Millennia

thank paradox for abandoning and messing up yet another title.

Its fun and all but feels like there was more to it that Paradox killed off

This is the first time in a while that someone tries to actually do something new instead of creating the n-th clone of Civilization (*cough* Humankind). The divergent ages, the production chains and the domain powers all work well and set this game apart from other 4X. The military game is funny and values good positioning a bit more than other titles, since even the strongest stack can be wiped out by a much smaller army if caught with low morale. Diplomacy is not super useful since the AI players are a bunch of psychopaths ready to backstab you at every turn. Speaking of AI, it is more or less in line with that of similar titles. On the bad side, balance is somewhat off and the artwork/animations are really ugly, which is quite an accomplishment for a strategy game. The flavor aspect (say, tech and unit names, national spirits, event texts and so on) is mediocre at best, which is a shame since the variant/crisis ages would have been stellar had they done this better. All in all, it is a shame that PDX killed it this early. It did not deserve it. The game is really worth a try.

Paradox fxxked up this title and just abandoned it

Just another reason I don't trust Paradox to make GOOD strategy games. Only complex ones for reasons beyond understanding.

I dream of a good Settlers + Civ hybrid... The game is kinda decent but also not well thought out. It's good for about 2-3 ages where it's actually somewhat exciting to explore and jostle for terrain, and mana accumulation feels exciting as there's something to do. Then, once you are land limited MM for improvement points and domestic shipping somehow feels worse than Ara although it's much more simple. Vassal system is also great on paper to make map-painting less of a pain but in reality, again, it's not thought out - like there's no way to join cities settled to close and there's no way to even raze them to free up space. And if you settle far enough away for end game cities, theAI will walk in and build a thing in the middle. There's no culture pressure or anything so it will just sit there and also make the AI mad at you being so close. By mid-game AI becomes completely brain dead. At some point on island map AI declared hostilities so we could attack each other in neutral territory. Then it proceeded to try to reinforce one of its islands against me, by sailing full stacks of land units without protection past my fleets for like 20 turns. Every couple turns I'd kill a stack without any resistance and then it would send another one. Sometimes AI land units camp in the water for no reason and get killed by barbarian canoes. "Sir, our tank transport is being attacked by canoes! What shall we do? Shall we go on land?!!" "Stay the course! We go down with the ship!" Diplomacy is also really primitive and seems purely strength based, AI flip flops like crazy and once you are on top everyone wants to ally with you unless they are really mad because of that pointless city in the middle of your starting area. Lots of the end game content is just useless, like the victory era techs, what are you going to do with it? You just spam whatever wins the game. There's really not much to do with mana either, many actions are useless or spammed so much they are at the max cost (e.g. create artist). And AI just cannot fight at all with more than 2-3 stacks involved, you can just walk in and kill stacks one by one, retreat to rest, repeat.

Abandoned

Welp, this is a Civ style 4x. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Yeah the Civ's perhaps feel a bit generic and the balance may not be excellent, but I really liked the Age shifting mechanic and enjoyed the variant ages I tried. I also like the exploration elements with Cities of Gold and Landmarks. They tried a lot of new ideas here! I liked it much more than Humankind, which also tried new stuff, but I reckon Millenia does it better and doesn't get disjointed with magical fundamental/cultural transformations. I don't think Mixed is at all a fair review! This is much better than that. Overall a definite recommend.

Having played all the other major civ and civ-clone games, I find Millennia to be a superior entry into the genre. There's no ridiculous eternal leader or avatar!! So many cultural and research focuses possible,

If you can get over the bad graphics, there is an amazing game waiting to be discovered.