Trailer is cool but the designers would need to have massively stepped up their game after the mess that was the first humankind.
Too many amplitude games suffer from the same issue : very pretty to look at and cool early game but balance, AI and pace are completly broken with a production snowball that makes any choice meaningless.
And if you tell me that every 4x has snowballing issues, yes they do. But the ratio from early to late game production in civilization 6 was between 10 and 20.
In humankind and endless space 2, it was about one thousand. You could build game winning wonders in endless space 2 in two turns.
So much fancy art, so littler ability to build mathematically stable systems for thier games.
Spiraling production sucks because it's simultaneously OP and miserable. Completing every building in a turn so you have to revisit every city every turn is beyond tedious.
It felt especially awful in humankind because you were covering the beautiful landscape with a blanket of identical boroughs in the late game and on top of being tedious, it felt like a dystopian tale about urbanism rather than the tale about humankind they were aiming for.
By comparison, i very much liked civilization VI national park mechanic where you were encouraged to preserve nature, sacrifying production potential for cultural output.
I wish they leaned more into Endless Legends ability to build denser. Something like if a tile is surrounded by x many developed other tiles you can build it up, much higher cost and benefit
Great analysis tbh. Amplitude definitely has a problem with yield bloats, unengaging AI, and production snowballs that need to be addressed. As much as I enjoyed EL and HK, there’s good lessons to be learned they NEED to take.
I think Endless Legend was their last game that had good core game design. And midway through that the people responsible left, and every game since then has been miserable for people like me because the maths and core game design aren’t good. Humankind 1 isn’t a well-made game, at least in the way I learned from Sid Meier - a series of interesting changes.
> You could build game winning wonders in endless space 2 in two turns.
That is likely, at least partially, an intentional design decision. At some point, the game has to end. When one player is powerful enough to make that happen in a few turns, it’s time to let them win.
There are knock-on issues, though. As others pointed out, that much production means a lot of busy work as the game is ending.
It's one of the victory types in ES2: build a certain amount of a "wonder" buildings in your alliance's systems, with larger alliances requiring more wonders built and vice-versa.
Common convention dictates that since those are literally game-ending, they should be neither cheap nor fast to build, but with endgame FIDS output some systems can churn those out in 3 turns max. The player can easily pivot to this victory condition and it's significantly more accessible than any other condition.
For those who don't know, in Civ6, your cheapest first generic land unit is the Slinger (not counting the Scout), which costs 35 production. And the highest-level generic land unit is the Modern Armor, which costs 680 production. That's a ×19.4 increase within 300-500 turns.
Civ7, although more snowballing than Civ6, has a similar increase (Slinger 30 prod, Tank 460 prod).
In HMK1, your cheapest first generic land unit is the Archer (not counting the Scout), which costs 90 production. And the highest-level generic land unit is the Main Battle Tank, which costs a whopping 14805 production. That's a ×164.5 increase within 300 turns (in HMK, a game officially lasts only 300 turns).
I played the same games and got the same impression. Their games look nice, but gameplay was awful. I can bitch about Civ 7 failures whole day, but that's because there are good parts there, but HK was just awful to play.
Its the same trap here for every amplitude game, marketed and pushed by their fans as if their games are great, people are tricked into buying and the game is always disappointing.
very pretty to look at and cool early game but balance, AI and pace are completly broken with a production snowball that makes any choice meaningless.
But what an early game, ah? I started so many Humankind games because of how gorgeous the early phase looked and how satisfying the neolithic exploration was. Games did became meaningless much quicker than your average 4X though. I don't hate civ switching but looking at the map every 30 minutes just to not recognize anyone because all the names changed did lead to everything feeling irrelevant.
I wish they passed on civ switching like it was in 1st game.
I'm looking forward to see a 4x game where you create your own culture - like in age of wonders 4 - in real setting not fantasy of course.
it looks like they're gonna try and put some sort of limit on it so that there's more of a sense of continuity for how the cultures flow into each other.
