How to play the Neolithic age in Humankind - Humankind Overexplained Tutorial Let's Play ep.1 #ad

hey spotties potato mcwhiskey here and welcome to humankind in this series we are going to be tutorializing the game teaching players how to play and exploring all of the various features and we're also gonna be talking about what the sponsor of this video wants to talk about thanks to amplitude studio and sega for sponsoring this video and technically the entire series i'm throwing in the series as a bonus thumbs up sega i hope this kind of makes up for all the bad stuff i said about you guys in the past listen i've i've had opinions sometimes those opinions they come back to bite you in the ass not today baby because we got sponsored for this video huge thank you to those guys so if you're interested in playing the game make sure you there probably a link in the description you can get the game on steam the epic game store you can get it on stadia the xbox game pass and there's probably like one or two other places that i don't know about yet so before we talk about the gameplay we're going to spend a little bit of time on the pre-gameplay stuff there will be timestamps at the bottom of this video you can go ahead and skip straight to the gameplay if you want but i'm going to spend a little bit of time exploring the ui exploring the menu so you can have a really good idea of what this game is about and what it has in store for you so one of the cool things is in this game is you can set you up your own personal avatar now i have already set up my own personal avatar and here she is basically uh what i did was i started off with this default preset character and i was like okay this is cool and all but i kind of wanted them to like wear different clothing and i couldn't figure out how to make them wear different clothing like how do i get her to be in different clothes and then i click this mail button and she she just became like a sort of a knight with like a very like androgynous face and i was like this is my hero but there is a massive amount of customization you can do in here uh you can change the color of your eyes you can change how your eyes look you can see up here as i move around her eyes change drastically which is awesome in my opinion also can we get like this kind of a costume for women in the game because i like the idea of having some ginger haired warrior lady oh did they update that you used to be able to give ladies beards hang on a minute oh yeah here it is i like it i like i like the freedom they give you you could just create characters in any in any shape or form you want but basically i was actually pretty happy i literally just clicked mail and i was happy with this character but there's a massive amount and you can also give them a a an ai persona so you can make them like you know have high integrity or you know be audacious or whatever you can give them a bunch of stuff and then you can export it i think there's a way to share it with your friends so they can basically use the avatar you created in their game um yes this is the avatar we're going to use i'm going to go ahead and get ready to play we're going to start a new game so humankind is a 4x game it's a turn-based 4x tactical strategy historical forex amalgamation of basically everyone's dream of a you know the question of what if human history was like condensed into a video game sort of like the civilization series and as such it's going to come with like all the drippings or all the trappings that a normal game like this will have i would recommend if you're a relatively new player i would play on a small map and i would maybe get rid of a few ais so like i don't know how to do that uh up here so i was like like i think um like a small map is recommended for four players so i would go up here set this to competitors put it on a small map just play out a small map uh pick a random world shape pangaea continents whatever play on a relatively small map to learn the game it's the best way to learn the game i usually say small and pangaea these are the two settings that are the best for players to learn these 4x games on because a relatively small map means you have very few opponents and a pangaea map means that you're all on the same landmass which means you have to interact with the other players in order to succeed if you have sort of an island-based game you can kind of sit off and play your own game and you'll never learn on how to like play against the ai if you don't live near the ai so my recommendation would be again a small map and pangaea every time you play a game like this civilization or any sort of magical 4xd game these are the settings we are going to play on normal pace uh normal end conditions i play on nation difficulty purely because i'm relatively new to the game i do have 100 hours into it which makes me confident to explain the very very early game but towards the late game we're going to struggle a little bit so i i'm just going to play it on like a medium difficulty for now i will eventually get up to the human kind difficulty but yeah that's all she wrote we'll play on pangaea let's get started so at the start of the game and at various points throughout the game you're going to be greeted with these movies i'm going to skip the movies welcome to humankind you start off the game as a little neolithic migratory tribe and this is these guys right here unlike any 4x game you can select them with left click you can move them around right click as long as you hold down the right click button they won't actually execute your orders and they will sort of try to intelligently figure out a route to the place you want to go using whatever information is available to you or them like i think it's pretty obvious that there's a bit of water here but they think oh you know maybe we could walk across that and once you've explored that that'll become obvious that that's not possible and they'll kind of be like oh wait i can't go that way but you can either like move them this way or you can move them one tile at a time so i could move down here like this and then i reveal a little bit of the map and then i move again like this carefully and now i can see that this is in fact ocean and that they probably couldn't cross here but because this tiny little chunk of the map right here is still fog of war they're like hey that's totally potentially land so maybe we can go there now there's a lot of the ui that i kind of have to explain here there's not much going on up here in the top right so we won't talk about that yet except there is a very nice useful button here that i'll probably make reference to a couple of times um that allows you to see an entire list of all of your military forces right now all we have are this uh these guys this little hunting party which is super useful super helpful make sure you use this to keep track of your land your navel your air and when you have cities and outposts you can also use this button down here to do the same thing up in the top left here is the little diplomacy window which is not relevant to us yet but when we do meet another player and they are available for diplomacy we will talk about that more importantly we have this empire little screen here this tells us what phase of the game we're at so nomadic tribe is the default name of your civilization before you've picked a culture and this is the era that we are in we are a nomadic tribe in the neolithic era and we have a list of various missions that we need to achieve as well as how many stars we need in order to achieve those missions so the first sort of mission is a growth star this is basically trying to attain a certain amount of population and then this will allow us to go on to the next era then the second one is the knowledge star which is basically making discoveries about the world by running over these uh scientific curiosities which will give us some influence which we'll talk about a little bit later when we actually have some and then the final objective is the hunter star we kill a certain amount of animals and this will allow us to advance to the ancient era and become a real cult like well i say real culture well more like a named culture for lack of a better term we become a named culture in the game so something you want to keep in mind it is possible to lose the game when you have just this one unit now it's quite hard to do and they have made the neutral sort of uh wildlife ai slightly worse to make sure that you don't accidentally kill yourself on a deer the first time you load up the game however just keep in mind it is possible to lose make sure you're playing carefully okay it's okay if you lose you just click the you restart the game and you're fine just don't worry about it um so this is our unit here and they have various stats that we can talk about but for now i'm just going to go ahead and continue to move but yeah it is possible to be killed at this early stage of the game uh if you're not careful enough on an angry deer gets the high ground uh and you turn into anakin it's not going to go well for you and you really don't want to lose and get killed because it's obviously not ideal you want to be the guy who wins the game that's like what games are about kind of um although arguably you could say that games like humankind or maybe a little bit more about the journey rather than the destination if there's any stormlight fans out there man i'm i'm referencing out of control right now so when your units have moved used up all their movement points which is this number right here you come down here to the bottom right and you click and turn and that will end your turn and then this will become a new button that will prompt you within actions that the game thinks is important for you to complete before you end your turn again i don't know if there's a way to force and turn in this game i it either doesn't exist or i haven't discovered it yet i would imagine that it exists and i simply haven't discovered it let's continue to explore ah okay so we