Through all these eras, you and your competitors keep the same avatar, who is just dressing differently in each era. By playing several games, you can unlock strengths and biases, with which you can equip the AI persona of your own avatar. Via a website your friends can then download your avatar, and play against a virtual "you". Interesting idea, horrible execution. The avatars are mostly uncanny valley kind of ghastly. And the systems to find avatars to download, and to include them as opponents in your game are both very badly done and annoying. You will miss the opponent selection of Civ.

World creation is working quite well. I played two games with 3 and 4 continents, with a total number of 4 and 6 players. With the "new world" option set to yes, each time there were exactly 2 players per continent, and one empty one to discover. Last time I played Civ 6, that sort of world was a lot harder to set up, but I don't know if it improved since then with updates and DLCs. While I do like the kind of world where there is an uninhabited continent to discover, in reality it turns out that it is a huge bonus to the player, as even AIs with "maritime" traits never manage to find that continent before you. In fact, pathfinding for ships that should stay in coastal waters is horrible, and even when you have ships that can go everywhere and you set them to "auto explore", they just go around in circles. Last time I tried, Civ wasn't doing much better with ships. Maybe I should just set the world to "Pangea" and not bother with ships. One interesting change from Civ is that the world is divided into territories, so you don't need to "create" territories with city districts.

Overall, playing Humankind felt a lot like playing Civ. You get in that "one more turn" mindset and suddenly hours have passed. Fun enough for a while. I have been playing "normal" game length of 300 turns, and every time the game reaches a tipping point way before that, where you already know you won (or lost) the game, and just have to click through turns to finish. While there are a number of different win conditions, you can also win by simply having the most fame at the end of the game, which is a nice way of keeping score. Maybe I should play shorter games, there are options for 150 or even just 75 turns, and you can always opt to keep playing afterwards. How many turns you want to play is hard to predict, as a turn can be very fast if you don't have any units moving around, but can take very long if you are mobilizing large armies or exploring a lot.

While not exactly a "Civ Killer", Humankind is a very nice game that is similar enough to appeal to anyone who liked Civ, but different enough to offer something new. I don't know if I would have wanted to pay €50 for that. Fortunately I am playing for "free*", as the game is on XBox Game Pass for PC since release. Weirdly the Game Pass version is minimally different from the other versions, e.g. you can't rename cities and armies in the Game Pass version, but you can in the version available on Steam or Epic. The game still has a few minor bugs, e.g. with battle area previews not going away, but nothing gamebreaking. If you are a subscriber to the Game Pass, you should definitively check this out!