Some similar grand strategy games like the Total War series or Paradox productions like Crusader Kings have a single map for a single consistent experience where challenges can be balanced. That has its own niche (typically one without multiplayer). And these games are about challenge if Humankind was simply about development it would be a city-builder. It’s the balance between challenge and freedom. I’m not talking about a gun being overpowered in multiplayer, either. Playing a 4X often means playing a meta-game of figuring out which options unlock an actually enjoyable experience - if there even is one. All these choices tie in together getting any single one wrong can ruin the whole experience. Too many continents and islands, and the campaign will rely on whether the game’s naval movement and combat are any good (a major risk!) but playing on a single Pangaea-like continent makes naval cultures irrelevant. In which case your game’s over almost instantly. Difficulty has the same issues - if there’s a severely limited set of resources, and the AI is buffed at the start of the game, then they’ll have those resources regardless on a smaller map. Make it too big and there isn’t enough pressure to provide urgency. Make the world too small and you’re forced to instantly race to the good stuff on the map alongside your competitors. Questions like those form the combination lock I mentioned. How big is that world? How quickly does your city-state progress through time to become a nation-state and an empire? What kind of world is it? How many competitors do you have? And assuming that you, the player, are smarter than your computer opponents, what level of advantage should you give them? That process introduces justifiable questions, which are options presented to players at the start of each new game. In space-based 4X games like Stellaris or Endless Space, you start with a planet just discovering interstellar flight before becoming a galaxy-spanning empire in a fantasy 4X like Master of Magic, you take a village wizard and have her become the overlord of a fantasy land and in a historical 4X like Civilization or Humankind, you start with a single tribe that builds a city-state that takes over the entire world throughout the course of human history. To take a step back and explain: The 4X is built on the idea of taking something small and building it up to dominate the entirety of the game’s setting. But it also, like Civ and like the genre increasingly, presents a combination lock to be solved before you actually get to that point As such it has a lot of great ideas and reasons to recommend it. Amplitude’s new entry into the genre, Humankind, is a direct competitor for the Civilization crown. But it’s also how one of the most prominent niches in strategy games, the 4X - “games like Civilization” as shorthand but eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate if you’re fancy - has come to operate. It doesn’t tell you which parts of the combination you got wrong until then, either, and only provides vague clues as to which part of the lock is most important. Oh, and you won’t find out if you actually solved it until you start the campaign and play for hours - two or six or 20. If you can just solve it, you’ll have a good time! If you don’t, however, you never will. You load it up, check out the intro, press start on a new game, and… There’s a combination lock to start the game. GAME HUMANKIND FULLIt costs full price, but has everything you want and you’ve heard good things, so you’re going for it. Imagine you go and pick up the hottest new game one day.
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