the game is buggy and not very fun. I was expecting a unique twist on the formula mastered by Civilization, but what i got was clunky gameplay, many soft locks, and crashes.

In this game Combat is taken into its own little micro world on the map youre stuck into, that you and the pc or other players take turns making moves in. Problem is about 50% of the time the enemy AI forgets what its doing and just decides to sit there, holding the entire game hostage. Usually the only way to fix this was to close the game and restart, but that only fixes it untill the AI gets confused again and decides to pause your game while it takes a nap or wtf ever its doing.

Its free on Epic atm, try it there if you want. But as someone who loves RTS and 4x games i do not recommend this game at all.
Just go play Civ, old world, Imperator Rome, or one of the Crusader Kings games, youll have a much better time

Humankind is an ambitious entry into the 4X strategy genre, offering a fresh take on civilization-building and gameplay mechanics. While it certainly has its moments of brilliance, it also suffers from notable flaws that prevent it from reaching its full potential. Here’s a breakdown of both the positives and negatives:

One of Humankind's standout features is the cultural system. Instead of sticking with one civilization throughout the game, players can change cultures every era. This provides a unique challenge and makes each playthrough feel fresh, offering a great deal of strategic variety.
The ability to combine traits from different cultures allows for interesting combinations, making each civilization feel like a mix of the best elements from various historical cultures.

The game world is stunning, with beautifully crafted maps and an eye for detail in city and terrain design. The visuals are vibrant and immersive, with an art style that draws inspiration from history while maintaining a modern, polished look.
The game’s map is procedurally generated, making each new world a unique experience, full of surprises.

Humankind does offer a lot of depth in its strategic layers. From resource management to city planning, each decision can have lasting consequences, and there’s a sense of weight behind every move.
The game’s tactical combat, though not perfect, gives players the chance to plan battles and expand their influence through war as well as diplomacy.

The AI in Humankind is a major letdown. It often makes illogical and inconsistent decisions, whether it’s in warfare, diplomacy, or city management. The AI doesn’t pose much of a challenge even at higher difficulty levels, which significantly reduces the strategic depth of the game.
Diplomatic relations with AI civilizations often feel shallow and nonsensical, with AI factions frequently breaking alliances or making unexpected, irrational decisions.

While the game features tactical combat, it’s not as refined as other 4X titles. The combat system feels cumbersome, with slow animations and an overall lack of polish. It can feel like an afterthought compared to other elements of the game.
The strategic value of battles diminishes quickly due to unbalanced units and repetitive mechanics, making combat less rewarding over time.

The diplomatic system, while promising, falls short. Interactions with other civilizations feel static, and the system fails to offer meaningful choices or consequences.
The grievance system, which is supposed to add layers to diplomatic play, often feels arbitrary and doesn’t have the intended impact on relationships between civilizations.

As you progress to the Industrial and Modern Eras, the game begins to lose its momentum. Turns become longer and more tedious, and the late-game doesn't introduce enough new mechanics to keep things interesting.
The influence system becomes a resource that’s accumulated at an excessive rate with few meaningful ways to use it, leading to a lack of engaging late-game decisions.
The gameplay becomes repetitive, with not enough meaningful variation in the world or challenges to break the monotony.

On higher-end PCs, Humankind still suffers from performance issues. Slow turn times, stuttering, and graphical bugs can detract from the experience.
Multiplayer features are plagued by desyncing problems and crashes, making it difficult to enjoy competitive or co-op play.
The UI, while visually appealing, is clunky and not very intuitive, making it hard to manage large empires or make swift decisions.

Compared to some of its big-title rivals, i.e., famous competitors you can guess in 4X genre, Humankind is really unnecessarily expensive in its standard and undiscounted form.

Humankind brings fresh ideas to the 4X genre, particularly with its cultural mechanics and world-building elements. The game can be somewhat enjoyable, especially for players who appreciate experimentation and strategic planning. However, the flawed AI, clunky combat system, and lack of depth in diplomacy and late-game content prevent it from being the definitive 4X experience. While there’s potential here, it currently falls short of competing with classics like Civilization.

