I put Empire of the Ants on my PSN and Steam wishlist as soon as I saw it. It looked really unique and won a bunch of indie gaming awards. It was designed for console, so I went ahead and played on on PS5. Besides, I had a gift card balance on PSN at the time when it released, but my Steam wallet was empty, so ...

As the title implies, the game is about playing as an ant. More specifically, players are an ant "general" so to speak, and commands legions of ant soldiers in wars against other bugs. Your ant character is from a colony within a "Federation" of cooperating ant colonies, each with their own queen who are subordinate to a single "queen of queens". A flood ravishes the colonies of the Federation, and so your character is assigned to rally the troops to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed in the flood, and fight off termites, spiders, and other ant species who are trying to expand their territory after the disruption of the floods.

If bugs give you the heebie-jeebies, then this may not be the game for you...

The game combines some exploratory platforming with simple real-time strategy concepts to create a unique -- but sadly under-cooked -- experience. The bulk of the game is a series of "strategy" and "tactics" missions strung together in a story campaign. Each map contains nests (little ant hills) that must be captured by a faction's legions, and then that faction is able to construct new legions or infrastructure, upgrades, or abilities in those nests.

This game also features a wide variety of different bugs. If bugs give you the heebie-jeebies, then this is probably not the game for you. No cockroaches though...

Ant's-eye view

Empire of the Ants has some pretty simplistic strategy. There's 3 basic units, which have a simple "rock-paper-scissors" relationship: warriors beat workers, workers beat gunners, and gunners beat warriors. There are a few other types of units representing different bugs that the ants can recruit to their cause, such as beetles, wasps, snails, and so forth. These special units might provide support roles, or be powerful combat units with special abilities. Beetles are heavily-armored and immune to ranged attacks, for instance. Wasps can fly, and so can only be damaged by ranged attacks. The ability to fly also means wasps can move across the map quickly, and they can freely disengage from enemy units.

The strategic battles are pretty straightforward. What makes the game standout is its unique perspective.

There is a simple rock-paper-scissors relationship between units, and some special "hero" units.

I'm used to playing strategy games from a "bird's-eye view", with a wide-angle overview of much of the battlefield. But because of Empire of the Ants' novel premise, the view is actually quite the opposite. Instead of a flying bird's-eye view, the camera is at ground level at the ant character's perspective. This limits the player's view to only what your ant character can see. If you want a broader view of the arena and activity, you need to find some physical high ground, such as a large rock or a climbable plant, and park yourself there.

If you read my review of Civilization VII, then you know that I have some significant reservations with the way that Firaxis broke the game up into 3 distinct ages. This has easily been the most controversial change in a game that made a lot of questionable decisions.

I'm not going to speak for other players, nor am I going to repeat my review, but my biggest issues with the ages of Civ VII are as follows:

• The ages end suddenly, without giving the player an opportunity to finish ongoing tasks,
• The age transitions skip the transitionary periods in between ages,
• The crises don't always feel like fair tests of an empire's stability.

First and foremost, I'm not going to propose that the ages should just be removed. The ages are too fundamental to the game's design and Firaxis' vision for it. But more importantly, I don't actually think that the solution should be to throw out the baby with the bath water. There are redeeming qualities to the ages as well (which I also talked about in my review). As such, I want to take a few moments to share some ideas that I have for how the above issues could potentially be addressed by Firaxis in future updates, DLC, or expansions.

I'm also going to present the idea in order of complexity and ease-of-implementation, from the simplest and easiest changes, to the most involved. The simpler ideas could easily be patched into the game, while some of the more complicated ideas could require a bigger DLC or expansion.

Ages end suddenly, and often prematurely.

This is a follow-up to the previous topic, in which I talked about gameplanning, and Madden's general failure to simulate the process of gameplanning for an opponent. This time, I will be talking more about the procedural element of preparing for the next opponent, which is the various practice and preparatory tasks that coaches and players perform in the week leading up to a match. Weekly practice is something that Madden also currently fails to simulate. But it's also something that Madden (and other football games from other developers) has made multiple attempts at emulating in the past. Some of the previous solutions that EA came up with are, in my opinion, much better than what is available now.

Skill Trainer was good practice!

I will begin by actually ranting about something that I like in modern-ish Madden!

