Ara: History Untold News

Today, we set our sights on the fascinating aspect of city growth, a pivotal element in growing your vast Nation. As a leader in Ara, you'll witness the birth of new settlements, including your initial city, starting with a small group of citizens. But fear not; with each passing turn, your population naturally grows, igniting the spark of progress in your fledgling nation. With a growing population comes an increase in workers, the driving force behind your city's productivity. Harness this labor pool by assigning workers to various Improvements, magnifying their yields and efficiencies.

Migration plays a significant role in city growth, with the goal of attracting more people than seeing them leave. By maintaining happiness and health, enacting sensible policies, and occasionally pampering your citizens, you can entice people from distant lands to join your nation. As your cities grow, you will notice various changes to the landscape, including additional homes and infrastructure being built. These tiny details breathe life into Ara’s Living World, allowing each city to feel unique in its design.

Players can build specific Improvements to help manage population growth. For instance, a newly constructed City Hall will raise your immigration level, while Granaries and Hospitals increase your city's birth rate. For ambitious players seeking rapid population growth, the power of crafting comes into play. Crafted goods, such as Wine or Jewelry, can temporarily elevate a city’s birth rate, providing a strategic advantage in shaping your empire's trajectory.

A screenshot of the available buildable zones in Ara: History Untold.

Resource management is the cornerstone of an enduring Nation. Larger cities will consume more food per turn, and newly established cities demand well-planned improvements to avoid excess emigration. As expanding cities require ample room to grow, players must balance the need for more land (and more improvements) with the need to upgrade and enhance their existing Improvements. Striking the right balance between expanding and upgrading is a delicate dance of resource management and the key to ensuring your Nation's long and healthy existence.

A screenshot of a large and prosperous city in Ara: History Untold.

Stay tuned as we reveal more about Ara: History Untold in the coming weeks!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2021880/Ara_History_Untold/

Throughout history, nations have employed scouts to expand their knowledge of the world around them. In Ara, players can accomplish this task by sending scouts to explore new regions, uncover hidden resources, collect loot caches, and hunt dangerous wildlife.

When you establish your first settlement in Ara, you gain access to a single scout unit. Send them forth to explore nearby regions, peeling back the fog of war that shrouds the map. As your scout ventures further, they may stumble upon Independent Settlements or make first contact with other nations, presenting new prospects for alliances or rivalry.



The path of exploration is paved with possibilities, but one scout can only do so much. For those eager to accelerate the exploration process, the solution lies in the workshop. By crafting a scout staff, you can enlist additional scout units to expand your reach and gather information rapidly.



Beyond exploration lies the potential to harvest hidden resources and collect valuable loot caches. Your scouts can survey regions, revealing precious resources, such as salt or copper, that can be used to craft goods once harvested. Loot caches can provide precious resources and equipment, but you must act fast! Every nation is racing to claim these caches, so swift action will be required to secure them before the competition.

Certain zones are inhabited by dangerous wildlife, fiercely guarding their territory and preventing players from building improvements. However, where danger lurks, opportunities also arise. Your brave scouts can engage in wildlife hunting, which grants you valuable furs and opens up the ability to construct new improvements within these zones. For more info on Dangerous Wildlife, check out our previous post here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/2021880/announcements/detail/5319358487445882911.

Scouts are essential for early-game exploration, and we’re excited to see how players utilize them in Ara: History Untold. Stay tuned for more info in the coming weeks!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2021880/Ara_History_Untold/

It’s time to meet the neighbors! At the start of Act I, Independent Settlements are scattered throughout the world, hidden by the fog of war. You can uncover these villages by sending scouts and other units to explore the wild regions beyond your borders.



Independent Settlements are not initially aligned with any nation and can be ignored, antagonized, or befriended over time. Your relationship with a settlement can range from Hostile to Loyal and will improve by completing various quests. Some groups may ask you to share resources before the coming winter, while others will call for your aid in defeating a rival tribe.

