A nicely written, generally positive preview from RPS’s Nate Crowley: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/humankind-preview-hands-on
It sounds like each culture’s bonus is nicely impactful, leading to some meaningful decisions about when to era up. But as I suppose is inevitable in a game with 10⁶ possible culture combinations, the snowball effect (particularly versus the AI) can be extremely powerful. Obviously the game isn’t finished yet and balance patches will continue for some time after release. I wonder how this chimes with people’s experience of the OpenDevs?
This preview build also doesn’t include the end game, on which I think a lot is riding in terms of bringing the game and its familiar 4X ever-increasing numbers to a satisfying conclusion.
Some quotes from the article:
It sounds like each culture’s bonus is nicely impactful, leading to some meaningful decisions about when to era up. But as I suppose is inevitable in a game with 10⁶ possible culture combinations, the snowball effect (particularly versus the AI) can be extremely powerful. Obviously the game isn’t finished yet and balance patches will continue for some time after release. I wonder how this chimes with people’s experience of the OpenDevs?
This preview build also doesn’t include the end game, on which I think a lot is riding in terms of bringing the game and its familiar 4X ever-increasing numbers to a satisfying conclusion.
Some quotes from the article:
Rock Paper Shotgun said:By forcing you to assess risk and rewards situationally, and constantly shaking up the context you're working in, Humankind does a great job of avoiding no-brainer choices. There are no obvious beelines, and you're often incentivised to take picks which you haven't tried before, because some new factor in play makes them a better deal.
But I can't help but wonder if I'd keep feeling this way after a few more weeks with Humankind, and the chance to discover some truly broken synergies. Already, I've found one tactic that I can honestly never bring myself to shy away from, since it's never done anything less than turned me into a god: the self-replicating caveman swarm.
Rock Paper Shotgun said:...even in Humankind's more circumstantial decisions, there are often options whose outcomes just put you too far ahead in the numbers game not to consider. To whit, I rarely chose the culture picks I actually fancied the look of during my playthroughs, since there was almost always one culture offering such a towering synergy that I couldn't turn it down. Equally, mass-producing holy sites on some godforsaken tundra purely for stability bonuses didn't feel convincingly... religious. My civic picks, meanwhile, were decided entirely by what would move me towards the greatest bonus stacks, with nothing to do with what I actually wanted my culture to be like.
This doesn't make Humankind a bad strategy game. But it's a shame, as it completely undermines the "tell the story of your own civilisation" premise which is so wonderfully supported by artistic and narrative direction. You're not really telling any story - you're trying to increase a score by any means necessary, because that's how you get the most happy-brain-feel.