Ara: History Untold is not a Civ killer. It is a game with currently a score of 76 on Metacritic, and 68% positive ratings on Steam. Player numbers don't tell us much, because the game is somewhat overpriced on Steam, while having first-day availability on Game Pass: So a lot of people figured out that for an unknown game, playing it for $12 on Game Pass is a better idea than playing it for $60 on Steam. I don't think anybody at Firaxis is having sleepless nights over Ara: History Untold.

Having said that, Ara certainly has some potential. The general idea of combining the crafting and chains of goods from games like Anno 1800 with the civilization building genre is a good one. A lot of people are disappointed *because* Ara is fun to play in the first act, and then loses fun much faster in the mid- to end-game than Civ does. There are clearly two potential futures here for this game: One in which it receives great support, and by a number of patches and DLCs becomes a really good game; and another in which the project is somewhat abandoned and forgotten.

Another part of the general public disappointment is due to modern day influencer marketing and Steam refund periods: Ara looks graphically great in a streamed video of act I, and it takes way more than 2 hours of own play to realize its more serious long-term flaws. It doesn't help that not every streamer that is playing Ara is actually serious about it: I have seen far too many of them saying things like "oh, for my first building, I'll build a farm, to grow my starting city"; which simply doesn't work, as farms in Ara only give +3% to city growth. Putting a maximum of resources in round 1 into your Great Hearth to build a feast, which gives +25 city growth, is significantly more important at the start of the game. In fact, I don't build any building at all in the first region of my starting city early in the game, as these central spots are sorely needed later for dwellings and the palace. Building a scout, followed by a spearman, followed by a settler is a much better strategy. By the time you finished that, you'll have a second region, in which a farm on a wheat/corn/barley resource if you have it is probably the best move. That then enables you to build a granary and produce grain stores, which give another +30 to city growth.

One thing I like about Ara, but which is potentially already too demanding for the average player, is that it uses math quite cleverly: Buildings or resources can give a flat +X bonus, or they can give a percentage +Y% bonus. Over the course of the game, the relative value of these changes: In a city of size 12, the +3% bonus of the farm becomes as large as the +25 flat bonus of the feast, and with larger cities the percentage bonus becomes better, while for small cities the flat bonuses are better.

The same level of math knowledge is needed to understand how the crafting of goods works. Typically to produce a good, let's say fabric, you need a certain number of production points, in this case 500. The weaver building will give you a number of points each round, which depends on the city production value (which grows with city level and various bonuses), as well as on the supplies and experts of the weaver building. Let's say that all together the weaver building produces 50 production points, then it takes 10 turns to make 1 fabric. But the fabric has 3 slots to put in resources for accelerated production. And each slot gives +500 production points! If you fill all three slots, your fabric production goes up from 0.1 per turn to 3.1 per turn, which is a huge difference. Some slots can be filled with either a specific resource, e.g. fur, or replaced by putting in wealth. You can get +500 production on the first slot of fabric production with either 1 fur, 1 llama, or 50 wealth. These resources are used *every round*, so the more slots you fill, the cheaper the resource cost per produced item gets. If you have only fur, you can get 1.1 fabric per turn for 1 fur per turn. If you have fur, wool, and silk, you can get 3.1 fabric per turn for 1 fur, 1 wool, and 1 silk. Overall that means that without the correct input resources, producing a crafted good is slow and expensive, while it gets cheaper and faster when you have the right resources. Understanding how all of that works is the key to playing Ara well. Sorry for the math! It takes a lot of juggling, because for some goods the bonuses from resources are a lot smaller than for others. For example bandages at that same weaver have only 2 slots for accelerated production, and they only give +25 production points each, while 100 points are needed to make a bandage. It is a lot more viable to produce bandages without resources than it is to produce fabrics without resources. And while an expert giving +150% to base production of the building is quite impactful to bandages, it doesn't do very much for your fabric, as it doesn't increase the accelerated production points.

As I mentioned in a previous post, each city has 5 stats, and these stats receive a negative modifier based on city size, e.g. -10 at size 6 and -30 and size 12. But the size 6 city has only 3 slots for amenities, while the size 12 city has 6 slots. The game loop of Ara is growing cities to gather resources, crafting amenities from those resources, and compensating the negative size modifiers with the right amenities to keep everything going. That is fun in act I, and would be fun in acts II and III if Ara had the right UI tools to scale, bundle, and automate certain tasks. That isn't the case right now, so having 10 cities with sizes up to 30 in the end game is just too much of a chore to manage, and even fans of micro-management might give up way before that.

The basic game loop of Ara is significantly different from that of other 4X games, like Civilization or Millenia. If you are trying to play Ara like any other 4X game, you won't be very successful. You need to understand the resources and the crafting, and in many cases that only comes through playing; the game often doesn't tell you what exactly you need and how impactful a resource will be before you actually constructed the building. While I can tell you that if you build a farm on a non-resource space to just grow basic food will produce different amounts of food based on the fertility of the specific region and the city size, the math for that is so obscure that I haven't understood it fully.

If I'll start another game of Ara, I will probably just play until the end of the first act and then declare myself the winner if I am leading in prestige. Setting the difficulty right for this to be interesting isn't obvious. It is possible to set the difficulty for the AI to a different level than for yourself, and that might be necessary: If you apply the same high difficulty to both yourself and the AI, the AI becomes stupidly aggressive and unresponsive to diplomacy, as well as cheating to a frustrating level. Thus I might try a game with a high difficulty for myself to make the economy challenging, but lower difficulty for the AI to make the cheating and bad diplomacy less crippling.