ARA is out... death for micromanagement = no automated workers?

[Lazy sweeper]

Some reviews on Steam points out the constant barrage of clicks that the players must do,
when having to deal with tile with multiple slots, that also can not be automated,
and certainly has not any automated worker like OG Civ...


1:
Now let's say you have 5 cities each with 3 farms, and you have 15 plows to place in them. To do this, you have to click on City 1, switch the city menu to display all Harvester buildings, find Farm 1 (which could be somewhere on a long list), click on Farm 1, click on Slot 1 (if you remember that Slot 1 is for plows), click on Plow 1, close the Farm 1 menu, repeat for each farm in City 1, close City 1 menu, repeat for each City. This is just one example, but these issues are present in every aspect of the UI. The game also does not display important reminders and does a poor job of letting you know that entire windows (such as trade) exist.

2:
It's an attempt to create a complex game that combines Sid Meier's Civilization games, Anno and Humankind without any utility to actually apply that complexity efficiently. Full of performance issues and bugs, sometimes you have to click 3 and 4 and even 10 times to get something done. The materials, products and the buildings that make them are all over the map and the tiny, hyper-realistic circular icons that appear together are VERY difficult to distinguish from each other, so you end up clicking everywhere to find the building that you need, hoping, with your intuition and on your patience limits, that it's the one you had been looking for.

3:
- this is no civilisation, there is way more necessary micro management... so much that i don't see this game playable in multiplayer at all, as the game takes too long for that

 

[Sephi]

How much did you actually play the game? There are no workers in the game, so there is nothing to automate there. The production chains you can automate once you have them set up, just set quanity of goods to produce to unlimited. The game will dissapoint those who want a civ 6.5 with better graphics. It plays different and it takes time to learn. Fortnite timmy who posted a review on steam after playing it for two hours might not be the best reference. Wait for reviews from players who played 30+ hours.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

None, I will be hard working for the next month or two, and have no time for gaming at all, just some quick reading here and there.
Also I would like to see a M1 Mac version available, not just PC, but that's another story. Because the graphics looks really really good,
like R.E.D. super mod. so I wanted to at least demo it. Maybe they ll patch some stuff along the way with the increased feedback of other players.

Automated workers could be told to focus on production, irrigation, or commerce (network).
This was simplifying micromanagement to a high degree.
It seems like a bad move for me to not have this kind of help in the game, seeing the amount of stuff that the game has to offer.
Workers has been unique to civ for a long time. Only AOE had a similar concept with civilians units.

IGN : vote 6

The problem is that this becomes a nightmare to manage with even two or three fair-sized cities. There's no notification I could find or enable for when a city has a free amenity slot, for example. Nor when I could potentially fill an empty supplies slot on a production building, or swap out those supplies with a better option I had recently unlocked through technology. It also won't warn you when you have idle experts – Ara's version of specialists from Civ, who appear as your population increases and can be slotted to supercharge specific buildings.

There's not even a really convenient way to keep track of your economy. There is a tooltip that will show you a basic balance sheet of everything you're producing and consuming, but it's too small, there's no way to sort the rows by anything but alphabetical order, and it eventually fills up with so many types of goods that it becomes overwhelming. Or you can look at a grid view, which is a bit easier to navigate, but doesn't include the spreadsheet and still can't be sorted.

To really optimize my economy, I had to open dozens of individual building menus every time I unlocked a new tech or gained access to a new type of tools. And since this is essentially the core mechanic in Ara, everything else starts to collapse around it. The late game really gets to be a tedious slog, unless you pull far enough ahead that you can simply stop caring about most of the mechanics, which is what eventually happened to me on the default difficulty.

 

[Xefjord]

How much did you actually play the game? There are no workers in the game, so there is nothing to automate there. The production chains you can automate once you have them set up, just set quanity of goods to produce to unlimited. The game will dissapoint those who want a civ 6.5 with better graphics. It plays different and it takes time to learn. Fortnite timmy who posted a review on steam after playing it for two hours might not be the best reference. Wait for reviews from players who played 30+ hours.

