Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition

The game has really become great with the updates. A automation for crafting, unique leaders and leader specific units, UI improvements. Really immersive. My go-to now after the failure of Civ7.

So I've been playing Ara quite a lot these last two weeks. I feel like it's a really solid game that could and should have some of its weaker aspects improved; on this, the game is being actively developed and player feedback is taken into account. What's good: - The map/living world looks absolutely gorgeous + the choice of having natural looking provinces rather than hexes makes it look all the more realistic - The economy is great, with lines of production and goods galore - The technology system makes sense and you see your civ slowly evolving as you go through time - Good variety of units and buildings. The formation and reserve system for armies is a nice mechanic, though war is a bit too reliant on having the biggest stack. - Also that is a tiny aspect that really matters to me but cities in Ara show the actual number of inhabitants rather than abstracted numbers. Seeing that my mighty capital hosts 6m people rather than 21 units of population is one of these little things that helps getting immersed in your civ-leading. More of those! What could be improved: - Diplomacy and religion are both there, but they could be much more engaging. Multilateral diplomacy is sadly absent - Trade is nowhere near as developed as economy. With that many goods to be traded, that's a real pity! - There should be an easier way to compare your cities and to see their production, income, etc at a glance - Leading to this, this game screams for more stats and graphs. There is already a stats and standing screen, but it could definitely be expanded with more entries Also larger maps would be great! I've started playing on the 1.4 preview and the numbers of regions have been expanded (which is great) but as someone who loves playing on humongous maps with a lot of opponents, more size and generation options would be very welcome.

Bought this game on a whim after being hugely disappointed with Civ7, and Ara has definately scratched the right itch, it's not perfect, but it has got the right level of in depth city management and variable gameplay, along with challenging AI. Unit management/wars take a bit of time to get used to, but overall this game ticks all the Civ boxes that Civ7 failed on. Overall i'm poorer but happier with this purchase, just wish i hadn't wasted money buying Civ7 first.

Sadly in it's current state I cannot recommend this game. The gameplay itself is very nice, although sometimes a little too much micromanagement, but altogether an immersive gameplay with lots of ressources, materials and items. The only thing that is a huge problem (and huge means unplayable) is the performance. At the beginning of the game I had 60 fps and no stuttering or something like that. After 200-300 turns, when more and more big cities develop, the game runs slower and slower. Up to the point where I was having 24 fps at all times. Sometimes lower. I tested various graphic settings because I though my hardware was the problem. But when I changed the graphics from Ultra/High to none/low I only got ~10 fps more. In this state the game lookes worse than my old strategy games from the 2000 era. And because it was late in the game I already crossed the 2h mark for refunds on steam. Performance is very bad in this game, even for better hardware as it seems. And the options do little to enchance the poor performance. I am sick of play-testing seemingly finished games only to be confronted with poorly developed software that cannot be run smoothly even on newer hardware.

I've played this game for 200+ hours and liked it a lot better than Civ7. I enjoy the depth of the resource planning and management, crafting and city optimisation. It also feels to me more like old school CIV than CIV7 actually does. Each turn can take quite a while and each game itself can last a long time. I personally love that please don't dumb it down because a few people complain. Only thing i'd like to see improve is the military side of things, love that there are lots of unit types and tech advancements etc but the battle craft is somewhat lacking and not as engaging as CIV7. Having said that I much prefer ARA and will keep replaying this rather than CIV. Beautiful graphics and music too. Well done team.

