Ara: History Untold announced its first major patch for sometimes in November, promising to improve the economic user interface to something that works better when your empire is growing. But when playing Millennia and Ara back-to-back, I have to remark that the resource management and crafting chains in Millennia work a lot better since the very beginning. Yes, there are fewer options, but that means that you aren't constantly micromanaging what your buildings do.

4X games in general have a middle- to late-game problem of the management of larger empires getting tedious. I must say that Millennia is doing a lot better in that respect than Ara. The different ages in Millennia bring some new challenges to later ages, for example rebels. Some of those still can get tedious for large empires, but at least it is something new to manage, and you won't have the same thing to manage if you play again and go into a different age. Unfortunately the choice of ages is the one point where Millennia has a problem that Ara doesn't: At higher difficulty levels, due to the AI not getting smarter but just getting more resources than you, it is usually an AI opponent that gets to a new age first. And thus it becomes very random what new age the AI triggers, leading to a total loss of player agency on age selection.

Where both games, and pretty much all other 4X games, are rather bad is warfare: Higher difficulty levels enable the AI opponents to produce a lot more troops than you do, but they are universally bad at the strategic gameplay needed to send those troops somewhere to achieve something. All of these games seem to rely on the player's imagination, "I see an accumulation of enemy troops here, there AI must be planning to attack me"; that only works if the player then launches a counter-attack, because if the player tries a defensive strategy he'll notice very quickly that the AI attack isn't coordinated at all.

I am less excited for the next DLC announced for Millennia, Atomic Ambitions, as that probably won't affect the earlier part of the game at all. So maybe Ara still has some time to catch up and improve upon its flaws. But right now, Ara is the prettier and worse game, while Millenia is uglier and has the much better gameplay.