HUMANKIND Tutorial — Empire Expansion
In Amplitude Studio’s new 4X strategy game HUMANKIND, expanding your empire is far more nuanced and interesting than in traditional games of the genre. Let’s take a look at the mechanics of empire expansion and how they work as of the OpenDev.
Understanding the Map
The map in HUMANKIND is a mostly standard hex tile based map, however the map is also broken up into larger collections of tiles called Territories. Each territory is a good number of tiles in size and organic in shape. They feel quite natural, and often all the tiles, or at least most of them, in a territory will conform to a given biome such a desert or grasslands.
When it comes to expanding your empire and controlling the map, it is these territories which you must control. Once you gain control of a territory no other player can do so, and by default no other player can even enter a territory you control.
You gain control of a territory in one of two ways, by building an outpost or a city.
Outposts
Regardless of your end goal, an outpost is your first step in controlling a territory. Unlike other similar games, you don’t need to build any specialized settler type units, but rather any of your normal armies can establish an outpost in a territory. Doing so simply consumes all of the army’s movement points for that turn. The army is not lost, and will be able to move as normal on the next turn.
To establish an outpost, simply move one of your armies to an unclaimed territory, then click the Claim Territory button in the army’s control panel. Once you do this your cursor will change and you can mouse over the map to select the tile you want the outpost to be built on. While mousing over the map you will see the resources on the tile under your cursor as well as the neighboring tiles, even if by default you have these hidden. This is a nice touch.
Once you decide which tile to place the outpost, simply left click to place it. Do note that you can actually move the outpost later if you decide you don’t like the spot, though it will cost time and money to do so.
To establish an outpost costs time and money. The money cost increases the farther the territory is from one you already have control of, as well as increasing with each territory you claim. From what I have seen so far, it takes two turns to establish the outpost, but this may vary with some factors I haven’t seen yet in the limited scenario we have in OpenDev right now.
Where some of the nuance and strategy comes in here is that an outpost is not just a stepping stone to a city or a quick way to claim a territory, though it can be both of those things. Additionally however, an outpost can allow you to take control of luxury and strategic resource tiles in the same territory. You do so by building special extension to the outpost for pure money, not production points like when you build from a city. Furthermore the resource tiles don’t need to be right next to the outpost. In Civilization for example if you want to exploit a special resource you need to build a city either right next to it, or if you build the city a bit farther away you need to grow the city until you can get it connected in.
With an outpost however you just build this extension and plop it on the resource and as soon as it is built, you immediately can exploit it for your entire empire.
While we will talk about this more below, cities require a lot more overhead to build and maintain so outposts staying as outposts provides a certain strategic choice you can use to exploit resources.
Cities
For a price, outposts can be upgraded into full cities with all the benefits attributed to such. This sounds great at first, but bear in mind that a city’s production output will be reduced unless it has an administrator assigned. Administrators are a limited resources however, and you only unlock extra ones through technology.
Once an outpost has been upgraded to a city however, it acts just like any other city you may have started the game with. You can build extensions and infrastructure as well as new units using production value.
Attaching an Outpost
Finishing this tutorial off, outposts have yet one more ability not to be overlooked and that is the ability to attach an outpost to an existing city. This is in many ways a sort of middle ground between outpost and upgrading to a new city. Once you connect the outpost, it no longer is a separate entity. You can’t click on it directly, and it can’t build anything on its own. However, the city it was attached to will gain additional room for city extensions allowing you to build more things like quarters to improve the city output. Furthermore this newly attached outpost, while allowing the city to build more extensions, does not need an administrator.
This makes attaching outposts a great way to continue to expand your empire and your cities without the administrator overhead of just building new cities.
