiles I'll be able to deploy my units in and the light blueish are the tiles the AI animal will be able to deploy on. The tiles are blue because I'm the Blue (+Horse icon) player and the tiles for the animals are light blue analogously (+ pacifist icon). The top-centre portion of the screen titled "Hunt at Alioth" is what pops up the moment I clicked my unit onto the Deer unit confirming that I am interested in fighting these magnificent creatures. Those numbers represent strengths of our units - since our Tribe boasts 10 strength and the Deer 8, this battle is a 10 vs 8 and supposedly is in our favour - "our side is stronger overall". Don't trust these numbers and these assessments. It's not that they aren't informative or useful - it's just that terrain, attacker priority, unit types and their placements is what matters, not only bare numbers. Back to that later - once again.

So this is what happens when I push the "Battle" button. I am now in deployment phase - me and my enemy are supposed to put our units on the tiles I described earlier. We don't know our deployments until we both finish them, so you can't play some weird quickswap deployment games. The tiles change from their 3D trees to map-like pencil silhouettes. They don't look big enough on my screen to make out that they are tree canopies (which led to some problems in my past games...) but if you figure out they are that I think it is pretty legible.

The following spoiler shows what happens if I were to leave the deployment phase of the battle - the terrain excluded for the battle is still seen on the map and there's a nifty UI to show you what's up and a button to click to go back. It's not necessary to see this part but yes, you can start a battle and leave it hanging till you figure other things out. This might be important for reinforcements later.

Going back to regular programme, battle start:

So as you can see I decided to deploy my unit on the higher-highground. From what I can tell Humankind has terrain levels ranging from -2 (ocean) to +5 (mountains) with 0 being the-lowest-kind-of-ground-i-guess. Mountains are not traversible but everything else is. Sea has its own rules but all the land you see is something you can go onto. The tile I deployed on is also a river. Currently, being on a river tile grants you a -3 malus to strength, the attackers will also gain this malus. Sometimes only one of the sides gets it but the rules seems to be very blurry to me so I can't say why it goes one way or another. Rivers are also movement impediment - they'll take all your movement to get onto such a tile, but once you are on a river tile you can traverse it like it were a normal tile. Notice how now the game believes my "side is weaker overall" - this malus is already applied in the centre-right and my Tribe currently sits at 7 strength to Deer's 8. But this says nothing - if the Deer were to attack from its current tile, it'll take a -3 crossing river penalty dropping it to 5 and then also have to work against my boni of being on higher ground. So like I said, numbers lie, terrain is king.

In the top-centre there are two things we have to pay attention to: Round 1/3 and the 1/1 Clock symbolizing turns. Combat takes places in rounds and one turn has three rounds. This means this battle can only take one turn and those three rounds is all we get - if not, the fight will be inconclusive since the objective is to "Eliminate all enemies". Fights against non-animals have a different objective which we'll learn about later. This inconclusive ending would mean that the deer would retreat somewhere with damage taken from the fight and I think our unit would stay where it started the fight also with the damage taken from the fight.

Since I was attacking I have the first move advantage. So let's get it! Suddenly, I'm strength 11 thanks to the high ground! That gets me favourable odds and my damage range is 22 to 33 and their in return is 7 to 25. I have no idea how %s work out, but they seem to be skewed towards the min. amount but maybe there's some kind of a display bug - I think the least max. you can get is 25 so you have wrong expectations. Units have 100 health as you might've guessed/noticed from before. At different points dropping health nets you mali to your strength, the most wounded units I believe lose -2 strength. Very important in the early to mid game. Animals are special in the sense that they do not have Zone of Control. Other units do have Zone of Control (some can ignore it, some have bigger ZoCs but it all boils down to unit types and so on) and that means that you can't move past them. I think it works the same way as in Civ 5 when it comes to this basic mechanic. I'll note this already although we might see this soon - Humankind doesn't let you "swap" units. So if you want to cycle one tile you have to have enough movement and enough tile space to rotate the units out. They can move through though, so they don't count as obstacles. This is important for tactical considerations later on since you'll be fighting in tight spaces most of the time on this map.

I played it out and that's basically what we got out of it. 5 food for our next unit and a pretty beat up tribe - but we also got 5 influence. They'll heal up somewhat - which you can see shown as this grey part of the gauge. Units heal in neutral terrain, take damage in enemy terrain and heal a lot more in friendly terrain. I do not believe this is dependent on not moving nor is the amount dependent on moving or not but I have not paid enough attention.

Now we could set up an outpost on the tile we're on, even though we have 0 movement. As you can see, the game doesn't suggest that. The UI shows the yields we're gaining and how much time it'll take for the outpost to set-up (I believe this is dependent on industry). The cost of outposts goes up the more outposts you have. There's some tricky rules related to eras, as in in Neolithic your outposts come very cheap and seem to cost the same everywhere but when you settle a city in Ancient it seems that the neighbouring territories are the cheapest while the further you go the more expensive the territories get and also there is a neighbourhood bonus to settling neighbouring territories - it is cheaper to get territories that are next to each other than enclaves. We are not building an outpost now since we're not on a tile I'd like to this on.

And now for I believe the most innovative part of the game: the fame and era system. So to progress eras you have to earn stars which are given to you for fulfilling some objectives. Neolithic only requires getting one era star to progress to Ancient era and there are three stars you can get. The conditions are written down. The Neolithic Legacy Trait seems to be not implemented yet according to my knowledge and other players' reports. So Fame is supposedly THE score and THE objective of the game. Of course many other feats will help you win the game and I found that expanding through war nets you insane amount of stars and thus fame but maybe some of it changes in the late-late game that we could not access in this build - the last, contemporary era.

When we get to Ancient era our set of era objectives won't change till the end of the game. We'll have to grow our cities or gain territories or kill units or get techs or get money or build districts or... I don't remember, we'll get to it very shortly.

The deeds part of the screen is basically achievements that only one player can get. Those achievements can be as easy as discovering a natural wonder or being first to Writing or as hard as circumnavigating the world or discovering all the landmasses. Those achievements "pay out" in Fame. I use "" because Fame is not a resource, it's a points tally.

When we get that one star we unlock advancement to another Era and thus we can pick a culture. On turn roll you become that culture and get boni coming with them and you need to grab era stars again. Cultures are first-come-first-served. So if you're lagging behind you might not end up with a culture you'd like to. This doesn't necessarily mean you'll end up with a bad one - in my opinion they've done a pretty good job making sure the cultures are all pretty damn amazing - but you might end up with one that's not as useful as you'd like or one that gets you on a path you did not plan for. More on that, later.

Alright, so that's the first turn. I'll get back to playing and grabbing screenshots so I can actually show off some of the game before the access runs out.