Preview of the "Living Strategy" v1.4 Update
[h2]Coming June 18, 2025[/h2]
[h3]Players Can Access the First Preview Build Now[/h3]
View the full preview 1 changelogSince the release of Ara: History Untold, there has been a tremendous amount of feedback on the game. While most people appear to enjoy the game, I believe my views align with those of others who see its great potential, yet recognize that it requires further development in these areas:
- UI (User Interface)
- AI (Computer Opponents)
- Pacing (How fast things happen)
- Map Generation (Where things are placed)
- War & Peace (How combat works and how diplomacy between wars works)
- Performance (How responsive the game is on your PC).
These are pretty broad categories and there’s a journey to be had between where we are right now and where we think we need to get and it involves improvements in all 6 categories.
Today we want to talk about some of the user interface changes coming to 1.4.
[h2]User Interface: Living Strategy View[/h2]
Being able to see information and act on it with minimal effort is critical to the game being an enjoyable experience. We are dividing our efforts between what we can do quickly (version 1.4) and what is going to take more time (version 2.0). The first part of this is the new Living Strategy view of the world.
The Living Strategy view is a sort of a hybrid camera view between the Living World, where all things are visible and the strategic zoom layer where everything is abstracted to icons.
[h3]Living Strategy View Concept:[/h3]
- The player should be able to engage with the game almost entirely from the main map screen.
- As much city information should be visible on the main map screen as we can.
- All interactions that can be done on the city screen should be able to be done right from the main map.
- The map itself should provide more information by looking at it (sub-regions, what they do, etc.). This is particularly important for dealing with choosing what to build which can be overwhelming right now.
- The main UI should be updated to make the various actions a player can take be front and center.
How much and how soon?Version 1.4 will begin by showing more information on the main screen and make interacting with cities easier. Critically, the living world armies will scale up as you zoom out allowing players to get a lot more information about the units not to mention it’s looks better.
[h2]Living Strategy View in v1.4:[/h2]
Modern container ship under attack by a nation that is…a little bit behind in tech.
Detailed 3D armies are now displayed on the map. The units from different nations look different even if they’re technically the same unit. First step on the path to per nation unique units.
Scout unit north of London which now shows the quality of life stats along with how many turns are left on the current project. And yes, we plan to jam even more into that banner based on player feedback if we can.
These Aztech units are visually distinct – those are feathers in outfits. This is the first phase of “Per nation units” which will have a dev journal all of its own.
More access to the improvements from the map is another change in 1.4. We want players to also be able to change crafting, add equipment, and do anything they want right from here (and see the status of these improvements more). But that will be a post 1.4 thing.
[h2]How do you get Preview Builds?[/h2]
To execute on this rapid development cycle we are going to have 3 branches on Steam:
- Default (the current released version)
- Preview (a “buggy” version of what we’re working on)
- Previous (The previous version just in case a saved game gets wonky)
[h2]Next up: AI[/h2]
Preview 1 of v1.4 is a pretty massive improvement to the AI. We’ll be talking about that next.
[h2]Some addl. screenshots of 1.4[/h2]
