Ara: History Untold is the latest 4X Strategy game from the brains of Oxide Games, released to lukewarm embrace on Windows on September 24th. I say lukewarm because Microsoft Games neglected to say much about the product at hand, simply giving it a showcase in 2022 and never speaking about the title again.

In a landscape where many developers are dipping their toes in the 4X genre in order to bite a piece of Paradox Entertainment and Fireaxis' cake, it's not mystery that there's skepticism about a new title from a relatively 'fresh' company - with their most famous release being Ashes of Singularity: Escalation (2016) - considering how Millennia by C Prompt Games did on release.

Ara: History Untold does a lot to dispel skepticism but falls short of being a neatly confectioned title despite the important updates the game is still getting. With the important note that it doesn't set out to be a Civilization 6 lookalike, the game has its own innovations, perks and, sadly, a lot of downfalls.

~ are the things I find mid. + are the things I appreciate. - are the things I hate.

~ The graphics are pretty and, at a first glance, not necessarily too heavy but in the long run, the game starts to lag and have incredible issues at loading maps with multiple cities either yours or led by the AI. On three rigs of varying power (mine and my friend's), the game pushed the CPU and GPU usage to almost its limits, often ending up performing just like a game such as Still Wakes the Deep or other more intensive games.

~ The tutorial is in-depth and, at the same time, lackluster, not touching specifically on many different mechanics you will need to keep an eye on in order to make a city that is at its core extremely efficient and extremely performing: waste is never properly explain and it lacks a dedicated page in the Encarta (the encyclopedia of terms and tutorials of the game) neither is the fluctuation in production of your farms.

~ Your city expands through the gimmick of city growth: every turn you are one step closer at raising your city level and, in doing so, you gain one regional claim; instead of expanding through culture bombs, the game adopts the same style as Age of Wonders 4 in letting you pick in which region you'd like to expand, giving you an overview of the region's main production: wood, food, materials and wealth. The more icons of each, the better their production should be.

Every city, all that you fund, needs a certain amount of food to survive and grow. Failure to provide enough food means that your city will stagnate and not reach the next level, losing a level if it gets too low and your "food reserves" (not flagged anywhere to my knowledge) dry up.

+ Every region will accumulate their resources a little bit at a time, alongside with whichever special resources (such as cattle, elephants, iron, gold, etc etc...) is on that region, giving a very brief overview at the beginning of your turn in the form of numbers atop them. Building an adequate improvement on top of it will speed up the gathering of said resource but it won't be a "stable" income: as easily as it'll be +5 one turn, it could be +2 to +3 the next, never allowing you to completely understand what is causing the fluctuation between incomes - it happens and it can screw you greatly.

+ Who advances towards the end game is dictated by their overall prestige, which can be accrued by building certain improvements, building triumphs (their version of world wonders) and researching technologies to boost your score on the nation rankings. Failure to accrue enough prestige will land you in the forgotten section of leaders and, by the progression to Middle Ages, you will be kicked out of the game.

- As with every 4X game, you can achieve victory by speed-running every possible age, by dominating your enemies in countless battles or... who knows, really. It's never explained what you can do to win and it's not clear whether or not a cultural/religious victory is even possible considering things. But let me go a little bit deep in these things.

Every city has five main indicators on how well it's doing:

• City wellness.
• City knowledge.
• City health.
• City prosperity.
• City security.

+ Each and every one of these factors need to be accounted for when building improvements and choosing amenities to boost your city through various turns. Differently from Civilization 6, amenities in Ara are meant to be usable goods that are slotted within a city's 'Amenity' section and consumed in x amount of turns to boost any of these five indicators for that long before having to use another good to refresh the buff.

+ Amenities are built within your city in improvements such as granaries, academies, fermenting pits, great hearth and so on and so forth using either no materials (thus taking a longer time) or slotting the right supplies in both your improvement's "improvements" (e.g. granaries will work better with wheels or with electrical power, farms will work better with plows and fertilizer, every workshop works better with tools and so on and so forth) and in the crafted object's supplies to make it take less time.

~ Amenities are supposed to be your leg-up towards eventual issues in any of the aforementioned metrics, mainly with food issues that will indeed arise as you go through your game. These, coupled with experts (a bonus to the improvement in either production, wealth or whatever depending on where you are slotting them) and bonuses from advisors (the equivalent of governors from Civilization 6) should do enough to help you through eventual problems.

- Now, the output to any of your improvements varies turn by turn, without any indication of why and how: is your improvement consuming a supply and then taking a turn to renew it? Who knows. It's never explained properly at any point in the tutorial or in the game's Encarta (not to mention that some tutorial popups simply don't appear unless you're doing the supposed activity by yourself. Or they appear after way too long and after you've done already done the requested thing once or twice).