have found our very first curiosity this glowy thing with a little food simple that is like a wheat i believe or maybe it's corn i can't tell it's either wheat or corn it's some sort of crop and basically this is food this is a food curiosity because what we need in order to grow our population is food you can see over here this tribal unit that we start with is a very specific kind of unit called a nomad and nomads are kind of like gray goo if they generate enough food by collecting curiosities or ransacking or fighting they can actually generate more of themselves which gets you into a grey goo scenario where you have a bunch of nomads running around fighting killing things collecting things generating more food and the more nomads you have the more nomads you can generate so these are very very powerful units very early into the game um arguably this is like the strongest unit you will get access to until i would say maybe turn 20 or 30. so this unit is very very dominant into the game and not everyone gets access to that better unit at turn 20 or 30. so this unit is very powerful be ready to fight tribes and it's powerful because of the sheer number of them that you can you can sort of build up very quickly so we picked up that food curiosity which added five food to the 20 food that we need to generate another population and it was in fact wild berries but yeah if you have some sort of building your outpost on the map every time you end your turn they will also collect resources so uh you know let's say i'm i have a outpost generating six food i end my turn that outpost gathers up six food and tries to grow into the population itself all right let's continue to explore we found ourselves another food curiosity let's go ahead and pick it up and it was some nuts might i say these nuts but that the nuts are actually slightly better for nutrition than berries i don't know why um and they gave me actually 10 food there and you'll get pop-ups down here and you know if you ever have a pop-up down here and you're not sure what to do with it you can just like uh click this little locate the event button and it'll take you to it like let's say i acknowledge this i buy accents i'm like oh wait what was that event actually doing you could just click on it and then click this and it'll go to it you can also turn off the map focus so when you click on things it won't automatically focus you to them so like if i turn map focus back on and i click on this it'll immediately take me there my recommendation would be my map focus off because i prefer to have more control over my gameplay that's just a personal preference you can play with it on if you play a little bit slower and don't mind getting your camera kind of pulled around uh some people appreciate that because it draws their attention to things and they could be a bit forgetful to actually click the little hard to see magnifying glass right there we shall continue to explore however do keep in mind that i am going incredibly slowly here in order to explain as many of the game mechanics as possible let's pop down into the very first patch of snow not the first fatch of snow we've discovered two very interesting things here the first one is a scientific curiosity this is a discovery which is one of the things we need to advance to the next era we if we find 10 of these we can advance to the next era and i believe if you get enough science you can get a special bonus neolithic legacy trait from getting enough science but that's another mechanic we'll talk about once we're actually ready to advance we'll talk about legacy traits a little bit later um we've also discovered our very first mammoth which is a very scary boy indeed um if you have a single tribesman do not attack the mammoth okay just don't don't do it it won't end well for you okay don't attack the mammoth um run away until you have at least two tribesmen you will lose to this mammoth every single time i'm pretty sure when i was playing uh i was playing humankind as duncan from the yogscast was uh was playing in the background with me and he um he immediately died to a um to a deer or something the first time he loaded the game up and it was very funny let's enter on into turn five now here is uh this is where we're going to talk about a little bit about actual like strategy in this game i have two places i can go this turn i can't reach both right because if i go here i use of two movement i have four and then it would be another three to get to the layer and the layer is something i want to get to because if you pop this layer with a ransack which is this action here it actually generates 20 food which i would really really like i really like that 20 food but i can only do one of the two however we can use our advanced game knowledge okay by testing and exploring the systems that i did during the you know early development of the game i have actually managed to come up with a way to get both of these things and that is if i come over here and step on this food i will immediately grow a new population and this population even though the shared army will have used moves the new population tribesmen will actually have his full form movement the second he spawns and so i can use him to run over and grab the layer by splitting them up right so i come over here i grab this boom instantaneously this number becomes two i picked up more of these nuts and now i have two population i have now i have two tribes so i i actually can't reach this right i can't reach this with this hunting party uh but if i select the second tribesman who spawned and make sure he alone is highlighted and then right click to split my party you can see this guy actually has the full movement i did use one movement while they were conjoined so you can see each unit has their own independent movement so that's something you have to think about when you're gonna play the game at a slightly higher level so i know you're probably completely brand new to the game and i'm giving you what looks like a fairly advanced tip but the great thing is this is an advanced tip that's really really easy to execute and you do it right for the start of the game so that's why i'm kind of giving you that one to make you feel a little bit more pro when you're coming into the game now what i want to do with this guy is now they both have their own separate food pools the original guy kept c5 food out of 20 and then this guy has his own food pool but that doesn't really matter to me because if i pillage the lair i'll get plus 20 food and they'll combine together and i'll get another tribesman so let's go ahead and pillage that layer pillaging is well it's more like ransacking it's basically um if you've played other 4x games it's like the pillaging mechanic typically you run over something that your opponent has and you spend a turn on it and you destroy it and it becomes yours but what we are pillaging is actually a monster layer and you can kind of tell what the different kind of monsters layers do by the symbol they have on them if it has like this lightning bolt symbol it means it spawns hostile monsters if it has a sort of peace symbol it spawns peaceful monsters and that same will ring true later on in the game when independent societies start popping up in unoccupied land just keep that in mind it's not important right now we'll talk about that when we come to it um but we've actually had something interesting here as well see here this tribe has a narrative event on them so if i click on this and you can also click down here in the bottom right to make that happen a a narrative event comes up i'm not going to read these because i don't want to spoil the the whole you know we're gonna sit here and talk about this if you wanna you can pause the video and you can read it but basically this is the way of the game sort of to ask you questions about what sort of world or society that you live in you know what direction are you gonna push your civilization or your human you know culture in are you going to you know maybe go more in one direction like maybe that's more open to strangers or are you going to go more in like a closed direction a more introverted society and this is just one of those events basically are we going to use these people who have lost their home to chase something i don't know what the event actually says but we basically we could choose between getting a new unit or we can get a discount on researching a technology later on in the game the early game technologies are fairly cheap so i don't think this discount is a big deal however getting an extra an extra character here is a big deal if this was like 50 maybe or if it was like plus one science on your capital this would be a baby but getting an extra hunting party is just super super strong and now we actually are on our third hunting party and we'll be on four next turn so uh we're just going to continue to split up some of our tribesmen to make sure that we um are covering as much ground as possible picking up as many curiosities as possible and picking up all that kind of jazz nice we had a successful ransack which means we now have two people living in this tribe and i'm gonna keep these guys together so they can fight mammoths um i think now i have enough guys they're all kind of working together i can go ahead and try to fight some mammoths but picking up some of these curiosities has actually given me influence and influence is super useful because it's used for a variety of actions most typically in the early game it's going to be used to actually settle and create your cities and make your outposts and stuff like that and it's also going to be used to pass your laws but those are all kind of mechanics we'll talk about as we come to them the most important thing you can do with influence in the very very early game is build a thing called an outpost with your unit you can see here this button here claim territory and you can see as i hover over various tiles with this um they're highlighting which is showing me that this outpost is