Culture shuffle system prevents mid-game slog
You can win by being the most famous farmer, if you ♓want
Narrative events & civ🀅ics create unique playthroughs
AI pathfinding is sometimes easily distracted
Easy t🎶o hit a fame victory w❀ithout reaching final era
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Humankind strips away the victory conditions of other 4X games and replaces them with a single metric: fame. While this isn’t wholly unique – it functions on a similar level to Civilization’s score victories – it brings the ‘backup victory’ front and center. No longer totting up the interesting things you did as a sort of tie-breaker, the interesting things you do are the point. Charting a new continent? Fame. First to discover writing? Fame. Absolute best at farming? Fame.
Platform(s): PC, Google Stadia
Release date: August 17, 2021
Developer: Amplitude Studios
Publisher: SEGA
You start the game off in the Neolithic era, without any kind of culture yet. Your culture defines who you are in any given era – from Ancient Egyptian builders to British expansionists – but that can't develop in a vacuum, so your first job is to get the lay of the land. As you explore, hunt, and fight other settlers, you accumulate the influence needed to settle your first outposts, which will eventually become your sprawling cities. Hitting certain milestones garners you era stars (which in turn earn fame), and it 𒆙only takes one before you can pick your first culture and move on to the Ancient Era – or lurk in the Neolithic Era to keep picking up stars, and fame.
Each culture has a key strength - like expansion, agrarianism, or science - and getting era stars for that particular strength earn you an inch more fame than the other kinds of achievements. So for the Ancient Olmecs, who I first played as, their strength was aesthete - with an emphasis on diplomacy and influence. That strength came with a skill I could use to bring a territory of mine back under my sphere of influence by pushing works of art, potentially flipping nearby territories too. It felt so sneaky the first time I realized what had happened, but when you get another empire’s territory fully under your sphere of influence, it pings a grievance on your behalf, so you can say: “hey, I think those look like my people, 🧔not yours – guess we should we renegotiate those b💟orders, huh?”
I’ve never been one for the extermination part of 4X games, so these more diplomatic forms of expanding territory delight me. You can’t play quite the long game as you would in a grand strategy, but the transparent cause-and-effect of grievances and demands adds up to a system that just makes sense. When you press a demand, it cuts off trade routes, as well as either side’s ability to improve on treaties or start alliances. If someone is really dependent on access to your iron – well, they should consider not accidentally owning some of what is obviously your land, then.
| Genre | 4X |
