Humankind is overall not a great game. It's kind of fun for the first one or two playthroughs, but then it's just boring. Every game is the same, nothing really matters, and you basically can't lose. Meh. The combat is neat, but it's also kind of too much. Combat in Civilization VI already takes long enough!
Anyway, we're much more likely to see the next game use Unreal Engine than Unity since MMS used Unreal Engine. And Humankind's engine is just Unity, so there's no reason to license anything from Amplitude/Sega.
Humankind is IMO really bad 4X game in almost all aspects
except combat, in which I'd say they went in much better direction than Civ5 - 6. The problems of combat are mainly of the technical rather than conceptual nature:
- Horribly unclear interface and rules
- Too restrictive terrain, with too many cliffs everywhere, forcing way too opressive and frustrating bottlenecks and narrow corridors everywhere. This is actually the problem of the campaign map (as battlefields are based on the campaign map), resulting from too many damn height levels and generating cliffs between all but the smallest height level differences. In the end making maps feel absurdly labyrinthine, restrictive and claustrophobic, especially on the batlefield.
- Too many damn units on too small battlefields, quickly cluttering all space, which is awful when combined with the previous issue. As a result, horrible logistic issues of civ5 - 6 are abstracted away from army's movement across the world, but they are even more frustrating once the actual combat starts. Bonus problem of too many damn units is making battles too damn long and mentally exhausting.
Still, their combat system would have some great advantages, once you gave it decent interface, sane map design, and sensibly balanced, non overwhelming amounts of units. On the campaign level, it allows armies to traverse the world in stacks, so it makes for one click on the campaign map instead of 5 - 10, greatly reducing tedium; reduces turn loading times to the shocking degree; avoids logistical horror, constant traffic jam and visual clutter of dozens of units spamming the campaign map; and last but not least, it is WAAAY easier to make AI capable of offensively threatening human player this way, instead of programming it to drag dozens of stupid individual units across Vietnam of logistics. On the battlefield level, it makes for much more emotional 'big decisive battles' instead of 1UPT vibe of endless skirmishes. It is also conductive to better AI performance, because it separates tactical combat 'framework' from everything else, instead of forcing AI to juggle every individual unit every turn along every economic decision in every city on the planet. No wonder turn times in Civ6 are vastly longer than in HK despite worse graphics.
My dream would be Humankind's combat system reworked to remove of all its feadache and frustration, make its battles as 'clean' and compact and possible (with the optional auto resolution of battles). Simultaneously allowing short but satisfying bursts of tactical challenge and glorious victories when you wanna fight, and as little pain when you don't really wanna (manually) fight. Compared with 1UPT, which
forces you to micromanage a ton of tedious, time - consuming stuff all the time, for
moderately climactic payoff. That's what aggravates me the most in 1upt, I think - as a player who prefers large scale strategy over minutiae of tactical combat, I can't even minimize the amount of time I spend with the combat system. I just
have to individually juggle dozens of units every turn, just to move them across the map, just to fend off endless waves of always chaotic evil nameless barbarians, must manually fight every minor skirmish across the globe once AI wages yet another impotent war against me, etc. In Humankind I can just build few stacks of units, do nothing with them in times of peace and transportation and put them in some place with no traffic jam, and in case of war either auto resolve battles or manually fight them. I respect Humankind's army system for minimizing all this pointless, tedious, time wasting busywork, and at least trying to focus on what should matter - the pure joy of military victory - even if it doesn't quite succeed.
