izigame.me

I had hoped this expansion would breathe new life into a buggy mess of a 4X title that suffers the same issues of an incredibly stale late game that the Civ franchise has to grapple with.
Boy was I wrong.
Not only are Humankind's new diplomatic features even more shallow and limited than Civ VI's paltry World Congress functions, but they're not explained at all. The new diplomatic and stealth units are virtually useless or don't function correctly. For example, Envoys are supposed to generate additional influence or the new "patronage" resource depending on if they're in another culture or independent peoples' border respectively. Except they don't actually increase anything. It's virtually impossible to collect the new resource because it only drops randomly from the AI doing things, and it really doesn't have much of an effect on the game, you'll never be able to collect it fast enough to get the new diplomatic stars, and the actions it's used for can be made completely irrelevant by just playing even barely competently.
And the bugs. It's like Amplitude is either incapable of fixing actual breaking gameplay issues, or more likely knows they're there and just chooses to ignore them. The infinite turn loading bug, which I'd like to point out has been an issue SINCE RELEASE is still not fixed. The issue with audio crackling, also a problem SINCE RELEASE is still not fixed.
I would love to know if the invisible districts bug is still present, but I haven't been able to get far enough into a single game thanks to this expansion introducing the most frustrating Amplitude bug to date: The unendable turn! At a random point in your game, one of the speech bubble events will appear on the "End Turn" button, claiming you have "urgent affairs" to attend to. Except when you click it, nothing happens. There's no event to coincide with this notification, but you also can't cancel it or skip it. Saving and reloading also does nothing, the bugged event will always pop up on the same turn for that match, no matter what you do, meaning once it happens your game is done for, and you're starting over.
The new Diplomatic Affinity cultures are also complete garbage, because the diplomacy system they rely on for their bonuses just flat out stinks, as mentioned before. These cultures effectively bring nothing to the table that isn't massively overshadowed by even the worst cultures from the base game.
All in all, you're really better off skipping this expansion. It's like Amplitude looked at their game, said "How can we make this expansion as functionally worthless as possible?" and just brainstormed a list of stupid ways to implement features.
Save your money, I wouldn't even install this expansion if it was free.