Ara: History Untold Reviews

I just can't get over the bizzare war and combat mechanics. The way the AI musters forces seems strange and unfair. >be me >aggressive neighbor (Rome, Aztecs, etc) is a little close for comfort and they've already engaged in skirmishes with me >no worries I've got a good resource chain and tons of gold I can build a bunch of armies real quick and raze a city or two >my military strength is now double or even triple my aggressive neighbor's strength >awesome, lets declare war of retribution >take out a small line between them and me, ez >siege the nearest city, completely undefended >oops the AI started mustering 3 batallions in the city but they still spawn since they did it before you started sieging >in one turn my 150 strength army goes from deleting a city to being shat on by a 400 strength defense force because being fortified in a city grants unreasonably huge bonuses >that's okay let's just retreat >retreat takes multiple turns and this doesn't stop the enemy forces from engaging on the next turn >okay cool guess my entire army is just fucked now whoops >enemy waltzes into my territory and razes two cities before I have the chance to build new units or even muster them >can't fight back because the war reached it's arbitrary 40 turn limit >fuck me ig Okay so, let's just try playing another civ, let's try a peaceful-ish run. And it's turn 60 and I'm fighting a 3 front war because the AI is more aggressive on Default than Civ 6 Deity. I mean seriously. And you can't even send gifts to keep them off your ass like in Civ because they can just. Decline the gift. Wasn't this game supposed to not be focused on the war aspect of 4X games??? Everything else is great, gets a little micromanage-y late game with massive chains of resources (this could also use some improvement) but the combat just feels unfair and unfun. I like the idea of different unit group shapes but then they don't really play into anything and with the weird way the AI does things it just feels really awkward. I think perhaps another few updates and rebalances will really make this game shine, if that happens, I'd be more than happy to change my review, but until then, I can't recommend it.

I really like this game over civ 7. Many mechanics of this game are fun, but If the Devs will just stick with it and add more content it could be one of the best in my opinion. Really needs those special nation only units and more types of units!! We will see.

This game had been sitting on my wishlist for ages due to the mixed reviews. When it finally went on sale, I decided to give it a shot—and now I regret not buying it sooner. It’s exactly what I hoped Civ 7 would be. An amazing game that, in my opinion, really doesn’t deserve the negative reviews.

Ara: History Untold can be quite the fun game. Most people will probably look at it and immediately draw comparisons to the Civilization series as they do share plenty of similarities. However, the two main entertaining challenges of this game ironically do not come from the genre's staples. Rather, I'd liken them to features in the Anno series, The Settlers, or perhaps even the old Impressum city builders like Caesar. For they are building placement and production chains. In Ara, while you do exploit resources much like in many other games, most raw materials are actually just that. Raw. And they aren't particularly useful in said raw state. Instead, you are encouraged to build buildings to process them so they can be turned into a greater asset to e. g. your cities growth or production. For example, finding copper on the map might make you think you'll just build a mine and then you're done with it. But that couldn't be further from the truth. Copper is entirely useless unless you include it in the production of for instance lithic tools (a staple of the early game). To make lithic tools you'll need a workshop for which in turn you need to find a good spot. Because buildings in this game take up an actual spot on the map. Each region has a random number of slots available. Some are large (e. g. 5 slots), others are small (e. g. 2 slots). And to make it even more complex, some buildings buff other buildings or receive a buff from being in a region with buildings of the same sort. So for our lithic tool workshop we'd now want to think about where to best put it so it receives as many bonuses as possible or at the very least doesn't block other buildings that might profit from bonuses in the respective region. A water well improves the output of farms in the region, for example. So we'd probably not want to put our workshop where we want to farm. And to top it all off, some of these goods you produce then need to be manually assigned to your cities to give them the buffs you want for them. A city founded in the desert will require some extra food to keep it afloat, for instance. Which then leads to considerations of which good to use where, because you can only produce so much before you run out of space. As such, Ara will quickly become rather micro-management intensive. This is why I'd urge you to ask yourself what you are looking for in a game like this before you buy Ara. If you are mainly looking for Civilization but better, you'll be left sorely disappointed by this game. If, however, the sound of a mix of Civilzation and the aforementioned Anno series or similar sounds intriguing to you, then give this game a shot. As long as you belong to this latter group of people, at a price of 30 to 40 bucks you'll probably feel well compensated. Thank you for reading! And should you buy it, enjoy the game!

