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Humankind - 4X turn-based historical strategy title from Amplitude Studios, update: Cultures of Africa/Latin America, Console Pre-Order trailers


Commissar SFLUFAN

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Humankind is Sega’s innovative new challenger to Civilization (Polygon)

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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.

 

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Several new hands-on previews today

 

Humankind’s big ideas work even better in practice (PCGamesN)

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One would expect technical and balance issues at pre-alpha stage, of course, but a concern that might remain is that Amplitude’s games, despite being generally brilliant, have always struck me as a little cold. Humankind is the same. It looks terrific – its map and artwork are both gorgeous – but it’s polished, clinical competence, with a lack of flair and joy: there’s no sense of ceremony, no little construction movie, when I manage to build the Temple of Artemis, and no Sean Bean quoting Monty Python when I discover new technologies. It’s not fatal, but it’s something I do miss from Civ. Hopefully when diplomacy is added and we get to see our evolving avatars chatting with everyone else, we’ll see a little more soul creep in.

 

In every other respect though, I’m hugely excited for Humankind. All those clever ideas that were teased at the announcement are, if anything, revealed to be even smarter in practice.

 

 

Hands-on preview: Humankind is an open ended 4X that lets you build civilisations your way (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

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After a year of speculation, I’ve finally had a chance to play Humankind, Amplitude Studios’ much-anticipated competitor to the Civilization series, and while I only got to play through the very first era of the game on a single map, I can say for sure we’ve definitely got a contender here. I’m hesitant to say how strong a contender until I’ve seen more of the game, since I think Humankind’s brand of satisfaction is going to lean heavily on the way the outcomes of your decisions stack across thousands of simulated years. But the fact that I could see, even in the early game, how the calls I made might have ramifications for centuries to come, was a promising sign.

 

 

 

Humankind's Cultural Melting Pot Is The "Natural Evolution" Of Amplitude Studios (USgamer)

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The point is that Humankind has a firm core, but the rest of the game is still evolving. Like the cultural system that underpins the game, Amplitude is looking to get feedback from players and shift the direction of the game as needed. That focus on change and evolution is how Humankind will make its mark on 4X history, especially with the recent Civilization 6 Frontier Pass and upcoming competitors like Old World and Crusader Kings 3. As someone who absolutely loved Endless Legend, I can't wait to spend more time with Humankind and see what kind of melting pot I'll end up with.

 

 

Humankind might solve the historical 4X's biggest problem: culture (Eurogamer)

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It's not perfect - certainly not yet, as the build I played was still waiting for a number of pretty crucial systems to be finalised, or even implemented at all - but what makes Humankind immediately stand out from its illustrious cousin is its approach to one of the genre's biggest frustrations. Humankind is trying to solve the problem of culture, that weird and conceptually squishy amalgamation which feels essential to any game about human history but has, so far, proved to be a bane of the Civilization series and others like it - and the team at Amplitude's Parisian studio might actually be onto something.

 

 

Humankind hands-on: Civ’s new rival is complex, clever, and more unique than you might think (VG 24/7)

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While the surface resemblance to Civ might work as a helpful shorthand to help sell the game, it’s clear that there’s a lot more going on here. This is no simple clone. When I first saw it at Gamescom 2019, it was pitched as a Civ killer, the first true rival 2K’s series has had in years, coming from the creator of other successful 4X games and put out by the publisher behind Total War. That’s a powerful elevator pitch, but now it’s clear Humankind has the in-game framework to match – it just has to be shaped and defined before final release.

 

 

 

Making History In Humankind Makes 4X Approachable (Gamespot)

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The nature of 4X strategy games can often make them unwieldy and hard to understand for players who aren't immersed in the genre. Part of that is the scope--in most 4X games (the genre name standing for explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate), you're growing and managing a whole civilization, often throughout its entire history. That's your mandate in Amplitude Studios' upcoming title Humankind, too, but one of the more remarkable things about the game is how it guides you through the process of creating a civilization that'll make its mark on history.

 

 

Humankind Hands-On: This 4X Lets You Tell the Unique Story of Your Civilization (IGN)

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The story of humanity stretches back quite a bit further than the first settled, agricultural societies. And portraying the nomadic life of many neolithic hunter-gatherers as part of that story is only the first of many ways Humankind is looking to innovate on the time-tested march-through-history 4X formula popularized by Sid Meier’s Civilization. Starting out, every civilization in Humankind is merely a roving band of units that must forage and hunt for food to bolster their numbers. A wooly mammoth represents a major challenge as you roam this wild and untamed world, until you’ve grown your population or discovered enough scientific insights to progress to the Ancient Era.

