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.
I really love that there is such a large variety of resources and goods, and that these resources and goods have such a variety of uses. The variety of resources available at the start of the game really creates a lot of interesting early-game decisions for how you want to specialize your civilization (based around what resources are available in your immediate surroundings).
Steel is required for military units like battleships, but it can also be used to create luxuries and amenities.
This also addresses one of my biggest, long-standing complaints with games like Civilization. I've long been annoyed by how narrow the usefulness of resources is in other historic 4x games. In Civilization, "strategic resources", such as iron or oil are only useful for constructing or maintaining military units. Iron in Civilization can only be used to construct weapons for armies, and cannot be used to create tools or housing or other infrastructure for the general population, and oil can only be used to fuel tanks and battleships, and cannot be used to create things like public transit. Ara addresses this weakness by doing something that I've long wished Civilization would do. In Ara, iron can be used to train military units, but it can also be used to create jewelry to make your population happier and wealthier, or to create tools that can make your cities more productive, or go towards constructing skyscrapers to house late-game population growth.
The variety of resources allows for many recipes to support substituting resources for other alternatives. If you don't have iron, you might be able to craft your tools with copper. If you don't have horses, you can use camels or llamas as pack animals. And if you don't have cattle to make preserved meat, you can use fish, goats, pigs, or venison instead.
In fact, the only major human resources that is not included in the game is fresh water. You don't have to harvest fresh water from rivers or lakes, nor contend with late-game desertification from climate change reducing access to such fresh water sources.
Also, there's weird, hypocritical censorship of some resources and manufactured goods. For example, tobacco is included in the game, but it cannot be used to craft anything. It just provides flat money per turn. You can't turn it into cigarettes, cigars, chew, or vape pens. There also isn't any hemp or opium. But yet, Microsoft did include grains, grapes, and malt that can be turned into beer, wine, and hard liquor. And, of course, genocide and religious wars are very much a direct path to a victory.
Tobacco cannot be processed into cigarettes, but you can craft beer, wine, and hard liquor.
Perhaps even more surprising is that the game does not seem to include any nuclear weapons. Uranium exists in the game, and can be used to train a Nuclear Submarine or build a nuclear power plant, but it cannot be used to construct atomic bombs or nuclear missiles.
The crafting mechanics, quality of life mechanics, and variety of resources available also means that the game gets to include technologies that you don't typically expect to see in a 4x strategy game. They can be technologies that unlock things other than military units or buildings that improve a city's productivity. There's technologies like "Hospitality" (which unlocks Inns and various food recipes), "Candles" (which provides artificial illumination that increases the knowledge of citizens), "Coffee" (which speeds up the generation of masterpieces), "Leisure" (which unlocks toys, playgrounds, and other amenities), and more.
Told histories
Effectively managing your resource production and economy is absolutely essential. Warfare is very under-developed in Ara, and warfare has strict rules. The game can be won through military might, but most of your victory points (called "Prestige") will come from economic development and infrastructure.
story events can provide opportunities for buffs, Prestige, or diplomatic improvements.
The game is divided into 3 acts, and at the end of each act, the poorest-performing players (in terms of Prestige) are removed from the game. Their cities, improvements, and units simply disappear in the blink of an eye, leaving behind only ruins. Because of this, the game includes little random story events that pop up periodically and give the player 2 or 3 choices on how to resolve it. Usually, they will ask you to spend one resource or another in order to acquire a temporary buff, gain diplomatic relations with another civilization, or acquire a small sum of Prestige. Sometimes, these events will provide you with an optional goal, which, if completed before the end of the act, will grant a large sum of Prestige. These help to direct play, and also provide strong incentive for the player to maintain a diversified economy, so that you'll have the various resources available to complete these events.
The player elimination mechanic is another interesting idea to include in a grand strategy game, for which I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it doesn't seem entirely realistic for an entire civilization to just disappear overnight. On the other hand, this has the benefit of clearing out space on the map for other players. Even a peaceful player can suddenly have extra un-claimed space in which to build new cities, without having to build a military and start a territorial war.
Players with the lowest Prestige are removed from the game at the end of each act.
This also creates additional miniature phases of re-exploration at the beginning of each new act. The ruins left behind are similar to the resource caches from the beginning of the game. They can be explored with Scouts in order to claim various rewards. This keeps Scouts useful later in the game, without having to turn them into military units. At the start of each new act, there's a bit of a mad dash for players to send their Scouts out into the territories vacated by the ruined players in order to claim as many free resources as you can. It's like an armored bank truck breaking open and dumping cash all over the road. And you'll need armies to protect those Scouts from roaming warbands.
The idea of clearing out un-competitive civilizations and opening up their former territory for colonization by other players is an interesting (and worthwhile idea). Early-game exploration and colonization is always my favorite part of any 4x game, so having mid and late-game opportunities to explore again and claim newly-vacated territory is welcome.
Elimination creates empty space that can be colonized, and ruins that can be explored for rewards.
However, this idea or opening up new periods of colonization is almost completely undercut by the game's city caps. Each government has a maximum number of supported cities. This cap isn't quite a "hard cap", since you can exceed the cap. But it's also not really a "soft cap" either. The game will let you conquer cities beyond your city cap, but it won't let you found new cities that would exceed your cap. Strangely, the largest city cap actually comes from the Empire government, which is unlocked at the end of Act 1. Late-game governments like Democracy and Communism do not raise the cap beyond what is available from most mid-game governments.
