Ara History Untold: Anniversary Edition

5/10 would recommend for: - 1-2 playthroughs - newcomers to the 4X genre - if you get it on sale This is NOT gonna be your longterm 4X-fix that you sink thousands of hours into. positives: - nice visuals - basic 4X mechanics are solid - unique building system around city districts - exploration is fun the first 100 turns or so - combining units into different type of formations feels fun - technically: game runs smooth, no crashes or massive slowdowns in late game - as of april '26 devs still seem to be working on updates, so needed improvements might be coming negatives: - even largest map feels too small - no way to gauge enemy strength (militiary, economic, ect) you just see their prestige - diplomacy limited to constantly bribing opponents with money&goods - no way to trade tech, units, cities, districts, or masterpieces - micromanaging all crafting quickly gets tedious, no way to bulk-change all industries of a type at once when new tech arrives (who play-tested this???) - no way to combine/split armies on map - you have to send all units back to reserve to re-form as a brandnew formation, and all XP is lost (wtf?!?) - would like more random encounters, re-spawning tribes, predators (maybe barbarian attacks?) - no significant modding scene, no steam workshop

This game has had a very interesting development history. Seems that now it is finding its voice. Upcoming 2.0 update (now available as a Beta) pretty much fixes many of the design issues that afflicted the game upon release. The game is now interesting, quite addictive, and most importantly, PLAYABLE. The unmanageable micromanagement due to the major innovation in the design - we do have an actually economy going, with supply chains and all - is now gone. This has been achieved by implementing subtle, yet very smart changes in how production works. Rather than specifying fixed size "work orders" for the vast amount of products that can be generated by improvements, now we can set stock levels and priorities for every type of commodity. So if you want to aim towards a stock of X units of ceramic vases, a key item early in the game, your improvements will build towards that until the desired stock level is reached, and then switch automatically to the next item on their production queue. What was an obvious gameplay disaster - the mid game would be come hardly playable as you would have to review those work orders every other turn - has been now fixed. I can now recommend the game to anyone who is wanting a quite fresh take on the 4X genre.

This game just doesn't cause any desire to play it. I was lucky to understand it fast enough and get a refund. It simply doesn't have the spark. Got Humankind as an alternative for Civ instead, and it is great.

I wouldn't recommend this game. The difficulty is still radically wild and NPCs will gift you a gift one turn and declare war the next. I played a game on the hardest difficulty and had no problem, I put it on an easy difficulty with "Adaptive AI" and I was at war with 5 civs with all of them having 3-4x my troop count. This was on an EASY difficulty setting. Once again, we must give this game more time before it makes any sense. They have a lot of cool systems and ideas, but it's still all useless due to the AI either being way too easy, way too strong, and have no strong direction. this is AFTER REVOLUTION where they said they fixed this stuff. Continue to save your money.

The game is really underrated. Though I understand that it is most definitely not for everyone since it is really complex on the surface and can be very very overwhelming at the start. Took me dozens of hours to figure out how to navigate through the game and now I think I have decent idea how to play it, though I still cannot tackle the highest difficulty as I suck at warfare in general. The game still has some glaring issues but compared to the videos I've found on youtube on release, the devs really improved a lot of things. For me, this game was one of the most enjoyable startegy games I've played in the past few years.

Really good game! I really like the amenity system which makes it possible to optimize your cities according to what your empire needs or what the city need. The game also works really well in multiplayer. The combat have a certain degree of tactical flavour, although I would like to see this expanded even more. The trade and diplomacy aspect could need some improvements (although they work fine). I also really enjoy the prestige and goals system, it makes sure that tall play is viable (at least as far as I have experienced so far). The 1.1 version did a LOT to improve quality of life. Highly recommended!

The level of polish on this feels far shy of a Civ VI sized pricetag. This isn't a bad game, but it is far too expensive for what it offers. First experience with it was shadows flickering rapidly. I played it months after release, I can't believe a basic bug was still there. Beyond that it just feels like a game that needs a lot of refining to get it exactly right, not bad by any stretch just bad at it's price point of $60 dollars If you're looking for a Civ-like game that isn't Civ, just go play Humankind. It's got much more time and polish in it due to it's older release

Need Ottomans .