Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition

This is the game Civ VII should have been. And that's coming from some who played the franchise from Civ II And ARA's devs actually LISTEN to players feedback. They released 2.0 which is a huge upgrade and didn't charge existing players for it. I like that I don't get a crisis reset that changes the nation that I'm playing. So you actually get a sense of progression. The AI is actually smart. So AI bonuses are not needed. It's surprisingly good at both warfare and empire building. I get to control the supply chain. You get good maps.

Poor interface choices and slow pace ultimately drag down a promising game. Did I mention poor interface? About that interface... I really really want to like Aura and in many ways I do. It's fun for a while but by the mid game it's very repetitive, little happens, you're basically just cycling through turns to advance the years. Eventually I get to a point where I ask myself why am I even playing this? Now let's move to the worst part of the game--it's interface. Is teh long list of commodities search able? No. Can you use page up page down to scroll? No. What about mouse wheel, yes and takes forever to move down the list. What about drag the scroll bars? Well, those are so skinny that they are very difficult to grab. So The player has the choice of trying to grab a scroll bar a few times before it's successful, or of using the mouse wheel for five to 10 seconds while their hand gets sore from all the scrolling. Why is there no search? Why does page up page down not work? Why is it so hard to see your itty bitty little teensy tiny icon for your army? Why is it thus so hard to see enemy armies that you don't even know they're there until you're being attacked? Why is it so hard to see armies because the icons are so dinky Is that avoiding armed conflict is really just avoiding an annoyance? And doesn't that diminish the game? Yes it does. Developers, come on, just make the icon big enough to see for goodness sake! This thoughtlessness of design and poor taste in interface runs throughout the game. Rather than list all the many annoyances I would just say that by version 2 they should have somebody on staff that can coach the developers on interface. We all know developers are bad with interface design, so hire somebody to help you and then you would have a better game! The gameplay itself was never the issue. Locating upgradable structures is a manual process even with the kind of empire wide production view behind the little anvil icon, you still have to click through each structure type manually to see if there are any upgradeable examples. And guess what--You can't scroll here either except with your mouse wheel or dragging the skinny skinny bar that is difficult to click on! This game is like instant carpal tunnel. Overall there is a lot to like about the crafting system and it is automatable to the degree that it kind of takes care of itself and that's great because managing it manually would be a huge drag--so good job there. My complaint here is with the policy setting. You can only set policy when you open an individual structure in an individual city (by finding its icon among dozens of similar icons). If you go to the global view you can change what that structure is producing but you can't change its policy. So in the global view you're thinking here's a building I'd like to switch to the national policy I set up, but then you have to go manually find that exact structure on its individual plot of land inside the individual city view. Some of the production buildings look very similar so you're squinting at these tiny nearly identical icons trying to figure out which one is the crafting structure that you identified in the global view. There is no way to go from the global view to the individual structure view where you can set policy or do other similar things. So there is no connection of any kind between a structure in the global view the same structure in the city view. This is a crazy omission! You're literally playing a visual pattern matching game trying to find the structure in the city view that you were just looking at in the global view. In some cases it's hard to find so you just give up and say well that structure just won't use the policy I wanted because I've already invested enough time in hunting for it and I'm tired of hunting for it so I give up! How little would it take to fix this so you can click the structure in the global view and it takes you to the structure in the city view?!? OR allow setting policy in the global view.. How does this not already exist as a feature--it's insane that it doesn't. And this really perfectly illustrates the problem with this game every time you turn around, all over the place, in all kinds of ways, it makes the player go through a lot of extra work to accomplish simple tasks. Can you see an alphabetical text list of the structures in given city? No you cannot. You can hunt through a random grab bag of extremely similar icons though! And as with all lists in this game it's difficult to scroll this one too! Is there any way to tell easily if you already built a certain structure in a certain city--No! Do you consequently end up with duplicate structures you didn't know you had, yes! Next we have land--I'm not sure what the idea is with making land so scarce but your cities pretty much never have room to build. Wonders are generally not worth the space they take up. Later in the game cities grow so slowly that realistically you'll have one or two cities that you can afford to buy land grants for and the rest will just strangle for lack of ability to expand. So that's great--I have 12 cities and realistically only two of them can receive new improvements because it's all about the budget for land purchasing. Piling on the food growth to try to force the city to grow is only of minor benefit here. There'll be all kinds of unclaimed land all over the map but you can't have it Mister player! I have played thousands of hours of Civ and 4x is my favorite genre. Ara Has some great features but ultimately the turn by turn, day by day experience will drive you away eventually. I think most of the annoyances are relatively easily fixable. Make army icon bigger--not hard. Allow alphabetical text list of structures in a city to sort existing and highlight duplicates--not hard. Allow clicking into individual structures from the global view--not hard. Make land growth about 500 percent faster, especially in the later game--not hard. Wonders do not need to take up an entire territory, that just contributes to the artificial land scarcity, easy to change. Make the scroll bars wider--easy. Enable use of page up/page down in lists--easy. The worst defects of this game are easy to fix and it's my hope that the developers will see this review and take it in a constructive way. This game has a lot of potential and it's ruined by trivial problems that are in your face so constantly that they become not trivial. The irony here is the interface is attractive in terms of its appearance, but in terms of its functionality it's the worst.