This game has the framework to be a great game. The graphics are beautiful, the UI is great, the narration and sounds are satisfying. The entire concept is also a great idea, with civics and religion and cultures. The territory and battle mechanics are fantastic as well.

All of the above is ruined with terrible pacing. Nothing you do feels significant. This is the complete opposite to games such as civ 6 where a single turn can be quite impactful (which also has its issues).
In Humankind i reached the industrial era far earlier than any of the AI and I did not even need/manage to build basic buildings to achieve this such as a [i] school [/i]. And this is just the start, in my capital there are at least 10 ancient/medieval era buildings still left for me to build, because everything moves by so quickly that I never even had the chance to think about building them, and it doesn't even feel like I need to.

The AI is definitely not completely terrible but still suffers from some issues with falling behind. Despite losses I expect my neighbors to be able to rebuild. Instead, my neighbor is stuck with two cities with 1-5 pops because they get rebellions every other turn that my troops are left to deal with. I could easily crush them but they are supposed to be my ally.

When this game came out I understood that balance would be something that takes time to fix. However, it has been a couple of years or so since this games release and I only see marginal improvements.

I would like to see how this game works with my friends but even at low graphics it is not well optimized for play, and given the issues its a bit difficult to convince others to make the purchase.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game

I played this game for some 60 hours once. I had quite a blast, the game is very pretty and the sound design is amazing. The community is/was quite active and helped me get around and showed me how to use some neat 3rd party tools. However, I haven't opened it again since. The release of their odyssey expansion was a complete fluke and it just seems like the devs are throwing away their success. Rather than making their mediocore expansion they should be spending way more time adding interesting events to the game that are accessible and flavorful, instead it just seems like nothing is happening. It seems like over time other space sims will take over and its a bit of a shame