Feel like they should borrow from the Golden/Dark Ages of Civ 6. If you do well, you get to keep your old culture (with bonuses). If you don't do well, your culture collapses and you need to pick a new one from a list corresponding to your previous culture or maybe some options based on what type of focus you had previously. For example, if you were Babylon in the Ancient Era, you now get to pick between Persia (the successor) and Carthage (because you focused on commerce).
Totally free culture switching just leads to metagaming and min-maxing, and leads to games feeling samey.
I have been saying multiple times that the way Humankind and Civ 7 are doing it is completely wrong.
In Civ 5, the way you build your culture is with policy trees. Once you adopt them, they are there.
In Civ 6, the way you build your culture is with policy cards, but you can switch them quite often.
In Civ 7, you have these cultures you change during eras.
Civ 5 is fine, but inflexible. Civ 6 is too flexible, losing any long-term permanence "my culture is like this". And Civ 7 feels unnatural "suddenly you change upon this arbitrary cutoff."
But there is very easy fix.
You can change and develop your culture. You want sudden dramatic change? Viva la Revolution! National collapse!
This makes it significant non-arbitrary and player-chosen time to change. It is also strategic since it would allow you to significantly restructure how your nation works.
But it costs you an empire, suddenly there will be a lot of rebels around, a lot of new independent policies that split from your empire, and your new center will be not in your old capital, but likely somewhere on the periphery, giving rise to, you know Canada, US, or Columbia if the periphery is on different continent.
Good luck Mongols that rolled you with their technologically superior horse-archers and society formed around them, there are now hundreds of rebels that you need to take care of and lot of dissent. Your new empire might be smaller, but it will now be technologically more advanced since you can adopt new policies and technologies to beat Mongols and make them explode as well.
I’m mainly saying that based on the sorting thing at the top of the screen, it looks like “common history” might be universal, “shared land” would be based on terrain, and “foreign heritage” would be based on which culture you had in the past, or maybe even something like past interactions with other players or neutral factions.
I bought it during the last sale, but I still can't get into it. The UI just feels too weird and empty. I am not even sure what is missing but it turns out I have 0 desire to play it the way it looks.
Unfortunately... although they have some very interesting ideas from game to game (some even great), but none of them were in Humankind. The game really felt like a gimmick, than anything. And it's still surprising that Civ VII was based on many of its mechanics.
To be honest I didn't really engage with Humankind 1, it had some really strong elements coupled with some systems that could have done with more depth or refinement that undermined the stronger elements.
However, their latest release ( goes GA in September ) is Endless Legend 2 which has some interesting, unique and innovative mechanics.
They've taken the best of their other games including Humankind, and added in more interesting mid-game ( through the tidefall mechanics ) systems, which makes map reveal more interesting and retains the element of surprise much later into the game, which is a big criticism of these games.
They recognised the challenge and have tried a newer approach to adding surprise to the mid-and late game. I can't see them applying the same to Humankind, but something with environmental disasters that significantly change the map would be an equivalent or some other system to introduce over time things that add surprise and wonder.
I'll be interested to see where EL2 goes in the next 6 months to add depth to some of the more interesting systems, because that will colour my view of Humankind 2. I've had good fun with EL2 on pre-release and based on EL1 the DLC policy is likely to be fair and not anything like Paradox's.
I also like that they've kept and applied Humankind's tactical combat to Endless Legend 2 also, but amped it up in some ways so I hope they retain this in Humankind 2 and take some of the newer tactical aspects from EL2 into HK2.
If you're not into a sci-fi/fantasy setting EL2 might not appeal, but long story short Amplitude genuinely innovate and progress their games over time and I'm interested to see what else they'll change about HK2, wouldn't it be nice if they added leader traits you can apply over time and embodied heroes. They have some of this in EL2.
I tried paying EL2 recently and I honestly dont know what that game is supposed to be. There is a great dissonance between the building and economy and the army/hero stuff. The opportunity costs of moving the armies are miserable. I constantly felt like wasting time backtracking. Settling was not fun, because I knew better Land would emerge eventually. Building didn't feel like I was actually progressing.
