So I haven't bought or played the game and have only watched a couple of "lets plays", but there's something I'd like to know from those of you who have played it.
From what I've seen, it looks like a lot of the choices you make when building or selecting civics or choosing between cultures or selecting beliefs, is that you're making choices between +x or +y towards this or that yield, right? Like, some extra production here, extra strength on that unique unit there, extra gold income from this culture, extra faith from that civic etc. etc.
Yes, that's one issue I have with it. The game is very transparently just bucket-filling - Civ 6 fell into the same trap for at least its early development. From what I know of the update history of past Amplitude games, this is not likely to change with expansions as this sort of barebones pure-additive approach is just how they design their games, and the systems may not exist to do anything more nuanced.
So my question is... is that a fair assessment? Is Humankind just about choosing which yields to boost and how to boost them? Am I correct in saying that's a major difference between Civ6 and Humankind? Or am I seeing it wrong? I'm genuinely curious about this because it makes me wonder how much flavour and uniqueness the game has, so keen to hear what thoughts you guys have
I don't think Civ 6 departs from this as much as you think, but yes that's exactly the pattern. My problem with the approach is not so much that, it's that there aren't very meaningful tradeoffs and the specific choices to make are usually obvious, and this seems to be by design: for instance you get endless events which are 'choose between extra science for 10 turns (good), a small one-off money payment (irrelevant) or a stability boost (mostly irrelevant). Endless Legend had the same issue. In Civ, doing X usually stops you doing Y or at least slows progress - districts are strongly capped, production is limited and even the fastest production can only produce one thing a turn, city space is limited prompting you to make choices about what to put where that maximise investment. Settlers and workers have limited charges to expend each etc. etc.
In Humankind everything is there for the taking, and resources are largely interchangeable - you can have as many districts producing resources as you want, and buildings that buff them come faster than you can build them early game (and are automatically present in new cities later in the game), both gold and influence can be used to buy a lot of things (and gold has no other use that you're trading this off against) and if you rush-buy things you can make as many as you can afford a turn. Units have a nominal maintenance cost but buildings and districts don't seem to, so again go nuts. Civic choices are reversible for nominal cost (by the mid game you have more influence that you can ever spend). Only civ choice per era is locked. There's no need for settlers or workers, and city placement is all but irrelevant - you can place outposts that expand your workable tiles almost anywhere you want and add those to the city (as with a lot of things there is a nominal cost to stability that rarely has any detectable game effect).
It's all very much Civ-as-sandbox rather than Civ-as-strategy-game (you can do basically whatever you want knowing that you can still win regardless), which is something a lot of people love but it does lack depth and comes across as a bit bland.
how can I maneuver my army to get the Immortals always fighting from higher ground. And it really can’t be overstated how much fun the terrain is. For instance, the hoplites work identically to Civ6, but keeping formation throughout winding cliff allows them to punch through otherwise impenetrable choke points, giving them flavor they don’t get in Civ6.
I've started to appreciate the combat system following some larger battles in the game I finished yesterday. It was pretty late that I learned that high ground increases the range of my gunners, but it's a nice detail.
I suspect, though, that in practice this won't really make any more difference to the outcome of a battle than simply having good terrain placement in Civ VI, where you can also stick hoplites on choke points in hills. It's nicely thematic and feels more Total War than the shoddy 'it's like autoresolving, only you spend three rounds meaninglessly 'roleplaying it' Endless Legend version, but I expect I'd tire of the novelty and go back to autoresolving eventually.
