Xefjord
Prince
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2015
- Messages
- 386
Hey CivFanatics! A couple quick disclaimers: I asked the mods before making this thread since its half Ara related, but I didn't think there would be much discussion in the Ara forums since the game is pretty inactive. Also, this thread is not so much meant to compare which game is definitively better than the other.
I have put close to 100 hours in both Ara and Civ 7 both singleplayer and multiplayer since their release, and really like both of them for different reasons. I got what I feel is my moneys worth out of both so far, but I am not consistently playing either at the moment, and that's part of the discussion I would like to have, but I would also like to be optimistic and talk about what makes me hopeful for both games futures. Interestingly both games released around a similar time, both have involvement from Civ devs (Ara is more Civ 5 devs and Civ 7 more Civ 6 devs), and I think its interesting what aspects both developed similarly and independently.
First, I want to give a little bit of background by talking about my experience with Civ. I started with Civilization 5, and put 500ish hours into that game, I greatly enjoyed it, but my one biggest and most frustrating complaint was that every single one of my multiplayer games went the same way: Whoever gets the Great Library first started a chain reaction of snowballing to get all the other wonders unless someone was willing to militarily destroy that player, but no one wanted to be the guy to kill one of our friends 30 minutes into what would likely be an all day civ game session and essentially kick them from the group. So that player then skyrocketed ahead, and everyone else was just passing next turn with little chance of victory.
When Civilization 6 released, I felt they did a great job tackling this specific problem and making the early game substantially more varied and dynamic in multiplayer. I adopted Civ 6 first among all my friends, and got 300 hours in it, I loved the game early on even when all my friends were skeptical, but as the expansions rolled in I kind of fell out of love with Civ 6. My biggest complaint is that the gameplay was starting to feel extremely bloated. I could never finish a game anymore, and the task load was super asynchronous as well. One friend may have 10 minutes worth of stuff to do while everyone else is just waiting for the next turn. So for a while I kind of swore of 4X games and just started playing Paradox games. I am a roleplayer at heart and mostly played Earth TSL maps. But there is still some elements of Civ that I missed that Paradox games couldn't provide. I didn't come back until Civ 7 was announced.
Civilization 7
The Good
I came into Civ 7 as a massive skeptic of the Civ switching mechanic, especially as a role-player, it felt like it was invalidating my favored forms of gameplay in favor of cheap gamey tricks copied from Humankind and other games (Which I didn't like their implementation either). But after playing my first full game of Civ 7, I largely changed my mind. I feel like the civ switching was implemented pretty well, I really liked how each act has its own challenges and segments the game into digestible pieces, while also acting as a soft reset to help mitigate some of the snowballing effects. I got very attached to various characters and loved the leveling mechanics for those characters. I loved the flavor of each civ having its own civic tree, and of course the immense amount of detail put into each and every civ's design. I also loved how quickly modders like Gedemon were able to get out a high quality TSL Earth map for me to play with. The Devs seemed to have a deep understanding that Civ 6 was too bloated, and previous games too snowbally, and I think they tackled both challenges greatly with their changes.
The Bad
All that said, its been very hard for me to open Civ 7 again, and I think its largely because little constraints add up to me ultimately feeling like I have a pretty large lack of choices in Civ 7. Its cool there are so many leaders, but only a couple really interest me, and the game encourages me to just play one for a long time to level them up. Then, there are a lot of interesting civs, but again, not all of them really interest me, and if I want to stay historically consistent for a civilization I start, I am extremely limited on who I can transition into, I am also limited by my leader. if I am playing Charlemagne then I am only really going to get optimal benefits from militaristic and science civs. Then some victory types are more fun for me than others, but every victory type does feel like it railroads me a bit into playing very similarly every game. If I want to play an economic game in Act 2, then I have to become a colonizer regardless of how convenient or narratively sensible it is at that time. Ultimately I have felt like Civ 7 offers a lot of options on paper, but the options have felt a bit shallow over time. I feel like the area this is most apparent in is just Civ numbers: On paper the game has the "highest starting number of Civs in any civ game ever!" but from act to act, I don't feel like most people feel that way. It just feels like a disingenuous buzzword because we really only have like 10-12 civs per age, and you can only have 8 civs in a game with you. If they add another act before adding new civs this problem could become even worse feeling.
The Hopeful
Despite all of that, I feel like a lot of core mechanics are really really good in Civ 7. The UI was pretty unpolished to begin with, but thats fixable, I mean they hired Sukritact. The most visible problem to me, the lack of Civs, is something that is already guaranteed to be addressed through DLC, and I will happily buy every single one of them. I think 2-3 years down the line when the Civ count is doubled, the game is going to start feeling really good, and we will start to escape that trap of feeling like we lack options. The only downside to all this, is that with the amount of detail and care they put into each civ, it does feel like we will be waiting a couple years to see an adequate amount of Civs. But assuredly, it will come, Firaxis is a big company, we all know launches are rough, and the game gets better with time because the devs listen.
