
It's really a sprint, a particularly brutal one on the highest difficulty, where you're competing to get first dibs on the list of playable cultures and stake your claim on the most bountiful regions. I'm sure this all sounds quite relaxing-that's a trap. Picking berries and beating up mammoths-a perfect Neolithic family day out. During this phase you saunter around gathering food and other resources from nodes scattered all over the world, with breaks where you get to fight animals. Before picking a site for your first settlement, or even picking a culture, you must first explore the world as a nomadic, Neolithic tribe.

Normally you'd need to pick a civ, faction or race of nerdy dragons first, and then plonk down a city, but not here. It's clear that isn't the case as soon as you hop into a campaign.

This is not to say that Humankind doesn't have any bold ideas.