going to start working those tiles okay so like for example if i put this right up against the edge because the world is divided up into different little territories you can't actually work across this little border here so i'm only working actually three tiles so you kind of want to settle a little bit away from the edge of things except in some cases where you want to settle when you're gonna like merge two territories together which is something you can do later on in the game but the game is actually suggesting over here this three food eight production area and i generally my philosophy is if i can get like close to 10 of each resource then that's a good spot so like this 18 food 3 production spot i don't think i would ever go there over the 13 food 8 production spot even though the total number of things that they produce is the same right they both produce 21 things having a city that kind of generates an even amount of each gives you a lot of flexibility in this game and i would say a general rule of thumb you want to have like at least six of each resource and ideally 10 of each resource so this is slightly under on production but slightly over on food so it's kind of acceptable so i'll go ahead and send my um my little old alpha tribesmen over here to go settle that outpost all right another food curiosity over here and we found ourselves another sanctuary this time a peaceful one this duo squad aka mammoth killer is what i'm gonna nickname them and you can actually nickname your your parties this will be the mammoth killer party so this is something that's really really cool and you should totally be doing in your games to make them more fun and interesting for yourself they're going to be looking for mammoths and they're going to be looking for curiosities and stuff like that let's yoink this food and then we want to head up to here where was the outpost going on the 13 food 8 production i think we decided so they'll step over here and they'll place the outpost and the outpost will begin constructing itself um how long it takes the outpost to build itself they require 35 production so the amount of production that you get with your outpost will dictate how long it will be before it comes online so that's why if you get an outpost with only like three production it's gonna take like 11 to 12 turns for that to come online if you get five production that's only seven turns and with like that which is why i typically say go for at least six production because that means it'll take six turns at a maximum for this thing to build itself which is a totally reasonable number of turns for an outpost to take to construct itself let's go ahead and ransack this little sanctuary over here oh and we actually discovered mount rarima this is a natural wonder and discovering natural wonders is pretty cool for a variety of reasons in the neolithic era mostly what it does is it gives you a little bit of science which is important again because remember i talked about this legacy ability is unlocked if you get enough science um but it also gives us access to some fame here you can see my fame number is now 50 because i have completed a competitive deed competitive deeds are like actions you can do in the game and only really the first person to do them gets any points now certain deeds i think have multiple slots available for them so i think sometimes um building like two people can get credit for building holy sites and stuff like that but there's a ton of things in here like nuclear weapons tests finding uh natural wonders you know sending interplanetary rocket missions these are all things we will talk about later on in the game right now we are mostly discovered with berries and nuts just know that fame is a fairly important mechanical part of the game it's it's not quite score because it's a little bit more important than score fame is one of the ways that the winner of a game can be decided unless you kind of go for one of the other win conditions and so it's kind of like a measure of how how cool your empire is basically like how many cool achievements did you manage to do like you could theoretically make like a super hyper-optimized civilization that basically races up the tech tree and like launches the space race within like 150 turns however is that really the coolest civilization that ever existed like maybe you want to take the time to spend a little bit of time in the medieval era and make a bunch of you know districts or maybe you want to spend a little bit of time in the you know classical era and fight a bunch of wars right so these sort of things are going to be important to you beyond just like how can i hyper optimize to get to like the win condition um which is why i really like the fame system it kind of incentivizes a different style of play we'll grab ourselves another curiosity and every time we grab one of these curiosities we are getting a small amount of science and a small amount of influence so that turned we successfully ransacked and doing that ransack actually gave us our fifth population that we needed to earn our growth star so that is fantastic uh which is probably about the time that i should click on the empire button and begin explaining cultures now unfortunately the harappans have been taken and these are one of my favorite civilizations because they really like producing foods and their scouts are really really cool they're really fast and really hard to kill and um stronger than regular scouts so i like the harappans unfortunately someone else advanced to the ancient era ahead of me so i don't get to do that um so in the game there are six eras and in each era there are ten civilizations to choose from i don't know if you know how like factorial or multiplicative math works but that means there's like an unfathomably huge number of combinations i think i think someone said it's like over a million different possible combinations of all the sieves because maybe you pick the assyrians in era one and maybe then you become the romans and maybe then you become like the franks and then you become like the british and then you're the americans and then you're like the japanese you can kind of go through a whole bunch of different cultures and like you change any one of those and it actually kind of theoretically changes your whole game so there's a massive massive number of cultures that you can possibly um combine together into like one little weird sort of culture that you have fully customized and built yourself from all these like component parts like a giant lego stack but i think i think the reason that i can't access the harappans is because someone else reached the aerostar the same turn as me the ai actually takes their turn the like at the same time as you so sometimes you need to actually try to be faster than the ai to do something or they'll catch you off guard and sometimes picking a culture is just one of those things you don't get the first turn advantage you gotta you gotta go quick yeah so this is this is how you advance through the eras is you pick a culture and each culture has like a set of traits there's four traits here and it only looks like three but there's actually four this is also a trait up here this little flag symbol so one two three four each of these symbols here represents a different trait for this civilization um one of my favorite early game sieves or cultures that i would recommend for relatively new players is actually the olmecs they have a really good influence gain really good food and they have a strong defensive range unit i'm a really big fan of these guys i kind of play them all the time i also play the the joe all the time too which are kind of like our um japanese chinese i actually don't know it says confusion school but i can't tell if that's like meant to be i think this might be might be like pre-early ancient china or something culture i i'm not actually sure but they're really really cool because they have a ton of stability which is an important mechanic that we'll talk about later as as well as a bunch of science which is another important mechanic that we'll talk about later and they're just really really cool for building really big powerful high-yield cities very very fun save i would definitely recommend trying them out uh but how i'm gonna just pick a culture is i'm essentially just gonna close my eyes and left click until i land on a culture all right here we go spin the wheel bend the wheel and i landed okay all right let's uh let's spin the wheel again oh my god i landed on the show i listen every time i play this game i play the show you know what i'm just gonna i'll just you know what everyone like the egyptian egyptians i'm gonna play egypt right that's it decision made i'm gonna play egypt so let's talk about egypt's bonuses right they have four like i said earlier they have an affinity they are a builder affinity which means they gain extra fame from builder era stars builder aerostars is something we'll talk a little bit later it's basically uh for building infrastructure you get fame and that's important for a builder affinity civilization because they get more fame for building uh they are also grand planners this is their sorry this is their affinity uh they which is like temporary but it gives you a very very powerful uni uh sort of ability i think other civs can have the same affinity i think who else are builders no one else is a builder but for example uh the babylonians here are a scientist and i believe so are the oh god i'm totally making a liar of myself right now oh god okay the hittites are militarists and so are the mycenaeans right both of these sieves have the same affinity so this thing can be shared with other sieves the rest of these abilities are typically unique um of particular importance is actually this trait right here this is the legacy trait this trait you will keep for the entire game you can change your culture you can go to a different culture you could be 300 turns from now if i pick the egyptians and i have gone through five or six