I think for a lot of people like me who were initially very skeptical of Civ 7, you may actually find yourself enjoying it a lot more than expected when you give the game a try, and I am pretty optimistic about its far future, even with some of the doomering I have been seeing online lately about player numbers. ARA on the other hand, is an interesting story to say the least. The game has abysmal player numbers, and has been very slow in its development, but I still love it, and I think there are reasons for some people to give it a second chance or at least watch the game in-between updates for Civ 7. But I want to be frank about the stuff that concerns me there as well.
ARA: History Untold
The Good
The biggest differentiator Ara has from Civ is that it has a pretty detailed city building and economy system, it probably doesn't hold a candle to something like Anno, but its a pretty refreshing and interesting mechanic in a 4x format, and it definitely never leaves you feeling bored during your turns. It was a bit unwieldy on launch, and there still isn't good tutorials for how it works now, but there have been quite a bit of updates to streamline and automate various parts of it so you can focus more on grand strategy as opposed to micromanagement. Jumping back and forth between Ara and Civ, City building in Civ just feels kind of opaque, and resources feel inconsequential in comparison to Ara. When you see a valuable resource in Ara you suddenly start thinking about all sorts of possibilities for how you can improve your economy and build your town around that resource, whereas in Civ its just kind of another item to slot that boosts some numbers. And if my biggest complaint about Civ 7 is the Civ numbers, that definitely does not apply to Ara. Ara started on launch with 40+ civs, and you can play with as many as 36 of them in a single game. The map doesn't use hexs, but rather irregularly shaped tiles with sub regions, which allows you to have a really detailed Earth Map, which the devs threw full support into developing early on. I also felt challenged by the AI in the early game in ways I have never felt in Civ, not even in Civ 7 in the middle of a crisis. The AI is fairly good at war in Ara, and strategic blunders can easily lose you cities or trap you in dire straits, which for some may be frustrating, but for me made the game interesting. The AI can put up a fight numbers wise in Civ, but militarily they never really compete much, not the case in Ara.
The Bad
The elephant in the room is that this game had a pretty bad launch. Microsoft is notoriously awful at marketing, and they rushed the game out undercooked. I think a lot of people can lodge the same complaint at Civ 7, but Ara came out before Civ 7, so I think a lot of people were willing to write off Ara expecting Civ 7 to be much better, then after Civ 7's rough launch most people just steered away from Ara because of its bad reviews or simply because they forgot about the game. Where Civ 7 has been very vocal about its continued updates to improve the game despite its undercooked launch, Ara has been both very slow and very quiet about its updates. Many issues regarding the awful micromanagement were fixed, but no guides were really released on how the new system worked. A ton of player complaints have been heard and were getting worked on by the devs, but the only way you would ever know about them is if you followed the devs comments on discord, add on top of this Microsoft was kind of refusing to let them release updates at a regular pace. In many ways I think Ara is already a pretty good game, it just needs a lot of tuning and some extra meat in places, all of which the devs have made very clear they are aware of and on the same page as the player base with, but... only on discord, and their slow pace of patches has led to pretty dangerously low player numbers, that we don't even know if they would be able to complete there vision. There have also been some hardware issues for some users, although none of those affected me at all. What has affected me though, and to some this may be quite small, but it affects my playstyle disproportionately, is that the earth map which had so much potential given their map generation, is just... too small. This has negatively affected a lot of people I try to get to play with me on that map since its very cramped. But its supposedly getting fixed in the next major update.
The Hopeful
I think the devs know very well what needs fixing, and are already doing a lot to fix the game. They have said they are guaranteed development support from Microsoft for the next year at least, but the level of support is still somewhat dependent upon sales. Its easy to be pessimistic about a Microsoft game nowadays, but it seems the company is fairly self aware that Microsoft marketing sucks, and that they are bottlenecking their game's development, so part of what has led to their radio silence recently has actually been from them reorganizing, and hiring another company to help with publishing, which it seems are in the final stages of integration. The game has frequently been going on sale at a pretty affordable price (Its on sale right now at 40 dollars USD), and we already know some of the major features coming in the near future (Like, within the next month) include: doubling the tile density to greatly increase map sizes, performance improvements, micromanagement fixes, AI city settling improvements, and the implementation of all the balance changes made popular in community mods. They already have a DLC planned for this summer to help beef out some of the more bare bones features as well and help fund a more radical overhaul later in the year. All in all, the game is not developmentally dead yet and if the devs can make good on their promises for upcoming updates, I think this game is quickly going to start feeling really good for its budget price of 40 bucks on sale. (also, side note, you can trial the game via Microsoft's Xbox Game pass even cheaper, but I think only steam sales count towards their development budget, so if you like the game definitely get it on steam).
