Humankind may not be releasing until August, but there are still plenty of things to talk about while we wait, especially cultures. Unlike Firaxis’ Civilization series, Humankind offers the player a choice in every era about which culture they want to play as, taking what is arguably one of Civ’s most strategic decisions and making it a recurring choice throughout a single playthrough.
You may start off as Phoenician, but who will you end up as by the end of the game? Americans? Turks? Speaking of which, Amplitude has recently finished revealing what the Contemporary era culture choices will be. This is the final phase in Humankind, and appears to be some kind of fusion of the Atomic and Information eras from Civilization VI, which loosely covers the time period from the Second World war till today.
With the final ten cultures revealed, that means all 60 of the 4X game’s options – across all six eras – are now known. One user on Reddit has compiled them all into one handy table, so you can see all the choices, what their focus is, as well as the unique unit, quarter, and legacy traits.
Legacy traits are a unique bonus that you keep when you switch to a new culture, as a way of keeping a connection to that part of the game.
It’s currently believed you keep all legacy traits, so the more you switch cultures the more bonuses you’ll have. For the history buffs among you, the Reddit post also has some maps to show you where all the culture options were located historically.
There’s one for each era (bar the Contemporary era), and then there’s a global ‘culture’ map that shows how cultures from different eras were connected to each other in terms of historical continuity. There do appear to be some abstracted connections though, so don’t take it as 100% factual. We recently took the game for a spin during its most recent OpenDev build, and while we enjoyed it there is still some balancing to be done, as the game might be a bit too easy at the moment.
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Humankind will release on PC via Steam on August 17, 2021.