
I was also fairly disappointed with the late game. But it's not necessarily a lot more logical, either. This is of course, no siller than Civ's version of this same problem where you have American tribesmen founding the city of Washington D.C. Sure, we could say my Khmer realm was conquered by the Ming Empire when I chose them as my next culture, but where did these Chinese bureaucrats come from? Were they hiding in the forest? Outer space? They weren't on the map anywhere before I decided to play as them. The culture system also doesn't exactly solve the roleplaying problem of telling a coherent, historical story like I’d hoped it might. The problem is, while this is cool for roleplaying and can generate new conflicts in the case of atheism, it felt like taking away some of my toys since neither of these belief systems get anything to replace holy sites or tenet bonuses. There is a kind of interesting late-game wrinkle in that you can pursue tolerant secularism or militant state atheism, modeling changing ideas about the nature of the universe. Religion only spreads passively, and unless I was looking for a reason to go to war, I usually forgot it existed. Like the era bonuses for each culture, the bonuses you can add to your faith are mostly simple modifiers to resource generation or modest military buffs. There is a religion system, but only just. So to truly be a successful conqueror, you need to be exporting your gods and your top radio hits, not just have the biggest army. If you instead spread your religion or culture to one of their cities, you can gain a grievance against them for "oppressing" your people, which will slowly tick up your side's war support over time. You can just declare war out of nowhere, but doing so gives a large bonus to your enemy's war support, which is a measure of how enthusiastic their people are to fight you. Influence is also used quite a bit in the diplomacy system, and this is probably the cleverest idea Humankind brings to the genre.


As a chill tile-painting game in which I can watch my civilization spread across the gorgeous world map, Humankind stands up well against its competition. These considerations made planning out my empire's path to prosperity an interesting and often challenging puzzle. Influence limits how much you can expand externally and spreads your culture to neighboring cities, while stability limits how much you can expand internally, as urban centers that sprawl out further and further become more difficult to govern. There are two new resources that mix things up a little.
