Hey everyone,
It’s been about a month since we took on the responsibility of overseeing the design and production of this ambitious new historical 4X strategy game. Stardock has been making turn-based 4X strategy games since the 1990s and we have really loved the opportunity of working with our friends and colleagues at Oxide Games and Microsoft.
For the first week, we dug deep into player feedback to identify the core areas of the game that needed meaningful improvement. With the upcoming release of version 1.4, we're delivering substantial changes that address gameplay depth, quality of life, and technical performance. Here's what you can expect from what we're calling the "Living Strategy Update."
Finding a Voice
Now to be candid, we look at version 1.4 as just the first step. Ara: History Untold needs to stand out from other historical strategy games. I love all the games in the genre, from Civilization to Humankind to Millennia. The most successful games in the genre always find a way to scratch a certain itch. Even if a game is pretty good, if it’s not the best at what it’s trying to do, then I might as well just play the best one. Being 95% as good as the best game in a particular genre doesn’t cut it. So Ara: History Untold must have its own unique take that is compelling and wanted by enough players to do that and version 1.4 is the first step in that direction.
Improved Map Generation
One of the first areas we tackled was the map generation. A strategic game can only be as good as its map allows, and we felt the existing map generation didn't offer enough distinct strategic choices. If every player has all the resources they could possibly want, then what’s the conflict about?
Now, in the first Premium DLC, Untold Scenarios, we got to hand place the resources. North America is terrible of course (no bacon, no pork chops, and no ham!). But for random map generation, we need to be more fair and this is our first revision of the map generation to make area of the world more distinct.
The maps also have about twice as many regions in them as before so effectively, each map size is twice as big as before without using more screen space (or RAM).
Introducing the "Living Strategy" View
Ara has a wonderful “Living World” view where you can zoom in and see the actual people living their lives. And it has a really useful strategic view where you zoom out and everything is iconized. But there was nothing in-between. As a result, all games are just played with icons. And static icons have real limitations. 128x128 stylized icons can’t convey as much as a fully 3D rendered, animated unit. This is doubly true if an army contains say Samauri and cannons. So we made the Living Strategy View. As you zoom out, the living world units that matter scale up as well. And they are glorious.
And players gave us a lot of additional things to add. For example, the city banners now display quality of life. Armies now show the types of units in them (like melee and artillery) to make it clearer..
Smarter AI Opponents
Why is AI so terrible in 4X games typically? I see this posted all the time. I have been making strategy game AI for 30 years so I feel comfortable telling you exactly why: Good AI comes from being good at the game and knowing how to program your strategies into the game. If you think it’s just a simple matter of “Attack nearest unit” or it’s a lot more than that, especially if you don’t want your AI to cheat (which Ara’s AI basically doesn’t).
And being good at a game like this means time. A lot of time. I have just in the Steam version of the game 843 hours in staged builds. That’s not counting dev builds. That means I am ready to leave a negative review of the game as is the custom but also I’ve played it enough to be able to know what strategies work and don’t work. Version 1.4’s AI isn’t just a little better, it’s fantastically, ridiculously better. This was only possible because Oxide’s engineering is pretty fantastic. The AI worker functions were all there. It just required utilizing it to have the AI build good strategies.
Reducing Micromanagement
Micromanagement should never overshadow strategic decision-making. One person’s depth is another person’s slog. For version 1.4 we were able to take advantage of the underlying simulation of the game. The little people in the Living World are not just eye candy. They all have names, stats, wants, needs. It’s kind of insane really. But we were able to tap into this to have the citizens use their needs to pick items from inventory to supply their own homes, farms, shops, factories. You can turn this off or even override what they do but by default, you don’t have to. They’ll do it themselves and they’re pretty good at it.
Battle System Improvements & Retreats
Combat in Ara needed clarity and depth, so we've revamped the Battle Panel to clearly display critical information like army composition, damage types, and combat advantages. Battles now last slightly longer, allowing for more strategic input. Importantly, we've added the highly requested ability for armies to retreat from battle, giving players new tactical options and strategic flexibility.
This isn’t the last word on combat or war in general for Ara. But we felt that it was important to quickly move to explain how combat works, what mechanics are in play and make it so that engaging more armies to a battle was possible and that retreating from a losing battle was possible. This came with a host of UI updates to fasciculate this.
Performance and Visual Enhancements
Performance matters—a lot. But we want the game to be pretty too. So for v1.4 we focused on both. The game, both early and especially late game should be dramatically faster. Especially in terms of framerate. Now, it’s only been a month so our optimization focused on “low hanging fruit”. But Oxide was able to make a lot of engine and shader improvements that you will likely notice. At the same time, the visual clarity of things should look a lot better across the board. Enough that you should notice it within seconds of starting a new game.
One area we did lose performance: We disabled some “maximum effort” algorithms that led to a 1% performance improvement in framerate but generated 50% of the GPU use. I don’t know about you but I hate loud fans and going from 64fps to 65fps (especially when our other optimizations already took us from 19fps to 64fps on the same system) wasn’t worth having the fans go crazy.
Balance and Quality of Life
Version 1.4 also includes extensive balance adjustments and quality-of-life improvements. Taxes, growth rates, city caps, and crafting recipes have been rebalanced to ensure a more enjoyable and strategic progression throughout the eras. There's far too much to list here, but rest assured we've carefully considered your feedback in every tweak.
Really a lot of the overwhelming feelings that players had came from cities just becoming really big really fast.
Just Getting Warmed Up
The litmus test for Version 1.4 is for players to load it up, play it and either go “Okay, I really like the direction this game is evolving. I want to play this and see what comes next” or, of course “Oh this is just another game in the genre that does things better done in game A, B and C.”. You let us know.
Cheers!