Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition

Fun game so far, I really like the variety in leaders and the events referencing lots of different points in history

Revising my initial positive review of this game to a negative review. When you first play the game you are faced with some really fun and innovative mechanics, they aren't tedious at first but by the last age you are under resource types overflow, nothing ever gets outdated, you can still make stone age stuff in last age so everything becomes a terribly tedious game of moving production around and juggling probably well over 100 resources. They even have PDA, I mean PDAs were a fun thing in the early 2000s but come on... And then, there is the rest: Wars are outstandingly bad, religion becomes 100% useless beyond a certain point, expansion is not fun, mechanics are obscure, water is useless, cities specialization can be changed overnight with amenities, I could keep going for hours... I just started to play with Update 2.0 and so far I love it. Really cool take on the "Civ" style gameplay. So far, no major complaints. I also love the hybrid multiplayer mode where you can swap Async to Sync and vise versa at any point. This allows for a lot of flexibility when playing with friends. I will update my review later but I'm pretty excited that this might become our new top game in my friends group.

Depuis la 2.0 le micro-management est toujours omniprésent mais quelques changements rendent tout ça un peu plus accessible. Il manque encore quelques améliorations ergonomiques pour rendre le jeu très bon. Mais il y a un net progrès qui mérite d'être encouragé

I give a recommend to this game but with a BEWARE note. But firstly, I like this game since it takes fresh approach on civ style game. I like that the core game system is actually nation wide resource management. It's quite different approach than what civ has. I also like how units are displayed in this game. Units are represented in big icons and zoomed to individual units only if you enter to detailed combat mode. I never liked modern civ approach to display units as giants walking on earth. I think I like the general graphics design in this game. It looks good and I like the leader characters. I also find the management rather addictive and the game really has one more turn vibes. But then the beware note: My biggest complain is that the game is really slow to play. And not due to it's core system but how you handle the system. I have read other reviews where people have complained about tedious user interface is where you need to manage your resources and I totally agree with them. Especially at the mid to late game where number of items kind of blows to your face. I took me 25 hours to complete the game on second lowest difficulty which is way too long game. Most of my time I was actually clicking on resource icons and figuring out what consumes some resource and how to start or boost up the resource crafting. It's actually really horrible. I complained about this in Whislist thread and I hope the UI is somewhat re-designed all over again to make the management more feasible. The combat is fine but there is actually a risk that when you swap to next age your unit building is halted since the unit is obsolete and you don't have necessary resources to build new units. This halt can take rather long time and I could see that AI blows you during this time. It would in Civ at least. So this little bit of tells that the unit, resource and advantage system is not very fine tuned. Then there are some silly things where you can exploit the game system like sending unit to reserve from other side of the world and rebuild it in your city, so you can save whole lot of travel time. I actually think that since the game system is so complex and vast, there are plenty of places where to exploit the game. The amount of resources is really vast. I think you can ignore most of them and still be succesfull in the game but I understand if someone finds the amount of resources overwhelming. Then there are lots of UI issues like the fact that you can't insert a number in the field how much items to craft but you have click + icon and repeat. Consider the case where you have to start crafting of 20 items per every turn. Ouch. Buy a new mouse. I also find the improvement build system rather tedious. If you lack some resource, you can't put the improvement to queue, but you have to remember first to craft the required items and then start to build the improvement. This makes planning and design of city very painful in some occassion. And this actually appllies to units as well. I completely hate the UI system to track down what building is consuming resource and where. First you hover mouse cursor on resouce, then you hover cursor over + or - icon, then you hover cursor over city and then over improvement. This repetition can easilly take a minute or two alone. When you repeat this like couple of times per turn you start to see where your time is going. Not actually playing but trying to get information out of the system. Then there was some odd performance issues where I noticed that game had short delays and lag when I started to craft item and increased item number in the counter. This game is full of this kind of odd little things that just all the time consumes your playing time. Generally speaking, Civ is actually much fluent game to play than this. But this is already very long writing and that actually tells something about the game. I recommend to try this on Game pass if it's possible and see if you like to purchase after you have demoed the game.

I previously gave this game a thumbs down, due to too much micromanagement. This has been improved recently. It still has a way to go, but there is another significant update coming soon, so I'm changing my review to a thumbs up.

Fajna gra civopodobna

The most disappointing game i have seen so far after decades of playing strategy games. Even worse than Millenia and it is a lot to say. Logistics are good but that is all. Basis of a strategy game is the map and the map size, as well as map generation and AI management are the worst i have ever seen. As for combat, i wonder who the heck has designed this ridiculous system wher 2 guys on a donkey can capture a whole city. To conclude, i would add that the devs are obviously not listening to the players as those problems have been out for a long while. I had high hopes. Now id ont even want to hear about it. Going in the bin. Avoid this game. You have much better games to play.