Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition

Right now "Ara: History Untold" is something like a solid chassis for a great game but not much more than that. I give it a recommendation mainly because I think the team behind it should be supported to keep developing the game and I even intend to buy the typical DLC with cut content from the initial release (with the additional leaders) - something which I never do and detest as a business practice. I'll do that in a hope that the development won't be abandoned mid-way before the title becomes what it has the full right to be - a worthy member of the Civ-like 4x family. Anyway. What does "Ara" do well? The main thing that makes it different from your typical Civilizations game is the complexity of the production system - and this complexity is good by design (although there is much to improve about the actual implementation). Your economy functions on layers. The initial one is extracting raw resources from the basic "yields" on the map just by colonizing some region, then adding some improvements to increase the output and this is where the "economy" of every Civ game more or less ends. In "Ara" you go deeper. The raw resources are used for crafting various alloys, tools, clothes, different consumer products and so on - the list is pretty big. Then you use these manufactured products to improve the performance of other buildings (for example - you improve the harvesting output of farms by supplying them with ploughs), to build new buildings that require "advanced" materials, to improve the quality of life in your cities and build military units. It takes a while to figure out what requires what to achieve what (something which the game will not make easy on you with hints or convenient UI, on the contrary) but once you grasp the whole process, maybe after a few restarts, it starts working surprisingly well. Planning your economic development is central from the very beginning and your whole expansion around the map is basically aimed at ensuring stable and (hopefully) prosperous economy in the later ages; economy that can, in turn, provide for scientific, cultural or military dominance over the other civilizations. Personally, I like the concept and I see enormous potential in it that is partially utilized and partially it is not. When it comes to actual difference between the civilizations and the leaders... Well, the bonuses for each leader seem to be pretty distinct, so it's not the same if you play with Confucius or Catherine the Great. Beyond that there isn't much. Sure, you get your usual unique military units for each civilization but just like in Civ Whatever, they play a limited role for a limited time and can't even be upgraded. The animations of all leaders are the same - same reactions, same gestures, same facial expressions, so you shouldn't be surprised when Elizabeth I starts beating her chest when declaring war or Julius Caesar waves in frustration like a spoiled courtier from XVIII century. No voice acting, if you don't count the AI "voicing" of the text messages you get every now and then. There doesn't seem to be "national" music either, except when you negotiate with a foreign leader - then it plays a short track. In short - you don't get to "feel" that you play with a certain civilization very much. The progress through the ages is generally slower than in Civilizations and each age has a fixed type and number of "developments" that you can research. You may skip certain technologies for the purpose of advancing to a later age faster and the drawback is that you won't get their respective benefits at that point - but you WILL get them at some point later. I suppose the idea here is to plan your development one way or another but it looks like there is an optimal technological path you can stick to every time without losing much in short- or mid-term. In long term you get all technologies and improvements anyway. The warfare is so-so. Doomstacking is a thing in "Ara". Nothing's stopping you from combining all of your units in a huge WAAAGH! and sending them to stomp anything smaller than such a horde - you just lose the ability to attack multiple targets at the same time. The enemy does the same. Battles are resolved mostly by numerical and technological superiority which clearly goes against the intention of the devs to introduce "deeper" warfare features which make a lot of sense on paper - like formations. So far I haven't been able to beat a numerically stronger enemy by countering his formation or something like that. Not sure if the terrain plays any role in the battles either. This is one of the points where the game may become significantly better but right now it's just a blueprint of what it can be. Diplomacy is as shallow as you can expect from a 4x game. Most of the time the AI does completely random things like sending you gifts or demanding tribute, seemingly without even taking into account your current relations. I got gifts from nations that were on the brink of war with me, multiple times. As expected, you have your usual alliances and research agreements. The only time when diplomacy can be remotely useful is when you trade products that you have or don't have with other nations. Technically the game needs a lot of improvement too. The graphics are quite good but around mid-game the performance drops considerably even on medium-ish settings. What needs addressing most urgently however is the UI - it's just not convenient. You have to gather information from multiple panels to understand what building produces what materials that can be used for the production of something else. The city building screen is convoluted - you see everything which can be constructed anywhere, no matter if the respective city has the ability to build the said thing (for example, you can see a nice, quite buildable dock on a city which is in the middle of the desert). Initially that's not a problem but later on, when you get 100 available buildings to construct, you have to scroll through all the fillers to get to what you want. Production is managed PER BUILDING, i.e. you have to click on each and every workshop or farm and tell it what to produce - something which obviously becomes quite tedious after a while. There are screens which show you the overall production output but you can't actually manage the production from there. I'm pretty sure a lot of people will at least give the game a chance if they get a user-friendly UI to work with. Edit: It looks like there already is some improved version of the UI released as a beta build. I can go on and on about all sorts of details but it will boil down to the first paragraph - the game has a very sturdy foundation that needs an equally sturdy structure to be built upon it. Right now it has something like a placeholder instead. If the development continues, there is a real chance that at some point it will become what Civilization VII is not - a great Civ-like game. Fingers crossed and my extra 5 dollars come in too soon.