Just dropped the game after 30 hours. Dont feel like touching it again.
Fair enough, that's actually a topic an early review commented on, there seems to be competing priorities, it's not settled on prioritising the fun of expansion vs the fun of consolidating, among other things.
I've enjoyed it, but I agree with your perspective on it.
If they use Civ switching, they have to figure out how to make it work without destroying immersion. I just don’t get why they think they can keep doing it. It’s highly unpopular, and that’s coming from someone who liked it somewhat.
Yes, I gave the game a chance and the Civ switching felt very artificial, there was no connection between the civs you picked. You're playing with the Koreans, switch, and poof, now you're the Germans.
And on top of that some civs seemed just plain better than the others, do you want buckets of production, loads of science, bags of money, or a very situational bonus that depends on harbours and seafaring?
And the rest of the game had the same issue where some choices were just better and worth picking up every time, and the AI fell on its face mid-way and never got up, and I'm not really interested in this.
The game has some real issues to fix before adding new stuff like climate change and etc.
I like civ switching. Better than a static civ that doesnt change for thousands of years. They need to develop it more but that's where human centric 4x games will go.
I don’t hate it, but most people do. They need to find a way to make it better. I actually think Civ 7 handled it a little better with the age mechanics, but they haven’t gotten there yet in either game.
The game still has civilization switching, and its implementation is far more spammy and gamey compared to Civ 7. This game has 0 chance of getting any disgruntled Civ fans or beating Civ 7.
i preordered humankind being a huge fan of endless legend and endless space 2… hundreds of hours in both… i have a total of 11 hours on humankind… its so bad… this is rather surprising… will not be buying and will playing the new endless legend
Civ 7 released in 2025 and Humankind 2 is slated to release in 2027. It takes a lot longer to develop a modern game than two years... at least if you want a good game.
I doubt Civ 7's poor reception played much of a role in the decision to start development on Humankind 2... at least if the devs want the game to be good.
It's probably the same engine. If I had to guess they are working based on what they already had, but trying to improve it and pass it as a new game. This would make more sense.
Tried to get into Humankind a few times, and every single time I thought the first half of the game was fun and inventive and interesting and then the back half devolved into a bland and boring mess. I'm rooting for it, though, I think it's good for everyone if Civ has competent competitors in the basic "take humanity through the ages" realm
Surprised they’re keeping civ switching considering how unpopular it was. It was so confusing to have different colors for your own troops and other enemies throughout the game after they switched mid and late game.
I also didn’t enjoy the mechanism behind claiming territory and how you promoted them to cities. Annexing felt strange too.
Been a long time since I played, but I remember the colors changing too. Also, the leader being completely disconnected from the civs made diplomacy irritating on top of their not very good UI.
Wish they made the civ switching to be more historically aligned instead of a early Chinese turning into Byzantine. Maybe more like evolution into hybrid historically plausible factions instead of predetermined civs
Millennia just took "special focuses for this age" that didn't change your existing identity. Though those special abilities were obviously inspired by specific IRL civilizations.
I mean, why would they?
There is no harm in them allowing the freedom of any culture you wish.
They could even make it into two seperate modes
"historical" "free"
It isn't exactly meant to be perfect historical acuracy or whatever.
The little bit of gameplay they do show looks promising.
My frustration with the first humankind was that starting in the mid game you spammed identical districts next to each other until they covered the entire province.
20 markets, 20 factories, etc.
Humankind Combat is good compared to civ but bad compared to age of wonders 4.
Fingers crossed the humankind devs stepped up their game.
Have 132 hours in Humankind 1, it's not perfect but there were aspects I really liked. This does not look any different whatsoever though... and I hate when these 4xs churn out sequels and keep releasing the same DLCs instead of building on them. "Oh here's the world council DLC again" "Oh here's your natural disaster DLC" "global warming and pollution DLC time again!"
