Ara: History Untold News

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!

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The living world in Ara: History Untold is meant to reflect the real world's natural biodiversity. This is why the game features twelve biomes, all of which present unique challenges and opportunities to the player's budding nation.

Each biome has a baseline amount of resources such as food, wood, and stone, however, specific biomes can provide more or less additional resources when an appropriate improvement is built.

Biomes also affect which Dangerous Wildlife may appear - while a Temperate Forest may contain cougars, a Savannah may instead be teeming with lions, which are harder to clear. Other natural resources use a similar system - Cows are more likely to inhabit the Temperate Grassland while Camels are more likely to reside in the Arid Desert.

The distinct makeup of each biome ensures that a player can employ unique strategies in each playthrough, and create nations shaped by the world around them.

A screenshot of Ara: History Untold's savannah biome.

A screenshot of Ara: History Untold's tropical forest biome.

A screenshot of Ara: History Untold's temperate grasslands biome.

For more details about Ara: History Untold, be sure to stay tuned to our Community Hub! We will be releasing future news posts on Mondays, with our next one coming out on June 5th.

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

Continuing our conversation on Ara: History Untold's living world and exploration, this week we'll dive further into the Natural Resources that can be found all over the map!

When players first start to explore beyond their Nation's borders, they'll have a chance to discover over fifty different kinds of Natural Resources, from rubber trees to silkworms, to precious metals or the staple fruits, vegetables, and grains that shaped the growth of early societies in the ancient world.

A screenshot of undiscovered grapes in Ara: History Untold.

However, as we mentioned in last week's post on Dangerous Wildlife, there may be obstacles to overcome before taking advantage of these items. Some resources are hidden, requiring additional surveying to be uncovered. Others are blocked by Dangerous Wildlife, until it can be dealt with. And not every Resource will be immediately useful - some require that a player has developed a relevant technology for their use.

Once a player has unlocked the potential of these resources, they can be processed into a variety of items which can be used in a myriad of ways to enhance their growing Nation. They can be consumed by cities to provide unique time limited bonuses, or used to craft important materials for building Improvements, Triumphs, and equipping Armies. If a player has enough to go around, they can also be used for trade. As the player advances through the Technology Eras, new ways to take advantage of their Natural Resources will be discovered, unlocking their potential for the generations yet to come.

A screenshot of a farm in Ara: History Untold.

There is plenty to discover in Ara's living world and we're excited to divulge more about crafting and the economy soon. Be sure to stay tuned for more!

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One of the key principles we’ve had for Ara since the beginning is that the various components of the game’s Living World are not just visual flourish but are in fact meaningful to gameplay. This takes many forms, including providing players with feedback, reflecting the outcomes of their choices, and calling their attention to important changes or new information in the world.

A screenshot of an early settlement in Ara: History Untold.

One of the earliest examples of this in the game is Dangerous Wildlife. Dangerous Wildlife is comprised of various biome-specific animals that were a danger to humans in early agrarian societies. As a game concept, it’s there to help reinforce to the player the areas of the world that are wilder and will require additional resources to settle and provide some additional interesting early game activity and rewards for exploration.

Prior to our Technical Alphas, Dangerous Wildlife was being treated as a set of solo military units, roaming around the map, to be defeated by a player’s early units (e.g., Scouts). They were grouped under a “Wilderness” faction so they would play nice with the other military systems – but what this did in practice was emphasize a focus on early game warfare and create a distracting / frustrating set of obstacles for players to explore and progress.

We received a lot of valuable feedback on how this made players feel – and we made some adjustments.

A screenshot of the Ara: History Untold Insider Forums, where one user writes: "I hate cougars I hate cougars I hate cougars"

Today, Dangerous Wildlife is treated instead as a modifier for Sub-regions. Sub-regions that contain Dangerous Wildlife must be “cleared out” before their resources are available for players to harvest and exploit, and doing so gives players a small relevant reward (e.g., Furs for clearing an area of Wolves).

A screenshot of Ara: History Untold UI showing that wolves will bolck the use of the area until they are defeated.

Now players have a more interesting strategic decision to make early on – should their exploration focus on exploring new areas to find new resources or opportunities for Diplomacy, collecting resource caches on the map (which we’ll talk about in a future post), or clearing wildlife to free up additional regions for settling.

We’re excited to get this feature into players’ hands to see how they like this new approach to fauna in our game. If you’d like the chance to try out this feature before the game’s official release, please head to AraHistoryUntold.com to sign up for our Insider Program for the opportunity to participate in future Alphas.

To be notified when posts like this go up in the future, please click here to Wishlist and Follow the game so you’ll always stay informed on the latest news about Ara: History Untold.



- The Ara: History Untold Team

This week's update to Ara: History Untold's Living World is focused on how the team ensured that our procedurally generated roads would all come to an organic endpoint or intersection.

Our last update on roads was in our City Layouts Developer Diary, where despite plenty of progress to placement and pattern, intersections were still in progress. Previously, overlapping roads would create seams, intersecting roads would have harsh transitions, and some roads would just end abruptly. To more accurately mirror the path of real roads, the team has made it so that intersections, even complex ones, have a more natural transition with proper blending. Additionally, buildings and structures will be aligned along the edges of roads and won't intersect with them.

We think these changes add to how realistic our living world can get, and we're excited to make more of these improvements in the future. Be sure to stay tuned for updates!


Take a look at the before (left) and after (right) of our roads.


This is a full view of what roads looked like before our recent changes, with visible seams, harsh transitions, and buildings intersecting roads.


This is a fulll view of what roads currently look like, with proper blending and smooth transitions in intersections.