 

 

Humankind is a slick, speedy historical 4X strategy game about getting famous (PC Gamer)

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You start Humankind as a nomadic tribe in the Neolithic era. The gorgeous wilderness around you holds little pockets of treasure—a resource deposit here, a volcanic pool there. As I move my tribe across the map I'm rewarded for discovering the Great Blue Hole, a circular underwater ravine that hosts "sharks to gobies to angelfish". I'm already discovering wonders of the world, and I haven't even built my first settlement yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Humankind - 4X turn-based historical strategy title from Amplitude Studios (Endless Space/Endless Legend), update: release postponed to 17 August 2021 to implement player feedback changes

Fine by me! This is one game that I want to be awesome at launch. Civ has been stagnating, and this looks to have some awesome innovation that could challenge it. I especially like that the end-game goal isn't conquest, it's the fame score (which can be accomplished by conquest, if you want). I love early-mid game Civ, and I despise late-game.

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2 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

Fine by me! This is one game that I want to be awesome at launch. Civ has been stagnating, and this looks to have some awesome innovation that could challenge it. I especially like that the end-game goal isn't conquest, it's the fame score (which can be accomplished by conquest, if you want). I love early-mid game Civ, and I despise late-game.

 

Civ died for me when I found Paradox.

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2 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

Fine by me! This is one game that I want to be awesome at launch. Civ has been stagnating, and this looks to have some awesome innovation that could challenge it. I especially like that the end-game goal isn't conquest, it's the fame score (which can be accomplished by conquest, if you want). I love early-mid game Civ, and I despise late-game.

 

Yeah, the late game is lame because the AI is so shitty that as you try to dial in the right difficulty level, you basically go directly from steamrolling the AI in the late game to being steamrolled by the AI in the late game. I've had games that have stayed competitive into the modern era but they're few and far between.

 

Like, the only one that sticks out in my memory is a Civ V game where I was Venice and either I didn't have oil or didn't have flight, and Spain had flight, so there was a long war with a lot of back-and-forth with having to let them roll forward out of airplane range and trying to flood anti-air infantry. I think then I eventually got oil but not flight an there were some borders cities that were basically flattened as tanks went back and forth conquering them.  But usually it turns into nuking every single enemy city to get the domination victory, or getting nuked into oblivion by the AI.

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1 hour ago, Jason said:

 

Yeah, the late game is lame because the AI is so shitty that as you try to dial in the right difficulty level, you basically go directly from steamrolling the AI in the late game to being steamrolled by the AI in the late game. I've had games that have stayed competitive into the modern era but they're few and far between.

 

Like, the only one that sticks out in my memory is a Civ V game where I was Venice and either I didn't have oil or didn't have flight, and Spain had flight, so there was a long war with a lot of back-and-forth with having to let them roll forward out of airplane range and trying to flood anti-air infantry. I think then I eventually got oil but not flight an there were some borders cities that were basically flattened as tanks went back and forth conquering them.  But usually it turns into nuking every single enemy city to get the domination victory, or getting nuked into oblivion by the AI.

 

Just comes a time when you need to move on to MP. 

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27 minutes ago, Zaku3 said:

Just comes a time when you need to move on to MP. 

 

The problem there of course is, one, finding enough people to do multiplayer with, and two, actually getting to finish the game. If you don't finish the game on the first sitting then good luck getting the exact same group of people together again to finish it.

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36 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

The problem there of course is, one, finding enough people to do multiplayer with, and two, actually getting to finish the game. If you don't finish the game on the first sitting then good luck getting the exact same group of people together again to finish it.

 

How many players do you feel is enough? A few of the discords I am in do a decent job with EU4. Though im fairness it's a bunch of HS kids with mad free time. They do try to find replacements if one of the majors can't play.

 

It is a concern though. I think that is a benefit of HOI4 and Vic2 since the time frame is smaller it's easier to finish the game in 1 sitting. The HOI4 games I play last about 6-8 hours. Though the mods I play remove the Spanish Civil War and China so the focus is purely on WW2.

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It doesn't outdo the king of one-more-turn grand strategy in every respect, but the challenger is looking smart.

 

 

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WWW.ROCKPAPERSHOTGUN.COM

Upcoming 4X blockbuster Humankind features some masterful systems design. But at least for now, balance issues mean it's a bit of a min-maxers paradise.

