Grand strategy games are a bit too big to demo. Building from a single settlement and a couple of farms into a vast nation is a time-consuming process, and even playing tens of early game turns can only show you so much. Even with that being the case, though, a little time with the opening of 4X game Ara: History Untold suggests a sprawling entry into the genre that brings along some new ideas that focus on offering lots of different paths for creating a thriving civilization.
I played about an hour of the massive turn-based strategy game Ara: History Untold at Xbox’s Gamescom preview event in Los Angeles. That amounted to about 35 turns–just enough to hit the end of the first era of human history and to get a sense of the way Ara approaches a game about being the most influential civilization on the planet. Like most entries in the genre, there are multiple paths to victory in Ara, like building a conquering military, constructing great works of culture, or amassing a ton of wealth.
What was interesting in those early turns was seeing the ways Ara lets you pick a specific path to victory, focusing your gameplay on what you think is most important.
That starts with choosing your civilization and its leader, of which there are a lot. Ara includes 36 different leader choices, each of whom has their own special bonuses for their civilization. It’s in choosing your leader that you home in on a particular gameplay approach, because each one’s unique ability can give you major advantages if you play to their strengths.
I chose Ghana’s leader from the abridged list, who gained additional wealth from focusing on mining in the early game, and seeing as I didn’t have much time to play, figured benefits in those initial turns would be for the best. Other leaders’ abilities gave them upgrades to specific kinds of units or benefits to population or food production, generally in keeping with what their real-life nations actually excel in.
Ara gives you some additional micromanagement options, too, allowing you to focus on particular elements of your civilization as you’re building it. One of the main ones is a crafting system. Keeping your people happy along a variety of metrics is essential to keep your civilization growing and productive, and you can push those meters up by crafting amenities from different resources. Early on, the amenity my city produced was a feast for its residents, which boosted production throughout the city for 10 turns. Different amenities have different effects, so you can make and use different ones depending on your short-term needs.
As in most 4X games, you start off small, with the early game mostly concerning scouting, upgrading your village, and finding resource-rich territory to claim.
You can also craft other objects that give certain buildings and improvements a leg up. For example, early in the game, scouts you send to explore the world might find caches of resources or tools from past, lost groups of humans. Among the tools, I often found plows I could then assign to my farms, boosting their food production. Much like you might spend money and resources to build specific units, Ara lets you craft items that make changes to the way your civilization functions. It’s another way to tune your specific approach to the game, because to craft certain items, you also need to build improvements like a workshop or a forge, and those can have both positive and negative effects on different elements of your nation.
A lot of Ara’s gameplay was pretty familiar for 4X and grand strategy games, but with notable twists. Every time my city earned enough research points to unlock a new technology, I was presented with a host of options related to the specific era of human history I was in. These don’t function as a tech tree, as these games normally present them, though–instead, you’re grabbing a number of options from a list that eventually lead to a specific tech that can kick you into the next technological era.
Some technologies require earlier ones as prerequisites, but Ara simplifies the entire approach by just giving you a set of technologies and letting you pick the one you want at that moment. It also makes your civilization’s development feel a little more organic. Choosing to research grain storage, for instance, gives you big gains in agriculture, but then allows you to unlock fermentation. Developing that technology can let you make alcohol, which increases your people’s happiness but lowers their wisdom. However, if you skipped out on the grain storage tech and chose different options, fermentation wouldn’t have come up. So you only know about the technologies that are relevant to your path through the game, and have to make moment-to-moment decisions based on your earlier choices, rather than a grand plan devised from knowing what the future will hold.
Crafting different items gives you ways to change the focus of your cities and boost the happiness of your people.
As you advance, you get additional opportunities to choose specific pathways through the game. Like in other 4X games, you’ll sometimes trigger one-time events where you have to make a decision. As I was exploring, I ran into a small tribe not far from my city, which seemed similar to the city-states you can encounter in Civilization.
As with other major civilizations, Ara tracked my relationship with these folks. Meeting them triggered a one-time event in which the tribe asked for some support in the form of extra food. Trading with them would boost our relationship but cost me resources, while refusing their request had the opposite effect. I picked the diplomatic option, and after a few more turns of good relations, the tribe chose to join my nation instead of remaining independent, giving me an instant boost to population, which triggered an expansion of my territory.
Upgrading my city with improvements like farms and workshops, plus the expansion in population, also gave me an “expert” unit. Like the craftable items, experts can be assigned to your cities in different roles, allowing you to choose specific benefits. The slots I had available allowed me to either boost food production or the speed of building improvements.
And finally, after a while, my civilization earned me a Paragon–a notable historic figure. These people are similar to the leaders you can choose from at the beginning of the game, offering specific bonuses to your civilization. You can choose how to use a Paragon, with the option to assign them to different jobs. I assigned mine to help us boost our scientific accomplishments, and that decreased the time for me to research technology. Paragons seem to have their own specific strengths that determine what jobs they can do, but there are also a lot of options for how you can assign them–so as with the crafting system, you can use them to address short-term goals or help push your whole civilization in a specific gameplay direction.
The Act system eliminates civilizations that fail to be memorable to the world, relegating them to the dustbin of history.
Regardless of the paths you take in what improvements you build, technologies you choose, and units you make, you need to be conscious of keeping your advancements coming. Ara also shakes up the usual 4X gameplay by dividing history into three Acts. The Act system brings what developers call a “battle royale” element to the 4X gameplay.
At the end of each Act, all the civilizations in a match are judged on their “prestige,” looking at elements like development, expansion, creating great works called Triumphs, and so on. During the transition to the next Act, the bottom half of civilizations are culled from the match–lost to history, essentially, with their civilizations failing to make a mark and becoming forgotten. Those players (or AI-controlled leaders) are eliminated, and at that point, the remaining civilizations can send scouts in to spoil the ruins.
My time with the demo ended just as I was hitting the Bronze Age, having found a couple other neighboring civilizations but still long before the end of the first Act. According to the score screen, I was only the third-most-prestigious nation, suggesting it might have been about time to get a little more aggressive in my plans. With a focus on quickly expanding to increase the wealth of Ghana, I also hadn’t done much in the way of building military units, and I had a potentially aggressive rival civilization not far from my borders, so building up some defenses was probably a rising point on the agenda.
But with just 35 turns, I only just scratched the surface of what a game of Ara: History Untold would likely entail. It was just enough to get a sense of the many decisions the game adds to the usual 4X cocktail, though–with systems like crafting items, using amenities, and assigning Paragons, there are a lot of small ways you can influence your civilization’s trajectory for either long-term planning or short-term needs. I’d like to spend a couple hundred more turns seeing how those choices shake out.
Ara: History Untold is launching on PC on September 24.