Be careful; pillaging one of these settlements for loot or failing to complete their quests will cause them to grow hostile and create mercenary units in retaliation. Claiming a region inhabited by an Independent Settlement will also result in a group of angry mercenaries at your doorstep.



Beyond improving relationship status, settlement quests have their own rewards, such as rare resources, equipment, and prestige that can help advance your nation quickly. Upon reaching the “Loyal” status with an Independent Settlement, you will be presented with their Capstone Quest. Slightly more challenging than those leading up to it, this quest will allow the settlement to join your nation once completed!



Work swiftly to establish relationships because all surviving settlements disappear at the start of Act II. Depending on your final relationship status, they may gift you resources and equipment or join your nearest city as newly welcomed citizens.

Stay tuned for more info on Ara: History Untold in the coming weeks!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2021880/Ara_History_Untold/

The development of agriculture in early civilizations was vital to growing the population and often signified an advancing society. This is why Farms are able to be built from the very beginning of a new game of Ara: History Untold - they represent a society's transition from hunting and gathering to an agricultural civilization.



Farms are one of the most important Improvements and can be crucial to a budding Nation. While one is necessary, building multiple can generate more food and in turn promote City growth. To maximize the food output of a Farm, they can be placed on fertile regions that are likely to provide bonus food in addition to the default amount that Farms will produce on their own. If a player doesn’t have enough room to build more Farms, they can also be upgraded and be assigned workers for larger outputs.



Another important factor is the rate at which a City is consuming food. In Ara players can adjust how much food is consumed by the Nation's populous, which can increase the rate at which your City grows. The more food available for consumption, the faster the cities will grow, but beware, the larger the City, the larger the appetite!

Farms also function as harvesters that gather natural resources from the map for use in building Improvements, Triumphs, outfitting Armies, and more. These harvesters allow for players to choose what item they want to gather from the natural resources. For example, the player can choose to gather extra food, money, or even malt to brew beer when harvesting resources like wheat, rye, or corn. For a refresher on natural resources, we've discussed them on this previous post.



Placing farms on regions with natural resources won't just affect the player's strategy but also the world around them! Farms are visually distinct depending on what resource they are placed on. A pig farm will look very different from a wheat farm, and each will have unique vignette animations to simulate life.

Stay tuned for more as we continue to develop Ara: History Untold!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2021880/Ara_History_Untold/

Like many great stories, Ara: History Untold is broken into three acts. Each act contains a different set of technological eras that mimics the progression of technology over the course of recorded human history.

Act 1 begins with the Ancient History era and continues through to the Bronze Age and the Iron Age before ending on the Antiquities Era. In Act 2, players will experience the Early Middle Ages, the High Medieval Ages, and the Renaissance until reaching the Enlightenment. This leads to Act 3, which represents some of the most recent technological eras of humankind - the Machine Age, the Atomic Age, and the Information Age - and ends with the unpredictable Future Age.

While advancing to the next act is exciting and oftentimes represents a thriving Nation, it is not guaranteed. During the transition between one act to the next, Nations are sorted into different tiers based on their relative Prestige, and the Nations with the lowest amount of Prestige are removed from the game. Prestige is gained from a number of sources in a variety of categories we'll get into later including culture, warfare, science, religion, and more. To ensure that they survive to see the next act, players can complete quests, research technologies, create Triumphs and Improvements, and employ a plethora of other strategies available to them.

A screenshot of some notifications presented to this player showing one of their achievements and what tier they landed in at the end of the Act.

Once the Act Transition is complete, players are given more information about their relative standing amongst the world's nations, which can be a powerful tool in determining if and how they want to pivot their strategy as they head into the next act.

A screenshot of the detailed Act Transition screen showing the Nation's statistics like population, prestige, and more.

We can't wait to share more about Prestige and other systems in the upcoming weeks, so be sure to stay tuned!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2021880/Ara_History_Untold/