Score: 9/10
(My Civ VI score: 5/10)

* WONDER MECHANICS
Simply wonderful!
One of the best features of Humankind is the two steps mechanics to CLAIM and then BUILD World Wonders. It also allows the Wonder to be built by the whole empire, as a Shared Project, which makes perfect sense. I cannot praise this enough!
I've been playing Civilization since the very first version, back in 1991, and the most frustrating thing about Civ was always the Wonder building system. In Civ, its ALL or NOTHING.
Amplitude Studios did their homework well and came up with a new system, which is fair and realistic.
For "builder" players like myself this feature alone makes Humankind worth buying and playing. :-)

* COMBAT
The combat mechanics is simply great! They mix the advantages of manual strategy with automatic strategy in three ways: Fully automatic, semi-automatic and fully manual modes. What else could you ask for?
Besides that, combat takes into consideration the height of the battle ground and the AI is actually very good in tactical combat. They often surprise me with their deployment.
This strategic combat type was never implemented in any Civ-like game that I know of, but it makes the battle more realistic and much more strategic. I never liked combat that much in Civ, but I was excited to try this system to the full in Humankind and I quite like it.

Another good thing is that your units are able to retreat from an unwanted battle or one with a possible defeat. Even this was done in a realistic and pondered way, because you cannot do it two times in a row with the same unit and you must have accessible terrain where your unit may go to run away. Again, this makes perfect sense and is well balanced.


* 6 ERAS AND 6 CULTURES
Being able to choose a different culture with a new set of skills and abilities, makes perfect sense and mimics how humans actually evolved through the ages.
Everybody that played Civilization had to stand before a ridiculous situation of facing an old civ (e.g. Ancient Egypt, Grece, Rome, Aztec) with the modernized Americans or Germans.
This huge change in mechanics is an historical achievement in this type of games.
My congratulations go to Amplitude Studios. The proof that this was (and is) the way to go, is that the developers of CIV VII already made it their main feature. ;-)


* START OF GAME IN A PRE-ERA: The Neolithic
The way we start the game is perfect! That is exactly how it should be done.
In civilization you can choose a place to start but most of the times you have to choose a tile in the first turn, without knowing anything around. That may be disastrous in the long term and was one the major reasons why I quit many games of civilization after having spent a few hours and played for 60 to 100 turns. All because your very first city was not on the best spot, OR because you lost 2 turns finding the best spot, you would then lose the ability to build important and critical Wonders, which would ultimately kill your long term strategy.

This no longer happens with Humankind. Since you start as a group of wanderers (as in real life hunter gatherers) you can start raising population with food from wild animals and at the same time search the surroundings for the best spots for your home capital city.

RELOCATION OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE CENTRE OF TERRITORIES
Apart from this, there is also a huge and meaningful option: before creating a city you need to claim a territory. The main tile of that territory, around which food and production will be gathered, may be changed as many times as you need, before it is evolved into a city, or simply attached into an existing one.
Again, this avoids many frustrations and is a lot more realistic, because that's exactly how things happen in real life.

DISTRICTS AND INFRASTRUCTURES
In Humankind a District is basically a building than you use to increase the yield of certain resources, such as Food or Industry (Production in Civ).
It makes a lot more sense than the awful idea that designers of Civ VI had, which made me dislike a Civ version for the first time ever!

* CITY LIMITS
Territories and Outposts make the evolution of cities much more interesting, flexible and realistic.
The City Cap limit that is implemented in the game allows players to create only a certain number of cities without an Influence penalty.


* WAR UNITS
Each military unit consumes Population to be raised, which again makes perfect sense since it's how it happens in real life.
It also forces the player to think strategically when going to war and raising armies because you must have population, not just units.

* FAME POINTS
Although points had always been in Civilization, they were calculated in obscure ways that I never truly understood, since v1, and you could only know them at the end of the game, so they never influenced the gameplay at all, being just a kind of side effect of your gameplay.

THINGS THAT NEED IMPROVEMENT
* The AI is very poor in almost all situations, except in tactical combat, where it is very good.
Most Civs seem not to have a specific goal and strategy for how to win the game and so it's very easy to beat them after learning how to play the game.

