Lord Lakely
Idea Fountain
Disclaimer #1: I didn't really see a thread where you can post your own impressions about Millennia so here it goes I guess. If I did miss such a topic, feel free to move this post there.
Disclaimer #2: this is going to be a rant, so be warned. Contains whining betwixt the good points.
Disclaimer #3: this kind of turned into a review as I wrote but oh well.
Okay, so I've spent the entire day playing Millennia, which I was excited for. It's a Civ-like by Paradox and has several really cool mechanics I want to see implemented in Civ. It looks like a game specifically tailored towards building your own empire, tweaking it to your liking with no stress. It has production chains, towns, modular constructio which are all things I dream of for CIv 7. Finally, I thought. Finally, a game for ME.
How wrong I was. I am not yet sure whether Millennia is a bad game with really good ideas, or a good game that is very badly balanced. What I do know is that I've tried to play it four times, including on the lowest possible difficulty setting (which is really just the same game as ever but with one really dumb AI as the opponent), and ragequit all four games before Era five. This game is anxiety-enducing, and that's not fun.
So sure, the game is not for me, and I could leave it at that. But the game has a fundamental problem it urgently needs to address: Millennia a critical mass of convoluted mechanics that are very poorly explained.
The first problem for me is that the game punishes you extremely harshly for playing a peaceful builder game. The strongest national spirits are all militaristically oriented and you're incentivized to conquer the map as effectively a single city state with a lot of bad, low population vassals that you do not control directly. Raiders especially is busted as you can very quickly get a critical mass of cheap units that cost no maintenance and last you all the way to Era four. That is, to my knowledge, the only way to play the game and enjoy it. Which feels like a shame for a game with such rich economic mechanics. Military approaches being the most optimal would be more okay for me if this didn't feel like the only way to play Millennia effectively.
Directly controlling cities almost always leads to problems, even if you micro them, so you're better always better off playing it like Civ 5 Venice. This playstyle also causes you to fall behind the AI, as you only have one or maybe two cities to get all the valuable types of experience from, or units, and it's very difficult to get both. (Picking Raiders in Era 2 is one of few ways to get both). No matter well you build up your industry, you will always be come up short militaristically or economically unless you integrate more cities into your empire and doing that destabilizes your empire. Walking this tightrope could work if the values were balanced properly and they're not. Vassalization is a broken mechanic that solves all of your problems. Unrest? Vassalize. City causes a Crisis? Vassalize. Instability in any way shape or form? Vassalize. Absorb the city, dev it, then vassalize it again, rince and repeat. It gets old, surprisingly quickly.
As an example of its strength, take for instance, the Theologians civil idea (or national spirit or whatever it's called) you can adopt in the Age of Kings. It incentivizes you to found a religion, so I do so immediately, as soon as I can, in my largest city. No idea whether religion has any downsides, the game advertises it as a cool new mechanic introduced in Age 4, so I take it. Before I know it, I garner civil unrest due to a lack of Faith for my religion in my city and the ONLY way to stop it is to vassalize my city immediately. None of the buildings that give faith are unlocked as I had a tech lead and entered Era 4 first. Unfortunately, I was too late to vassalize my city, locking my next Era as an Age of Intolerance.
The Theologian idea group offers a way to help you out by building Monasteries, which are described as an Improvement exclusive to hills. However, after unlocking Monasteries I don't see them amongst my other improvements and they don't show up in the Infopedia. In reality, you need to research Organized religion first AND you can ONLY build Monasteries in outposts attached to the city, not in actual cities! THE GAME DOESN'T TELL YOU ANY OF THIS. The game does NOT tell you how you can avoid this particular crisis because it does not explain the mechanics that can help you prevent the disaster. I had to infer everything myself through guesswork and deduction. The game gives you ONE pop up telling you that your city needs religious satisfaction, but the speed at which the dissatisfaction snowballs out of proportion gives you no time to react, only to prep in advance. It's like playing Baldur's Gate 3 on Honour Mode blind.
Speaking of the Age system. Um, who the hell balanced this? (and that's a rethorical question because the answer is no one). The Age idea is great and so are the idea of Special Ages and Crisis Ages. However, they imprimentation is not good and civ 6 did it better. Say that I am happily building up my empire on continent #1, and an AI that I haven't met, on the OTHER continent, who has ZERO bearing in my game, grows their homeland city to 11 pop, fails to build an aquaduct or midden in time, resulting in horrible sanitation issues, and then locks their next era into an Age of Plague Crisis Era for EVERYONE. Fun! Your population just DIES and you're forced to spend hundreds of Improvement points cleaning it up, as you try to catch up in tech. But you can't as improvements lead to production, and production leads to everything else. Pity if you haven't built Lookout Towers in your cities during Era 1 because that's the only consistent way to get the Exploration XP needed to have the plague doctor unit you get for free clean up the waste.
I don't know whether it's the same for you guys, but when something like that happens and there is NO WAY TO STOP IT AS A PLAYER, and the "solution"prepping like a maniac on the off-chance it may happen, I just lose all will to play the game. The game, pardon my choice of words, F***S YOU OVER for playing it because it's not balanced properly. It uses trial and error, but in a way that leads to regretting having made the purchase.
