Conceptually the game is really refreshing and interesting—each era provides an opportunity to further develop a premeditated long-term strategy, or dynamically adapt to the game's situation. In theory, this should lead to matches feeling unpredictably distinct from one another, and therefore prevent the game from getting stale as your experience, knowledge, and skill level increases from playing it. In practice, however, the cultures are too poorly balanced, and, consequentially, not distinct enough for many of these adaptive strategies to occur as they are seemingly intended.

For example, you may pick the Assyrians as your first cultural selection, intending to harass and plunder your neighbor's territories with your military, stealing gold and territory to further your own expansionist agenda in the process. This seems to be the clear design goal of the Assyrians, but they do not excel at it when compared to other cultures with entirely different design goals.

The Harappans, for example, are clearly intended to be a culture which focuses on empire growth and development (traditionally, 4X players might call the Harappans' design that of a passive, “tall” faction, and the Assyrians’ design that of a militaristic, “wide” faction).

The Harappans definitely beat the Assyrians at growth, as they ought to, but building and incorporating new outposts requires influence, and, because influence is generated per population, the Harappans are often better at claiming unsettled territories than the Assyrians. Additionally, military units cost population and either production or gold, all of which the Harappans should quickly outproduce the Assyrians in thanks to their ability to work so many population slots at once. So, when the Assyrians produce their superior unit to gain early dominance, they are crippling the early development of their first city by costing it population and vital early production or gold, to secure territories they don’t yet possess the influence to claim. Meanwhile, the Harappans’ growth advantage allows them to outpace the Assyrians in every important aspect of their design goal past the first handful of turns, making the Assyrians’ focus irrelevant.

All of the era’s culture pools contain these kinds of ‘illusionary’ choices, where some of the culture’s gameplay orientations are more of an aesthetic choice than a strategic one. Unless you are the kind of player who enjoys playing at a clear disadvantage for the sake of style, this results in the player feeling like only a minority of the faction choices are viable choices. Additionally, some of the factions excel at fulfilling their design goal so much (The Khmer are a particularly egregious example in this case) that choosing a similarly aligned culture in following eras becomes redundant.

These factors all result in the selection of your culture having the opposite effect to the intent; deciding what faction to play quickly becomes stale. If you’ve selected the Egyptians as your first culture—a culture which is very proficient at generating incredible amounts of production—you are less likely to feel like you need to select another faction focused on generating production later in the game. Considering the already small pool of viable cultures, this further shrinks your pool, making consecutive playthroughs much more similar than they should be. Separate playthroughs will contain a variety of cultural selections, but from a significantly limited pool, and with a dull, predictable combination of cultures representing each aspect of empire development.

The game’s approach to war and diplomacy require either of them to be long-term commitments, rather than impulsive choices, which I find quite good. Tradable resources are represented by an undepletable number relative to your number of deposits, of which access can be purchased. Diplomacy is streamlined through the removal of quarrelsome haggling between both by compressing everything into a number of progressive, independant treaties. This prevents trade from feeling unreasonable due to the uncompromising nature between both parties, especially since these interactions can generate war support in either direction.

War support is the resource required to maintain and reap the rewards of a war against each of your opponents, forcing you to take their actions, demands, and grievances more seriously. Though this system sometimes results in unexpected or seemingly unintuitive outcomes, like not having enough war support to keep occupied territory when your opponent is forced by a lack of support to surrender, I generally liked it. The mechanic prevents the game from becoming a snowbally steamroll when one opponent gains a sudden advantage, and keeps war from feeling frivolous and unpredictable.

The pacing of the eras is one of Humankind’s biggest problems. Early and mid-game eras are understandably the most important, since they establish your borders and early disputes, but late-game eras are far too compressed by comparison. Many of the technologies are made inferior by the one directly following it (like the technology for contemporary tanks directly following the technology for WWII era tanks), while others are completely irrelevant because they do not progress you towards the easy-to-execute scientific win condition enough to justify their rewards.

These problems are magnified by the player’s tendency to grow exponentially in nearly all possible categories during these eras, with science easily being the worst offender. This is primarily because of poor balancing on the features added by the later era’s technologies, which are able to propel even the poorest civilization to the moon if they have access to the right stuff, or, in the case of science, poor balancing of cultures traits you can only get access to later in the game. In extreme cases, it is possible to spend only a couple of turns in some of these eras, especially when trying to achieve a scientific victory.

The late-game eras are also the stage when the AI usually starts falling behind, and the game starts to feel like you're kicking a can down the road. In my playthroughs, it was normal for my neighbors to still have horsemen and swordsmen when I had the ability to produce tanks and planes, even when the scores were somewhat close. This is so much the case that I would usually abandon having a military at this stage, since the units any potential attacker would siege with were unable to beat my city’s free garrison and implacements, and going for a military victory almost always seemed too time-consuming compared to a scientific one.

In my first 30 hours or so, when I was still learning how to play this game, I was visibly excited to try and master all the fresh concepts and ideas this game brought to the genre. Once I had a good grasp of them though, I quickly understood how unrealized this game’s potential is in its current state. That excitement hasn't left, but it's been tempered by disappointment.

I don’t think Humankind is a bad game, I think it’s simply an unfinished one. I think Humankind will become an excellent game once the cultures have been rebalanced, the AI enhanced, and the technology tree more well-rounded, as well as some smaller things. If you’re itching for a new 4X game, Humankind will definitely keep you entertained while you master the new mechanics it introduces, but expect it’s replayability to be low when compared to other 4X games until these problems are addressed.