Ara: History Untold

[quikah]

Tried out Ara last night. Incidentally I have been playing Civ 5 the past couple of weeks. I haven't played Civ 6. I get on these grand strategy kicks couple times a year, will probably lose interest in a few weeks...

TLDR: Overall seems interesting. I like the more in depth city management. Haven't been able to experience the fighting yet. I really don't like the random events they use for interactions with neutral tribes. UI is bleh, but might just need to get more used to it. Not a fan of the art style. I would pass until they patch it to get the CPU usage under control.

First, there seems to be some serious optimization issues with this game. Sitting at the menu screen it is burning 40%+ CPU. During gameplay it was at 90%+. I made some changes to the graphics and restarted it seemed to calm down a bit to about 60-65% CPU during gameplay, but still seems like excessively high CPU usage since it is almost constant with no fluctuations even when I am just idleing in the city screen. I have an i5-10400 and 4070. Few threads on the steam forums about this.

Gameplay I am sort of mixed. I only played a few hours, so cannot really get too in depth.

- Neutral tribes: I don't quite understand how this work. They seem to only be icons on the map with no way to directly interact with them. There are seemingly random events that happen which give you some short story then you can pick 1 of three actions which will impact you in some way on resources and your reputation with the tribe. If you bring the tribe to full reputation they join your city. When I encountered a tribe that was all the way in the red nothing really happened, just the same random event to bring up the reputation. Civ 5 city-states seem more interesting in that they are full neutral civilizations with borders which you can fight or trade with.

- City/Territoy mangement: this is a bit more involved than Civ5. Like Civ 5 a city will have several territories it will control. As the city grows you can choose a new territory to add to your city (this is better than the random expansion Civ5 does IMO). Each territory will have an overall resource generation, then is divided into a few plots of land within it. Some of the plots have resources like some plant, animal, or mineral. You need to build a specific improvement on that plot to take advantage of it (ex if you build a farm on a corn resource you get grain out of it). You can build different buildings on each plot which can generate certain things. For example, you can build a bakery which you can use to bake bread. You can then use that bread to give your city a perk which will increase the health of the city. There are other buildings which you can build tools which you can use to improve your other improvements. Some buildings can create raw materials to feed into other improvements. It seems like it can get pretty complicated.

- War: Maybe I just got lucky, but every AI in the game seemed pretty passive, so I didn't fight anyone. Encountered 3 other civilizations, they were all pretty neutral. Like the neutral tribe I again had some random events happen involving them.

- UI: confusing, will take some getting used to. Lot of nested menus you need to dig through to get to stuff.

- Graphics: The graphics seems OK, though I prefer the art style of Civ 5. This game is a bit too cartoony for my taste. You can judge for yourself from screenshots. The animation seems pretty mixed. On one hand the world has interesting details if you zoom in like flocks of birds flying around, on the other hand your unit looks like a 2D icon which you move around.

 

[paperfist]

Thanks for the review! I've heard about the optimization issues and a lot of people complain about the micromanagement at least compared to Civ. Can you comment on that?

It's interesting that you're calling the graphics cartoony. When Civ 5 came out that's what everyone said too

 

[quikah]

Thanks for the review! I've heard about the optimization issues and a lot of people complain about the micromanagement at least compared to Civ. Can you comment on that?

It's interesting that you're calling the graphics cartoony. When Civ 5 came out that's what everyone said too

I haven't had much time to really play it that much yet, so it is all a very surface level opinion.

Civ 5 is also cartoony, but Ara is just cartoony in a weird way that is off putting to me. Hard to explain, I guess look at screnshots and judge for yourself. Mostly it is just the leader models which just look weird to me in Ara.

I like the micromanagement of the cities so far. I like that it gives you more choices, instead of just having set builds or very limited options for every city. Seems like it would allow for more ways to build up your cities. I imagine if you don't like micromanaging in these types of games this would be a big negative.

One other point I didn't mention which I am not sure about yet is the progression. The way the game progresses is that they kill off the bottom 2 civilizations based on your score when everyone moves to the next age. At the higher difficulties in Civ the AI cheats, so it can be very hard to keep up in the beginning. If Ara follows the same pattern, I imagine it will be extremely hard to even stay in the game to the end at the higher difficulty settings.

 

[paperfist]

I haven't had much time to really play it that much yet, so it is all a very surface level opinion.

Civ 5 is also cartoony, but Ara is just cartoony in a weird way that is off putting to me. Hard to explain, I guess look at screnshots and judge for yourself. Mostly it is just the leader models which just look weird to me in Ara.

I like the micromanagement of the cities so far. I like that it gives you more choices, instead of just having set builds or very limited options for every city. Seems like it would allow for more ways to build up your cities. I imagine if you don't like micromanaging in these types of games this would be a big negative.

One other point I didn't mention which I am not sure about yet is the progression. The way the game progresses is that they kill off the bottom 2 civilizations based on your score when everyone moves to the next age. At the higher difficulties in Civ the AI cheats, so it can be very hard to keep up in the beginning. If Ara follows the same pattern, I imagine it will be extremely hard to even stay in the game to the end at the higher difficulty settings.

The city layouts look a little strange. I haven't actually seen leader screen yet, I'll have to check that out.

Thanks. I don't mind micromanaging, Civ late game and with armies of workers is pretty micro. Have you used the crafting system yet?

That actually sounds pretty cool. In Civ you can keep playing and playing even if you're really out of it.

 

[quikah]

Thanks. I don't mind micromanaging, Civ late game and with armies of workers is pretty micro. Have you used the crafting system yet?

The crafting is fairly interesting. You have basically 2 separate improvements you can build, which will be a producer of a resource and a crafter which can use the resource. The producers often have options of what you can produce.

For example if you have a grape resource node and build a farm on it you have the option of producing extra food to contribute to general city growth or produce grapes which you can use in the fermenting pit improvement. At the fermenting pit you can produce wine or syrup. Forget what syrup is used for, think it can be used by other crafters. Wine is used as a buff to your city. When you select to produce one of those it will take a really long time, something like 25 turns, but there are buffs you can apply. The buff will cost either some generic resource like wood or gold or food, or it will allow you to use 1 of the specialized resources, in this instance the grapes which will increase production by something like 200%.

Most of the improvements work like this. Additionally a lot of the improvements will have seperate improvement slots which can use some crafted resource to buff the output, for example you can add plows (which are made in workshop improvements) to your farms. It can all get pretty complicated.