 

 

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WWW.PCGAMESN.COM

It has the systems to surpass Civilization, but 'strategy snowballing syndrome' is severe in the extreme

 

 

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METRO.CO.UK

GameCentral gets to play Sega’s answer to Civilization and speaks to the developers about the moral quandaries of 4X strategy games.

 

 

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SCREENRANT.COM

Build a civilization from nomadic tribe to empire.

 

 

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SCREENRANT.COM

Build a civilization from nomadic tribe to empire.

 

 

Humankind has that special something (Eurogamer)

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There's something kind of special about playing a new 4X game, especially a historical one. These games are about playing through history - all of history - which means that as much as they're about expanding, exploiting and the rest, they're really about discovery. This is the game: discovering your way through time, via The Wheel, or Irrigation, or Thermonuclear Weapons or whatever, until you reach the end of history and that game ends. And you do this over and over again, until you can fly your little towns through the neolithic age, a couple wars and a dalliance or two with Authoritarianism right the way to the future without really thinking about it.

 

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Humankind - 4X turn-based historical strategy title from Amplitude Studios (Endless Space/Endless Legend), update: multiple new preview articles posted
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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Humankind - 4X turn-based historical strategy title from Amplitude Studios (Endless Space/Endless Legend), update: "Official Closed Beta" trailer
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Amplitude Studios said the anti-tamper tech "isn't quite up to snuff," and the issues can't be fixed in time for release.

 


 

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Today, Humankind developer Amplitude Studios announced that it's making some Denuvo-related adjustments of its own, and of a rather more serious sort: The anti-tampering tech will be removed from the game entirely before it launches.

 

"We’ve been working on this game for more than 4 years now and personally it’s been my dream project for 25 years," Amplitude Studios head Romain de Waubert de Genlis wrote on the Humankind forums. "We’ve been one of the most wishlisted games on Steam this year, so we know we’re going to be targeted by pirates, more so than any of our previous games. If Denuvo can hold off a cracked version, even just for a few days, that can already really help us to protect our launch."

 

"That being said, our priority is always the best possible experience for the players who buy our games and support us. Denuvo should never impact player performance, and we don’t want to sacrifice quality for you guys."

 

 

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  • Commissar SFLUFAN changed the title to Humankind - 4X turn-based historical strategy title from Amplitude Studios (Endless Space/Endless Legend), update: Denuvo removed ahead of launch to avoid performance problems

Reading that made me feel bad for the devs. Just wanting a few days of sales not impacted by piracy is so little to ask for, and it's a shame that is such a difficult decision to get the game working the way the want it, but likely have to suffer fewer sales.

 

I am looking forward to trying this. I can easily see sinking a hundred hours into this. More if it really captures me.

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7 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

Reading that made me feel bad for the devs. Just wanting a few days of sales not impacted by piracy is so little to ask for, and it's a shame that is such a difficult decision to get the game working the way the want it, but likely have to suffer fewer sales.

 

I am looking forward to trying this. I can easily see sinking a hundred hours into this. More if it really captures me.

 

Did you check out Old World by any chance?

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From one of the articles Wade posted back in June:

 

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You don't have to turn every outpost into a city, though. This is another place where Humankind improves on Civilization, in my view. In Civ, if you want a strategic resource that isn't near one of your cities, your best course of action is to send a settler over there to found a new city. Humankind allows you to attach an outpost to a city, expanding its reach without creating another building queue to manage. It's a nice solution.

 

Civ III did in fact have this.

 

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Outposts are tile improvements in Civilization III. Outposts eliminate fog of war. To construct an Outpost, move a worker to any land tile in neutral or owned territory and select the Build Outpost unit action. Construction of the Outpost consumes the worker. The range of vision for the Outpost is 2 tiles on flat terrain, 3 on hills and 4 on mountains. Outposts can only be used by the player who created them. If an Outpost...

 

They also connected resources outside of your empire. IIRC you had to have a land connection back to a city you owned via road or rail (don't remember if water connections worked) and you'd have to defend the land connection to keep it from getting severed by barbarians or other powers. It was a fun bit of realism.

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I was interested in Old World until reviews said what I'd feared—it has improvements on the genre, but actually goes into the more complex direction (giving you more control over micro things). I am interested in Humankind because it seems like it's simplifying a lot of things in terms of management, streamlining a lot of annoying things from Civ.

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