HUMANKIND™ News

4X game Humankind just completely changed how war works, and it's for the better

Civilization 7 hasn't quite been the 4X game many of us hoped for so far. Huge changes to progression and issues with the user interface have marred the launch, but developer Firaxis is already hard at work bringing the historical strategy game back with plenty of patches. If you'd rather step away from Civ 7 while these changes come into effect, however, there's another, somewhat forgotten 4X experience getting some love. Humankind had a mixed launch, but the latest update offers up some big improvements.

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Achilles Update

Hey everyone!

After a couple of weeks in the beta branch, we are ready to release Achilles Update 🎉

The goal of this update is to address some of the frustrations that players encountered and expressed regarding War Support, War Score, and Surrender.

We want to avoid players feeling surprised by a warm ending with little warning and create a clearer connection between demands, occupied territory, and available surrender terms.

Here are some comments from the devs regarding the update:

Originally posted by author
Let's start with a bit of context on the War System in general before moving to the changes.

When we first starting thinking about armed conflict during the initial development of Humankind, we mostly followed the Clausewitzian saying that held that "War is a continuation of Policy through other means". There were many interactions with what had happened before and during conflict, and a big resolution at the end where one of the sides was forced to surrender. While this approach worked well enough after release, we kept getting feedbacks that said that players were often puzzled as to why a war they were fighting had to end. Often, this boiled down to the War Support system not making enough room to account for all the subtleties of strategic context that may unfold during a war in Humankind. After smaller changes brought during past updates failed to resolve all situations, we decided to make a more drastic modification.

With the update we are separating the 2 aspects, War Support and War Score.

War Support, which used to being considered as your "War HP", is now meant to be your " War Stamina": it measures how long you can fight before the conflict starts taking its toll on your Empire's Population. Now, both sides can keep fighting after reaching a War Support of 0. It is the social consequences of continuing to fight beyond this point that should drive Players to make or accept a surrender proposal.

War Score has also been simplified to be solely related to your Demands and territorial gains during the conflict. Its calculation should be less finicky and more predictable for both sides.

Our hope is that these changes go towards having War outcomes that both sides agree with. At the end, its about giving you more control on the decision.

P.S There's always the option of proposing a White Peace 💡

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Patch Notes

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[Version Number >> 1.28.4612]

All surrender proposals can be refused now, even if you are at 0 war support

Both parties reaching 0 War Support no longer forces White Peace
While at 0 War Support, empires take a Stability penalty scaling with era and number of turns spent without War Support
While their enemy is ready to surrender (at 0 War Support), empires will take a penalty to their own War Support
Centralized Power unlocks an empire bonus that reduces the impact of lost and destroyed units on war support, so wars can last longer

War Score now only depends on demands and occupied territory, not War Support
You can now always declare surprise wars
(Together We Rule) The Placate action is now forbidden during war
Corrected the buyout formula to avoid inflation
Several new historical personas: Zenobia, Sun Tzu, Miyamoto Musashi, Napoleon, Shaka Zulu, Artemisa, and Alexander The Great.

Then after some feedback we received from the community, we included a couple of extra changes ✨

Added a -10% Food, Industry, Money, and Science War Weariness penalty on all Settlements for each refused Surrender while at 0 War Support.
Reinstated a one-time +10 War Support bump whenever an opponent that is at 0 War Support refuses a Surrender offer.
Reduced the "My Opponent is at 0 War Support" War support penalty scale to a maximum of -5/turn
Forbidden City Balance to be adjusted with the changes in War Support
>> Now provides +25% War Score (instead of -10 War Support required to declare a Surprise War)

With these changes, you can keep fighting even if your enemy or your own people are ready to give up. You may have to deal with a few rebels if you push things too far, though 😉

Also, here is a video (from Amplified 2025) from the Devs talking about the details and explanation regarding the update.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Have a nice day ^-^

Underrated Civ style 4X game Humankind is free to keep for a limited time

By and large, mankind has had a troubled history. We tend to run headlong into catastrophe, occasionally only surviving by the skin of our teeth. Correcting such flaws is an inherent fantasy of Humankind, a 4X RTS all about guiding people through several eras of evolution. It's an underrated project that went a bit under the radar for many, but now it's free for a limited time if you'd like to try.

