This is something ive noticed, starting with the custom characters/persona's, where modifiers and traits cant even be used by the player, and can only be placed into the hands of the ai by someone else, making persona's nothing but a face of the players liking for them, a severe downgrade from the custom nations of previous games.

Another restriction is the victory conditions. Fame in essence is like a glorified score victory, when any of the end conditions are met, the nation with the highest fame wins, in a similar way a player with the highest score wins in other games, and you cant change this, unlike other games where you had multiple victories to activate or deactivate. humankind only gives 1 victory condition, taking away how a player wants to win their game. Infact conditions that are normally considered victories in previous games are called end conditions, meaning you could win a space race, yet still lose the game to someone with more fame.

A 3rd restriction is the new war mechanic, the war mechanic restricts a players choice on what lands/territory to take, do you want to take all the land quickly and suffer penalties or safely take pieces of another nation bit by bit, you arent given that choice in this game, you can only take pieces away. Many players have tried to justify this by saying that this is similar to paradox war mechanic and is more historically accurate, problem with that is, this is not a paradox game, Humankind cant be more farther away from a paradox game, to go into a game made from a entirely different studio expecting paradox mechanics is dubious at best, and while historically, nations have taken pieces out through multiple wars, theres plenty of conflicts where the attacker took the whole of a opponent, the mongol empire come to mind.

another restrictions seems to be less map customization, correct me if im wrong, but didnt ES2 have the ability to control how much randomly generated resources are on the map. From what ive heard, you cant do that in this game.

These restrictions make me worried a bit, because Amplitude has preached before about player choice, about making your own canon/story/universe, yet seems to restrict us more than previous games. Meaning if the game succeeds and these restrictions are still present, what stops them from restricting us even more in future games?