4/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Ara: History Untold.

Ara is my favorite Civ-clone of all-time. And honestly, I think I like it better than Civ VI and Civ IV (but less than Civ V and Civ III). It certainly kicks the shit out of Old World or Humankind or Millenia. It still needs some time and some work under the hood. But truly I think it's mostly just in need of tweaks and tuning and small content updates, there are no issues that feel fundamental to the game. As we await the release of Civ VII in February, there's a realistic future where Ara is the 4x I play the most for the next five years. Ara has an overall degree of polish and quality that immediately exceeds what you see with other Civ-clones like Old World and Millenia. The game looks pretty great. Detailed, animated leader models that look like Civ VI while meshing the cartoon-y abstracted artstyle of a Civ VI with the more realistic renderings of a Civ V. The sound design is tremendous and the detail on the disaggregated cities and humans on the map is really good (even though I found them to be quite small). Ara meshes the disaggregated city building of a Civ VI with a much more palatable and enjoyable tile mechanic like Civ V. You place improvements per tile like in Civ VI, except these aren't districts with limits and buildings from within them. They work just like building farms or mines in Civ on strategic resources. Your city expands to new tiles, each one of those tiles has a number of spaces. On each of those spaces you can build an improvement. If those spaces have a particular resource, you'll extract that resource, otherwise you just receive yield bonuses a la Civ. Unlike Civ, in Ara your city gains tiles when it grows and you can choose what tile you wish to expand to. Which is a considerable improvement over Civ's random expansion via culture growth. Your cities begin to resemble something more like states, perhaps. Regions, certainly. As they disaggregate over the map and into changing biome spaces such that a city may start on a coastal tile that is urban because of placed dwellings and churches with some docks and will fan out into rows of farmland and mills in the fertile soils outside. Each space having lively citizens walking about, animals milling around and mines tinging with the sounds of pickaxes on metal. It looks fantastic and as your city grows and you pass through the ages, these landscapes change considerably giving a much better execution of, what I consider to be a failure, Civ VI districts. In all, the city management is not exceptionally different than Civ. Cities grow, workers work tiles, experts enhance that work at an increased maintenance cost, you build buildings, you build units, you build wonders. You also get Great People (called Paragons), you research a tech tree, you get new government types, you found religions. A lot of the game is the same as Civ. Even diplomacy for the most part. The differences are more than surface level but they're also not all that much of a paradigmatic alteration. There are two major ways in which Ara is different. The first is with supply chains. In Ara, buildings can often make more than one product. And you can choose which product you wish to make at-will. These products take turns to create and are shared in a sort of national pool with all of your cities. Then other buildings can use that product to do other things with. You have to choose these as well. For instance a workshop can create ropes. It can create ropes faster if you bring it wool from a sheep farm. Those ropes can then be used to make building things faster in a city or they can be supplied to something like a stable to increase stable production. Those ropes can also be consumed to build buildings, as some buildings may require not only gold and generic raw material resource cost but may also require finished goods. An easy example is that you need to build logging camps to get wood, which you then need to send to a paper mill to make paper, which you then need to send to a printing house to make books and then you need to use those books as a consumable resource to build schools and libraries. Almost all of the game's items are a part of or a result of these production chains. You can trade these goods with other civilizations in the game. But you can't land them via conventional Civ style trade like-for-like agreements or via Civ style caravans. You have to form a trading a agreement and then you can benefit from whatever the surplus a civ has by assigning a merchant to it. You get merchants by building various buildings that provide them, you can think of them like bureaucrats in Civ or ambassadors in Stellaris. The supply chains are cool. They make the different nations feel distinct and they provide more control and immersion in controlling your nation. I do find them to be a little too opaque and a little too involved. Too many different buildings that are fairly crucial to the game require too many different resources that are several steps into a supply chain. You will be forced to make trade agreements with other players in order to build these buildings but those trade agreements are nontrivial as most nations in the game tend to be innately aggressive to you in most scenarios. So you'll need to spend time bribing them with gifts to coax them into trading you the things you want. And you have to hope that you can sustain that long enough before the opposing player inevitably declares hostilities of some form which will break the trade agreement. It also will require you several playthroughs with several different leaders before you can come to grips with what buildings will require what, as many of your choices will feel somewhat path dependent. Managing the supply chains just ends up taking a substantial amount of time to get right and takes many turns to yield benefits in the early-to-mid game. It's also difficult because cities only work tiles when they grow a population to acquire a tile. Not like Civ where you can acquire tiles via culture or cash so you don't have to have the citizenry. This means most of your cities need to perpetually produce more and more food so they can grow into a sufficient size to sustain themselves so you can work the tiles you want to work. You will find yourself building farms on 75% of your tiles in the early game to facilitate this growth. I can give a more concrete