Also you have to waste multiple cities worth of tiles to build 'testing grounds'. They just wanted to make nukes - and war in general for the game - completely tedious and worthless as a mechanic.
Yeah, they were fully too lazy to try and built things into each other, and use their imagination to actually think what these sorts of cultures might become with time. It's a shame really. Again, lots of good ideas sort of just pissed up the wall.
In its benefit though. It's a very good looking game though, and the UI is rock solid. The way they have implemented culture change makes it so that age to age, the game does change and become more varied with multiple play throughs. It's not awful.
It would be hard to impossible to balance this (though I don't really give a shit, I think balance obsession ruins historical strategy games), but I think you could generally take cultures as being able to upgrade into cultures that historically split off them, that they conquered, or naturally evolved into.
So, for example, Romans could become Spaniards, Franks, Italians. Celts could become Gaels, Franks (Gauls), Spaniards (Celtiberians). Germans could become Britons, Vikings, Germans (Medieval), Franks, etc. Aztecs and Spaniards could both become Mexicans.
And there could always be a "cultural stasis" option or something where you forego benefits if you really want to keep LARPing as muh Romans.
It wouldn't make perfect sense, especially since you're not actually conquering/being conquered like that, and it might have to have arbitrary restrictions (some cultures, namely Germans, have expanded way more than others), but I'd love to see someone do this.
What I like with Humankind, that was making me still consider it, is that it actually has an interesting range of civilizations including ones that are underappreciated. Unlike Civilization being all "Lol Canada and Australia XD."
Edit: Lol it has Caribbean Pirates WTF. And there's some other duds, it does have Australia and Singapore (lol). Low standards of what qualifies as a "civilization."
Something that really gets to be a problem in 4X games is how you handle Indians. They're interesting, such that you wouldn't want to not include them, but they never got past the Stone Age/Bronze Age. So, do you render them at the level of advancement they were when Europeans were in that age, or is all their content loaded into the very start? And oftentimes these cultures were a mishmash, like Sioux definitely didn't have factories, but they did have cutting edge firearms, but only because they imported them, etc.
The same problem exists for the rest of the world, just not as extreme.
