izigame.me

Score: 9/10
(My Civ VI score: 5/10)
* WONDER MECHANICS
Simply wonderful!
One of the best features of Humankind is the two steps mechanics to CLAIM and then BUILD World Wonders. It also allows the Wonder to be built by the whole empire, as a Shared Project, which makes perfect sense. I cannot praise this enough!
I've been playing Civilization since the very first version, back in 1991, and the most frustrating thing about Civ was always the Wonder building system. In Civ, its ALL or NOTHING.
Amplitude Studios did their homework well and came up with a new system, which is fair and realistic.
For "builder" players like myself this feature alone makes Humankind worth buying and playing. :-)
* COMBAT
The combat mechanics is simply great! They mix the advantages of manual strategy with automatic strategy in three ways: Fully automatic, semi-automatic and fully manual modes. What else could you ask for?
Besides that, combat takes into consideration the height of the battle ground and the AI is actually very good in tactical combat. They often surprise me with their deployment.
This strategic combat type was never implemented in any Civ-like game that I know of, but it makes the battle more realistic and much more strategic. I never liked combat that much in Civ, but I was excited to try this system to the full in Humankind and I quite like it.
Another good thing is that your units are able to retreat from an unwanted battle or one with a possible defeat. Even this was done in a realistic and pondered way, because you cannot do it two times in a row with the same unit and you must have accessible terrain where your unit may go to run away. Again, this makes perfect sense and is well balanced.

* 6 ERAS AND 6 CULTURES
Being able to choose a different culture with a new set of skills and abilities, makes perfect sense and mimics how humans actually evolved through the ages.
Everybody that played Civilization had to stand before a ridiculous situation of facing an old civ (e.g. Ancient Egypt, Grece, Rome, Aztec) with the modernized Americans or Germans.
This huge change in mechanics is an historical achievement in this type of games.
My congratulations go to Amplitude Studios. The proof that this was (and is) the way to go, is that the developers of CIV VII already made it their main feature. ;-)

* START OF GAME IN A PRE-ERA: The Neolithic
The way we start the game is perfect! That is exactly how it should be done.
In civilization you can choose a place to start but most of the times you have to choose a tile in the first turn, without knowing anything around. That may be disastrous in the long term and was one the major reasons why I quit many games of civilization after having spent a few hours and played for 60 to 100 turns. All because your very first city was not on the best spot, OR because you lost 2 turns finding the best spot, you would then lose the ability to build important and critical Wonders, which would ultimately kill your long term strategy.
This no longer happens with Humankind. Since you start as a group of wanderers (as in real life hunter gatherers) you can start raising population with food from wild animals and at the same time search the surroundings for the best spots for your home capital city.
RELOCATION OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE CENTRE OF TERRITORIES
Apart from this, there is also a huge and meaningful option: before creating a city you need to claim a territory. The main tile of that territory, around which food and production will be gathered, may be changed as many times as you need, before it is evolved into a city, or simply attached into an existing one.
Again, this avoids many frustrations and is a lot more realistic, because that's exactly how things happen in real life.
DISTRICTS AND INFRASTRUCTURES
In Humankind a District is basically a building than you use to increase the yield of certain resources, such as Food or Industry (Production in Civ).
It makes a lot more sense than the awful idea that designers of Civ VI had, which made me dislike a Civ version for the first time ever!
* CITY LIMITS
Territories and Outposts make the evolution of cities much more interesting, flexible and realistic.
The City Cap limit that is implemented in the game allows players to create only a certain number of cities without an Influence penalty.

* WAR UNITS
Each military unit consumes Population to be raised, which again makes perfect sense since it's how it happens in real life.
It also forces the player to think strategically when going to war and raising armies because you must have population, not just units.
* FAME POINTS
Although points had always been in Civilization, they were calculated in obscure ways that I never truly understood, since v1, and you could only know them at the end of the game, so they never influenced the gameplay at all, being just a kind of side effect of your gameplay.
THINGS THAT NEED IMPROVEMENT
* The AI is very poor in almost all situations, except in tactical combat, where it is very good.
Most Civs seem not to have a specific goal and strategy for how to win the game and so it's very easy to beat them after learning how to play the game.
* The graphics in the game are good, but the 3D Avatars are simply awful and should be improved.
* You have to pick 6 cultures in a game, so if you play with 10 civs (like I usually do) there should be at least 60 cultures available, and preferably a lot more than that, but there aren't.
I end up using only one or two different cultures, in each era, most of the times I played, because there are not many different options to go the same path.
UNBALANCED WONDERS
Some are too powerful (e.g. Machu Picchu) but most are too weak or are of little use for most game strategies.
Besides the cost to claim them raises exponentially, and it is almost impossible to build more than 10 Wonders in a single game, which is a shame.
I think there should be more Wonders with different effects and more balanced.
* DIPLOMACY (on DLC)
Most of the Diplomatic features are only useful to the loosing players. So, unless you are a beginner being beaten by the AI, those traits will not benefit you at all, but instead will benefit your opponents, which makes little sense to me.
Besides that, the Diplomat stars (only in expansion) are extremely difficult to get in large quantities like it is usually required in every Age.
Diplomacy in general is weakly implemented and needs a huge rework. Civilization is a lot better than Humankind in that regard.
CONCLUSION
Humankind was pioneer in many regards, and that brought difficulties for civ players, like myself. But after understanding the game, I have no doubt that it is much better than any previous Civilization version. And the proof of it, is that Civilization VII, which is just about to be released, implemented almost all of the major new mechanics that Humankind created.
So my congrats go to Amplitude Studios. Please don't quit Humankind, because I'm still going to keep playing it. Please launch more Culture Packs and do a rework of the Diplomacy.