I don't have a strong opinion about the game (yet), but I am disappointed by how most of the reviews I see here are rather misleading and whiny (Reddit users much?) so here is an honest assessment. For reference, I have binged over 40 hrs/week the past two weeks on Ara, and I have been playing Civ for over 20 years. Not a flex, I'm just unhinged. Slight lean towards recommend; not too risky of a buy, especially if on sale, but some of the cons are pretty bad. See below for summary, pros, and cons. S: Ara is a solid 4x similar to Civ with elements from Humankind and Cities: Skylines, but not a ton. The reviews comparing Humankind in general are wrong; Civ VII honestly takes WAY more concepts from Humankind to the point where Humankind will essentially become irrelevant next month, whereas Ara really only uses a few elements, e.g. victory conditions. Ara takes a pretty modest dose of micromanaging from Cities: Skylines, but not enough to become overbearing. Overall, this game is for people who like Civ and 4x but want more detail and reformatted micro; you have to build the materials to make city improvements and units, rather than just poofing them into existence with production/money and tech alone. Remember that this game is in its infancy and still has some somewhat annoying gameplay and UI issues to resolve, but once fixed, is definitely worth the buy (if not already). Pros and cons are tough because they tend to be subjective, but I will try: PROS: - Exceptional graphics and attention to detail. You will be impressed. - City layout and development is appealing and satisfying, with a greater and more fluid ability to customize your overall city build than Civ or other similar games. All adjacency bonuses are focused within regions of your city rather than individual tiles, eliminating the complexity and brutal sacrifices as in Civ. - UI is smooth and relatively easy to navigate once learned. Some improvement needed, but it's pretty damn good. Most of the mods you would have to download to make Civ VI lit are already incorporated. Viewing stats, bonuses, and other localized information is much easier than in other games, for the most part. - Some leader abilities and wonders are definitely worthless, however nothing appears too OP. - No confusing tech or civic trees CONS: - Combat and military needs help, desperately. For most players, this will be the biggest deterrent. It should not take 5 turns to upgrade a single military unit (which STACKS if upgrading multiple units in an army), when I can just build a brand new one in 2. I cannot imagine what the incentive is to disband/rebuild every unit, other than curbing OP military dominance (the latter of which is easily countered by the land combat unit army cap, or just getting better at the game). Also it is unclear why an army with clearly superior strength suddenly gets pwnd due to some factor not easily discoverable by the player. - If you are skilled at micro, you will advance through the tech tree and into new eras (and thus make older improvements/units obsolete) far faster than you can build infrastructure, sometimes unintentionally. Remember you have to balance five city/empire stats with production of buildings AND goods made at those buildings with resources, which is unreasonably difficult and unbalanced when you're flying through the tech tree. - Trading with AI empires is usually pointless if you have a good economy. Yes, you can get a slow trickle of resources from them, but a good or resource will suddenly become "unavailable" from the AI nation before you even get anything at all. - Victory conditions are very limited, so you either dominate the world or play the long game for prestige. Unless you like the game enough, this can get boring, quick. That's all. If you made it this far, you're a real one.

The 2.0 update really made this game into what it should have been from the start. There's automation for your crafted goods now, it runs way smoother and the UI makes a lot more sense, the nations and leaders finally feel and play differently, and tons of other stuff. I can't say much about the new adaptive AI, but on normal it seemed to hold about my level of progress as intended. If the team can keep this level of quality for future updates, this game has a really bright future ahead. But even now it can be recommended to any fan of Civ-like 4X games.

Very interesting 4X, clearly inspired by Civilization and Anno. Amazing graphics and promising mechanics, but poor execution. The Anno part on this game is clearly poorly designed, and leans heavily into micromanagement and byzantine systems. If your civilization has one incoming source of iron, why is it forced to dump all of it into either the production of metal tools, troops, or other consumer products? The game tries to be clever by forcing the player to micromanage a rapidly growing list of amenities, but lacks the proper execution of a minimally intelligent supply and demand system. In the end, the player is not taking interesting decisions, but instead managing numbers in the game's spread sheets to get some obscure bonuses. On the Civ side of the game, nothing too innovative compared to the Civilization games. Most of the systems are at best on par with Civ, and some others (such as combat) are mediocre. I want to like this game, but right now I cannot recommend it. The soul is there, the mechanics also; the devs just have to figure out a direction to make the game pleasing and interesting to play. Hope to come back to it in the future and see some good work done.

Kriege werden nach einer bestimmten Rundenanzahl automatisch beendet wenn die Kriegsziele bis dahin nicht erreicht wurden. Besonders geil wenn man gerade kurz davor steht die feindliche Hauptstadt zu erobern (des Aggressors wohlbemerkt) und dann einfach beendet wird und ich zurückziehen MUSS, nur damit das Spielchen kurz danach erneut beginnt, weil der Typ mir ständig den Krieg erklärt. Geht gar nicht. Refund.