TLDR - Playing through humankind feels formulaic and several major systems are not fun or interesting to interact with, namely religion and civics. This is basically me complaining about religion and civics.

Unfortunately my games of Humankind have started to feel repetitive, once I found a formula for winning it was hard to stray from that formula, as it was so simple and the game provides you with very low options. For me, the formula to win, on HK difficulty, is stay in Ancient a little longer, save influence to get a second city in Ancient as fast as possible, then build two or three stacks of units and annex your neighbors capital. Rush Settlers and patronage and never look back. The games usually end with me queuing up all end game techs to be researched and half heartedly launching nukes while I wait for the end screen, having pulled away in fame and economic ability in the early modern era. 

There are numerous factors that make this repeatable and boring. Some, like first turn advantage in combat, I don’t think will ever be fixed. Others, like the power of both the builder and scientist active abilities, patronage, and settlers, are more or less just a question of nerfing them. The final group is a bunch of mechanics I do not think function well in the game, do not warrant interacting with, and are painfully limited. This would include religion, civics, and the city cap.

Religion, I never care about founding a religion in my games. The theoretical benefits of religion are twofold, you gain access to certain buffs at certain tiers of followers, and you gain grievances against certain territories when said territory follows your religion. This latter benefit I agree is theoretically useful, however in practice it is very easy to just have cultural dominance give you these grievances, or brute force your way to war simply by asking the AI to sign a treaty they will not sign and using that to boost your war support as much as possible. The former bonus, that of the religious tenets. Religious tenants are actually a bit impactful when you first start unlocking them, sure some are better than others, but it is always nice to unlock them, unlike civics. However religious tenants do not incentivize you to spread your religion at all. They are all flat bonuses, nothing per population (like they were in the opendevs) so there's no reason for you to care about faith production, beyond getting tenants a bit faster. Even if you fail to produce enough faith to the point you convert to a neighbors religion, well guess what, you just wind up getting those tenants even faster, and even if the AI gets to pick them for you, you are probably at a point in the game where the bonus actually isn’t all that impactful. Not only that, faith spread is incredibly binary, either you convert fast, or you get converted fast. In any case, this all leads up to a system in which you don’t really care about producing faith after a certain point  in the game (rendering a ton of wonders and cultural EQs useless.) Even if you did care, the act of spreading religion is just diffusion, there's just painful little interaction between you in the game. So yea there's a religion system in the game, but the player interacts with it a handful of times across the hundreds ofd turns a game takes. I mean hell, even if you wanted to roleplay a bit, the AI never changes their religion into the historical religions in the game, you're running around with tanks and everyone is still worshiping Olmec polytheism or Egyptian shamanism.

Civics, it seems to me, are analogous to empire plans in Endless Legend, laws in Endless Space 2, and Social Policies in Civ V. You spend a resource to pick bonuses and rollplay with the qualities of your empire. The bonuses are often mutually exclusive and lead to different strategies. Unfortunately civics suck. From how you unlock them by hoping you meet the requirements or  having esoteric knowledge memorized because the game will not tell you, to their astronomical influence cost and negligible economic effect, civics are trash. Granted, there are a couple civics like Founding Myths, Army Composition, and Leadership, that you unlock at the beginning of the game that are important, unfortunately for two of these three they are important because there is a clear good answer, and as such you always pick the same option over and over again. Picking the second option isn't interesting, like going liberty in civ v, its just bad. Even with army com[position you typically pick the option that bumps your ideology towards homeland, cause the idlogy system also sucks, and two of the axes have clear superior options. Anyways, once you have finished up choosing your first couple civics, you're left with a ton of civics that just have negligible impact and inane influence costs. Why does the cost scale exponentially with both the number of previously enacted civics and number of eras? This is one of those cases where you can tell that Influence became a spendable resource late in development, and the influence economy just doesn't make sense. Even if you bother picking these civics, the most notable thing they do is increase the scaling of the next civic. Wow +2 Influence on main plaza, +1 Science +1 Gold on commons quarter, -50% hire army cost. All trash, and the only reason to choose on the vast majority of civics is to push your ideology bar in a specific direction, which you might as well do with events. Not only are the government civics hard to unlock, they are useless. Different governments should be powerful and enable radically different strategies so that one can have a monarchy game, and then want to play the game again to choose a different government. Its that replayability that is so lacking from the game right now, that is the result of these systems that don’t add up, and aren’t fun or interesting to interact with.