It's not much better when you're accidentally locking yourself into a Crisis age either. Once you've passed the threshold (and the threshold is LOW, irrespective of difficulty), there's no undoing it. If you advance 18/20 points into the crisis age, that's it, those 18 points are there to stay forever. That feels... unwholesome, even unsatisfactory. A player should definitely have the agency to reverse their mistakes, especially if when interacting with game mechanics that are poorly explained. You accrue all this political power with the different XP you get, and you can't use any of it to buy down crisis progression?
The things I've mentioned aren't even the only things that should be improved - Diplomacy for instance is terrible in this game, with an AI so painfully obtuse and dickish it makes for worse interactions than Civ 6, and that game's bar for Dip is below sea level. Most meaningful interactions are locked behind sending an Envoy, but as it turns out, there's no point down that as the average difficulty AI will find ways to declare hostilities and hate you anyway. Envoys are much better spent on buying city states, which is also the cheapest and easiest way to get cities. You don't actually settle that often in the game, so enjoy having a region list full of Spanish names in your game as the Persians, because the Minor nations are just the cities of empires that didn't spawn in the game. The Civ you play (whichever one that is) suffers badly from a lack of flavour and identity.
Overall, I just feel like this game failed at the overal objective of playing a game in the first palce: which is to be fun. Sure my fun isn't your fun. If you enjoy painfully realistic simulators of How The Western Roman Empire Fell, then this game is absolutely for you. For me though, I would appreciate an option to dial back the some severe, punitive nature of the game. Currently, there's no such thing - every game you set up in Millennia determines the map, the size and the number of opponents (also the opponents themselves but this is entirely meaningless in Millennia - Rome, Egypt and Japan are 100% identical save for names of the towns they settle.)
It all leaves me with the impression that Millennia in its current form is half-baked, and that I'm playing a beta-branch early access rather than a full release. Mechanically it does not run like a game that has been playtested properly. I plays like it was released not because it was finished but because it hit its publication deadline. I hope the rough edges get patched out quick.
I'll do another series of games tomorrow to see if I can figure out a way to make this game fun for me as a player. There are definitely... parts of Millennia I enjoy: the production chains, the improvement system, the different kinds of mana and upgrade system for both units and buildings, are all very promising. None of it matters. If the balance of the game remains as problematic and punitive as it is (except for when you snowball into conquering the entire map on the basis of Raiders), I can't see myself sinking many more hours into it. I kind of hated playing Millennia, and that bad first impression will be hard to overcome.
Disclaimer #2: this is going to be a rant, so be warned. Contains whining betwixt the good points.
Disclaimer #3: this kind of turned into a review as I wrote but oh well.
Okay, so I've spent the entire day playing Millennia, which I was excited for. It's a Civ-like by Paradox and has several really cool mechanics I want to see implemented in Civ. It looks like a game specifically tailored towards building your own empire, tweaking it to your liking with no stress. It has production chains, towns, modular constructio which are all things I dream of for CIv 7. Finally, I thought. Finally, a game for ME.
How wrong I was. I am not yet sure whether Millennia is a bad game with really good ideas, or a good game that is very badly balanced. What I do know is that I've tried to play it four times, including on the lowest possible difficulty setting (which is really just the same game as ever but with one really dumb AI as the opponent), and ragequit all four games before Era five. This game is anxiety-enducing, and that's not fun.
So sure, the game is not for me, and I could leave it at that. But the game has a fundamental problem it urgently needs to address: Millennia a critical mass of convoluted mechanics that are very poorly explained.
The first problem for me is that the game punishes you extremely harshly for playing a peaceful builder game. The strongest national spirits are all militaristically oriented and you're incentivized to conquer the map as effectively a single city state with a lot of bad, low population vassals that you do not control directly. Raiders especially is busted as you can very quickly get a critical mass of cheap units that cost no maintenance and last you all the way to Era four. That is, to my knowledge, the only way to play the game and enjoy it. Which feels like a shame for a game with such rich economic mechanics. Military approaches being the most optimal would be more okay for me if this didn't feel like the only way to play Millennia effectively.
Directly controlling cities almost always leads to problems, even if you micro them, so you're better always better off playing it like Civ 5 Venice. This playstyle also causes you to fall behind the AI, as you only have one or maybe two cities to get all the valuable types of experience from, or units, and it's very difficult to get both. (Picking Raiders in Era 2 is one of few ways to get both). No matter well you build up your industry, you will always be come up short militaristically or economically unless you integrate more cities into your empire and doing that destabilizes your empire. Walking this tightrope could work if the values were balanced properly and they're not. Vassalization is a broken mechanic that solves all of your problems. Unrest? Vassalize. City causes a Crisis? Vassalize. Instability in any way shape or form? Vassalize. Absorb the city, dev it, then vassalize it again, rince and repeat. It gets old, surprisingly quickly.
