I never played the demo, started with the full game... maybe a couple weeks after launch.

As I said in another reply, yeah, it absolutely was rough on a technical level for the first few months, a good number of actually fairly common edge cases where the game's systems would break, things wouldn't actually work as intended, as described by the game itself.

But, after about 6 months, they fixed basically all of these... and didn't really even have to do like major tweaks to the balancing of the game... the problems were technical implentations of the designed game, and once they got those ironed out, the game as envisioned was now actually the game as it performed.

Go pull up the steam store page right now: Overall score is still 'Mixed' it did indeed have a rough launch... but Recent Reviews are 'Very Positive'.

The people that bothered to stick with it... well they seem to very much like where the game is now.

So, I'd say yes, the general consensus of people still playing it is that it did indeed improve significantly.

Also, its pretty undeniable that 2K, Civ 7, very much did try to ape some, but not all, of the changes that Humankind put on what is basically the Civ formula, that just never occured to them.

The entire concept of you and other players basicslly just having the avatar of your civilization remain the same for all time, but the civilizations themselves change, with historical eras?

Thats one of the most obviously visible differences between Humankind and any Civ game that existed ... prior to Civ 7.

It is also, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons those initial reviews of Humankind were 'Mixed': a whole lot of Civ fans just thought the whole idea was stupid, and were vocal about it.

... And then Civ 7 does the same idea, but more watered down, with only 3 eras, 3 different civs per playthrough, as opposed to Humankind's ... well basically 6 + 1, where that + 1 represents your pre-civilization nomadic tribe/culture, basically playing a fairly different kind of game, prior to building your first real city and thus advancing to your first choice of civilization.

Also, worth throwing in here I guess: Advancing through eras works with a similar mechanic as to racing to build wonders in Civ: You can only have one player as each civ at a time, so if you really want to have first dibs and the full range of civs to choose from, you have to be the first to era advance, otherwise another player may beat you to it and pick the one you were planning on.

But, it also works differently than wonders: Wonders are just built by a city in Civ. Eras in Humankind are advanced by earning points for completing basically era specific mini objectives... and you have a range of different options to choose from, maybe you go for numerous easier objectives, or focus on a few, more difficult ones.

It may have not caused that much panic, but Amplitude consistently put out interesting ideas and enhancements to the Civ-likes in their games, so no wonder Firaxis might use these as templates and negate any unique features their competition might have over them. Plus, the Civ genre has to move in some way, anyway.