If you sort the steam reviews from all to the ones with over 1 hour of play time, it switches from mixed to Mostly Positive. Sort by folks with 5+ hours of play time, and it switches to Very Positive

 

[Thormodr]

If you sort the steam reviews from all to the ones with over 1 hour of play time, it switches from mixed to Mostly Positive. Sort by folks with 5+ hours of play time, and it switches to Very Positive

Honest question as I don't know. Can you buy a game on Steam, install it and play for an hour, leave a crap review then ask for a refund?

 

[Quintillus]

Honest question as I don't know. Can you buy a game on Steam, install it and play for an hour, leave a crap review then ask for a refund?

Pretty sure you can, yeah. I've seen quite a few reviews (for various games, not Ara specifically, though they may exist there) that say, "I bought the game, played it for 90 minutes, here's why I'm refunding it". Which can be informative, but also can be poorly-informed, depending on the situation.

I like Xefjord's idea, as the less-than-an-hour reviews are rarely informative. Although there is likely survivorship bias when you set the threshold high enough, getting to the point of "have played the game enough to provide informed feedback based on more than surface-level impressions" will lead to more useful and informative feedback.

Or to use the classic saying, it's the difference between someone who judged a book by its cover, someone who read one chapter (which may still be enough to explain why they weren't inclined to read the remainder), and someone who read the whole thing.

 

[Thormodr]

Pretty sure you can, yeah. I've seen quite a few reviews (for various games, not Ara specifically, though they may exist there) that say, "I bought the game, played it for 90 minutes, here's why I'm refunding it". Which can be informative, but also can be poorly-informed, depending on the situation.

I like Xefjord's idea, as the less-than-an-hour reviews are rarely informative. Although there is likely survivorship bias when you set the threshold high enough, getting to the point of "have played the game enough to provide informed feedback based on more than surface-level impressions" will lead to more useful and informative feedback.

Or to use the classic saying, it's the difference between someone who judged a book by its cover, someone who read one chapter (which may still be enough to explain why they weren't inclined to read the remainder), and someone who read the whole thing.

Thank you. That makes sense.

 

[Siptah]

Most of the reviews by people that played less than one or two hours seem to be negative due to crashes or bad performance. They are in a way informative and non-negligible, but not necessarily indicate how good the gameplay is. They show the problems with optimization that I also observed in reviews and streams. If someone refunded the game or got it for free, the steam review shows an indication of that.

 

[zhugejingqi]

This is my fundamental criticism of many perspectives. Some people think it seems like they have to play for 30 hours to evaluate this game. In fact, people can't play for ten hours because the optimization is really poor. They did not accurately label the minimum recommended configuration for the game. The second point is that losing macro management through micro operations is indeed a disaster. Many people enjoy micro manipulation, but without other tools to assist, it will be reflected in the final game sales.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

I love that you have to tame wild sheeps for starting domestication!
It must be fun to try to tame wild Ox also to jumpstart cattle!

yeah, how that would turn out in Civ VII or more generally in Civ style??
I mean the map in Ara is full to the brim with stuff...

Civ IV had a precursor to Eurekas with the mission goals...
build 8 Colosseums, and you will start the Olymipad as a prize... +4 culture etc.

Civ VI Eurekas were kind of similar - to jumpstart domestication, improve a resource.... +300 science toward domestication and so on...
Just a generic resource and that's it.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Wait for reviews from players who played 30+ hours.

I'm trying to find one that showcases a single battle, which is not an icon hoovering over a cat...

Actually the sheep taming came from a video of a player with 30+ hours... He seems to be enjoying his time.
I have no doubts the game has its pros and can be highly addictive.
Core mechanics are more instantaneous tho.
If a normal playthrough is 10 h. , 30+ hours should be enough to finish three playthrough.
I don't know IGN but I think it was less than 10h before writing down the review.

 

[TreVor_ish]

IGN gave Concorde score 7. That says enough of it's credibility to me.
Yes, Ara has more micro, and the UI doesn't help in some places, but this is a game that once learned is a great experience. It's not as simplified as some 4x are trying to become.
The bigger issue I feel is, if I can stack enough modifiers, it's a real snowball. But hey, with so many of them I kinda saw that coming.

 

[bitula]

Btw I just checked steam review score. It is still mixed, but yesterday it was 55%, today it is 65%. like 60% of all negative review is about high micromanagement, too much complexity, too many menus, too long lists: music to my ears. The other "39%" is about crashes and bad performance - well this part I don't know but I usually don't experience these issues on my PC for similar problematic games.