different cultures i will have this grand planners trait it will always give me plus one industry which is the resource that you use to build things like wonders and units and buildings i will just have that on every single tile in my empire because i picked the egyptians in the ancient era so this is like your legacy trait this is one of the strongest parts of building the identity of the culture you're going for if i picked babylon for example i would get plus two sides per research technology on my capital which means very very early game they kind of get into a tech snowball if you research a bunch of technologies it makes researching future technologies easier because every technology that you research gives you more science so babylon very very strong scientific this ability tends to fall off in the late game because it doesn't scale amazingly because there's only a limited number of technologies in the tech tree and they get relatively expensive relatively quickly but it's still quite good um the assyrians get extra combat strength when they are ransacking which is pillaging and extra movement speed so very fast very strong units and they also get access to the assyrian raider um very very cool sieve but we're playing the egyptian the second part of our affinity is that we have an ability to go into land raiser mode which turns all of our money and signs into into production we'll talk a little bit more about that when we actually use it and their final affinity bonus is they get um they get 10 stability when they complete a district construct the basic explanation of this is their civilization celebrates so much when they build things that they're less likely to rebel we'll explain stability a little bit more later on in the game but again i know i'm saying that with a lot of things but i don't want to throw too many like random concepts at you i want to only talk about the things we're going to use right away and so ground planners is the thing we're going to use for the entire game so that's important to talk about egyptian pyramid we're probably going to use that in a little while just know that this is a really really good production building a really good production district it is going to give you a ton of production it's going to give you a little bit of influence which is that currency that we use to expand our empire and past laws and it will also you can only build one of them per territory which is something we'll explain again a little bit later and then we also get this unit which is a chariot archer it is a very very powerful chariot archer to put this unit in perspective most units in the ancient era fall between like 17 and 25 combat strength so this unit at 24 combat splints is actually on the higher end of that it's quite powerful and it's ranged as well and it's got three range which means you can shoot really far away and do a ton of damage but it also has some special abilities it can move and fire so it can shoot and then run away so this unit is incredibly powerful for hit and run tactics doing damage without getting retaliated upon however it does take horses to uh build this unit you could see there the resource prerequisite you need to have access to horses in order to do this so overall i would characterize egyptians as a very powerful construction civilization with lots of industry i would say they're very noob friendly sieve because it's very hard to make a mistake when you have production because you can turn production into almost anything in the game you can turn production into food you can turn production into production you can turn production into military very very hard to go wrong with a production-based civilization that's why i would recommend someone like egypt or maybe nubia because they also have a little bit of a production bonus here too and then the other one i would recommend is the almex so these are all the three that i would recommend for new players the almex the egyptians and the uh nubians all three can be quite useful new players let's go ahead and adopt the egyptians when you adopt uh you'll have to end your turn and then you'll be greeted with like a little movie we're going to skip that movie because i want you to experience them for yourself when you start your own game let's use this pair of tribesmen to attack this mammoth this mammoth is in an interesting position because if i zoom out it might become a little bit more obvious that he is in a very small sort of depression or valley in the terrain and that actually has profound effects like if i sort of simulate my my units moving over here you could do this by holding down the right mouse button and then hover over this mammoth you can see how the battlescape will shape out the center of the battle will actually be filled with low low terrain which might make it a little bit difficult for me to um get a good handle on him but i can actually attack this mammoth from multiple directions and that's sort of part of this this this game so what happens here when i do this when i when i hold down the right mouse button and hover over this mammoth it actually shows me a preview of what the battlescape is going to look like when we actually fight our battle and this is a hugely important thing because you could approach units from many different directions and depending on the direction that you approach from the the battlescape is going to look differently and the positioning of your army is going to be different so if i approach from the east here you can see the blue area is my deployment zone and then the light gray area is their deployment zone so i would mostly be deploying in this low ground and you know most you guys i assume have watched the prequel trilogy of star wars and know that the high ground is incredibly important so i would be more inclined to attack from maybe this angle where uh less of the low ground is on my side however i'm going to be the aggressor so think about where this mammoth is going to be positioned if he puts him on this uh sort of luxury resource tile i'm going to have a hard time uh getting units in positions that aren't just attacking uphill so maybe i will actually attack him from the depression valley he's not going to want to be positioned downhill i'll position on either side of the valley and then be able to get some flanking and stuff like that so let's initiate the battle from here and all you have to do to initiate a battle is right click on your enemy and here we are so this is the battle initiation screen i can retreat to get my units to just basically run away i think you can only retreat once and then you need a couple of turns to recover if you're caught after retreating your units will not be able to retreat again and they'll be forced to fight i could also fight the battle manually uh which is sort of you know part of the fun of the game so i don't know why you almost always want to fight the battles manually in my opinion because you can almost always get a better result than the ai and sometimes you might want to use the instant resolution for a battle if you for example think that you're going to win the battle so easily you're not going to lose any units or you think that you're like losing units in this battle isn't important or you just don't have the energy or time to really fight the battle so you'll accept any losses and stuff like that typically instant resolution will get you worse results than manually playing the battle so i would i would encourage you to play the manual battles and i'm going to deploy my men on either side of this valley i can deploy them wherever i want i could deploy both of them in the valley if i wanted to but that would be a terrible deployment each unit flanking each side of the valley and this is not where the enemy unit is going to deploy this is just telling me where they were located in relation to the battle later on in the game multiple armies can take part in a single battle so you might have an army that spawns over here an army that spawns over here an army that spawns over here and so on and so forth and the more units and armies that take part in the initial battle the larger the battlefield will be so in the late game so like like really really early game we're basically fighting over this very small valley in the late game when you have dozens of units piling into a massive multi-turn conflict you might have a battlefield that's like the size of half the continent and that's something you have to be careful with i actually don't know if like it's there is a maximum size but i have seen it to be at least like twice as big if not three times as big in every direction as this battle that i'm about to fight like i'm talking like 20 tiles this way and then 15 tiles this way i've seen battles that big um yeah so let's end our deployment and you can also choose to automatically battle this and then you can just like flick that off if you think the ai is going to make some bad decisions um i would use this again if you want to kind of manually control the battle but you also want the ai to take care of the orders but i prefer to manually battle and um this it's going to become readily apparent now when i explained this combat preview screen why i was so hesitant to attack at mammoth you can see here up the top i have 10 combat strength and they have 13. so if i attack this mammoth we're both going to do damage to each other i'm gonna do between 7 and 25 damage to him because i have three less combat strength than him he's going to do between 22 and 33 damage to me so if this was a 1v1 i lose this 100 of the time but the big advantage i have is that i have two units and depending on the positioning of the units at different statistics will apply attacking from the low ground to the high ground will also reduce your combat strength um but if i move this unit over here for example and i were to stand next to my own unit my combat damage would go up by plus one because i would be standing next to an allied unit and you get a small combat bonus from being next to an