For example in my current game, I am on turn 275, in the last era of the second Act. I have 10 cities, which have 130 regions, and each region has between 2 and 5 zones. The game tells me that I have 85 crafting buildings, but doesn't offer similar information about harvesting buildings and support building. But I'd guess I have around 200 total buildings to manage. Every turn I craft 70 to 80 items, which I know because the game insists on giving me a stack of 70 to 80 popups every turn, and there is no way to close them all at once. Crafting buildings are privileged in that there are tools to show, for example, all your weavers. Harvesting buildings don't have a UI like that, and if you are looking for all your iron mines, you need to cycle through the list of harvesting buildings of all your cities, manually. That is probably because harvesting buildings can only produce up to 3 different things, while some crafting buildings can produce a dozen different things. While there is an UI to display crafting buildings, there is no way to either automate them, or to issue bulk commands to all of them. If you want all your weavers to switch from making fabric to making rope, you need to do that manually. And for each individual building you need to not only set the produced item, but also the resources used. If you don't have specific resources, you can sometimes replace them with money, or you will craft much slower. It is an extremely detailed system, which is fun enough as long as you have a very limited number of buildings, but then gets rather tedious by mid-game.

Cities have 5 main stats: Happiness, health, knowledge, prosperity, and security. Some buildings add to these stats. But mostly the stats are falling whenever the city is growing. So much of the stuff that you are producing in all these crafting buildings are amenities, consumables that give a stat boost for 5 to 10 turns. It is complicated, but manageable in Act I. But by getting more cities, and having each of these cities growing to more regions, balancing your cities' needs with the production of amenities becomes really tedious. And the imperfections of the UI makes every action take more clicks than it should do.

And that is Ara in a nutshell, a game mostly about crafting consumables. This is the part the devs really cared about. In some instances you can get an excruciating amount of details on crafting, like for example how much production you are losing due to rounding errors. The other parts of the 4X game mechanics are much less informative. Combat still gets some interesting numbers shown, but the battle animations are useless. Diplomacy is nearly completely a black box. One AI opponent offered me an alliance, and when I accepted he denounced me a turn later and started a war against me. With zero information what would have caused this radical change of mind. You never get messages that you are settling too close, or that you should keep your troops away from his territory. You just get a meter that ranges from adversary to ally, and that can fluctuate wildly without giving you any reason.

I will stop my current game, because there is no victory condition I could fulfil early. The winner is the player with the most prestige, and I already have twice as much prestige as the next player. Setting the difficulty right is somewhat difficult in Ara: At the end of each act, the lowest third of the players in prestige is getting kicked out of the game. Unless you specifically disable human players getting kicked out, you need to set the difficulty level low enough to be at least in the middle third of the prestige ranking at the end of the first act. But if you do that, you probably top the charts by the end of act 2. The AI difficulty, like in all 4X games, is set by how much the AI players are cheating, and that tends to be much more impactful in the early game.

Overall Ara feels as if the devs got a huge budget from Microsoft and made a very beautiful game, which doesn't work all that well in the long run. Unless you absolutely love micromanagement and crafting, I don't think I can recommend Ara for $60. I can, however, recommend paying $12 for the Gamepass for one month and trying Ara out that way. You'll probably still have time to try out a bunch of other games that month.