Excellent 4X game. It doesn't copy from other titles and boasts an interesting system. It nevertheless still requires a lot of improvements (more about this later). (1) The map is not a classic hex map ; it is divided into regions, each region containing from 1 to 6 areas which you will use to improve your city (build industry, farms, mines...). In effect, a region is about the same as 3 hexes in Civ. (2) You gain a new region every time your city size gains one step, and you get to choose which region you gain ; this is different from most other games where you have little to no control on your expension. Regions farther that 3 from your city cost more (so you avoid expending that far). (3) The economic system is based on a supply chain and the basic production from you citizen. This starts with basic wood/material/food/money/specila resource. An industry can transform these into higher level products (e.g. with wood and materials you can get lithic tools, which you will later be able to transform into metallic tools and so on). Products may have three uses : as an intermediate step for a higher level product, as a lever to improve your buildings (e.g. a forge without and anvil is less productive), as a consumable to improve your citizen lives (e.g. your citizen have a better health and happiness with good clothing). Some players are troubled by this system, but it really forces you to think instead of mindlessly cloning your cities throughout the map (e.g. civ) where you always build the same buildings. Here, for exemple, a single forge will provide for your empire up to the middle ages, and two are sufficient up to the industrial age ; more is contraproductive : at best you'll overproduce metal ingots for which you won't have a use, at worst you'll drain your resources producing something not needed. (4) The game is divided into 12 periods (starting at bronze age), and every 4 periods, the last civilizations drop out, leaving their place on the map, so that other civs may find more space to expend to. Winning is defined by an intersting prestige system (win battles, build wonders, keep your cities happy and healthy). This means that you can from exemple wipe out your neighbours, but still end up into the trash bin of history because you achieved nothing meaningfull (say mongols for exemple). Now (devs, listen!), lets see the problems: (1) The game regularly crashes once I reach the industrial age (I have a very good computer and graphic card). This is a shame. The interface also increasingly slows down, to the point where you have to wait seconds when incrementing the production size by one! (2) Managing your cities/goods at high level requires a much better interface. I want to be able to organize the products used by a city. I want to see all buildings at once when I am into the city screen ; I don't care about the background city view, which obviously slows things down and brings nothing. I also want to be able to jump from product to producers/customers so that I can take action easily when needed. (3) I also want a much better diplomatic interface ; when I enter an alliance, I don't even know who the opposing party likes or dislikes, so that I don't have a clue on whom I might end up fighting. There should also be a possibility to trade without letting other units get through! There should be a possibility to attack other units inside my territory, even when at peace, possibly at a small opinion penalty. (4) I have a problem with setllers going around the world. Some even settle between my cities in spots that are obviously spelling problems. I believe you should have either a hard range limit, or better introduce an attrition for all units but explorers outside their country (say lose 20% each turn) which could later be mitigated by technology and/or a logistic train unit. (5) In the same idea, cities that are unconnected (no road) to the capital should somehow suffer, as well as cities that cannot connect though owned areas. Cities should have a chance to revolt if mismanaged (average stats less than 45). (6) I just understand nothing about the combat system. There are formations, but they look mostly irrelevant (the 10% strength bonus looks unsignificant). And why don't losing opponents retreat before destruction ? (7) Religion spread is at best unclear. Missionary/Oracle do nothing significant. Religion requires an overhaul and a specific interface, as in civ 6. And why should I expand my religion ? The prestige gain from religion looks minimal. (8) The map is hard to read ; roads are no really apparent. Terrain doesn't seem to affect combat and it doesn't affect movement. There should be a "strategic view" that abstracts things out instead of trying to render the same map as in the lowest level. Some terrain remain impassable even at high technology. Oh, and why can units not pass through mountains but move through desert (happens in many other 4X really) ? In addition, I want to be able to define my own roads : sometimes, a road between two cities cannot be built because a road that passes through other territories already exists. (9) Some specialists spots are clearly superior to other specialist spots (e.g the 150% production boost is mostly cosmetic given the underlying maths). Some production chains are weird ; there is still a lot to improve here. Docks and such should improve fishing more significantly. And there should be some improvement that boosts productivity for cities that have no sea access (or remove that from docks). Overall, this is a promising game, but it will require important overhauls to stand out.