allied unit which is quite good so i would instead do 9 to 25 damage rather than the baseline 7 to 25 damage however i want to do even better i'm going to do a rear attack on this unit and what that is is when you have two units that can draw a line through the enemy unit you get what is called a rear attack which gives you plus four combat strength against that unit in particular which means now i'm going to do 15 to 30 damage and he's only going to do 11 to 25 damage to me and i can do that with two units so getting this sort of a surround attack is very very important if you're wanting to take on a unit that's stronger than you by a significant amount because i get to attack twice he's going to counter attack he actually hit me really hard there and i don't like that but now that he's damaged you can see he's actually getting -1 combat strength from being damaged so if i just come back in with my relatively healthy unit i can do a big big big chunk of damage to him and um he didn't actually take as much damage as i was hoping for and he's looking pretty healthy so i'm gonna go ahead and use on this unit who he's likely to attack i'm gonna go ahead and use the defend action which will give them plus one combat strength and maybe encourage them to attack this unit instead which means i'm spreading out the damage on my army a little bit you know more evenly in the early game which i think is something that you want to do and then i can go ahead and do another rear attack which will be fantastic boom easy done we've defeated the mammoth we used our tactical superiority and like here's the thing even though i you know i had two units i still took over half my health and damage on both of these units so a single one of these guys could lose and honestly if you don't fight correctly and fight with these guys individually you could lose both of these units against the mammoth plus three combat strength is not to be messed with but from winning that fight we got a little bit of food which will grow as another population in fact we already have uh the extra population here and we also picked up a little bit of uh influence which we can use to build them another outpost and then the final important interesting thing here is that these units actually picked up some veterans see you can see here they have six out of 20 experience required to reach the next veterans and achieving a veterans level will give them plus one combat strength plus one combat strength is a lot um to put that in perspective plus one combat strength is on average it's like a plus it's like doing plus one damage on average and taking minus one damage on average but it's like way better than that because it raises your minimum role and raises your maximum role and lowers their minimum role and lowers their so you might go from a situation where you might do 5 to 25 damage but you might actually you know plus 1 might take you from 5 to 25 to 9 to 25 and then on the sort of retaliation side of that you might also take a reduction so plus one combat strength actually huge be very careful which are you know you a lot of people think uh plus one combat strength that's not a big deal it's a huge deal i know i just spent i i know i've spent a huge amount of time explaining and not actually playing the game but it's super super important that you understand these um like ideas for you to be able to tackle the game and play about any level of competency in my opinion one of the things that got me into doing youtube was actually wanting to make tutorials for people because what would often happen is i would watch these guys who were like really really super entertaining and they would play a game and they wouldn't really pay that much attention to it and it was fun to watch them because it was pleasant and experienced but if they ever played a game that i had played i would be like dude you need to like put time in and learn the game you need to like actually learn the game mechanics because it's annoying watching you that's why i put 100 hours in to learn this game pre-release um i played in the betas i played and all that sort of stuff this was so i could do this i could have a very very good grasp of the game's mechanics to be able to explain them to you and so you didn't get frustrated watching me play now i'm not going to make 100 optimal decisions but at the very least you'll be able to look at me and say hey you know what you're making okay decisions so i'll pick up that curiosity and i'll come back and murder this deer because these guys have 15 out of 20 food which means killing a deer will actually get me another um thing so i'll just manually fight this i'll step off the river because rivers are negative terrain plus i'm pretty sure the ai knows about high ground so what this deer is likely to do is to try to walk past my unit get controlled by my unit's zone of control you can see here it's quite hard to actually walk past the unit he'll get controlled by my zone of control get stuck on the river take a penalty to his combat spread because being on a river lowers your combat strength and then i'll be able to take the high ground even though it has a river and attack downhill into him so if i stay in my position and just attack this deer i'm pretty sure i'll come out on top and this is a pretty easy fight regardless so there's not really much need to optimize but at the very least i get to kind of show off some of the gameplay mechanics and how you can manipulate the ai into positioning them exactly where you want them to go which is once we once we've kind of done teaching you the very very basic stuff we'll we'll begin teaching you how to like manipulate the ai and how to use these terrain effects to your to your advantage so you can see here i'm getting a plus four from being on the high ground but a minus three from crossing a river but that sort of squashes out to be a plus one over my opponent right so yes it's not ideal but also it is ideal so we're gonna go ahead and squash this beef well i don't know it's venison not beef we'll squash this beef from uphill he'll attack me he'll kill himself i'll get another unit but a boom we can go to the next turn so we gain some more spoils you gain five food and five influence from killing deer i think you get 10 of each from killing bears and you get 20 of each from killing uh mammoths let's grab this tribe and head out over here this is actually really nice land for maybe some sort of food outpost it'll always have really really low production so it'll take a very long time to grow but it's a fantastic place for uh population growth so perhaps perhaps i may place an outpost here oh yeah look at that 21 food two production the two production is pretty low but this isn't gonna be an important city for me for a long time so i'm okay with this having low production this deer is really weak and i heavily outnumber him so i'm just going to instant resolve i'll take a little bit of damage in my unit it's not a big deal so when you advance your culture you get greeted with a little movie i'm going to go ahead and skip that because i want that to be something that you discover on your own and you can see here that the cultural look of our units actually change as we advance through eras if i turn off these map modes you can see my units are now looking slightly different before they had kind of a neolithic tribe look and now they've got like the i don't know i guess egyptian um long pants on i don't know how to describe them but yeah let's go ahead and kill this deer as well i'll go ahead and instantly resolve that took a lot of damage on that one and we'll go ahead and build ourselves another outpost for 20 influence i'll just let's pop this down for the sake of popping it down so these guys over here i'm going to pop out the oh my units have changed actually they are no longer are they um no longer they tribesmen they are now scouts which means they're no longer nomads which means they will no longer gray goo spawn more of them so that means i'm gonna have to start sending these guys off to the homeland to uh to get healed and um if if we think about like where i control on the map right now i take i control these two territories with these like blue dotted lines so if you like draw a sphere of my influence it's like roughly kind of this overly shape and a lot of this land is unexplored so you think it would be a good idea for me to explore land inside my you know power projection so i may send this guy over here although actually having thought of that oh yeah uh i didn't get a chance to show you but sometimes you can actually change your unit's direction when they're in mid-move and they haven't finished all their moves um but i can actually use these two scouts over here to scuff this area so that was like a small mistake in my part these two guys i'm going to send home for a heal and i may also disband them to put them into my new city although we'll talk about that when we cross that bridge let's send the weakened guy to the north he will explore the river and then stop right there to heal and you'll come over here pop yourself into this river and learn about the world oh i actually mixed them up well that was a mistake that's life alrighty welcome to turn 10. this is the first turn in the entire game that we will be able to actually settle a city so let's head into play and i hear um one of the things you can do in an outpost when it's fully established which it just fully established itself is actually spend a little bit of influence to move it like say you dropped this outpost down here and then you realize oh man actually there's like a way better spot like over here to the north that i totally missed out on you could you can just move your outpost over there it's totally fine evolving the outpost of the city is the button you want to click when you want to like grow a city and we're going to go ahead and uh and start a city boom we have gave birth to the city of memphis welcome to memphis capital of egypt creating a city unfortunately creates another