The game sucked back when it came out and it still sucks today.
Humankind is not your typical 4x game, it is more akin to a racing game, you have to race to beat the other AI/players to the next era in order to pick the best faction in order to secure winning the game for the most part.
It is a system that makes sense in theory but failed in execution because some factions are just clearly superior to others and years after the games launch, that hasn't changed. Anyone familiar with amplitude's history would have seen this coming a mile away as every Endless Legend/Space game runs into the same problem as well with balance and AI that cheats being core issues for the ride. What set Humankind apart from the other titles was, absolutely nothing. It felt and played like a reskin of Endless Legend and that was about it but given it had a new, different name as well as Sega investing money into Amplitude Studios, at the very least it seemed like an earnest effort would be made on this title this time but sadly not is the reality, to the point that Sega let Amplitude studios go.

The game is not worth buying, not even on sale. The main reason for this is simple, if you enjoy 4X games, you will have played many of them and as a result you will be used to the fact that the games play best against a human with maybe a few AI thrown in the mix as well. AI in this game just pull resources out of thin air just like in Civilization games, and that also has the exact same effect, harder AI is paradoxically easier to beat and/or exploit because they have more free resources to trade/steal. This devolves into removing the AI so only humans are playing and for gaming sessions that last literal hours, sometimes day, that is a huge ask for even 3 people to do, meaning games will go unfinished between humans and AI become unbalancing paypigs if humans exploit them, which they will because the free armies they spit out are just annoying to deal with.

If you do play the game, know that district costs scale based on how many districts you have, this leads to situations where you are producing a Production district to make building things faster but every future Production district ends up costing more and it feels like your production is going down, not up. It is going up and you will be able to make things faster but just don't bother with most districts anyway and you will do a lot better because attaching territory is a -20 stability malus but can easily outdo the everything bonus of anything you could possibly build, whereas each district is a -10 stability malus and 2 of any district won't come close to 1 attached outpost. Just another example of the game balance making no meaningful sense.
This lack of meaningful scaling crescendos when you are done in the first two eras as there is nothing for you to do. Districts beget more districts so you stop building them, wonders must be claimed before being built so unlike in Civilization where you might "idle" some cities by having them produce wonders in place of you constantly issuing orders for your large empire, here you can't even do that. There are internal city districts you can build and probably should just to give the cities something to do but you will never escape the feeling of just how shallow the game actually is alongside its broken balance that you will end up actively engaging/avoiding just to remove/add something that resemblances challenge.

If, and it is an extremely small if, but on the chance that this is your first 4x game, you will enjoy it and you have a whole world of wonderful 4x games ahead of you to experience too! But for anyone who has even lightly played any other 4x game, you will know something is amiss here, you might not be able to pinpoint it, but you will know it to be true. Another corporate waste of potential and imagination.

The game sucked back when it came out and it still sucks today. Humankind is not your typical 4x game, it is more akin to a racing game, you have to race to beat the other AI/players to the next era in order to pick the best faction in order to secure winning the game for the most part. It is a system that makes sense in theory but failed in execution because some factions are just clearly superior to others and years after the games launch, that hasn't changed. Anyone familiar with amplitude's history would have seen this coming a mile away as every Endless Legend/Space game runs into the same problem as well with balance and AI that cheats being core issues for the ride. What set Humankind apart from the other titles was, absolutely nothing. It felt and played like a reskin of Endless Legend and that was about it but given it had a new, different name as well as Sega investing money into Amplitude Studios, at the very least it seemed like an earnest effort would be made on this title this time but sadly not is the reality, to the point that Sega let Amplitude studios go. The game is not worth buying, not even on sale. The main reason for this is simple, if you enjoy 4X games, you will have played many of them and as a result you will be used to the fact that the games play best against a human with maybe a few AI thrown in the mix as well. AI in this game just pull resources out of thin air just like in Civilization games, and that also has the exact same effect, harder AI is paradoxically easier to beat and/or exploit because they have more free resources to trade/steal. This devolves into removing the AI so only humans are playing and for gaming sessions that last literal hours, sometimes day, that is a huge ask for even 3 people to do, meaning games will go unfinished between humans and AI become unbalancing paypigs if humans exploit them, which they will because the free armies they spit out are just annoying to deal with. If you do play the game, know that district costs scale based on how many districts you have, this leads to situations where you are producing a Production district to make building things faster but every future Production district ends up costing more and it feels like your production is going down, not up. It is going up and you will be able to make things faster but just don't bother with most districts anyway and you will do a lot better because attaching territory is a -20 stability malus but can easily outdo the [b]everything[/b] bonus of anything you could possibly build, whereas each district is a -10 stability malus and 2 of any district won't come close to 1 attached outpost. Just another example of the game balance making no meaningful sense. This lack of meaningful scaling crescendos when you are done in the first two eras as there is nothing for you to do. Districts beget more districts so you stop building them, wonders must be claimed before being built so unlike in Civilization where you might "idle" some cities by having them produce wonders in place of you constantly issuing orders for your large empire, here you can't even do that. There are internal city districts you can build and probably should just to give the cities something to do but you will never escape the feeling of just how shallow the game [i]actually[/i] is alongside its broken balance that you will end up actively engaging/avoiding just to remove/add something that resemblances challenge. If, and it is an extremely small if, but on the chance that this is your first 4x game, you will enjoy it and you have a whole world of wonderful 4x games ahead of you to experience too! But for anyone who has even lightly played any other 4x game, you will know something is amiss here, you might not be able to pinpoint it, but you will know it to be true. Another corporate waste of potential and imagination.