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Humankind: A challenger to Civilization

tankdrop24

tankdrop24

Tread First into Hell
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Polygon: Humankind is Sega's innovative new challenger to Civilization

Humankind is going after Sid Meier's Civilization, and it's not messing around. I watched a demo of the game last week, and I'm excited about this 4X strategy epic, due out next year on PC. My main takeaway is that Sega-owned developer Amplitude Studios is bringing fresh ideas to a format that's long been dominated by Firaxis' sure and steady sense of evolution. Grand historical strategy is getting the shake-up that it deserves.

The basic template is familiar enough, but the difference is in the details. I begin with a settler unit on a hexagonal map that's dotted with hills, forests, rivers, and special resources. I settle a city, research technologies, build units, explore, build districts, fight enemies, expand, build wonders, and try to become the most impressive civilization in the world.

But here's where things get interesting. Instead of choosing to be a single civilization, such as the Aztecs or the Germans or the Zulu, I pick and choose from a variety of cultures through six ages of history. So, in the bronze age I can be Hittite or Egyptian or Olmec or seven others. Each of those civs has a different emphasis in terms of units and traits. One might be better at technology, another at military.
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I'm extremely interested to see what sort of civilization mixing and matching I can get up to in this. Amplitude's past history has shown that they've got a fantastic mastery of asymmetric strategy games
 
Promising.

I really like the idea of choosing a culture for each Era instead of just selecting a single Civ with a single set of bonuses that last the whole game, it could really offers some interesting replayability through trying various culture mixes. Not to mention that thematically it's more interesting than the "single nation lasting 1000 years and never changing" thing that Civ has.

I'll be watching this with great interest :)
 
Duvalle said:
I'm extremely interested to see what sort of civilization mixing and matching I can get up to in this. Amplitude's past history has shown that they've got a fantastic mastery of asymmetric strategy games
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Simply put you can have a civ that spends a lot of money like Venice but have certain traits like the Cravers where you are at constant war with other factions, or maybe a civilization of mercenaries where you can't go to war unless you are attacked or is paid to do it and get perks related to being a civ of sellswords
 
The fact that you can apparently have Neanderthals that survive to the space age alone is enough to get me hyped.
 
I'm officially interested, Amplitude makes some real solid 4x titles, the one thing I'm personally unsure of is the combat. Not because I think it'll be bad (Endless Legend's was good, with each faction feeling different) , but because if you have to play out every combat encounter in an hours long game, it can cause the whole thing to drag on even longer.
 
Amplitude? Authors of Endless series?

This is going to be great, I think.

At the very least, it going to have outstanding soundtrack. :)
 
ARi05 said:
I'm officially interested, Amplitude makes some real solid 4x titles, the one thing I'm personally unsure of is the combat. Not because I think it'll be bad (Endless Legend's was good, with each faction feeling different) , but because if you have to play out every combat encounter in an hours long game, it can cause the whole thing to drag on even longer.
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Endless Legend offered autoresolve options and I see no reason this'll be different.
 
horngeek said:
Endless Legend offered autoresolve options and I see no reason this'll be different.
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To me the issue was how fiddly it was. It has customizable units but mostly a perfunctory time-consuming way that feels like it was aimlessly imported over from the sci-fi version where 'build your spaceship' is more of a thing. Meanwhile they have battles but they feel like a poor man's version of Heroes of Might and Magic or Age of Wonders style combat.. and autoresolve often means 'your units are dumbasses and get slaughtered by something they can easily beat'. For someone who tends to feel like Civilization-esque games are long and complicated enough as it is, it just felt unnecessary.
 
Amplitude has uploaded a number of videos on Humankind's features covering things like combat, terrain, etc.

But I don't care about most of them, so I'm not going to post them.

Rather I'm going to post the most recent video on PURE IDEOLOGY, or more specifically the Civics and Ideology system.



Your civ's idealogy covers everything from your economic system, the structure of your government, how gendered (in either direction) power is or isn't, and even if you have common land ownership or not. Most interestingly you don't mold it using arbitrary in-game currency but rather the decisions you make in events, organically shaping your society.

Before I was interested in Humankind but this has really upped my interest, in my opinion, the greatest downside of the Civilization games was that the societies felt very static and undynamic. You could replace them with hive minds and the gameplay experience wouldn't be too different. But with Humankind it really seems like Amplitude wants to do things differently. And that's definitely a good sign.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Amplitude has uploaded a number of videos on Humankind's features covering things like combat, terrain, etc.

But I don't care about most of them, so I'm not going to post them.

Rather I'm going to post the most recent video on PURE IDEOLOGY, or more specifically the Civics and Ideology system.



Your civ's idealogy covers everything from your economic system, the structure of your government, how gendered (in either direction) power is or isn't, and even if you have common land ownership or not. Most interestingly you don't mold it using arbitrary in-game currency but rather the decisions you make in events, organically shaping your society.

Before I was interested in Humankind but this has really upped my interest, in my opinion, the greatest downside of the Civilization games was that the societies felt very static and undynamic. You could replace them with hive minds and the gameplay experience wouldn't be too different. But with Humankind it really seems like Amplitude wants to do things differently. And that's definitely a good sign.
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This was one thing Vice talked about in their article about Civ is how mechanical it feels. Amplitude has a history of making 4x where no two civs play alike, with Cravers having an eternal war mechanic and Umbral Chorus method of building a civ
 
Yeah, the endless series is good for that, where they intentionally make things asymmetrical in how they play between factions rather than the more homogenized rosters and civics of Civ and co.
 
That ideology system is really interesting, I'll definitely be paying attention to this.

I'll probably always play the sameish ideology though.
 
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This is a neat little feature.

Going to be more than a little pissed if they block you from making multiple avatars to play against when the feature is right there.
 
tankdrop24 said:
Going to be more than a little pissed if they block you from making multiple avatars to play against when the feature is right there.
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Okay, I heard that on a livestream it was confirmed that there's going to be just one avatar per account.

Which is frustrating, because this means it's just going to be one of those features that would have enormous potential if they just let players have a bit more free reign in how it works.
 
I'm pretty hopeful about this - Endless Space 2 is a great game and Amplitude are really good at making different factions play differently.

It'd be nice if they took a leaf out of Civ's book for map design though. The Endless Legend map gives me a headache - it's just so busy.
 
FriedIce said:
I'm pretty hopeful about this - Endless Space 2 is a great game and Amplitude are really good at making different factions play differently.

It'd be nice if they took a leaf out of Civ's book for map design though. The Endless Legend map gives me a headache - it's just so busy.
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I wouldnt say so.

I mean, EL looks like a loading screen to me.

In all seriousness, Amplitude fucked over EL for me. I physically cant get past setting up a game because it then proceeds to get permentantly stuck at loading the game. And since they stopped patching EL, this is going to be a permanent affair.
 
So they just started revealing contemporary cultures, and the first have been the Americans, which are...



I have to admit the brutal honesty impresses me. And having the F35 of all things as a unique unit? Shots fired.
 
tankdrop24 said:
So they just started revealing contemporary cultures, and the first have been the Americans, which are...



I have to admit the brutal honesty impresses me. And having the F35 of all things as a unique unit? Shots fired.
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'Expansionist'
Emblematic Unit: F-35 Lightning
Emblematic District: Defence Agency

lmao trust a French developer to go in like this
 
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Amplitude's efforts experimenting and innovating within the 4X genre (plus the dating sim and the roguelike) over the past 10 years have all been to enable this one glorious shitpost. Dieu les bénisse.
 
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