This week, the Ara: History Untold team is excited to share with you one of the features that we think distinguishes Ara from other turn-based grand strategy games – true simultaneous turns.
But what does that actually mean?
Ara builds on the classic turn-based formula, but each nation’s actions and choices resolve simultaneously - after all nations have ended their turn. Like the classic board game Diplomacy this leads to suspense, anticipation, and surprising twists that are not possible in a game with serial turns or real-time with pause.
A screenshot of Ara: History Untold's user interface showing the queue of commands given before ending a turn.
During your turn, your orders, commands, improvements you commission for your lands, and goods you craft, are added to a queue. At the end of everyone’s turn, all of the Nations’ queues are then simultaneously processed, but of course in an orderly fashion. Otherwise, pure chaos! At the beginning of your next turn, you receive the reports and notifications of the results of your choices – and the visible choices of your opponents.
Where there’s a conflict, (for example, two armies from nations at war attempting to move into the same region) – the faster army (measured by their initiative rating) makes their move first, with the slower army then moving in second.
A screenshot of Ara: History Untold showing an Army unit planning to move from one region to another.
One of the key features we’ve added to support this approach is the timeline, which lets you look ahead to the predicted outcomes of your choices and adjust your plans turn by turn.
Ara isn’t the only game that’s ever taken this approach – but it’s the only one at the scale of true 4X Historical Grand Strategy. Of course, the gameplay possibilities for how this impacts your decisions as the leader of your nation are too numerous to list here, but we’ll be exploring some of them in our upcoming posts. Be sure to stay tuned for more!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2021880/Ara_History_Untold/