opportunity to talk about a lot of game mechanics so the first one i want to talk about is this thing right here in the center of your city this is your main plaza this is your capital building this thing is super important it is unique in a bunch of ways because it actually exploits all types of terrain i believe so you can see here around this is sort of like terrain that looks slightly different if i exit the city screen you might be able to see it you see how like this terrain looks just like normal and then this terrain has like farms and orchards and lumber mills on it and that tells you that i am actually working this terrain and drawing in its fields so if i come here you can see every tile in the game actually has a resource that it produces so for example this dry grass here makes one food per turn whereas this prairie right here makes um two food per turn this prairie river with a river spring makes four food per turn this regular old prairie with a river just makes three food per turn rivers i believe add one food to the tile and then there's also things like features if you zoom out just enough you might be able to spot them see these like little dots with like little things coming out of them if you zoom in that's usually a feature in this case it's another river spring it's like the mouth of a river has plus one food and stuff like that let's see if i can find like another one to show off here's one this right here is a terra rossa i have no idea what a terra rossa is but maybe it's like a sandy dust cloud is what it looks like i have no idea what a terra rossa is just know that it gives you science um speaking of extracting resources from the ground what the hell are resources well you have food you have industry you have money and science these are all collectively known as films you can see it down here in the tool tip it says fims fims uh stability also factors into that but we're not ready to talk about stability the first resource is food this is your growth resource this is how you get population always don't be afraid to um like hover over a thing because almost everything has tool tips there's an encyclopedia there's all sorts of crazy stuff that you can use to learn the game and food is what you use to grow population population are what you use to work these jobs up here you can see these kind of people-shaped holes you could put people in these jobs right now i have two jobs of each and a maximum population of eight which if you are a mathematician you realize that two plus two plus two plus two equals eight so the population limit of this city is equal to the number of job slots and things like districts tend to give you more job slots but yeah food is used to grow population and that's pretty much the only thing it does it is used to feed existing population and grow new ones um right now we're growing at 22 per turn uh population has a few uses you can unlock the ability to kill your population to finish infrastructure faster it's basically like quote unquote sacrificing slaves into building the pyramids kind of thing i know that's not 100 historically accurate for the pyramids but it's an example that everyone can relate to and understand even if we kind of now know that it's a bit apocryphal but uh so you can build units with population and production but you can also do the reverse you can actually disband your units inside the territory of your cities and it will actually give your city a population and this is something this is why i always try and get as many scouts like really really early into the game of the neolithic era so that i can kind of run some of them home and disband them inside my city it's a very very powerful strategy super good tip recommended 100 of the time you don't need eight scouts but you maybe you need four you know you could maybe just bound like two or three of them over time i wouldn't recommend just finding all of your units immediately into your city because you won't be able to make enough food to feed them without a little bit of infrastructure like things like farmers quarters or maybe uh yeah uh granaries which you can unlock later we also have this builder affinity button here it's very very simple it's part of the egyptian builder affinity if we click this we convert all the money and the science in the city into industry which right now isn't much i'm kind of science is a little bit important to me because science is the resource that you use to unlock technology every single tech in the game requires science to unlock which probably makes this a good time to talk about the tech tree let's go ahead and head into the tech tree so the tech tree goes across all six eras of the game and like you'll go from you know making things like what is it like iron and swordsmen and then you'll go all the way up into the super late game where you can make things like train stations uh partisans and like oil as well as a police force maybe a little bit of siege artillery all sorts of cool stuff you could do in the very very late game but right now we're super focused on the ancient era right we don't even we haven't even built a well or a public fountain right we need to like figure out how to do flood irrigation we need to build granaries we need to learn how to even do archery and cut down trees right we're at the super super early stages of human history right now i personally for most new players i think city defense is a perfectly fine option here it gives you access to a warrior who's very powerful very defensive very good it also gives you access to garrisons which allow you to secure your land as well as palisades which give your cities higher defense oops i clicked off the technology screen so i would you know i would encourage city defense to be an early game tech alternatively you can go for carpentry which is a little bit more of a slightly more defensive and offensive because archers are actually theoretically better than warriors if you use them correctly but they're harder to use because they will 100 lose to a warrior in a 1v1 straight up melee fight but if you can use terrain to your advantage and maybe block with a melee unit archers they become very very powerful i also really like picking up lumberyard and uh clear forests but you know so i'm probably going to start with with carpentry oh right i i completely forgot i was even meant to explain this i super take for granted that i have played like so many games with tech trees that like the mechanics of moving around a tech tree to me is kind of like knowing how to like uh bunny hop on an fps for someone else right like i know intuitively that like if i'm like oh i want fishing and wheel i just like i queue them up systematically without even thinking about it and uh it doesn't even you know it doesn't even factor into my thought process that someone else might not know how to do this so there's sort of a few main things you need to keep in mind here some technologies are locked and what that means is if you draw a line through that technology through this lock symbol to another technology the technology that doesn't have a lock symbol is the thing you need to get in order to unlock masonry so normally when i'm trying to pick a technology i click on it and it's not you know it puts a number there one and then i click on another tech two that tells me that i'm going to research city defense and then i'm going to research carpentry but i can't directly research research masonry because carpentry is a prerequisite so if i click on this it goes from one and then two so i have to research carpentry before i research masonry and the same is true for fishing i can also cancel all antecedent whatever follows carpentry if i click on carpentry again to stop researching it anything that is dependent upon carpentry will be cancelled the other piece of tech like movement tech for navigating the tech tree which is that's a very mind-boggling sentence the other technique that you can use to help you in the tech tree is like let's say i was just like you know what i don't care about technologies i'm just gonna i'm gonna like i'm gonna click on the end and just queue everything up i don't care too much whatever and then like let's say later on you just are like actually you know what calendar is like the eighth tech i'm researching i really want calendar right now if you hold down alt and then left click it will change calendar from eight to one which means calendar is now my priority well right now i want capa tree to be a priority and i'm going to cancel everything else yeah so hopefully that explains how the tech screen works how to navigate a tech screen and cool little how to queue things up like i i think in this game i would probably go like carpentry calendar or carpentry city defense or something like that i would kind of figure out a technology path like that i like to keep my text one of the time i like to make my decisions every time i go to the tech tree although sometimes if like the techs are gonna take one turn i'll just cue up every tech that only takes one or two turns and then just like quickly get them out of the way so we've talked about food we've talked about industry we've talked about science now it's time to talk about money in industry i want to talk about money first money is an upkeep resource if i go into the tech tree and i hover over the swords then you can see here he takes an upkeep of one that means forever sorry this is a spearman for every spearman you have it'll take one gold money it'll take one money per turn to maintain them and uh you can also use gold to purchase things like for example if i cube this pottery workshop it's 102 gold to purchase this out so i don't have enough to do it right now but if i wanted to get this instantaneously i could in theory do it and that's the main use of money money is used to maintain your resources uh your your armies and your infrastructure and stuff like that it is used to quick purchase new infrastructure and then also super critically money is also used to upgrade and heal