So I’ve been playing HUMANKIND over the last few days and think I have the hang of it now. It’s by Amplitude Studios, who also made Endless Space, Endless Legend, Endless Space 2, and Dungeon of the Endless (which was my favorite out the of four; also apparently I wrote up my thoughts on ES2).
The basic engine is the same as those games, and most similar to Endless Legend; the world is a hex-map that’s broken up into pre-defined territories, each of which can only have one outpost/city. Each hex generates some resources on its own (fertile land giving you food, forests industry, etc.), but you only work the hexes immediately adjacent to the districts you build (including the city center), and districts vary in what resources they collect. [Build a farmer’s quarter next to a forest and you don’t collect any of the industry, but build a maker’s quarter and you do.]
The core gimmick that differentiates it from Civilization / Endless Legend is that rather than picking one nation/race, you pick one culture from each age. (So no more Abraham Lincoln wearing furs / a suit at the beginning of the game, both of which were nonsense in different ways.) Instead you might be the Babylonians, and then the Carthaginians, then Khmer, then Mughals, then French, then Japanese (which was the path I took in my most recent game that I won). You end up building a history (both in continuing buffs and districts that remain on the field), and picking things that are appropriate to your setup. (In Civ, having Russians get a bonus to tundra tiles is sort of terrible because maybe the RNG will give you tundra and maybe it won’t, but having one of the faith options be a tundra bonus is fine because only someone who knows they have lots of tundra will pick it. This makes everything more like that.)
The other relevant facts are: 1) the cultures seem to vary wildly in power (or at least appropriateness to any given situation), and 2) you pick from the list whenever you age up from the previous age, and 3) everyone starts as a nondescript nomadic tribe. (Which, as a neat side effect, means you do much more exploring before you place your first city, and so you have much more choice than you normally get.) So rather than starting the game as the Babylonians, you’re racing to see who gets to be them. Wonders, the typical race dynamic of the Civ games, are minimized here (there aren’t that many of them and they aren’t that great), replaced by these cultures.
Overall, tho, I think the net effect is significantly increasing the ‘rich get richer’ dynamic and makes for a less satisfying game. One method of asymmetrical balance is to say “well, it’s alright if the cultures are unbalanced, because then the drafting mechanics will create a meta-balance.” But when the drafting mechanics are “the person in the lead picks first”, you end up with a probably dominant meta-strategy (and then the best available counter-strategy which is trying hard to play catchup).
At my current skill level (who knows, maybe I’m doing the naive strategy), it looks to me like the dominant move is 1) make one mega-city and 2) stack lots of cultures who have emblematic districts that give you buffs based on population size / number of districts. You can have only one such district per territory, but you can have lots of territories in your city (limited only by your influence and the number of territories other players will ‘let’ you have). So when each Khmer Baray gives you +1 industry per population, and you’ve combined ten territories into your megalopolis with 100 population, you now get 1k industry/turn out of that, instead of the 100 you would have gotten from having ten cities each with their own Baray. And then later you get the Japanese Robotics Lab, which gives you +2 industry on each Maker’s Quarter, and so that leads to a +20 bonus on each of the ten, for +200 industry (and another +200 industry from the effect of those Robotics Labs on themselves).
[There are countervailing forces pushing against the megalopolis—each additional territory you add to a city increases the cost of the next, so actually I had one big city and then five or six small ones, but I think I hadn’t realized how strong this effect was and will do something different next game.]
So far… I think I like it less than Old World, but it has interestingly different solutions to many of the same problems, and it’s covering a very different time period.
So I’ve been playing HUMANKIND over the last few days and think I have the hang of it now. It’s by Amplitude Studios, who also made Endless Space, Endless Legend, Endless Space 2, and Dungeon of the Endless (which was my favorite out the of four; also apparently I wrote up my thoughts on ES2).
The basic engine is the same as those games, and most similar to Endless Legend; the world is a hex-map that’s broken up into pre-defined territories, each of which can only have one outpost/city. Each hex generates some resources on its own (fertile land giving you food, forests industry, etc.), but you only work the hexes immediately adjacent to the districts you build (including the city center), and districts vary in what resources they collect. [Build a farmer’s quarter next to a forest and you don’t collect any of the industry, but build a maker’s quarter and you do.]
The core gimmick that differentiates it from Civilization / Endless Legend is that rather than picking one nation/race, you pick one culture from each age. (So no more Abraham Lincoln wearing furs / a suit at the beginning of the game, both of which were nonsense in different ways.) Instead you might be the Babylonians, and then the Carthaginians, then Khmer, then Mughals, then French, then Japanese (which was the path I took in my most recent game that I won). You end up building a history (both in continuing buffs and districts that remain on the field), and picking things that are appropriate to your setup. (In Civ, having Russians get a bonus to tundra tiles is sort of terrible because maybe the RNG will give you tundra and maybe it won’t, but having one of the faith options be a tundra bonus is fine because only someone who knows they have lots of tundra will pick it. This makes everything more like that.)
The other relevant facts are: 1) the cultures seem to vary wildly in power (or at least appropriateness to any given situation), and 2) you pick from the list whenever you age up from the previous age, and 3) everyone starts as a nondescript nomadic tribe. (Which, as a neat side effect, means you do much more exploring before you place your first city, and so you have much more choice than you normally get.) So rather than starting the game as the Babylonians, you’re racing to see who gets to be them. Wonders, the typical race dynamic of the Civ games, are minimized here (there aren’t that many of them and they aren’t that great), replaced by these cultures.
Overall, tho, I think the net effect is significantly increasing the ‘rich get richer’ dynamic and makes for a less satisfying game. One method of asymmetrical balance is to say “well, it’s alright if the cultures are unbalanced, because then the drafting mechanics will create a meta-balance.” But when the drafting mechanics are “the person in the lead picks first”, you end up with a probably dominant meta-strategy (and then the best available counter-strategy which is trying hard to play catchup).
At my current skill level (who knows, maybe I’m doing the naive strategy), it looks to me like the dominant move is 1) make one mega-city and 2) stack lots of cultures who have emblematic districts that give you buffs based on population size / number of districts. You can have only one such district per territory, but you can have lots of territories in your city (limited only by your influence and the number of territories other players will ‘let’ you have). So when each Khmer Baray gives you +1 industry per population, and you’ve combined ten territories into your megalopolis with 100 population, you now get 1k industry/turn out of that, instead of the 100 you would have gotten from having ten cities each with their own Baray. And then later you get the Japanese Robotics Lab, which gives you +2 industry on each Maker’s Quarter, and so that leads to a +20 bonus on each of the ten, for +200 industry (and another +200 industry from the effect of those Robotics Labs on themselves).
[There are countervailing forces pushing against the megalopolis—each additional territory you add to a city increases the cost of the next, so actually I had one big city and then five or six small ones, but I think I hadn’t realized how strong this effect was and will do something different next game.]
So far… I think I like it less than Old World, but it has interestingly different solutions to many of the same problems, and it’s covering a very different time period.