Ara: History Untold is the game that Civ fans will be playing until Civilization VII comes out early next year. This 4X grand strategy game owes much to Sid Meier’s magnum opus and is an absolutely beautiful addition to the genre. As you get further into the game you can certainly find yourself getting bogged down though with the sheer amount of the stuff the game expects you to manage, but you have all that to look forward to.
First, you need to get going and get past the first era. Times of Cyberpunky AI await in the future, but those pyramids aren’t going to build themselves, so let’s get cracking.
Ara: History Untold – The First Era
Scouting
It is unlikely you are here if you have never played a Civ game before so you likely know the drill. We need to get our Scout active and find a place to settle our first city. Unlike Civ though we don’t have hexes to move into, Ara is a little more free-roaming. Let’s start by setting our scout party to Auto-Explore the map for starters, that way we don’t have to keep clicking on them every few seconds. Hit the circle in the lower-left of the screen. Do the same when you want to control them again, but for now, let’s let them uncover a bit of the map on their own.
Era progression
We want to get out of the first era, certainly within the first 50 turns so we have a little work to do to achieve that. The speed of your progression will depend on how quickly we can get our research done so the first thing you want to be researching is the Workshop. The workshop opens up a world of crafting and other goodness that can help you increase your yields in other areas, causing more growth and ultimately era progression. So get it in the queue.
Think of your people
For your city to grow it is important to keep its inhabitants wanting to remain there. The Quality of Life is important in Ara, and as the cities are so gorgeous to look at as they expand, we can both keep our population smiling and give ourselves some lovely eye candy as we do so
Think about throwing a celebratory Feast to boost the mood and keep an eye on your Golden Age bar. When you fill it you enter one and you will get a Prestige bonus for the next 25 turns. It will take a while to get there but, when you do, the rewards are worth it going forward.
Careful Research
As with every grand strategy game the Research Tree can either make you or kill you depending on the choices you make here. Items all have tooltips that you should definitely take the time to read and even study in more detail so you can plan ahead. The Technologies all bring craftable items with them that you will need to enhance the happiness and security of your city. Grain Storage for example is vital and will give you the Granary building which you will need to ultimately feed all your people. You will also need a lot of Timber early on so you will need to unlock the Logging Camp building. This can be done by studying Ropemaking. Make sure you pause and have a good look here because it is important for consistent progression.
Expand your city
As the turns pass by you will get a Claim Generation which allows you to stretch out your boundaries. Consider before committing what resources you are a little short of and expand in the direction that might just help you out the most.
Settle down
There is not a massive rush to build more cities at the start in Ara, In Civ I always tended to try and build a city network much earlier than I felt the need to here. You will still be looking to add one around turn 25 though, which should have given you long enough to have sorted most of the mess out of your founding city.
Just like when it comes to expanding your city think about what you need to make the bigger picture palatable and settle there. Don’t send your Settlers miles away, maintain proximity to City One so that you easily move between the two. At least one of your first two cities should be on the coastline. So if your first isn’t, get your second city adjacent to the wet stuff to open up some new avenues.
War – what is it good for?
Well not much in the first era. While you may find yourself in minor skirmishes you do not want to be going all Genghis Khan at the start. You can fry these bigger fish further down the track when you are stronger and, if you play your diplomacy correctly, when your neighbors trust you and least expect a Caesar-style knife in the back. Maybe that says more about me than you.
Ara: History Untold Trivia
Oxide Games founders Dan Baker, Tim Kipp, Brian Wade, and Marc Meyer all met while working at Firaxis on Civilization V – wildly regarded as one of the best games in the series to date.
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