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Four years after launch, Amplitude strategy game Humankind deserves another shot

Too many worthy games get lost in the noise. It's understandable. We've all got big backlogs that we're trying to work through, and new releases arrive practically every hour. But it means a lot of solid or experimental titles fall by the wayside. Humankind is a good example. Originally released back in 2021, some less-than-fanatical early user reviews meant it was quickly overshadowed by strategy genre giants like the immovable Civilization 6 and Paradox's Stellaris. But as Amplitude confirms Endless Legend 2 is on the way, Humankind is well worth another look, especially right now. After a transformative update, it's now temporarily completely free to play, and then available at a huge discount.

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Beta - Achilles Update

Hey everyone,

We’ve got a nice surprise for you today: A playable beta for the upcoming Humankind update, Achilles.

Since the release of the game, we’ve received a lot of feedback about War Support, War Score, and surrender, and with this update we want to address some of the big frustrations. We want to avoid players feeling surprised by a warm ending with little warning, and create a clearer connection between demands, occupied territory, and available surrender terms. To achieve this, we made the following changes:

All surrender proposals can be refused now, even if you are at 0 war support
Both parties reaching 0 War Support no longer forces White Peace
While at 0 War Support, empires take a Stability penalty scaling with era and number of turns spent without War Support
While their enemy is ready to surrender (at 0 War Support), empires will take a penalty to their own War Support
Centralized Power unlocks an empire bonus that reduces the impact of lost and destroyed units on war support, so wars can last longer.
War Score now only depends on demands and occupied territory, not War Support
You can now always declare surprise wars
(Together We Rule) The Placate action is now forbidden during war
Several new historical personas, like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or Sun Tzu

With these changes, you can keep fighting even if your enemy or your own people are ready to give up. You may have to deal with a few rebels if you push things too far, though.

If you want to see these changes in action, you can already try the beta for this patch through the update_preview branch on Steam.
Just go to the properties of the game, open the betas tab, and select the right branch.

[h2]Hotfix [1.28.4599][/h2]

Some words from the devs

First and foremost, I wanted to thank you again for the feedback on the beta! We are about to update the Achilles Beta branch with some updates based on what you've told us.

We have tried to make changes that preserve what players liked from the change while addressing the two most extreme behaviors reported: Weaponizing your already low War Support to bring other players down with you, and spamming legit surrender proposals with no consequence.

These are the concrete changes and their underlying design rationale:

Reduced the "My Opponent is at 0 War Support" War support penalty scale to a maximum of -5/turn

This decrease exists to incentivize belligerents with positive war support to send a Surrender proposal before they lose their advantage, however its scale made it a bit too surprising (as a reminder it climbed to -15/turns in 5 turns) and ended up being too easily weaponizable by belligerents with already low War Support.

Reinstated a one-time +10 War Support bump whenever an opponent that is at 0 War Support refuses a Surrender offer.

This is meant to combine with the above change to enable some defense against the dropping War Support, without being a full re-up.

Added a -10% Food, Industry, Money and Science War Weariness penalty on all Settlements for each refused Surrender while at 0 War Support.

This is more an indictment of Stability lacking the oomph to have any meaningful effects once you are deep in the red; Ideally the FIMS hit would be related from the lack of stability, but there was no clear way of implementing this. We believe that tying this penalty to refusing surrender offers when you really shouldn't is clear enough.

I also want to address the other things you reported but that we haven't touched so far.

I've seen the "jettison territories" behavior being mentioned here and there, but at the moment I don't see how this would prevent you from razing the admin center and claiming it as your own without bothering with War Score, bagging all contained districts as well. Maybe my playstyle enables this but not everyone's?

I've also read the woes about the placate action no longer being a "get out of war free" card anymore. I get that for those players against the AI this was ok, but this is a behavior that causes much grief when you're on its receiving end. I'd much rather see players its use as a dissuadant during peace time.

All this to say that while we chose not to act on those feedbacks in this Beta update, this does not mean that we won't keep monitoring those (and other) topics, and enact changes if they become too problematic.

With all this said, I hope the changes put forth improve your Achilles Beta experiences!

[hr][/hr] [h2]Amplified 2025[/h2]
In case you do not know, we are celebrating our Studio Anniversary.
We have a lot of surprises 🎁

Just announced our new game, Endless Legend 2
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3407390

Claim for Free Cultures of Latin America
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1819410/

Humankind is FREE TO PLAY until Jan 30th
Free Wallpapers
And many surprises under the Stretch Goals that all the community will unlock!
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