These city caps are problematic for various reasons. For one thing, the fact that the largest city cap is still relatively early in the game means that you can hit that cap early and then not be able to grow your empire any more for the remainder of the game, even if there is plenty of open space. This can really make the second half of the game feel like an absolute drag.
City cap can block access to late-game resources.
Worse yet, CPU leaders don't seem interested in exceeding the city cap, and they seem hesitant to found mid or late-game cities either. At least, that is the case on the easy and medium difficulties. Maybe they're more aggressive and expansive on the harder difficulties? In any case, there is a very strong likelihood that all the open space in the 2nd and 3rd acts just goes un-claimed. You better hope that isn't where all the oil, aluminum, titanium, uranium, and other late-game resources are hiding.
If you build too many cities too early, you may find yourself unable to claim land that contains rare, late-game resources. And if all the other civilization (who are bound by the same caps) also don't claim territory with those resources, then you won't be able to conquer or trade for those resources. Not having these resources severely limits what the player can build in these later eras, which can also make the late-game less interesting and more of a drag. And if you are the only player who has these resources, and thus the only player who can build the advanced units and infrastructure that they unlock, then you'll have an overwhelming advantage that will also make the late-game less good.
Untold histories
The emphasis on resource crafting also means that other areas of the game are under-developed, and there are certain concepts that are just completely missing. I would have thought that with this emphasis on resources and crafting, that foreign trade and diplomacy would be robust. It isn't. Diplomacy is incredibly simple, with only a handful of options available.
Despite the emphasis on resources and logistics, trade and diplomacy are under-developed.
You don't negotiate complex deals with other leaders. If you have a trade agreement, you don't create agreements to exchange specific goods for other goods, nor can you promise to provide a particular good in the future. Instead, you simply choose which of the other player's resources you want, and you get a supply of that resource or good. As far as I can tell, your trade partners do not take any resources from you.
Maybe they do. I don't know, because I haven't seen anything in the U.I. that says any of my resources are being given to other civilizations as part of a trade agreement. I have noticed that resource generation and consumption does not always seem to add up. For example, I might see that I'm producing 12 steel per turn from my forges and blacksmiths, and that I'm consuming 9 of those units of steel trying to craft more advanced products. But yet the game will say that my supply is only going to increase by 1 next turn. Last I checked, 12-9 is 3; not 1. So where are those extra 2 steel going? Are they going into a city construction queue? Are they being claimed by my trade partners? Why isn't there a way for me to see where all of my steel (or any other resource) is going?
There's other annoying U.I. issues. For one thing, when an event appears, and asks you to spend resources, it doesn't tell you how many of that resource you have available. Thankfully, you can exit the event in order to check your supply without penalty. But still, I should be able to highlight over the resource in order to see my supply, production, and consumption without having to leave the event decision screen.
Even worse, queuing up multiple items in a city's build queue seems to spend the necessary resources, even if the item is being added to the back of the queue. This adds to the tedium and micro-management because it makes it horribly impractical to queue up multiple build requests. Thankfully, the same issue does not apply to crafting queues. But that kind of makes it worse, because it means that the developers found a way to fix that problem for one queue, but couldn't fix it for the other type of queue.
Um, where is all my steel going?
I'm producing 12, consuming 9, but only generating a net gain of 1?
Then there's religion, which is horribly explained. I largely ignored it, except when the game occasionally prompted me to select a new belief for my people's religion.
Espionage and spying is also completely non-existent in the game. There are no spy units that allow you to see into enemy territory or sabotage their infrastructure, nor are there any building that provide security against enemy spies. There's also no piracy of any kind. The lack of spycraft and piracy means that there's no aggressive actions that you can take against other players outside of open warfare, which can also make the game feel dull, if you aren't in a position to win an open war, or you're already at the city cap and have no interest in conquering more cities.
Great start, late drag
I really liked Ara: History Untold in the first few hours of play. It's doing things that are very novel in this particular sub-genre, which I've been wanting to see games do for a long time. It just didn't hold my interest through an entire match. The city cap, under-developed diplomacy, and complete lack of spycraft, combined with the excessive micro-management of crafting buildings, all add up to make the back half of the game feel like a boring slog.
I honestly do not understand the motivation or rationale for why the city cap works the way it works. It almost single-handedly ruins the game. Is it intended to reduce micro-management? Is it intended to prevent a runaway from colonizing too much of the map? Why does it hit its maximum so early in the game? I just do not get it!
Even the little story events seem to slow down considerably in the late game, giving the player even fewer opportunities to make decisions.
I can imagine a potential expansion pack for this game that increases the city caps, tweaks some of the economic balance, fleshes out diplomacy a bit, and adds espionage and spying. Such changes to the game could result in a much more compelling game that would have a better chance at competing against the likes of Civilization and Humankind. As it sits now, Ara certainly stands out as a novel entry in the sub-genre, but it puts itself in this weird, awkward middle-ground between 4x and city-builder. I'd much rather be playing Civ or Humankind. Heck, I'd much rather be playing Manor Lords, for that matter.
Combat and warfare are also under-developed and mostly passive.