Humankind is a brand new turn-based 4x strategy game developed by Amplitude Studios. It sees players advance through eras, taking control of various different cultures each with their own unique playstyles. The game takes place over 300 turns as players compete with each other to become the greatest empire.
Humankind uses fame as its main scoring system. Players can earn fame through a number of ways, achieving goals in each era to earn fame and stars - which can be used to progress through eras. The game has been very well received by players and critics alike, being hailed as an improvement on the usual 4x formula.
10 Bad City Placement
Humankind is often compared to the Civilisation series, though it differs in many places. Where the latter allows players to immediately build cities, Humankind needs players to place an outpost to later upgrade into the city. The game also has a cap on the number of cities a culture can have.
It's important to make sure that outposts are placed on the right tile before they are turned into a city, so players should be sure to look out for Resource Tiles, Plains, Mountains, Rivers, and other important useful tiles. Outposts can also be connected to cities in neighboring territories to expand the effective size of a city.
9 Not Growing Quick Enough
The growth of a player's empire is very important for success in the game. To make this easier in the Neolithic Era, it is easy to gain upwards of five military units by having multiple scouting parties. Players should also aim to find a location for their capital and place outposts in territories around that area, which can later merge with cities, but also prevent adversaries from claiming them.
After advancing areas and converting an outpost into the first city, military units can be disbanded into more population, which can be used to generate more FIMS resources for the city. This can lead to faster production, allowing for quicker population growth.
8 Lack Of Farms And Maker's Quarters
The FIMS resources of Humankind are the basic resources generated by a city and stand for Food, Industry, Money, and Science. Food is vital for the city to continue and Industry is vital for the city's production.
As such, these are the most important of the yields which are needed. The best method to build these involves making a few farms and then focusing on Maker's Quarters to give a huge boost to production. Once a few of these tiles have been made, farms will become quick to build and can then be used to boost growth.
7 Staying In Eras Too Long
The aim of Humankind is for players to advance through eras while gaining fame for various goals that can be accomplished to earn stars. Once enough of these stars are earned, the player can choose a new culture and advance the era. Often, players will want to advance to the next era as soon as the option becomes available.
One reason a player may put off their advancement is if they are close to earning another star, which gives a fame score reward. Easy to achieve stars such as the number of researched technologies, or the number of military units, can be achieved quickly if they are close to completion, meaning only a couple of turns are lost.
6 Poor Culture Selection
When players advance to a new era they get to choose a new culture. Each culture can only be picked once, so players should hurry to try and make sure they can choose the culture they want. Cultures should ideally be picked to either further advance the strengths of an empire, or make up for an empire's weakness.
For example, a player that has chosen the Babylonians and is science-focused could choose to advance era and become Greek to gain further bonuses to science. Alternatively, if the empire appeared to be lacking food, the player could choose the Celts, to give a benefit to food production.
5 Lacking A Military Presence
The battles within Humankind are more in-depth than other strategy games that the game has been compared with. This gives the benefit that players can often have a greater effect on the outcome of a battle, perhaps protecting their units from being entirely decimated.
Because the manual battle system is considerably fairer than the automated outcomes of similar games, players should feel more tempted to build some military units. As well as this, empires without units are more likely to get attacked by certain AI and will struggle to defend themselves from attacks.
4 Failing To Explore
Once a player has set up their capital city, it can be easy to forget about the rest of the map and focus on only the territories that are claimed as a part of the empire. Due to the large maps, it is important to keep an eye on the surrounding areas.
The best way to achieve this is by setting a couple of scouts or scouting units onto auto-explore mode and leaving them to roam the map on their own. These units can be used to spot approaching enemy armies or to obverse adversaries' empires.
3 Not Making Alliances
The AI of the game will often pester players with alerts about various reasons they may be disgruntled towards any action taken by the player's empire. The AI can also often offer deals for trade or military access. Once players have made enough trades with an AI, it is possible that an alliance can be struck.
When in an alliance with an AI, they can assist in wars against common enemies, as well as help with research agreements and trade deals which can give a great benefit to science and money generation. An alternative to this would be making an empire a vassal.
2 Auto Resolving Battles
The battles that can be undertaken in Humankind present a unique change from the Civilization games. This can allow for better outcomes in battle which otherwise would be impossible if the battle were auto resolved.
Auto-battle has a tendency to favor AI in battles, making some situations seem more difficult than they are. Due to this, players should always try to fight battles manually, as they stand a better chance of winning - especially since these battles don't take too much town to fight.
1 Not Managing Population
Population management is a recurring theme among all real-time strategy games of this scale, allowing players control over the output of each city. Players can assign population to each of the four FIMS resources, as a specialist, to generate more of that resource.
These specialists can give huge boosts to resource yields after technologies have been researched, policies have been enacted and various projects have been constructed. Additionally, certain cultures can give benefits to specialists and FIMS production related to them.