Civilization VII is right around the corner. For the first time in the Civilization series' history, it will actually have competition in its specific niche. One of those competitors is Microsoft's Ara: History Untold. Of the various games in the "historic 4x grand strategy" genre, Ara might very well be the most unique -- both to its benefit, and also to its own detriment.

Part Civilization, part city-builder

In addition to the obvious comparisons to Civilization, Ara: History Untold feels almost as much like a medieval survival-village-crafting game along the lines of Banished, Settlement Survival, or Manor Lords. The bulk of the game is spent building resource harvesters, building crafting buildings, and then trying to set up an efficient and self-sufficient economic engine that converts those harvested resources into manufactured goods. As you research new technologies and advance through the eras, you'll unlock new resources and recipes for new things you can craft with those resources. In fact, most of the tech tree is dedicated to unlocking new resources and craft recipes.

There is a huge variety of resources and manufactured goods.

The limited space available to each city will prevent you from ever really feeling like you've built a perfectly efficient machine. There's enough different crafting buildings, enough different resources, and enough different crafting recipes that you won't have enough room to build all the collectors and crafters for everything. So you'll be switching what crafting building is crafting what goods periodically, as certain infrastructure or units may require specific goods. Goods can also be assigned to buildings in order to "accelerate" their crafting efficiency, or to the cities directly in order to satisfy the needs of the population or to provide passive buffs.

For example, if you build a butcher shop in one of your cities, you can assign it to craft either salted fish or salted meat. If you choose salted meat, then you can assign a cow, pig, or venison, as well as optional salt or spices in order to speed up the production of that meat. You can then take that crafted meat and assign it to a city to provide extra food for the population.

Similarly, you can harvest raw iron ore from mines, process them into ingots in a forge, then combine the iron ingots with coal in a foundry to produce steel. That steel can then be used to create everything from skyscrapers to house more population, to luxuries like consumer automobiles and refrigerators, to tanks and battleships.

Candles can be equipped into housing to improve the knowledge rating of the residents.

And there are so many things that you can craft. There's candles, furniture, pottery, linen, medicinal herbs, pastries, coffee, microchips, and so forth. These sorts of items can be assigned to other buildings to provide certain passive benefits. A candle, for instance, can be assign to a residential dwelling to increase the "knowledge" rating of the city, which speeds up your technology research rate. Presumably, the people living in that dwelling are using the candle light to study books and learn things through the night. Similarly, metals, glass, and fuels can be used to craft lampposts, which can be installed in cities to reduce crime and improve the city's security rating.

But before I get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that EA has actually partially addressed some of the issues that I've discussed in a previous installment of this essay series. Specifically, Madden 24, Madden 25, and College Football 25 have substantially improved player logic in loose-ball situations. Since I published the 5th essay, about loose-ball situations, EA has added a number of new animations of players diving or falling onto fumbled footballs. This has mitigated some of the frustrations that I expressed in that essay. Scooping-and-scoring does not happen nearly as often, and players are now also able to recover their own fumbles.

There are still problems with fumbles and loose ball logic, so I won't be rescinding the entire essay. Many of the criticisms are still valid. Most notably, fumble recovery animations often appear pre-determined and break the laws of physics and human anatomy. Awareness during loose-ball situations is also still hit-or-miss.

Nevertheless, EA did actually improve this area of the game, and I want to acknowledge that. As I've said before, I don't make this content simply to shit all over Madden and EA for the sake of it. I make this content because I love football, I love football video games, and I want EA to give us a better product. All my criticism is intended as constructive criticism that I hope is taken in good faith by anyone who watches. As such, I always want to give credit where credit is due.

In any case, I previously started talking about off-field strategy and team-building. Now, I want to talk more about what to do with that talent once they have been scouted, drafted, and evaluated. Today I'll be talking about another one of Franchise Mode's most glaring high-level flaws. It's finally time to talk about how Madden handles (or fails to handle) gameplanning and preparation.

At a very high level, Madden focuses its game strategy almost exclusively on what you like to do! Not off of what the opponent likes to do, nor even off of what you team is built to do. This is not really representative of how real NFL teams prepare for games. In real football, teams do not generally take their entire playbook into any given game. They install, tweak, and practice a different subsets of specific plays each week, based on what they think will work best about their upcoming opponent.

However, modifying your playbook for a given opponent has just never been a part of Madden. This is especially frustrating, because the game has a mechanism for doing this. There is a Custom Playbook and Gameplanning editor that was introduced in Madden 11, and which is still in the game after all these years. While Madden games from over a decade ago did encourage users to use this feature to customize your play-calling to your personal preferences, newer games have pushed this feature more and more into the background, in favor of EA pushing updates to the pre-set playbooks, based on the play calls from real-life teams as the real-life NFL season progresses.