I enjoy playing the game, and am going to continue playing it after this upcoming patch. But I really hope that these systems get looked at. The systems don’t work well, spreading religion isn’t fun or rewarding, unlocking civics is frustrating, and civics cost too much influence for the bonuses they give. 

What actually happens if you take +2 CS tenant and later reach 0 followers in your religion? Do you loose the bonus?

blackwell wrote:
Civics, it seems to me, are analogous to empire plans in Endless Legend, laws in Endless Space 2, and Social Policies in Civ V. You spend a resource to pick bonuses and rollplay with the qualities of your empire. The bonuses are often mutually exclusive and lead to different strategies. Unfortunately civics suck.

As it is for religion, laws and civcs can have a great impact early on. But since they are just bonuses, unless they have a mechanical impact, they just do not matter as much as they could. Altough you input has interesting nuances, I feel like I have already read it many times.

Yea some.of the religious tenants are good. And some of the late game civics are good. However, either I never unlock the late game civics, don't have the influence to purchase them even if I unlock them, or really while an extra job slot is good, at the point you get it you have won the game 20 turns ago and are just trying to finish the tech tree.

I do pick other cultures. Cultures are the best part of the game, and the art and design of the cities is great. But really, they don't play that differently or lead to variation. The biggest varaitaion is picking Huns or Mongols, or maybe a culture with a really good EU like tuetons. After that you are basically picking a culture to get a boost in a specific yield. I've gone Zulu before when I could have gone Persians, and while I guess there are some niche strategies you could do with conscripts, you end up doing what you could have done easier with Persians 

I must not understand the religious game. I tried another game to focus on religion and maybe examine my thoughts on it, so I built holy sites as fast as possible, built stonehenge, and built the aksumite EQ. I still got converted by my neighbor, who snowballed by picking all the agrarian civs. If I can't spread my religion with that much investment, why invest at all when I could just switch to the religion they have and get all the benefits 

I think civics are much more in need of work than religion.

The religion system is very hands-off in its design, but I think that's a feature and not a bug overall. I don't want a religious mini-game a la Civ, personally. Religion gives you some useful grievances and tenet bonuses. It doesn't dominate the game but I think it serves a useful purpose. I'd like to see religion more closely tied to stability myself, but I think that's low on the priority list compared to all the other possible improvements in HK right now.

Civics are a different story entirely. Most of the civics in the ancient and classical eras provide relatively powerful effects and trade-offs that make the investment of relatively scarce influence an interesting choice. But from the medieval era onward, most civics are pitifully underpowered. You take them only if you have influence to burn after expanding territory and claiming wonders. Only a handful are meaningful and it's not hard to budget some influence for those. The government civics - which are especially hard to unlock - are particular offenders here. I've yet to take any of them. This in turn drastically devalues aesthete cultures and "tall" approaches in general. The devs have indicated that the forthcoming patch will try to address underpowered civics, so we'll see how that goes.

I agree that a lot of civics could use some “game changing” potential (some have it, like the inherited land civic)…but all of them really need it.  Religion is largely ok, there just needs to be a little more interaction (use faith to do things instead of just pure pressure)

I never have enough influence to pay civics. It's really a discussion for rich guys. :-)

I don't like religion stop on level 4. It's annoying to build so "faith" stuff just for that. 

I would like to see level 5, 6, etc...

I like it as is. I do not have to worry about it was it finished and unlike Civ it does not become annoying, unless the AI starts converting my cities very frustrating. :)

I agree with OP.

The devs seem pretty lost, a lot of "choices" in this game make no sense at all, like one option is so much stronger than the other and it's imbalanced, but they don't think it's a problem apparently.

Like they fixed shamanism vs polytheism (how did that ever make it past testing?) but they literally did nothing for something as absurdly weak as Americans.

Then you look at the Civics system and it's the same -- most civics are total garbage and the ones that you take, there is no consideration. One choice is 100000% better than the other. It's like offering someone $1M straight up lump sum or 1 dollar a month for the rest of their lives. That's how imbalanced this game is.

It is very disapointing when this game has so much potential but it's just unplayable right now. This game could have slayed Civ.