Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition

I started Ara on Gamepass, playing well over 100 hours there. Then bought it here on Steam. So my playtime is longer that whatever it says here. :) Anyway, I've loved Ara since it came out. When I found Civ 7's reveal (and later release) to be so disappointing, Ara gave me pretty much what I wanted. It's like Civ in many respects. It goes from ancient times all the way to the future. But it does also change the formula in ways I enjoy. A few of them are: 1. Simultaneous turns. Unlike Civ, where you move a warrior to a tile on your turn, then another player can't move to that tile, your orders represent your *intent* to do something next turn. Moving a unit to the next tile will happen next turn. Crafting a building (and using the required materials) will start next turn. Response to diplomacy occurs next turn. On the face that may seem odd, but it works in a way I quite like; it removes the advantage the player typically has in Civ, where s/he always has military move priority. In Ara, if you and an enemy player both move into the same tile, they battle. It just seems fairer. The only time this gets a little cumbersome is when you find yourself trying to track an enemy unit around the map. But this has been rare for me. 2. Territories and zones. I love the whole 'living world' thing. Very vibrant and fun. Instead of Civ's hexes, the maps generate territories. These are made up of between 2 and 5 or so smaller zones. These zones are where you build stuff like workshops, farms, etc. In warfare you can pillage enemy zones specifically, giving different resources. Building certain buildings in the same region will sometimes yield benefits (sort of like district adjacency bonuses in Civ 6). There's also some strategy in determining which territories to select as you expand in influence. A triumph (wonder) takes up all regions in a territory. So it's best to build those in territories with few zones. 3. Crafting goods. You spend a good deal of time producing goods for all manner of uses including improvement on your cities' various stats (health, happiness, etc), building units, trade, and increasing productivity of other buildings. As other reviews mentioned, when the game came out, these could get pretty micro. But the devs have done a great job of allowing you to get as granular or macro as you'd like. You can now manage crafting on a national basis. You can use policies that will auto-apply. So you no longer have to tell all 20 of your workshops what to do unless you want to. There are also a ton of strategic and luxury resources to give each player some sort of edge. 4. The Prestige system. Instead of winning a science victory, economic victory, etc., all victories are essentially a score victory. This is kept track of with Prestige. It's an amalgam of all sorts of things, from standing armies to cultural influence to religious prevalence and so on. It's nice to play the game fully designed this way, and not around specific victory conditions. Basically just play the best game you can in whatever area you can. At the end of each of three acts, a player (or I think more if you set it that way) is removed from the game (you can set this to exempt humans). This opens the map to settle their former lands as they disintegrate into barbarian clans. Since release, the devs have done a lot of work. They've added cultural policies (like perks you can 'buy' with influence), vastly improved AI behavior, better trade and diplomacy, huge improvements in performance (especially late game), aforementioned tweaks to the crafting system, nukes (!), and even unique units for all nations. I wish there was a minimap, and I wish the maps could be larger. Would be nice to have true start Earth (currently it's not true start location). I'm hoping to see a major DLC that maybe adds more unique units, buildings, terrain types, maps, and triumphs, an espionage system, world congress of some sort, maybe some natural disasters. But all in all I really enjoy Ara and would recommend it.

The devs can't fix the issue with shaders on NVIDIA hardware for several months now, despite repeated calls from the players. The issue seems to be exlusive to ARA, yet the game updates ignore the issue, with devs blaming nvidia.

You can call me any name in the book but I play war games and strategy games to kill, conquer, build, destroy. It takes me out of it that everything is so feminine coded. It's not written for me. That's okay. I don't know if who you are targeting plays these games but I guess this one is not for me. 3rd time wasn't the charm. Unless big changes are made to have this game bite a tree, I'm out.

The game is severely lacking in several key aspects that make it rather unfun despite the good production system and roguelike-esque trait empire trait system. There is no zone of control for military units, which means that enemies can run wild through your regions and pillage all your improvements with impunity. Game also started crashing multiple times in a row. The newest national production update seems to have had an adverse effect on the game, as it essentially forces poor automation and demands that I manually click every producible item over and over again to disable this system. I don't think the game is trash fire, but the devs need to fix this stuff asap.

I was positive about this game, even bought it for a friend. We are 100 turns into a MP game and we're bugged. Tried contacting devs, but plebians are beneath them. Tried refunding but 100 turns was off course more than 2 hours played. Guess this is the only way to let everyone know you should evade this dev like it has the plague.

Lackluster. Gameplay feels unengaging and boring. UI needs to be streamlined. Unnecessary complex domestic system. Paragons are too difficult to manage. Music soundtrack is meh. Combat feels phoned in. Lack of charm and personality. Ara just makes me want to play Civ or EU4

Does not support Nvidia cards properly.

This game had promise and I was really hoping that Stardock would fix some issues and make the game better. The visuals are outstanding and the supply chain concept for empire building is somewhat addictive. However, that system becomes really burdensome after you have a few cities and the National Production system has a SERIOUS issue. It was doing fine for a while and then suddenly it started using MONEY as a crafting ingredient and putting me seriously in the red. I would go in manually and fix all those and then the very next turn it would do it AGAIN on other items. The whack-a-mole just makes the game unplayable. So either you need to spend a crazy amount of time every few turns tweaking your crafting (using manual instead of National system) or just play with that handicap (having way too much of one item and way too little of something else you need). The National Production system was a great idea but the implementation of crafting accelerators just doesn't work

With my 5080 graphics card and the newest graphics driver, I have black tiles all over the map.

If you have an RTX 50 series. You cant play. The map is full of dark regions. the developer blames a Nvidia driver update from LAST AUTUMN. This seems very strange when no other game exhibits this issue. My feeling is the developer is just misdirecting. Do not buy.