As an example of its strength, take for instance, the Theologians civil idea (or national spirit or whatever it's called) you can adopt in the Age of Kings. It incentivizes you to found a religion, so I do so immediately, as soon as I can, in my largest city. No idea whether religion has any downsides, the game advertises it as a cool new mechanic introduced in Age 4, so I take it. Before I know it, I garner civil unrest due to a lack of Faith for my religion in my city and the ONLY way to stop it is to vassalize my city immediately. None of the buildings that give faith are unlocked as I had a tech lead and entered Era 4 first. Unfortunately, I was too late to vassalize my city, locking my next Era as an Age of Intolerance.
The Theologian idea group offers a way to help you out by building Monasteries, which are described as an Improvement exclusive to hills. However, after unlocking Monasteries I don't see them amongst my other improvements and they don't show up in the Infopedia. In reality, you need to research Organized religion first AND you can ONLY build Monasteries in outposts attached to the city, not in actual cities! THE GAME DOESN'T TELL YOU ANY OF THIS. The game does NOT tell you how you can avoid this particular crisis because it does not explain the mechanics that can help you prevent the disaster. I had to infer everything myself through guesswork and deduction. The game gives you ONE pop up telling you that your city needs religious satisfaction, but the speed at which the dissatisfaction snowballs out of proportion gives you no time to react, only to prep in advance. It's like playing Baldur's Gate 3 on Honour Mode blind.
Speaking of the Age system. Um, who the hell balanced this? (and that's a rethorical question because the answer is no one). The Age idea is great and so are the idea of Special Ages and Crisis Ages. However, they imprimentation is not good and civ 6 did it better. Say that I am happily building up my empire on continent #1, and an AI that I haven't met, on the OTHER continent, who has ZERO bearing in my game, grows their homeland city to 11 pop, fails to build an aquaduct or midden in time, resulting in horrible sanitation issues, and then locks their next era into an Age of Plague Crisis Era for EVERYONE. Fun! Your population just DIES and you're forced to spend hundreds of Improvement points cleaning it up, as you try to catch up in tech. But you can't as improvements lead to production, and production leads to everything else. Pity if you haven't built Lookout Towers in your cities during Era 1 because that's the only consistent way to get the Exploration XP needed to have the plague doctor unit you get for free clean up the waste.
I don't know whether it's the same for you guys, but when something like that happens and there is NO WAY TO STOP IT AS A PLAYER, and the "solution"prepping like a maniac on the off-chance it may happen, I just lose all will to play the game. The game, pardon my choice of words, F***S YOU OVER for playing it because it's not balanced properly. It uses trial and error, but in a way that leads to regretting having made the purchase.
It's not much better when you're accidentally locking yourself into a Crisis age either. Once you've passed the threshold (and the threshold is LOW, irrespective of difficulty), there's no undoing it. If you advance 18/20 points into the crisis age, that's it, those 18 points are there to stay forever. That feels... unwholesome, even unsatisfactory. A player should definitely have the agency to reverse their mistakes, especially if when interacting with game mechanics that are poorly explained. You accrue all this political power with the different XP you get, and you can't use any of it to buy down crisis progression?
The things I've mentioned aren't even the only things that should be improved - Diplomacy for instance is terrible in this game, with an AI so painfully obtuse and dickish it makes for worse interactions than Civ 6, and that game's bar for Dip is below sea level. Most meaningful interactions are locked behind sending an Envoy, but as it turns out, there's no point down that as the average difficulty AI will find ways to declare hostilities and hate you anyway. Envoys are much better spent on buying city states, which is also the cheapest and easiest way to get cities. You don't actually settle that often in the game, so enjoy having a region list full of Spanish names in your game as the Persians, because the Minor nations are just the cities of empires that didn't spawn in the game. The Civ you play (whichever one that is) suffers badly from a lack of flavour and identity.
Overall, I just feel like this game failed at the overal objective of playing a game in the first palce: which is to be fun. Sure my fun isn't your fun. If you enjoy painfully realistic simulators of How The Western Roman Empire Fell, then this game is absolutely for you. For me though, I would appreciate an option to dial back the some severe, punitive nature of the game. Currently, there's no such thing - every game you set up in Millennia determines the map, the size and the number of opponents (also the opponents themselves but this is entirely meaningless in Millennia - Rome, Egypt and Japan are 100% identical save for names of the towns they settle.)
It all leaves me with the impression that Millennia in its current form is half-baked, and that I'm playing a beta-branch early access rather than a full release. Mechanically it does not run like a game that has been playtested properly. I plays like it was released not because it was finished but because it hit its publication deadline. I hope the rough edges get patched out quick.
I'll do another series of games tomorrow to see if I can figure out a way to make this game fun for me as a player. There are definitely... parts of Millennia I enjoy: the production chains, the improvement system, the different kinds of mana and upgrade system for both units and buildings, are all very promising. None of it matters. If the balance of the game remains as problematic and punitive as it is (except for when you snowball into conquering the entire map on the basis of Raiders), I can't see myself sinking many more hours into it. I kind of hated playing Millennia, and that bad first impression will be hard to overcome.
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. I would expect there to be more than 25-ish names for towns if you can have up to 3 towns per settlement but oh well. Maybe the devs didn't anticipate anyone would play this game on Huge and with a reduced amount of players (which is how I play Civ all the time.). Maybe the devs didn't anticipate anyone would play this game.