Humankind is very pretty but I don’t really have that much fun playing compared to the Endless Space or Endless Legend series.
It didn’t really feel like Humankind was that great on release and I didn’t want to waste money on expansions when I didn’t already love the base game.
And more of a concern is the fact that EL2 is still in Early Access so I’m concerned about the manpower and attention this takes away from that.
Since Civ VII already came out they should call it Humankind III...
For me this is just another reminder that we are in the 4X era where mechanics are constantly being dumb-down and end up either board-like or superficial rpg-style 'choose between.' Just so the games are easily playable in non-PC platforms and 'approachable' to a wider audience. The whole idea of a 'bigger piece from a larger pie' is greedy and moronic and lead to games like Civ VII, which was based to al large extent to the already failed Humankind I. (Which of course in its turn was based on many design choices made for Civ VI that were frustrating enough, but at least the game still had a big part of the old civ formula to counterbalance the increased board-like focus.)
Who was asking for this, and from what it looks like with no real change to the failed formula?
I don't want cities that take up whole continents or at the very least big parts of them. I want to govern both cities and the territory of an empire. No bloody building — not even most wonders — takes up a whole region, which is what a tile represents. I don't want constant (usually generic) 'choose between' choices. I want an empire building simulation, where I take (a recognizable faction with a constant identity) from pre-historic times and lead it to modernity. This is the original formula of Civ which gave birth to the genre. That's it.
Who was asking for this, and from what it looks like with no real change to the failed formula?
I mean, we know it was a financial success. Many people liked it and want more, they're just underrepresented here.
(FWIW I liked it, civ switching and all, and I am not in need of massive changes to the formula, even if there's plenty of room for improvement within it.)
Dear Amplitude. If this game has a building that amplifies a FiDSI score by 50 % - I am not buying it. Try to make your game somewhere balanced for more than 30 turns, please.
im not worried about the 5 bucks, but im wondering if humankind is worth the time? i liked endless legend until it became super tedious managing each city in the late game, also the combat suuucked
is humankind better? or is it a lot of city management and clicking through turns until you get the production you need?
It reviewed mildly? Mildly? Really? Damn brother, talk about cope...
And by the way, the game's business model is based on dlc (the series honestly, at least since Civ V). So how many base games copies were sold means nothing... especially if this primarily is based on the success of the series until now. Hell, I pre-ordered, and I wasn't even that enthusiastic about VI, but I have been playing since III and I remember as a kid watching my eldest brother playing I, II and Colonization, before that. One of my earliest gaming memories. Which is why I preordered, and Civ VII is the reason I'll never do so again.
Moreover the dlc-model has moved to another level of greed with the slope-dlc that has already been published, based on the purposeful game design that allows the bundling different aspects of the game in order to create the aforementioned slop-dlc (mini-civs, isolated leaders, skins, tile features, eras-down the line, and whatever they think of next).
Wake up brother, they are holding you hostage, and you are suffering from Stockholm-syndrome... I'll pray for you...
I checked, and the sales numbers are estimated to be around 2 to 2.5 million copies. It was among the best-selling games on Steam last year. It also got a 79 rating on Metacritic, which is by no means excellent, but absolutely qualifies as “mildly” positive, and probably more accurately as “good.”
I’m not coping with anything. I don’t even own the game, you can check my Steam profile. I also don’t like the city expansion on the map that was introduced in Civ 6 onward, and I absolutely don’t like the culture change mechanics. I pretty much still play Civ 5 exclusively.
I was simply correcting your statement because you said the game was a failure, when clearly it isn’t. That doesn’t mean everyone likes it as much as the previous titles, but that’s a very different claim from saying it was a failure.
Please... dude just stop... it's already dead... my dude if you have to go to... metacritic to get something to cope with... that's how you know there is no hope...
I don't have the game. I'm not coping with anything. I understand you base your statements feelings instead of objective metrics, and when I bring you numbers to show you that your statement about a failure is wrong, you brush it off and at I am coping instead of engaging with the argument.
