Millennia

thank paradox for abandoning and messing up yet another title.

Released March 2024, last updated December 2024. I wouldn't have an issue with that except there are still so many issues with the game. For my personal example, the age of utopia, that let you build underwater cities, is horribly half-implemented. Since you can't station units in the cities, if you integrate it, the unrest is completely unreasonable. Maybe I'm too used to other developers continuing support and development for longer then 9 months, but its left a bad taste in my mouth that ensures I won't buy anything from them until I can see they've fixed that habit.

Good game, in a lot of ways I like it more than Civ

Abandoned, unfinished and unremarkable. For shame Paradox.

I don't understand the negative reviews on this game, I really think they rushed through it and didn't try to understand it's concept. I have played all the Civilization releases and have over 2700 hours on Civ VI. Is this like Civ VI - NO, is it as good as Civ VI - Heck YES. I understand it takes a bit to get the basics down and the tutorial is not great, but if you take the time and play through this game a couple of times to the end, you will figure out how to manage your regions and vassals and you can truly enjoy the surprises and challenges that are thrown at you. I have just have 70 hours on it and I am confident that I can manage this game easily now. If you where wondering, Humankind and Old World do not even compare to this game. I think it is worth the money as long as you play it as Millennia and not try to make it any other strategy game. Graphics are great, as you progress through each age when you upgrade your buildings they change to a more modern look. Battle is simple but yet important on how you set up your armies. World wonders are in your region capital, just have to zoom in on them. Movement is easy to understand as long as you look at the items to choose from in the unit screen. You choose what you want your towns to be and you build it from there. Timelines can throw surprises at you which is awesome. It's a great strategy game, it definitely has that one more turn feel.

Abandoned game

Millennia suffers hard from the paradox game syndrome. At the very beginning it was probably one of the worst Civ-like games I've played. Now with two DLC behind it, I'd say it's just below civ 5 level. Give it a few more DLC, and this game will probably be the best Civ-style game in terms of enjoyment. With that being said, it has a two core problems. 1. The combat is terrible. There is very little strategy whatsoever. Just put an even number of line, support, and cavalry units in your army and maybe a general. That's it. Even the bombardment system doesn't make up for it. Battles pretty much boil down to running a bunch of identical blobs at each other. 2. The first player to age up forces everybody to pick the same age, with the exception of crisis ages. I think. The age system is just convoluted, and I wish I could just steer the course of my own nation without some guy across the map deciding "Nobody gets to play age of heroes, we're going straight to the classical age!" If you enjoy building a massive economy and occasionally throwing blobs of units around, this might be the game for you. If you like being a mastermind general or a narrative gamer, I would recommend you stay away until a few more DLC release.

Millennia is a game that I thought I would like, as a fan of Civ3, Civ4, and Old World. it didn't take the "leaderization" model that Humankind and Civ VII did, and the deeper economic focus was appealing, with the alternative ages adding potential replay value. In practice? The demo, across the first three ages, was amazing. I liked the full game in the early going too. But the farther I got into it, the less I enjoyed it. it was a recent Civ VII review that clarified for me part of what didn't work for me in Millennia. That review mentioned the "magic button" - rather than showing the development of infrastructure gradually with player-controlled workers or builders, in Civ VII, once you get enough of a particular resource, you can just place a building instantly. Millennia takes the same approach, with infrastructure points. You can build cranes and other in-city buildings to gain more infrastructure points more quickly, but once you have enough infrastructure points, you can just add a farm, or fishing boats, or a mine, or what have you. In practice, after the early going, I often found myself finding I had near the maximum carryover of infrastructure points, so I'd build a bunch of things one turn, and then forget about them again. It didn't have that organic feeling that the older Civ games, and indeed Old World, have. The economic system has its plusses and minuses. In theory, the chain of "build farms, build flour mills, build bread ovens" or "build logging camps, build paper mills, build book factories" is appealing, and it sort of is in practice. But it all winds up flowing back to eight to ten end resources - books help knowledge, spices help commerce, for example. It's more than the Civ games have, but it's not a wholly developed, "you need logs or steel to have buildings" economy, like Banished or Factorio. It winds up straddling a line where it's more to manage but I'm not sure it adds enough to be worth it. It might if it were the main focus, but in practice, I spent more time managing my military. In part, this is because it's difficult to appease the AI - once a conflict starts, it's only willing to make peace when you have a significant advantage, and very rarely when things are close to even; sometimes it also starts the conflict, so the military system is mandatory. This would be fine if it were more enjoyable. In practice, I think it bogs the game down. The notorious battle animation screen does provide some feedback on what units are performing well, but the view-by-default configuration means that in practice, if a war is going on, I'm often watching battles as much as managing an empire. The military system also suffers for lack of a "rally point" setting as Civ3 and Civ4 had; I have to tell each reinforcement to go to the front lines, and have them join an army. It's tedious. So in a mid-to-late game conflict, once I've finally finished taking care of all the military tasks for the turn, I often overlook the economic ones, which is arguably where Millennia is a stronger game. Diplomacy is also unsatisfying due to being under-developed. I didn't expect Europa Universalis IV levels of options, nor the animation of the more recent Civ games, but it feels like the other civilizations are just _there_. There's so much potential in the economic and trading side of things that was never realized. Instead of just building textiles for commerce within my empire, what they were tradeable? Sadly, the game never gained enough popularity for potential expansions focused on economic-diplomatic matters to be developed. There are strengths. The crisis system, often powered by the side effects of conquest, is a unique and somewhat effective method of countering warmongering tendencies. The domain system, while also underdeveloped, is another good foundational idea. The systems individually often make sense, it just doesn't quite add up to a cohesive whole of the sort that would have me coming back over and over. Instead, I tend to play another game of Old World. Perhaps I'll revisit it again at some point, have a more peaceful game, and make it all the way to the end. But I'll probably try Ara and see if it delivers first.