example. Imagine you found a city because in either direction there's a tile you want to work that's two tiles away. Imagine R represents the resource, X represents a tile you don't want to develop and C represents the city. R-X-C-X-R. You found between these two because it will give you a short distance to grow to each resource. In Civ you would do this because the culture growth means it won't take very long to extend to those tiles. Once you do extend to those tiles, you can control your city center and the two resources with only three citizens. One citizen working the city center and one working each desired resource tile. The other two tiles, the Xs, would be left unworked but still within your borders. Because in Ara a city only grows to a new tile when it grows a population, you would need a population of 5 to work those two resource tiles because you can only grow your borders when your population grows. So even if you have no intention of working the Xs you'll still need a population of 5 and you'll still need to feed them all. Meaning you need to constantly be pumping out food production in a way that's not as crippling in Civ. And you only *need* to do this because the supply chains in Ara can be so intricate. You have to continue shoveling food into your cities so you can have more workshops and make more things but you can only do that if you're producing more and more food. You can leave a city in stagnation if you consume more food than it produces but your national food production is still positive. Because a city will pull from your entire nations food stockpile to feed itself. But then the game will not allow it to grow meaning if there are tiles you wish to still work you'll need that city to produce more food for itself. All of this is to say that by having very intricate supply chains but limiting city expansion to population growth means you'll be spending lots and lots of time desperately trying to meet food demands which ironically leaves less space to build supply chain components. This means not every city can build everything. This is okay in part because the resources are shared nationally, so grapes grown in City A can be made into wine in City B and then sent to the Inn in City C. This creates cities that are industrial cities and cities that are agricultural cities and cities that are academic cities etc. It's very nice. But the two problems that come from this are still that actual tiles and space in one city can only be gained by growth in that city meaning that city still needs to feed itself, meaning it still needs to dedicate lots of tiles to food production, at least until it expands to all the tiles you want to work. And additionally it means you need to build lots and lots of cities. Which can be fine, I've always loved building very wide in Civ, but with the supply chain micromanagement it also means that managing many cities in Ara takes a ton more time. That was a lot of words to convey that supply chains in Ara are a lot more intricate and the need for space necessitates the need for growth which necessitates a greater need for food than in other 4x games. Finding the right balance of this tradeoff is difficult and it doesn't quite feel like there's an organic answer or multiple viable strategies. There's a clear meta and optimized process to growing cities and planning your empire in Ara that I have not yet gained the knack for. But you can feel when you're playing suboptimally. You feel like you're chasing the game. The other major difference is the nature of warfare. Almost all warfare in Ara is based around a goal, or casus belli system. This is a war for a city. This is a war for extermination. This is a skirmish with no goal but to do battle and maybe kill some opposing troops. Every one of these war aims carries both a win condition and a time limit. In some instances there's a fail condition. Once two nations are at war they can fight in any form. Any city can be captured or razed. All gloves are off. Skirmishes happen often in the early game. These have a time limit of 20 turns and no defined goal. After 20 turns the war automatically ends. Sometimes there's a casus belli to conquer a specific city. These last 40 turns and end after that or end if the specific city gets conquered or razed. There's of course the extermination casus belli which is 60 turns and ends if the nation is destroyed completely. I am in love with this mechanic. The AI cannot simply enact wars that wage for 200 turns with no end in sight as the AI lazily sends one unit at a time. There are also specific win conditions and goals which hasten the speed of the war and the urgency of it. It feels like way better gameplay and it is far more immersive. The entire casus belli system gets a major thumbs up from me. The last mechanic worth mentioning is the progression through the ages. Like in Humankind or the upcoming Civ VII after a certain number of players in the gameworld reach an a new age, the entire gameworld enters that new age. There are three ages. Each time the gameworld advances to a new age it culls the bottom few nations in the game. Deleting them entirely as they fall to history. I find this to be very compelling as a game mechanic and it certainly stops the bloat you find in Civ where in the late game there may be a straggling absolutely failed civ across the game map that's thirty techs behind with three cities. This way the stragglers are just ousted. You get several warnings about where you are in relation to the cutoff and you can check the scoreboard at any time. I also love that you simply continue on, as-is normal in Civ because I hated the mechanic in Humankind where you became a brand new culture in each new age. A system that seems to be coming to Civ VII and I absolutely dread it. In all, Ara seems like a general improvement on Civ VI. A game that's still very familiar for a Civ-clone but has new wrinkles. It didn't bother to reinvent the wheel by bringing in new but nonfunctional features or radically departing from the formula that has produced 10, largely, fantastic games in the Sid Meier empire. I've almost always found myself playing Civ-clones thinking "Yeah okay this is fine but I'd still just rather play Civ." This is the first time I have ever felt, "Yeah I would definitely prefer playing this to playing Civ VI." I am totally onboard and I really can't wait to see where the devs take this.