your unit so if you're struggling in a war and you unlock a new unit make sure you've got money to heal your units and upgrade them super super super important and then finally last but not least in fact last but most is industry industry is the lifeblood of any civilization any 4x game industry is like your your fists that you use to punch the world into submission okay everything relies upon industry if you want to build buildings you need industry if you want to make an army you need industry if you want to make anything in this game you want to make wonders holy sites magical boats whatever whatever tickles your fancy you need industry this is the most important piece of resource you're going to encounter in this game so basically uh your city 99 of the time the way you're gonna get industry is from working tiles with your city you can see here i'm working this tile for three three three and four which is giving me uh nine production from these and then four from the main plaza which you can see here nine from exploitation and four from main plaza so if i want more production i'm probably gonna want maker's quarters which means if i hover this over here you can see all of these things are kind of highlighting in green which means i'm now working these tiles these tiles which is the important part of the makers quarter there is the resource exploitation and then it says industry in a little picture the other important thing is that these tiles actually only have one production on them but because i am the egyptians and i have the grand planners legacy i get plus one industry on every single tile in the game uh that i work and also my districts are 10 cheaper so the the egyptians are really really good at industry so if i were to build this right here uh the game will give me a highlight and tell me exactly how much i'm gonna benefit it would say i would lose two food and two intense stability but i would gain eight production here and so it the game kind of suggests where the good spot is now the really interesting thing about egypt is that they have the egyptian pyramid which if you look at that special effects means it counts as a maker's quarter so this is a maker's quarter however we can only ever build one of these per territory if i place this down i can no longer build it anymore and the other really important thing is we have the farmer's quarter now farmer's quarters don't exploit production you can see here if i put this place if i if i put this farmers quarter where i was going to put that maker's quarter these tiles don't light up because this doesn't exploit production okay the makers quarter lights up the production but similarly if you look at this tile right here the food doesn't light up when i place the makers quarter because the makers quarter only exploits industries if i put the food down the food lights up if i put the industry down the industry lights up so the colors match the terrain right green for food orange for in industry so just keep that in mind districts exploit the terrain around them as you can see here because the egyptian pyramid uh has resource exploitation industry if i put it here it will in fact exploit just like the maker's quarter now emblematic quarters are a little bit more expensive than regular quarters however they're super worth it to build because this one gives me influence and we've already seen influence is super important because it's how i expand my civilization but yeah since production is so important i am actually going to build an egyptian pyramid because i want that production and i can get 10 over here i can get eight here and i can get nine here however this nine is kind of technically lying to me because there is a mountain here that gives me three production and it would be for production once i actually claim it but the problem is that you know the land in this game is broken up into discrete territories and you can't actually work like tiles outside of your territory you can see here if i put my farmer's quarter here it'll very easily work these two tiles see they light up because i'm getting food from them but if i put it on this tile these two tiles here don't light up because they're not inside my territory and they're not attached to this city i can later on in the game attach this mountain range and this section of the map to this city to where i would be able to work this mountain so sort of thinking ahead rather than going for the 10 production here i'm gonna go for the nine production right here because i know i'm gonna pick up another four from this mountain later on that brings me to another important point about cities and that has to do with rivers rivers are incredible okay rivers are incredible at two things making food or production not both okay and the reason for that is the water wheel and flood irrigation so here's float irrigation it puts two food on a river then you have the water wheel water mill here plus two industry on a river technically these things can exist at the same time however an important quirk of how districts and how these things work is the tile that the district is on can't be exploited by anything but the district so if i put a food thing down on this tile that three production is destroyed that was underneath it and the same is true if i put a maker's quarter here the one food that was under that tile gets destroyed as well so that's something you need to be keeping in mind um when you're placing your things these are all like pretty advanced techniques and stuff like that but i want you guys to be coming into this game with with really the knowledge you need to succeed and make good decisions so the point of that is you want to dedicate your rivers to either food or production or even dedicate particular sections of a river to food or production so for example i might dedicate this section here because there's so many productive tiles around to i might just like build a bunch of maker's quarters all the way down this river and then build a water mill to get that extra production whereas maybe up here where there's a little bit more food maybe i'll dedicate this to a farming section so you can't do both if you build on the river and building on rivers has advantages so as much as i want this nubian pyramid because i want that nine production and the influence and the long-term potential of having a very strong river i'm actually going to go ahead and build a pottery workshop because i want influence influence is another resource your city generates that is mostly useful for expanding your empire passing laws and merging territory together merging cities together to make super cities so let's get working on a pottery workshop and i think that really covers all of the information i wanted to cover in this this this first video it's a lot to take in i talked about a lot of stuff and um honestly my voice is really tired but i hope this was a comprehensive very early game tutorial i'm going to take a short break and then we'll talk a little bit more i had a little bit of an audio issue there i'm not sure what it was but i have managed to get it resolved with the help of my editor thank you so much but this covers because sort of most of the early game like we've only just planted our city down and uh we're only we're only really beginning our journey in humankind and it took me so long to uh to get to this point and that's purely because these big 4x games are very large and very complex you know each one of these games lasts about 300 turns on normal speed and we've played 10. so hopefully that kind of gives you the idea of a scale of a game now you could probably win around turn 150 if you're really good probably turn 200 i would expect would be more realistic based on the little bit of a gameplay i've played like someone who's quite good at the game and is is rushing for the win turn 200 would be um will be pretty reasonable but we've all actually found our very first enemy player here with this orange border this tells me that there's another player in this area so i'm going to maybe bring this bring this scout down here to place an outpost in this zone because there is some pretty good outpost locations here 11 food 18 production for example with these two guys i'm actually going to bring these into my city and even though i kind of would like to keep my citizens around these warrior units i'm actually going to disband them this is more of an advanced strategy and by disbanding them they now live inside my city here you can see this first guy and then if i go ahead and disband the second guy that population also moves into the city and i can use these guys for various tasks for example i could put them to work on producing the pottery workshop they could bring down the number of turns to build it by two or by one could generate gold there's lots of stuff i can do with these guys but what i'm gonna do with them is is i'm gonna put one on food and one on industry i'm gonna set the city to city growth what this does is it sets the city's priority to be focused on food production and then gold and science so the city is going to focus on getting more population and producing more infrastructure which is you know i would say this is the default strategy most people are going to want to play with there is a stability mechanic which i should explain but i don't think i'm going to explain it yet because that kind of comes into play when you start building a lot of districts or uh you start moving your ideology around and we're still pretty early into this game so you don't have to worry about all that stuff right now um but i i do hope that these first 10 to 12 turns have kind of helped you on your journey your journey in humankind um it's a fantastically interesting game don't forget to check out all the links in the description of the video and also don't forget to check out the future videos i will be doing more okay there will be a follow-up video to this go ahead and watch that too i love you all very much and i'll see you guys next time bye-bye [Music] you