* The graphics in the game are good, but the 3D Avatars are simply awful and should be improved.

* You have to pick 6 cultures in a game, so if you play with 10 civs (like I usually do) there should be at least 60 cultures available, and preferably a lot more than that, but there aren't.
I end up using only one or two different cultures, in each era, most of the times I played, because there are not many different options to go the same path.

UNBALANCED WONDERS
Some are too powerful (e.g. Machu Picchu) but most are too weak or are of little use for most game strategies.
Besides the cost to claim them raises exponentially, and it is almost impossible to build more than 10 Wonders in a single game, which is a shame.
I think there should be more Wonders with different effects and more balanced.

* DIPLOMACY (on DLC)
Most of the Diplomatic features are only useful to the loosing players. So, unless you are a beginner being beaten by the AI, those traits will not benefit you at all, but instead will benefit your opponents, which makes little sense to me.
Besides that, the Diplomat stars (only in expansion) are extremely difficult to get in large quantities like it is usually required in every Age.
Diplomacy in general is weakly implemented and needs a huge rework. Civilization is a lot better than Humankind in that regard.

CONCLUSION
Humankind was pioneer in many regards, and that brought difficulties for civ players, like myself. But after understanding the game, I have no doubt that it is much better than any previous Civilization version. And the proof of it, is that Civilization VII, which is just about to be released, implemented almost all of the major new mechanics that Humankind created.
So my congrats go to Amplitude Studios. Please don't quit Humankind, because I'm still going to keep playing it. Please launch more Culture Packs and do a rework of the Diplomacy.

Incredible game that taught Civ how to make Civ 7 way more interesting to play... Highly recommended.

This is a game which really needs a middle ground between yes and no. I pre-ordered this game years ago as I enjoyed Endless Legend and am a big Civ fan, but when I got the game I was underwhelmed. I completed one play through and promptly forgot about it. I came back and picked up the DLCs when everything was on sale a few weeks ago and found not much has changed about the game. The early game is a lot of fun, the late game is just a slog dealing with stupid AI who is overly aggressive no matter how many wars you win, a pollution mechanic which makes so little sense there is an option to disable it, and a tech tree full of meaningless garbage you can't build because you are too busy constructing yet more districts to manage your overpopulation issue.

The game also has serious pacing issues, so you reach the late game incredibly quickly if you are doing well, meaning some eras can end within 10 turns of the start. You can reach the final era while still in the middle of Era 4s part of the tech tree. This is not really good or engaging design, especially when it can take 10 turns just to get the money to upgrade or build the new units.

It is a fun game at the start, but the start is very short and the better you do, the faster it goes by. Get the game when it is massively on sale, its fun enough at times especially if you just want something to do in the background. Don't get it at full price though, it isn't worth 50 bucks.

Gorgeous looking game, plagued with horrible gameplay decisions which will make you scratch your head and wonder about realism of certain mechanics. Let me tell you, this is not a sim.
This game is not a civ either, anyone expecting it to be a civ will throw their PC out the window, then get out and start jumping on top of the leftovers.
However, this game has some fresh and exciting mechanics witch I believe are still worth experiencing. In a void this would have been a good civ counterpart, after certain horrible decisions of civ franchise I end up coming back to this title for one reason or another.

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It needs a much more robust tutorial system in order to be playable. If I keep having to look at online guides made by other players to figure out basic concepts, then the tutorial has failed. Waited a long time in order to have a system that could play this game, and while some of the mechanics are fun and solid, I'm disappointed as I was really looking forward to an engaging Civ competitor.

does everything better than civ

such a great game, i know it had a tough release, but the reviews are definitely not fair as of right now.

I love many of the features, e.g. claiming wonders and shared projects. Terrain is very-very important and quirky, you can do so much with the right use of it. Also the turns go super fast even in late game! Very cool 4x experience! Awesome OST too, with some twists depending on your choice of culture, last era OST is especially good. If anything - the retreat can be a bit frustrating, when you don't know where exactly the enemy could retreat.