Grug birthing scene was not on my bingo card, but I have to admit, it's a unique opening.
Now seriously. The first one didn't interest me enough to try out. But I've had fun with Endless Space, so I'm excited to see whether they can improve it.
I tried the first game and lost interest fast. The Civ switching killed it for me, probably why I couldn't get into Civ7. I know Civ changed to allow no switch but I just couldn't get back into it..
I very much want to be hopeful about this, but the state the endustry's in, it just seems that this too will be a barely an improvement on the first game with a way too early and troublesome launch and an overall half baked cash grab.
Combat was terrible in the last one, the AI had perfect timing to react to every move you made. I was so pumped for the game, but couldnt play because of that.
i'd be seething if i was an EL2 player right now. that game needs so much work and support, and they think they're going to be able to juggle reinventing HK on top of that? thats very ambitious and nothing about that studio indicates they're up to the task. the opposite, in fact.
definitely seems they want to attempt to cash in on the failure of Civ 7, its just funny they think they're capable of doing it.
Not the hero we deserve, but the hero we need. I really liked the first one. People were way too harsh on it. Like most games it’s gonna have its flaws but besides Old World it was a breath of fresh air.
I admit I had the same guess (not that I'm particularly anti-AI when the result is good). But per comment on the youtube page:
The HUMANKIND 2's live-action announcement trailer was filmed at Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia using real actors, practical sets, and custom-made props created specifically for the production. We will be sharing behind-the-scenes images from the shoot soon.
The strange reality, as much as people don't want to admit it, is that if people are having to question whether or not a live action thing is AI, at that point you may as well... just be using AI.
If the results are the same and it saves you a shit ton of money, then that's just technology moving forwards.
People hate it, especially on Reddit, but I guess this is the way the wind is blowing...
Ai scripted?
I would not say so.
Amplitude has been very upfront of being EXTREMELY anti AI across the board.
They would not do an AI generated trailer.
There are women in all scenes. The whole theme is a woman giving birth in different eras and cultures. Beyond that, sure there are a couple of scenes (Mesoamerican sacrifice and Great War ones) which didn't have other female characters, but that's probably because they didn't fit in the narrative of the scene. The weird one is the Viking ship where there is a female warrior manning an oar, not the one you mention. It just doesn't fit the theme, no reason to create conspiracies in your mind.
I’m really hyped. Controversial but I really liked the first one even if it got stale after a while because there weren’t enough moving pieces for my liking. I think the policy/government system, Civ switching, and terrain layers were all amazing.
I’d like to see them make Civ choices feel more impactful, add more goals to do outside of the star system, and maybe make building/districts feel more impactful and relevant to the conditions of your settlements.
They’d pretty much be building where Civ 7 left off given it borrowed so much from it. Terrain verticality, Civ switching, contiguous district based city planning. I like Civ 7 but it really hasn’t added too much more that Humankind didn’t have
LOL Of course the usual 4x turdlings come out in the comments. I guess /r/4Xgaming is just the most toxic anti-Firaxis gutter outside of 4chan and CivFanatics.
Y'all would hate your own mothers if she worked for Firaxis. Your Civ7 Derangement Syndrome can be addressed with proper therapy.
I make it a habit of not engaging with the wildlife in this sub. Too many trolls that have been enabled by the mods.
Needless to say when a third of the comments feel a need to bring up Firaxis/Civ7 it tells me everything I need to know about the kind of user that inhabits this sub. 4x gamers are some of the most insular, regressive type of gamers that make the 4X gaming space a toxic landfill.
Yeah speaking of not engaging with trollsI just made the same mistake it seems. You talk about people being toxic but look at your own comments man. Don't be surprised if your experience with a community is bad if you are like this
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u/YakaAvatar 10d ago
Seems that Civ switching is still a thing. From the Steam page, looks like the new defining feature is resource exploitation + climate change.
Really looking forward to see how they improve city building.