Humankind: Diplomacy and war support guide — Grievances and demands

Your expansion in Humankind will eventually lead to conflicts against neighboring empires. As we’ve highlighted in our Classical Era guide, you’ll need to consider warfare when all other options have been exhausted. Here’s our Humankind diplomacy and war support guide to help you with grievances, demands, and that annoying war score.

Note: For more information, check out our Humankind guides and features hub. You may also take a look at our beginner’s guide to learn about the basic mechanics and early-game progression.

Humankind diplomacy and war support guide: Grievances, demands, and war score

Depending on certain actions, grievances can be generated by empires in Humankind. Here are some examples:

• Skirmishing and attacking units outside an empire’s domains.
• Trespassing within the borders of an empire when the “Closed Borders” treaty is active.
• Converting the population of an empire through ideologies/sphere of influence.
• Converting the population of an empire through religion/faith.
• Picking the “Religious Tolerance – Religious Hostility” civic and encountering empires with a different state religion.
• Refusing trade deals and treaty proposals.
• Breaking treaties.
• Using outposts to claim territories near another empire’s borders.
• Warring with someone’s ally or allying with someone’s enemy.

These grievances last for 10 turns after you first encounter them, and they’ll generate war support every turn.

You may also choose to press your claims to turn them into demands. Acquiescing to the demands will lead to a relevant result (i.e., breaking alliances, monetary compensation, giving up cities/outposts, or switching religions/ideologies). If a demand is refused, the one who pressed them will gain additional war support as well.

Note 1: The default war support is 50. Militarist cultures, meanwhile, have a +30 war support bonus threshold. Bonuses are also granted by the Forbidden City cultural wonder.

Note 2: Having the “Reject Luxury” religious tenet grants bonus war support when you make demands and when demands are active. Meanwhile, the “Sustain the Faithful” religious tenet adds extra war support when a demand is refused and when an agreement/treaty is broken.

Now, if both you and your opponent have active demands, either faction can choose to defuse the tension (going back to relative peace) or a war can be declared:

• In general, Surprise Wars tend to require only 50 war support. This will, however, earn you the Traitor Badge. You’ll lose war support each turn, other empires will dislike you, and they’ll gain a bonus to their war score gains when they defeat your armies.
• Conversely, a Formal War requires 80 war support (which means you need to wait until grievances/demands have taken effect to boost that war support threshold further).

Beating down your opponent and increasing your war score

War score is a mechanic that many players of Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy games will be familiar with. In Humankind, it’s a means of increasing your points while you’re engaged in a war. Here are some examples:

• Winning battles and killing units.
• Pillaging outposts, cities, districts, and resource extractors.
• Causing enemy armies to retreat.
• Having the “Tithe the Wealthy” religious tenet and winning battles/causing the opponent to retreat.
• Having the “Conquered Empires – Imperialists” civic and winning battles.
• Having the “Conquered Empires – Anti-Imperialist” civic and winning battles against an empire that chose the “Imperialists” civic.
• Capturing a city if you chose the Russian culture during the Industrial Era.
• Naturally, you’ll incur a blow to your war score whenever you retreat, get trounced in battle, or have your domains ransacked.

Forcing surrender: Destroying your foe and vassalization

Once your enemy’s war support hits zero, you are compelled to start peace negotiations even if you haven’t conquered their remaining territories yet. There’s no way to avoid this.

Your total war score will appear on the negotiations panel. You’re then able to enforce the terms of the peace deal (i.e., your rewards), such as occupying territories, receiving gold, and so on. Any active demands that you had (which caused the conflict to escalate in the first place) will be automatically included and they can’t be canceled.

The value of each territory that you want to control will be taken into consideration. As such, your war score might not be enough to gobble up an entire empire in one go. It can take many conflicts before you’re actually able to fully destroy or vassalize a rival:

• Destroying empires – To fully destroy an empire, you have to kill all its units and ensure that it owns no cities or outposts. The cities/outposts could either belong to you, or you could pillage/ransack the tiles to remove them from the map.
• Vassalization – Vassalization can be costly (expect 300+ war score needed for larger empires). You might need to cut your opponent down to size in multiple wars to lower the needed war score for vassalization in the future. If you can manage this, you’ll become the liege of that nation, as well as its vassals. You’ll get lots of gold per turn from your subject’s income.
• Simply put, especially when it comes to larger empires, it’s easier to bring their war support from 100 to zero than it is to get your war score up to 300 or 400.

Note 1: After peace negotiations are completed, you and your opponent’s war support levels are reset to zero. It’ll gradually climb back up to the default level (50), and you may also use grievances/demands to increase it once more for future wars.

Note 2: You could pillage/ransack cities after they’re given to you in a peace deal if you don’t want to go over your city cap limit. You can just build an outpost in the territory if you want. Alternatively, you can merge cities after researching “Military Architecture.” However, this process is very expensive.

Humankind is available via Steam, the Epic Games Store, Stadia, and Xbox Game Pass for PC. For more information, check out our guides and features hub.