Channel: PotatoMcWhiskey

Views: 251,829

Rating: 4.9324436 out of 5

Keywords: Humankind, humankind gameplay, humankind game, humankind guide, humankind review, lets play, amplitude studios, humankind strategy game, humankind gameplay ep 1, humankind pc gameplay, humankind strategy, humankind gameplay pc, humankind gameplay part 1, Humankind potatomcwhiskey, Humankind Civ, Civ vs humankind, Humankind tutorial, humankind gameplay tutorial, lets play humankind, humankind overview, humankind gameplay late game, humankind gameplay potato

Id: T8SukGtHjao

Length: 61min 49sec (3709 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Changlini]

Knowing amplitude games, this is 100% needed. Thanks for doing this!

[u/posca_]

Love your content, thanks for making this!

[u/lnaver]

Really well done potato!

[u/KnightDuty]

Hey! It's one of my favorite YouTubers! You and the Saxy Gamer are the only reason I'm worth a damn at Civ6 lol.

Loved "I was wrong about humankind".

Looking forward to watching this today while cooking!

[u/Grey-Templar]

Watched this tonight. Immediately downloaded the game. 50 turns in, I'm hooked.

[u/RSL2020]

I'm a big Potato fan, his Humankind videos have been great

[u/lovebus]

The only thing I need to know and haven't been able to find. When should I attach an outpost vs start a new city, and what is preventing me from having some sort of settlement in every territory?