Up until a few years ago, Madden's Franchise Mode allowed the user to play Skill Trainer drills for offense and defense as your weekly practice. In general, I love the Skill Trainer in Madden! I genuinely think that it is one of the best features that has ever been included in any sports video game ever. In addition to acting as a series of gameplay tutorials, the Skill Trainer also makes an effort to teach some basic football concepts and strategies to gamers. The Skill Trainer teaches users things ranging from how blocking schemes work, to how to read the conflict defender on option plays, to how to read different route combinations against different defenses. And it also teaches some defensive concepts such as how to play as a force or cutback contain defender, and which defensive coverages are designed to stop which route combinations, and much more!

The fact that EA used to incorporate these tutorials into Franchise Mode was especially genius. Each week, you could choose one offensive and 1 defensive Skill Trainer drill to run. Depending on how well you performed in the drills, your team would get scaled ratings boost whenever you call the relevant plays in the upcoming match. This allows the player to take the role of a coach and choose specific concepts to practice and focus on in a given week, depending on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team. If that sounds a heck of a lot like how I described actual NFL gameplanning in the previous installment, then yeah! That's kind of the point! Madden used to do this, and do it fairly well, but it doesn't any more.

Skill Trainer drills used to be part of Franchise's Weekly Training feature.

A few years ago, EA changed the Weekly Training feature in Franchise and removed the Skill Trainer. Now you choose very broad, vague concepts to practice, such as "defend inside run", or "throw the ball deep", instead of more specific concepts based on an individual team's scheme. Ironically, this new Weekly Training menu gives a more detailed scouting report of opponent tendencies, that would have worked better with the old training mode using the Skill Trainer. It actually shows which concepts the opponent runs most in different situations, which would have helped the user choose which Skill Trainer drills to run. Now, we have this extra information, but no Skill Trainer drills; and the more vague practice categories don't relate directly to the tendencies listed in the new scouting report.

When Civilization VI released, it was criticized by many as being a "do-over of Civ V." It was, indeed, a much more iterative release than many other Civ games have been, taking the concept of "un-stacking" units that was pioneered by Civ V, and expanding that to include un-stacking of cities. Then it threw in some iterative changes to many other core systems that had been introduced in Civ V, such as city states, religion, trade routes, and archaeology (to varying degrees of success). The end result is that Civ VI felt very familiar to anyone who had played Civ V.

That is absolutely not the case with Civilization VII, which enters life in a much more competitive market, and may have felt pressured to do things different. Civilization isn't the only dog in the yard anymore, when it comes to historic 4-x strategy gaming. For the first time in the series' history, it has real competitors in the form of Amplitude's Humankind, Microsoft's Ara: History Untold, Paradox's Millennia, and others. In fact, Civ VII seems to have taken many design cues from these competitors, and there definitely seems to be a lot of convergent design.

For example, Civilization VII borrows the idea of changing cultures between the different eras, which was introduced by Humankind. It divides the game up into 3 distinct Ages, similar to how Ara divides its gameplay up into 3 Acts. And all of Humankind, Millennia, Ara, and Civ VII feature units that stack together into armies. And that says nothing about all the "live service"-inspired systems that have been added, such as cumulative progression rewards for each leader, profile badges, and so forth. These all represent pretty dramatic departures from what Civ V and Civ VI were doing, and I'm not sure if I like the way that these creative choices have affected this version of Civilization.

3 ages of history

The division of the game into 3 Ages is probably going to be the most controversial change, since it fundamentally changes the way that the game is played.

Civilization VII is not designed as a single, seamless trek through alternate human history. Instead, it is basically divided up into 3 smaller, more focused games, each with their own distinct gameplay mechanics and goals. I couldn't find any statements from 2K or Firaxis that the ages were implemented in order to better facilitate multiplayer, but that seems to be the consensus among the game media. Many articles (from GameRant, The Gamer, and others) highlight how each of the ages can be played as a stand-alone multiplayer game that is much shorter than a traditional game of Civ, thus resulting in more mutliplayer sessions that actually go to a proper resolution, rather than everyone simply stopping because it's 3 in the morning.

This is great for players who do want to be able to complete a game, and reach a proper ending within a single afternoon. It's less good for players who do want a full, Civilization game. Put simply, the Ages create hard stops and resets at pre-determined points in the game, which hurts the sense of continuity when playing a full game.

The game is divided into 3 ages, with hard resets in between each age.

An age might just end when I'm in the middle of doing something, or with there still being things that I wanted to accomplish. Maybe I wanted to settle another city, or capture another player's city, or annex a city state, or build a wonder? Nope. Can't. The age just ends, and the game kicks me back out to a loading screen before advancing straight to the start of the next era, which may skip decades or centuries on the in-game calendar.

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.