Looking for Humankind warfare tips? Unless you’re playing on peaceful mode, chances are you’re going to be clashing with your competitors over the course of your game as you jostle for first place and those sought-after fame points for that ultimate victory.
In the early game, your first fight might be with bears or mammoths, but as leaders begin to stake claims on the territories surrounding their first city, you can expect skirmishes to occur between the various armies roaming the lands. Before borders are established, this doesn’t immediately lead to all-out war, but it’ll contribute to the ever-changing balance of ‘war support’ between nations. War support represents your people’s appetite for war, and determines whether you’re able to continue the fight, or find yourself with no choice but to give in to your enemies’ demands.
Individual battles themselves are also relatively complex turn-based tactical affairs that encourage you to manually direct your units in order to achieve the best possible outcome. Here’s everything you need to know about combat, wars, and battles in Humankind – good luck taking over the world.
When you open your diplomacy tab, you can see the current state of affairs between you and your competitors. At the top of the screen, the war support meter measures how much support you have from your people for fighting with that civilisation, and vice versa.
When two opposing armies clash, or an enemy army approaches a city, you will see a tooltip above the two parties in conflict, showing the approximate power balance between them. If you are considering initiating the battle, you can hold down right click on the enemy army to see a preview of the battlefield deployment zones when attacking from a particular angle.
If there is a free tile outside of the battlefield that your troops are able to reach, you may retreat to it. This will reduce your war support and increase your enemies’ war support. Once you’ve retreated, your army is not able to retreat again next turn.
This automatically resolves the battle. Note that this does not necessarily mean you automatically win if you have an advantage over your opponent, nor that all your units will survive even if you do – auto-resolving battles tends to give a much worse outcome than fighting them manually. Therefore, we recommend you only choose this option if you have an overwhelming advantage over your opponent. You can only instantly resolve battles in multiplayer if both sides agree to it.
This option allows you to deploy your units to the battlefield and position them as you wish, and then decide where to move units and which enemies to attack each turn. This allows you to make use of flanking bonuses, terrain bonuses, and favourable unit type matchups to turn the battle your way. Though you move your units around the map in grouped ‘armies’, you will deploy them in battle as individual units, one per hex.
The number of turns taken in each battle is determined by the number of units involved. Battles can even span more than one turn, as only three combat rounds are taken per turn. After researching the requisite technology (Organised Warfare, relatively early in the Ancient era) you can add new units to the battle via reinforcements, provided there are some close enough to join in. There is a single square in which reinforcements can arrive for each side – occupy the enemy’s reinforcement tile to prevent them from adding troops to the field.
To attack a city, you can attack any of the districts attached to the capital. This begins a siege, cutting the city off from its surrounding resources. Each turn, the attackers can choose to maintain the siege, gaining progress towards building siege weapons, or if they’re ready, they can assault the city, triggering a battle. Equally, if the defenders are confident enough, they can choose to initiate a battle and break the siege on their turn.
Certain sophisticated units are able to strike enemy targets without initiating a battle, most notably artillery units and aircraft. Here’s a quick breakdown of how these units work.