This seems good on paper. Why wouldn't we want realistic playbooks based on the plays that real coaches are calling this season? Don't we want those plays and play-calling frequencies to change to more closely reflect how those coaches call plays in real life? After all, that more closely reflects how the real NFL season is unfolding, right? Sure. Those are great things for Play Now pick-up games and Ultimate Team matchups against randos. But it's not exactly ideal for playing in a simulation Franchise Mode, in which the user is ostensibly taking on the role of a head coach or general manager over the course of multiple seasons, and in which coaching decisions should be based on the events and situations within the Franchise Mode, and not on how things are happening in real-life. And that is where Madden's Franchise Mode falters.

Madden 11 introduced a gameplan editor along with its playbook editor 15 years ago.

When Infinite was first announced, I (and many others) had assumed that it would just be an official release of the New Horizons total conversion mod for Stellaris. That mod was huge, offering tons of factions and covering the entire breadth of Star Trek canon from the Original Series all the way through Discovery (and even some Kelvin-verse-inspired content). Unfortunately, that ended up not being the case, and Star Trek: Infinite proves to be a major downgrade from New Horizons.

The "New Horizons" mod for Stellaris included all eras of Star Trek.

Despite its title, Star Trek: Infinite is surprisingly scaled back in scope. It only includes the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, and only 4 playable factions: the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians. I understand not including factions like the Dominion and Borg as playable factions. They actually make more sense as a form of "final boss" that invades the Alpha or Beta Quadrants to provide a late-game challenge that could help make the end-game of a 4-x strategy less tedious, less easy, and more interesting. And I also understand not including smaller, "alien-of-the-week" factions like the Gorn, Tholian, or Sheliak as playable factions. Although I wish more of them would show up as NPC factions. But I really think that factions like the Ferengi Alliance and maybe even the Breen should have been included. The Federation is peaceful and diplomatic, while the other 3 factions are (broadly speaking) different flavors of militaristic. The mercantile, yet exploitative trade-based play style of the Ferengi would have been a good change of pace from the other factions.

Worse yet, however, is that Infinite doesn't cover the breadth of Star Trek history that I had hoped it would. The game begins with the Romulan attack on Khitomer, for which Worf's father was framed, and shortly after the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. And [spoiler alert!] the Borg start appearing at the fringes of Federation and Romulan space within an hour or 2 of starting a new game. It takes place entirely within the scope of The Next Generation, and does not contain any content from Enterprise, The Original Series, or the "lost era" between The Undiscovered Country and Next Generation.

Star Trek: Infinite is limited in scope,
taking place entirely within TNG era, and having only 4 playable factions.

Unfortunately, Paradox killed support for this game prematurely, and it will not be seeing any additional updates or DLC. Initially, I had expected to see a lot of DLC that would fill in the gaps, because Paradox has always been known for the ridiculous amount of DLC that they always sell for their games. I expected to see DLC packs that would push the start of the game back to the 22nd or 23rd centuries and include Enterprise, Original Series, and "Lost Era" ships and storylines. I thought maybe we would see factions like the Ferengi, Gorn, Tholians, Kzinti, Xindi, Sheliak, and maybe even the Vulcans and Andorians show up as playable factions. And I had also anticipated expansions that might add Gamma and Delta Quadrant content, such as playable Dominion, Breen, Kazon, Vidiian, Krenim, Hirogen, and maybe even Borg factions, while also expanding the size of the galaxy.

But now, none of that is going to happen, and the only way Infinite will see any new content is if modders decide to take on these tasks. It would be cool if the "New Horizons" modders would move some (or all) of their content into Star Trek: Infinite, as it might give this game a new life, and help it live up to its true potential as an era-spanning Star Trek grand strategy game.

As my frequent readers probably know, I am a sucker for city-building and village-building games. I buy a few new ones almost every year, and ever since the release of Banished, the medieval village sim has been all the rage. Though it looks like post-apocalyptic settlement builders are also becoming a hot sub-genre -- probably as a result of the popularity of the settlement-building in Fallout 4. Anyway, last year, Chichian encouraged me to try out a then-Early Access title called Settlement Survival. I was hooked on it for a couple months, and then set it aside with the intent to come back to it later. In the meantime, the game saw its official Steam retail release, which encouraged me to go back and give it a second go (and formal review).

Time to plan

Settlement Survival is one of the more addictive and challenging city-builders that I've played. It features a complicated web of production chains and resources, which can be a real challenge to plan and manage. Trying to unlock and use everything in a single village will take a lot of time, effort, and planning.

