Much coverage of Sid Meier’s Civilization VII has compared the Firaxis 4X to Amplitude’s 2021 release Humankind. As our dirty turncoat strategy game columnist Sin Vega briefly explores in her review for Eurogamer, the game’s Age structure, which hands you a new culture at intervals in each campaign, is reminiscent of Humankind’s Era transitions.
Developers Firaxis have elsewhere observed that the impression of Civ cribbing notes from Humankind is an unfortunate coincidence. According to an interview with executive producer Dennis Shirk last year, the Civ 7 team came up with the concept on their own, pitching it to parent company 2K Games mere days after Amplitude unveiled Humankind. It’s also, of course, worth reiterating that as a historical 4X, Humankind takes plenty of cues from older Civilizations. Still, Amplitude co-founder Romain de Waubert de Genlis was tickled pink when he saw Humankind cited in Civ 7 reviews. “That was probably the best compliment I ever got when I read some of these articles on Civ 7,” he told me during an interview about Amplitude’s forthcoming Endless Legend 2, adding “I did not see that coming, to be frank.”
While they’re obviously competitors, and have never done any kind of formal collaboration, de Waubert de Genlis says Amplitude and Firaxis largely get on and are enthused by each other’s work. “Sometimes we have conventions where we meet some programmers, some designers, we chat, and it’s always cool, because it’s always very good stuff,” he told me, when I asked if the two teams had ever gotten together to bandy around features. “But we could see from a while ago that already they were following [our work]. And it was very exciting for us, being much smaller at the time, and still is today. I mean, Firaxis was, in many ways, the reason for me to become a designer, originally. So when these people look at my games, it’s very surprising.”
Being compared to Civilization can be tricky, of course, in terms of managing the expectations of players and publishers. The 4X is fundamentally a “niche” genre, de Waubert de Genlis argued, and few specimens beside Civ are capable of shifting millions before launch. Amplitude’s games tend to have a “small bump” at first, he said, gathering a healthy following over the coming months.
“Basically Civilization is like 16 or 17 million players on Civ 6, I think,” he spelled out. “Then most of our 4Xs are around 2 million-ish, Humankind is at 3.5 million. So it’s big, but still far away from the 17 million. And then if you look at the other 4Xs that are not Amplitude or not Civ, the best ones would be… I’d say it depends if you take Paradox as [the same kind of] 4X or not, because they’re real time. If you take turn-based 4X, very quickly you go down to the very small numbers. So it is difficult.”
Nonetheless, de Waubert de Genlis says Amplitude have never felt pressured to out-perform Civilization – even from Humankind publisher Sega, their parent company until November last year. “Sega were not really telling us, you know, we had to be Civilization because, you know, it’s a 25 year franchise, or more, maybe 30 year franchise,” he said. “And you can’t overnight become Civilization.”
Whether they originate from Civ or a smaller, feisty Civlike, I’m keen to see more Age or Era-style mechanics in strategy games. Back in 2021, Nate Crowley (RPS in peace) called jumping Eras “possibly Humankind’s greatest strength”, allowing the player to switch rails and transform, say, a culture greased by gold into one fuelled by research. “This on-the-fly redefinition of your entire gameplan, and the fact that it’s a necessity rather than an option, is a masterstroke,” he wrote. “The more I play, the more fundamentally brilliant a mechanic I realise it is, and on this front at least, I don’t feel like a dick in saying Humankind blows Civ out of the water.”
I’m not sure Civ 7 players are as keen about the implementation of Ages. Here is another chunk from traitorous opportunist Sin’s Eurogamer review: “The first two ages close with escalating crises that force you to choose negative modifiers (evil doppelgangers of social policies, which are unlocked with culture instead of science) until the act break. It’s a move towards narrative – an unpredictable challenge to make the game – and you – less rote. In practice, they’re either irrelevant or deeply irritating.”
The broad thinking behind Eras and Ages is to keep breaking players out of their ruts over the course of a mammoth campaign. I think that’s a noble aim, even if the execution is muddled. Endless Legend 2 is trying something similar with the tidefall mechanic, which peels back the ocean at intervals to reveal new navigable areas. You can read more about that in my Endless Legend 2 hands-on.