I wish i could put on a positive review, but for this price the game still needs a lot of work. 1) Performance on i9 9900k + 64gb ram + rtx3070 + m2 SSD is fairly terrible with huge lag spikes, on mid graphics even on low i get around 10-30 fps most of the time after act 2. Also i get huge lag spikes when trying to change production or resources on production buildings. And i checked neither CPU nor GPU nor SSD are bottlenecking... 2) Mid-Late game is a PAIN. Micromanaging every single production and harvesting building on top of the cities on top of the armies etc makes it borderline unplayable, mostly because the UI/UX does nothing to make it easier. Menus are for each thing specifically, even on the top right that the menu for all buildings are is a mess. No map search. No "craft this until i have X and then craft something else until i have Y" etc. Feels quite overwhelming a turn so long to complete. My first game with 6 civs and Prince difficulty took me around ~45 hours to complete. Which is crazy. 3) Technology is a mess. you can get locked out of technologies permanently. And things get deprecated after some technologies and you cant ever build them again, but if you never unlocked the advanced technology you get locked out of some features forever... For example you can reach atomic age, have tanks and not be able to siege a city because it has walls, and apparently tanks cant bring them down. And you never unlocked artillery or w/e and because catapults were deprecated by industrialization or something, now you are stuck with having 3 catapults from the bronze age and guarding them with your life because you cant build them anymore and you end up with having divisions with 5 tanks and 1 catapult just to bring down the walls... Sure you could tell its skill issue for not knowing that i need all these things and not blindly go with tech tree but the game not giving you the options to acquire them after is stupid. At least in CIV you can go back to research and research this technology again. Overall i am not saying its a bad game, but these issues are pretty serious. I like the fact that it has crafting etc. i kinda like the micromanagement up to act 2 probably, But after that the game doesnt give you the tools to play on the same rate... I see the devs bringing worthy updates. Lets see... I'll change to positive review accordingly. Try it on a sale...

Let me just first say, I am not trying to offend anyone. I just think this game is not worth players' time anymore. I bought this game because the game designers that helped create Sid Meier's Civilization V supposedly helped create this game. When I actually did play Ara, there were many mechanics that I thought were genuinely novel and brought new dynamics to the 4x game genre. Cities grow and new districts with really in-depth graphic detail makes it look like your cities come to life. Wonders, which are known as "Triumphs," are also highly detailed and can also be destroyed in war. It is stuff like this that made me wish I could like the game, but there are mechanics that I just can't get over. In ARA you can't just build something like a Cathedral willy nilly, you need to craft the specific materials first. You need to create mines for the stone, you need workshops to refine the stone. You also need to mine rock to create glass, you need workshops to refine the glass, then you need craft shops to take many shards of glass into a stained glass window. Don't even ask me how to make candles for the cathedral. Building improvements and buildings in ARA quickly becomes tedious. Someone on the game design team took what was in D&D and made it 100 times more complicated. At the end of the day you don't feel like you are a ruler in Ara, you feel like you are a one-man civilization where nothing gets made unless you micromanage everything. In Ara, you can't just feed your cities, give them luxuries, and call it a day. In ARA there are many bars that tell you the productivity of your city and its health. Are your cities getting enough food? Are your cities happy? Are your cities healthy? And what a city is supposed to provide for your civilization (e.g. science, commerce) only gets worse when your city gets bigger. This wouldn't be as big of a problem, except I already explained that building improvements to make your city stats better is tedious and takes a long time, at which point you are stuck trying to keep the declining city stats of your nation up for as long as you can by giving them temporary luxuries. The problems of trying to keep your cities healthy and trying to keep the economy of your cities okay does not get better as you found more cities: it gets much worse. I found myself dreading conquering foreign cities of civilizations that declared war on me, because one more city would tank the stats of my civilization. The more cities you have, the more micromanaging that you have to do. And when something goes wrong with your economy, (you run out of a material or something) trying to fix it feels like trying to put a four-funnel ocean liner in reverse after it was going full steam ahead. There are just some other small details that irks me the wrong way. One of those details is the choice of "leaders" in Ara; I'm sorry Copernicus was not a Polish king, but a Renaissance polymath, and Harriet Tubman was an abolitionist not a U.S. president. It seems that Ara tried so hard to break out of the mold of using the same, profoundly important leaders used in the past by other video games, that they broke the mold entirely and lost the definition of "leader." Another thing that was weird was the game's feeble but insistent use of C.E. and B.C.E. which I guess stands for "Common Era" and "Before Common Era?" What does that mean? Am I supposed to believe that the use of fire was not common until after Christ was born? I say that the use of C.E. and B.C.E. is feeble in this game because on some of the history entries of great persons you can earn in the game, they still use A.D. and B.C., which, quite frankly, makes more sense. I really wanted to like this game. I really wanted to see this game succeed. I thought there some mechanics that were cool, and that I hope to see in new 4x games in the future. But this game missed the mark in some really important parts. Playing Ara, for me, became such a drag, and I began to start dreading giving this game another chance. Let me just reiterate, I am not trying to offend anyone. I just think this game is not worth players' time anymore.