This weird output variation means that you can never truly account for how much food you're going to need: your city, at some point (c.a. tier 12 to 14) will always suffer from food deficiency. I am currently at a point where I have no idea where to go with my gameplay: my main town is at tier 14, the only other AI on the map remaining with me is hostile to me and has been since turn 10, all my farms are upgraded to the max available tier for the era, all of them have heavy plows and fertilizers (best in slot for the era) and all of them have an expert to boost production plus an advisor for such a thing, 3 amenities for food (grain supply +30, curated meats +25, great feasts +15) and yet I'm still stagnating with no way of growing another region tile in order to make more farms.

- No growth means no region tiles, no region tiles means no more building improvements for you and, worse of all, no triumph building. Every triumph you want to build, aside from needing varying things crafted at your improvements, needs a whole region dedicated to it. You'll still get the bonus from owning the region the triumph is sitting on but you cannot build anything else upon it and if it has any special material on it, you will not be able to harvest it.

- Does that mean that only the Nation with the highest prestige score wins? Maybe. I don't know. I'm not sure. As I said, it's never explained what kind of wins you can achieve in Ara, neither there is a consistent way of telling how you're fairing versus other nations aside the aforementioned Nation Rankings which only takes in consideration era and prestige points.

- You can however go to war and destroy your opponents. How? You pay a ridiculous sum of prestige and invoke a war: it can be a skirmish, it can be a war of expansion, it can be a war of annihilation... it's not explained or solidified how to trigger some of these casus belli (annihilation is peculiar of some nations, for example) and they can happen randomly.

+ When you're not at war, your forces are at rest, waiting to be mustered in prelude of a conflict. While in your reserves, troops do not cost their usual upkeep which means you can heave a pretty hefty reserve just in case someone decides to wake up with the wrong foot (which, with the AI, happens VERY often). Mustering forces costs 3 turns and, once on the field, the troops will start having their hefty upkeep. This upkeep can drive your economy and your food reserves down in the ground, so you need to be attentive in how many and how long you intend to use them.

- Now, the AI does not care about the upkeep costs because the Nation that does NOT like you the most will always be doing just a smidge less better than you, keeping you on your toes near constantly despite their bonuses not being towards production, settlers or even prosperity. They just tend to do "as good as you" until they wage war, then they are doing "better than you". They will keep their standing army going with the hefty upkeep cost, several tier 12 to 14 cities and all of their pillaged improvements while you flounder to recoup from having roused one elephant ballista or enough forces to counter the attack.

- War lasts 25 turns. It's declared as inconclusive if whoever waged it didn't do what it set out to do: so if Washington does not capture my city during a war of expansion but I manage to capture his, destroy his army and pillage every improvement done on his land, the war is inconclusive. He won't lose prestige, I won't gain any prestige from having successfully repelled his attack and di more than just that.

- The AI also tends to be the most prone to cheat in every other 4X game I've played out there: during a war, while losing a city the Triumph was being built in, with no more improvement to boost production (and you cannot boost production from your other cities), Washington managed to produce the selfsame triumph before being overtaken (making him gain 100 Prestige point) and build another triumph in a city next to the one capture only 3 turns after having started it. Which even with the highest production, the lowest you can go is 10 turns. This skyrocketed Washington way ahead of me. Upkeep of their armies also doesn't seem to faze the AI as they will keep expanding anyhow - not to mention their cities aren't built to be efficient at all. When I captured his city, I almost immediately had to fight with the fact that nothing was built to boost production, provide food or even boost economy.

- Relationship with other nation is solely dictated by whether you have matching traits, opposing traits or no traits in common at all. Even in multiplayer the relationships with your friends are decided for you, for no reason: if a friend of yours goes to war with a Nation you haven't even met, your relationship with them plummets to distrusted, which means you cannot trade or even barter with them until you raise the bar up through gifts.

- Trading is done via asking the other Nation to trade and them taking whatever they want from your resources without them ever getting a notification out of it. Whereas in Age of Wonders, Civilization 6, Stellaris and others of the genre you get a pragmatic "trade me for this resource in exchange for this resource", in Ara you get a simple offer to start a trading agreement and if you do agree to avoid going at war with them by refusing, the AI or your friends can take whatever they wish from you, without you ever knowing (because the tutorial does not cover it - still hasn't in 200+ turns of game time in this one tutorial enabled gameplay) you can do the same to them.

Closing down: there's a lot of good in Ara: History Untold, severely weighted down by major issues that seem inescapable due to the constraints of the game.

The AI is superficial at best, it has no ulterior motives than the traits provided to you by the game, it does not get jealous of Triumphs built, it does not get scared of a particularly populous city or big standing army. It simply acts on whether you have a city close to them that they don't like, your Prestige score and how to overcome it and that's all.

The way your city produces food and such is solely governed by numbers and crafts.

The formula can be improved.