According to the (surprisingly large) marketing campaign of the game, we as a player can rewrite the History of Humankind. That’s awesome, on paper at least. Because sadly the only stories that we can tell in this game are War Stories. It seems that all the development budget of this 4X went to “eXterminate”, and it shows: tactical combats are very good and nice to watch, terrain has a major importance and there is a huge amount of common and unique units. However, all the other aspects of the game feel barebone and are only there to support war efforts.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but apart from War there is no other way to dominate the other Empires. I’m not talking about the Fame system, which is in my opinion not very engaging, but rather actual gameplay mechanics that would allow you to actually roleplay something else than a Warlord. I’m talking about gameplay mechanics that let you leverage economic, cultural, scientific and religious power to dominate the world “peacefully”.

Some frustrating examples:

- We cannot customize deals or use influence to force treaties or even exchange technologies/ressources/stuff.

- Trading is painfully basic, and no long lasting and strong economic relationships can be built over time.

- Science only serves to unlock new units and buildings (aka FIMS boosters) to help us build armies faster.

- Civics offer very few interesting cultural choices, and in the end it only affects FIMS and thus our capacity to wage War.

- Religion only gives passive bonuses oriented towards more FIMS or stability.

- Faith and Sphere of Influence do not allow to peacefully “convert” cities.

- No denunciations or impact of our behavior on how other Empires see us.

In the absence of all these mechanics, yet offered by ES2 or CivVI at launch for example, nothing emphasize/reward/allow pacifist gameplay. Worse still, nothing prevents Empires to declare War all the time in order to dominate the world.

Building upon Endless Legend, Humankind proposes some interesting innovations regarding Civilizations and War. I would have loved real innovations for Research, Politics and Diplomacy to shake these old 4X standards that feel very flat in our modern gaming era.

In my opinion tactical fights fall a bit flat compared to games like Age of Wonders or even it's own pre-decessor Endless Legends. There need to be more diverse units traits and maybe even some unit skills. Currently everything goes over some minor modifiers on a single stat "combat strength".

I did one normal game where I did a bit of everything and game purely defensive building a single mega city. The last game was considerable shorter as there was nothing to do apart from queuing up a whole bunch of buildings and pressing "end turn". So I would agree that there are currently very few choices for playing a peaceful game.

Yes, i also felt like that, especially when i play on Civilization or Humankind difficulty. If you don`t focus on war and units all game you have 0 chance to win (in Humankind difficulty in closed beta compared to Victor and Lucy even with war you can`t win). Basically everything else does not matter and if you don`t go war you die. I was hoping for options to win on hard and very hard by other means other than war. 

Also i`m so scared for August release as the Open Beta compared to Victor and Lucy introduced game crashes to windows, save games don`t load and a lot of other bugs. I was hoping it would get better than Victor and it did in some aspects but in those basic ones it got worse. Also you can`t see what cities build (and the highlighted colored districts to easily distinguish them) from zoom out view, although you could see these stuff in Victor OpenDev. 

It seems Humankind is a downgraded Endless Legend without unique races/traits/skills (just 1 unit is different per Civ by skin and description but in play is mostly the same, far away from the plethora of skills and uniqueness of EL) , with neutrals that are also downgraded from Endless Legend with no bonuses and stuff to assimilate, weird pace tech is behind, when on peace there is just building to do that never gets done and no peace time stuff to do just end turn mostly, no cool quests, no incentive to use boats like in EL, no weather/seasons system, you can`t play like in EL from zoom out view as not all the info is available and you have to keep zooming in, city filters are not remembered and you have to keep filter items again and again, no pin/color code system to plan for future district placement and get best bonuses from them, BUT it has great music, great graphics and a cool idea. Hope it gets worked on and it is launched after is ready and not in august. I hope it`s not the first fail of Amplitude as i love their games. Please make this game as good as the others

Vassals should not give merchant stars. Conquest of cities should not give builder and agarian stars. Right now warfare is very powerful, building units make your cities grow faster since units don't eat food and reducing population in cities mean faster growth as farmers can't keep up with food consumption, thus you gain agarian stars quicker by spamming military which you can use to conquer cities and get all kinds of era stars and simply snowball far ahead everyone else.

Some suggestions:

• Give combat bonuses to the defender/penalties to the aggressor in the war, more in a surprise war.
• Make it cost influence to declare war and annex cities.
• Agarian stars should only count pops grow in your own cities and maybe not count military units, builder stars should only count districts built under your rule.
• Vassals should not give progress to merchant stars.
• Add a coalition system or something to counter huge powerful warmongers.