Very interesting 4X, clearly inspired by Civilization and Anno. Amazing graphics and promising mechanics, but poor execution. The Anno part on this game is clearly poorly designed, and leans heavily into micromanagement and byzantine systems. If your civilization has one incoming source of iron, why is it forced to dump all of it into either the production of metal tools, troops, or other consumer products? The game tries to be clever by forcing the player to micromanage a rapidly growing list of amenities, but lacks the proper execution of a minimally intelligent supply and demand system. In the end, the player is not taking interesting decisions, but instead managing numbers in the game's spread sheets to get some obscure bonuses. On the Civ side of the game, nothing too innovative compared to the Civilization games. Most of the systems are at best on par with Civ, and some others (such as combat) are mediocre. I want to like this game, but right now I cannot recommend it. The soul is there, the mechanics also; the devs just have to figure out a direction to make the game pleasing and interesting to play. Hope to come back to it in the future and see some good work done.

I really like the core idea for its game, it could be one of the greats of this genre, but it is held back by the same issue that holds back every game of this genre - it's difficulty settings. Nobody finishes a run in this genre for good reason. Humankind and Civ have the same problem too. Civ tried to resolve it with win conditions - it doesn't really work. Humankind tried to resolve it with its Star system. It doesn't really work. You can keep trying to shovel the garbage under the rug, and it might make the room look better, but it will never be good enough until you actually take the garbage out instead. Scaling difficulty should be the industry standard for this genre, Stellaris did it ages ago, and it works for them marvelously. So WHY does nobody learn from them? As things stand, any match you play will lose any semblance of difficulty as the game progresses, even if you crank it up to the highest, you will have one of two scenarios: 1 - The AI just starts with such a huge amount of cheats that you die at the first cut-off or get overrun if you turned that off. 2 - The game becomes progressively easier and easier and loses all challenge by the time you reach act 3, essentially feeling as if you were playing on easy mode, even though you selected the hardest one. So all in all, I just can't recommend this game until this is fixed. I had big hopes for 1.4, and they were misplaced hopes, because while the AI may have gotten upgrades, it doesn't bloody matter if you don't fix the core underlying issue, which is the difficulty settings.

It is basically a good game marred by the general lack of game design expertise prevalent in the industry right now. There are to many developers creating games from their player expertise rather than game design expertise, and those are entirely different skills. The game would be perfectly fine if the game designers didn't see themselves in the role of trying to compete with the players rather than just provide them with an enjoyable game. The challenges provided by the game tend to be "Spoiling" at every opportunity, and a lot of the set up is around helping the AI to compete. Most starts even on the easiest difficulties are unwinnable. You are given no resources, and dropped in the middle of three or more AI civs that settle all over the map around you and each other. Particularly as you are trying to learn the game, for which there is little instruction, this makes it a very frustrating experience. It ends up with you serially restarting the game 20 or so times, to get a playable game and then learning the game by trail and error. If you do make it through to the middle ages the game is by then not a challenge, because you will be so far ahead. I don't know if the designers think their customers are idiots, but it isn't hard to see which starts are an exercise in futility. If you don't find grain or any other food source in your first 2 cities, you might as well start again. The developers seem to care, and my advice is to get the game, so that it is easy to win and play at normal level, forget about making it a challenge. Make the AI civs non-aggressive and only settle away from the player. Let the player win. Once you have that working, then try to get the game more challenging on higher difficulties. Try to understand that you want players to win. No one wants to play a game they never win, and it really isn't clever as a designer to make a game so that players cant win it. In fact is rather ignorant to derive any satisfaction from that. The AI should be trying to make the player win, but put up a good fight, not win the game itself. If the AI wins at normal difficulty, then the AI is a failure.