Settlement Survival provides a handy-dandy timeline in the top right corner of the screen which shows when all the seasons start and end, and which also shows icons for important upcoming events. Everything from the arrival of a merchant ship, to incoming immigrants, and even disasters or other random events will be forecast a whole year in advance. This gives the player plenty of time to plan ahead, and avoids the problem of the player feeling un-prepared to take advantage of an un-expected boon or to mitigate a disaster.

This timeline is the core gimmick of the game, as it enables long-term planning.

There are also random events that are not forecast on the timeline, and they often require that the player have certain resources or tools on-hand. But these are rarely destructive, so worst case is that you miss out on the opportunity to get some free bonus resources (which you may or may not have needed anyway). Nevertheless, it does put a pressure on the player to build up a surplus stockpile of many goods in case one of these events pops up. Tools and beer being the most common items used for such events, based on my experience.

This timeline helps to create some medium and long-term planning and reward structures that really makes the game crazy addictive. There's the short-term goals for things like building the next building. Then there's the medium-term goals like completing the next harvest season. And then there's the longer-term goals like accumulating goods to trade to an incoming merchant ship, or waiting for the next batch of immigrants to give you a labor surplus that can allow you to go on the next wave of building infrastructure. There's always some milestone right over the horizon, and then another right beyond that, and I find myself playing longer than I had planned, and long after I should have gone to bed, because I want to get to that next harvest, or trade opportunity, or make sure that I get through that next disaster.

This also means that random disasters don't feel as annoying because you have plenty of warning that a disaster is coming, and can prepare accordingly. Further, the disasters themselves rarely kill population directly. Rather, they usually impact your resource-generation for a period of time. So most disasters are mitigated simply by stockpiling the affected resource ahead of time.

There are also random events that do not appear on the timeline.

The timeline also discourages save-scumming. Disasters are forecast a whole in-game year ahead of time, so re-loading to before the disaster would require going back more than a whole year. And that might not even necessarily save you, since I've noticed that the disasters still happen at the same time, even if I go back to a save from before the disaster shows up in the timeline. I'm not sure how long in advance they are generated, but the fact that I know that I can't avoid it by simply reloading and re-rolling a die means that I'm more inclined to batten down the hatches and just roll with whatever happens.

The end result is that the gameplay ends up feeling more organic, and the challenge of surviving and growing your fledgling settlement remains relatively high. When I do save-scum, it's usually to undo some mistake that I made, so that I learn from my mistake, fix it and do better; rather than to outright cheat by undoing some random event that the game threw at me.

I've been seeing more and more games putting an emphasis on mechanics oriented around environmentalism and sustainability. Games in genres that typically encourage unchecked exploitation of resources are now becoming more and more about the sustainable use of resources. It makes sense. Climate change is becoming more and more of a visible problem that affects our lives in tangible ways. Milliennial game developers are also searching for ways to cope with the fact that our generation and the next will be stuck paying the consequences of the short-sightedness of our parents' and grandparents' generations. Many members of those earlier generations are still, unfortunately in positions of political and corporate power, and make up a large voting block, and are continuing to make selfish, short-sighted decisions that will only make matters worse for the younger generations. It makes sense that younger game developers would be baking those anxieties into the games that they make.

Ecologically-focused colony-building

Imagine Earth is the type of city-builder / strategy sim that has typically been about conspicuous consumption, but it now wants the player to consume more responsibly. Not only does this game expect the player to industrialize the surface of entire planets at the behest of a corporation, it also asks the player to do that with an eye towards limiting greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and other pollution. Developing a sustainable economy doesn't only mean cutting back on emissions from power plants, industrial activity, and so forth. It also requires restoring or expanding natural habitats by planting forests, growing corals, and so forth.

Imagine Earth prioritizes limiting greenhouse emissions and pollution.

Either the player has to plan the growth of your colonies in a sustainable fashion and prevent emissions and pollution from ever getting out of hand to begin with, or you have to spend the back half of each mission doing damage control.

Unfortunately, just like in real-life, any individual person or corporation or government's environmental efforts aren't necessarily sufficient to curtail the effects of climate change. There are often other corporations or settlements on these planets which don't have the same noble ecological goals, and who will happily ruin things for everybody else. They are there to make a quick buck by exploiting as much of the resources as possible, with no plans for sustained long term habitation -- the other people living on the planet be damned. But the corporation we work for in Imagine Earth does plan on prepping these planets for long-term colonization, so we have to pick up those other corporations' messes. Sometimes through violence, coercion, or sabotage, but usually through a hostile takeover of majority stake.

Not all corporations are concerned with long-term colonization that requires a stable environment.