Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition

Rating: 7/10 One line why: scratches that Civ-itch like nothing other than Civ itself, but is not without its flaws. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [h2]First Impressions[/h2] First impressions were, unfortunately, not great; it felt like a cheap Temu Civ knockoff. The icons are inconsistent, the wild animals look almost like they forgot to take out placeholders, and they pop in and out of existence when you zoom. The UI looks like it was designed for a mobile game, and fails to provide useful information in many cases. It's just not the most intuitive either, which considering how poorly explained some things are, is a problem. Even when you go into [strike]the Civilopedia[/strike] Encarta (OK, I quite liked that little nod) a lot of the information is surface deep and doesn't really cover mechanics that it would actually be useful to know. However, once I'd got past that, I found there was quite a fun Civ-a-like with some interesting bits and a far less jarring era system than Civ 7. [h2]After some 95-ish hours[/h2] I can say I really like the way the map doesn't use hexes; not all regions are created equally. Some regions have more districts than others, and with the way some types of buildings buff others, it makes it almost like a little mini-game working out what to slot where. Stability has been OK, I've had a handful of CTDs, only about half-a-dozen mind, and since the game auto-saves every turn you don't lose anything really, except time. Though I'm not sure whether this is a bug or something odd - in my current game, I seem to have lost road access to an ally, Argentina, despite the fact that there's an abundance of roads connecting our civs, so I can no longer trade with them. I think it happened when I captured the Persian capital, when Canada took a couple of their other cities. This means I have a city which is surrounded by Canada on three sides and ocean on the fourth, and therefore has no direct road access to anyone other than Canada, including the rest of my civilisation. I wonder whether that's caused a quirk. Which seems pretty weird if you consider Britain, at the height of empire, had land borders with nobody and somehow managed to do quite a lot of trade :| Seriously, sea trading doesn't seem to be a thing in Ara. [h3]Combat[/h3] The combat system is a bit basic; it does give you these nice little ways to put armies together from individual units, and gives you small bonuses for putting the right units in the right slots - and you can further boost those armies by adding a paragon character to lead them. So, it's more akin to Civ 7 in that respect... but, unlike post Civ 5 games where you can only have one unit/army on a tile, in Ara you can plop a load down like the doom stacks of old, and that removes some of the strategy and simply makes it into a "numbers go up" game. About the only thing to remember is to have artillery on hand once your opponents have city walls. [h3]Then there's crafting[/h3] This feels like a good idea which they just got carried away with. I quite like it in principle, take tailoring for instance. You have a resource such as wool, which you can craft into cloth (at a weaver or tailor) for a basic component to use to make say tunics - which provide a small boost to health (and I think prosperity) when equipped in one of the amenity slots on a city. But from tunics you can get garments, which are essentially just upgraded tunics - and from there fine clothes. It's the same with food stuffs, there's preserved foods, dried foods, fresh foods, gourmet meals, basic cured meats and fish, grain stores... it really needs paring back a bit. Especially when you consider there are also slots in the buildings to provide additional buffs, that also take craftable goods. You want to make fine clothes, and you do, they're one of the best boosters for cities, well, you're going to want to make looms or sewing machines to improve your tailors, which means you need to craft them, and they might require ore or metals, or cash. Oh, and tailors also get buffed from being in regions with religious buildings, so there's that to consider as well. I do like the way that raw materials offer a choice - sheep for instance can be harvested for wool, or, erm, sheep (I'm gonna guess meat) depending on whether you need wool for tailors or meat for cured meat (for gourmet meals for instance). However, there are also Llamas which are basically identical from a functional standpoint. Then there are cows, pigs, and goats - all functionally similar. Just trim it back a bit. There is one other [b]major[/b] problem with the crafting system however, and that's the interface. To increase the amount of an item you're wanting to produce, you have 2 options. You can click the plus or minus buttons to set the amount you want to produce/store (e.g. if you set iron ingots to 50, then that foundry will produce iron ingots until you have 50 in store). or you can set it to infinite. The real problem with using the plus and minus buttons is that the game then seems to do some kind of global recalculation each time; which on a large map, in the later game, can take a second to run. So if you want to set your iron ingot limit to 50, that's 50 clicks, each of which take a while to process - which is absolutely tedious. There's no free-type box and the maximum value you can set is 99 ... which is incredibly annoying when there are "wonders" to build that might require 100 of some resources. [h3]Winning[/h3] The AI seems passable, but the win conditions are, odd. You basically need to accumulate enough prestige to pass each era, and ultimately have the most at the end of the game. However, eras progress based on scientific progress - so science determines when the game ends, but prestige determines who wins it. One recommendation I'd make here, set the game speed to epic. It doubles the amount of time things take to research, which means your manufacturing and upgrades keep better pace with scientific advancement - so you might actually get to build some of those late-game units before the game ends. There are loads of ways to get prestige, from population to religious spread, but they're not explained in any great depth, you can work it out though. However, I'm not sure how they're weighted - population seems to be the most important, and wonders less than you might think. [h2]In conclusion[/h2] If you like Civ with a hint of Anno - you might well enjoy Ara. It's not without its problems, but there is fun to be had, and it definitely has that "one more turn" feel to it.

J'aime beaucoup ce jeux pour le moment, il y a juste ce qu'il faut de micromanagement avec le système de craft, et le système de craft est bien complexe et intégré comme je les aimes :)

Its ok. Its like they took Civ and humankind and made a baby.

good game come with good developer

Gameplay und Grafik top

Het lijkt op civilization maar toch anders. Het is leuk en goed bedacht. Het verg wel meer denk werk dus meer naar de realiteit van ons alledaagse wereld. Ik zou zeggen neem dit spel, u zult geen spijt van hebben.

Schönes,neuartiges und Sehenswertes Aufbauspiel