Whether it’s Civilization 6, Cities Skylines 2, or even Stellaris, I expect economic management in strategy games to be difficult – I want some level of real-world accuracy, and I can only imagine that organizing the finances of an entire city, star fleet, or planet is pretty tricky. But there’s a middle point. Detail is good, but repetitive busy work is not. Until now, Ara History Untold has struggled to find a balance. Too much of your time is taken up with micromanaging individual workshops, farms, and other amenities. But that’s all about to change. Alongside a superbly designed new world map, a new leader, an overhauled battle system, and myriad other improvements, the new Ara update makes the entire game way, way better.
Ara History Untold is a strategy game with a twist. In Civilization and a lot of other genre staples, if you want to maximize your chance of success, you basically need to decide on a victory type before you start playing. Pivoting from a technology victory to domination partway through is tough – Ara tries to be more flexible.
Though you can pursue religion, culture, war, the economy, and other tentpole victory paths from the grand strategy genre, everything you do is also aggregated into a separate metric called Prestige. At the end of the game, the civilization with the most Prestige wins. It means you can explore different play styles in a single game, and that you’re not chained to the same goal from the first to last turn.
Economic management in Ara, however, is a bit too much of a pain, especially as the game rolls on. Let’s say you need to prioritize wood production, and you’ve also expanded your civilization into multiple regions and cities, each with its own workshops. If you want everybody to start mass producing timber, you need to select each workshop in each city individually, and manually set them all to making wood. It’s fussy and time consuming – and now, thanks to the new update, a thing of the past.
Arriving free for all players, the Ara History Untold Invisible Hand update adds a new ‘National Economy’ screen, so you can instantly set your entire workforce onto producing whichever resource you need. You can also use it to set a policy for improving facilities. If you decide that every workshop should be expanded, you can select that option, and, once your workshops have gathered the resources to build the expansion, they will do it automatically.
Complementing that, Invisible Hand adds a range of new amenities, so you have several new building options throughout each historical age. Combat has also been overhauled. Until now, you have been unable to upgrade individual units over time – it’s created a bizarre situation where your modern-day soldiers and armored vehicles are fighting alongside archers and spearmen.
But that’s over. You can upgrade individual units in Ara now, and there’s also a new battlefield system that takes into account different terrain types, each of which might buff or debuff your army depending on its composition. The development of this feature is ongoing, but Invisible Hand is the first step.
You get a tutorial when you start your first game in Ara, but even then, as you progress, it’s easy to lose track of all the screens, systems, and mechanics. The latest update introduces the Adviser menu, so you can get direction and guidance on every part of the game, no matter how long you’ve been playing.
Invisible Hand also introduces the first stage for modding support and there’s an entirely new leader in the form of John A. Macdonald, the real-world first Prime Minister of Canada. He provides a 50% boost to the production of military units and government buildings, but also possesses the pacifist trait, which means soldiers are 10% weaker when they are moving and attacking outside of the national borders.
Finally, the best new feature in the Ara History Untold update is the first version of the real-life accurate world map. If Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis are normally your 4X games of choice, Ara now has its own version of the actual globe. To maintain balance, however, and ensure that no civilization has a sheer geographical advantage over another, borders and continent sizes are partially adjusted – just because you pick a nation that is historically one of the biggest on the planet, doesn’t mean you get to own most of the map outright.
The Ara History Untold Invisible Hand update arrives on Thursday November 14 and is free for all players. If you want to get the game on Steam, just head here. Alternatively, it’s also available on PC Game Pass.
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