Ara: History Untold News

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/

Throughout the history of humankind, people from all cultures and time periods created monuments and artifacts that truly reflect human excellence. Ara: History Untold allows players to enrich their civilization's history with accomplishments like these by including Triumphs. Triumphs in Ara are a specialized type of Improvement that represent some of the greatest monuments and creations ever built.

Not only do Triumphs enhance a Nation's history, but they also provide powerful abilities that can greatly support any strategy. However, creating a Triumph is no easy feat - it often requires specialized items that have to be researched then crafted before work can begin. Triumphs also require more space, so while regular Improvements need just one zone in a region, Triumphs require the entire region.

This is a screenshot of the requirements for building a slightly more advanced Triumph, the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh.

This is a screenshot of Stonehenge in the process of being built.

Despite the many prerequisites to crafting a Triumph, the results are well worth it. Triumphs serve as impressive centerpieces to each City they're a part of while also providing powerful boosts. Also, only one of each Triumph can be built in a world, so the first Nation that is able to start construction on the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh will be the only Nation in the world to have them.


This is a screenshot of a completed Stonehenge.

These are just some of the earliest Triumphs to build in Ara, and we're excited to showcase more in the coming weeks. Be sure to stay tuned!

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

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/