In the words of the Ara devs, they wanted to make a game that learned from Civ 5 and 6. And I do think the game feels like a mix of Civ 5 and 6 in places that Civ 7 totally moved away from. For people that went back to Civ 5 after trying Civ 7, I think Ara may be a pretty good game to give a second chance to, and even some initial Civ 6 fans like me. With the direction change with Civ 7, and some of their own innovations both Civ 7 and Ara do feel pretty different now though. And I think they can both continue to excel in different areas.
Anywho, this is already a long post: TL;DR I think Civ 7 is going to be really good when it gets a bunch more civs, I think Ara is going to be really good 4X game on sale for Civ 5 fans and city builder fans whenever they release their planned updates over the next month or two. (Its on sale rn and you can play the game on gamepass)
I think other 4x games are cool too, but they all came out way earlier and are already established niches, discontinued, or different genres (Fantasy as opposed to History). But I am still interested in specific features you maybe think could fit well in Civ 7 that exist in other games.
I have put close to 100 hours in both Ara and Civ 7 both singleplayer and multiplayer since their release, and really like both of them for different reasons. I got what I feel is my moneys worth out of both so far, but I am not consistently playing either at the moment, and that's part of the discussion I would like to have, but I would also like to be optimistic and talk about what makes me hopeful for both games futures. Interestingly both games released around a similar time, both have involvement from Civ devs (Ara is more Civ 5 devs and Civ 7 more Civ 6 devs), and I think its interesting what aspects both developed similarly and independently.
First, I want to give a little bit of background by talking about my experience with Civ. I started with Civilization 5, and put 500ish hours into that game, I greatly enjoyed it, but my one biggest and most frustrating complaint was that every single one of my multiplayer games went the same way: Whoever gets the Great Library first started a chain reaction of snowballing to get all the other wonders unless someone was willing to militarily destroy that player, but no one wanted to be the guy to kill one of our friends 30 minutes into what would likely be an all day civ game session and essentially kick them from the group. So that player then skyrocketed ahead, and everyone else was just passing next turn with little chance of victory.
When Civilization 6 released, I felt they did a great job tackling this specific problem and making the early game substantially more varied and dynamic in multiplayer. I adopted Civ 6 first among all my friends, and got 300 hours in it, I loved the game early on even when all my friends were skeptical, but as the expansions rolled in I kind of fell out of love with Civ 6. My biggest complaint is that the gameplay was starting to feel extremely bloated. I could never finish a game anymore, and the task load was super asynchronous as well. One friend may have 10 minutes worth of stuff to do while everyone else is just waiting for the next turn. So for a while I kind of swore of 4X games and just started playing Paradox games. I am a roleplayer at heart and mostly played Earth TSL maps. But there is still some elements of Civ that I missed that Paradox games couldn't provide. I didn't come back until Civ 7 was announced.
Civilization 7
The Good
I came into Civ 7 as a massive skeptic of the Civ switching mechanic, especially as a role-player, it felt like it was invalidating my favored forms of gameplay in favor of cheap gamey tricks copied from Humankind and other games (Which I didn't like their implementation either). But after playing my first full game of Civ 7, I largely changed my mind. I feel like the civ switching was implemented pretty well, I really liked how each act has its own challenges and segments the game into digestible pieces, while also acting as a soft reset to help mitigate some of the snowballing effects. I got very attached to various characters and loved the leveling mechanics for those characters. I loved the flavor of each civ having its own civic tree, and of course the immense amount of detail put into each and every civ's design. I also loved how quickly modders like Gedemon were able to get out a high quality TSL Earth map for me to play with. The Devs seemed to have a deep understanding that Civ 6 was too bloated, and previous games too snowbally, and I think they tackled both challenges greatly with their changes.
The Bad
All that said, its been very hard for me to open Civ 7 again, and I think its largely because little constraints add up to me ultimately feeling like I have a pretty large lack of choices in Civ 7. Its cool there are so many leaders, but only a couple really interest me, and the game encourages me to just play one for a long time to level them up. Then, there are a lot of interesting civs, but again, not all of them really interest me, and if I want to stay historically consistent for a civilization I start, I am extremely limited on who I can transition into, I am also limited by my leader. if I am playing Charlemagne then I am only really going to get optimal benefits from militaristic and science civs. Then some victory types are more fun for me than others, but every victory type does feel like it railroads me a bit into playing very similarly every game. If I want to play an economic game in Act 2, then I have to become a colonizer regardless of how convenient or narratively sensible it is at that time. Ultimately I have felt like Civ 7 offers a lot of options on paper, but the options have felt a bit shallow over time. I feel like the area this is most apparent in is just Civ numbers: On paper the game has the "highest starting number of Civs in any civ game ever!" but from act to act, I don't feel like most people feel that way. It just feels like a disingenuous buzzword because we really only have like 10-12 civs per age, and you can only have 8 civs in a game with you. If they add another act before adding new civs this problem could become even worse feeling.
The Hopeful
Despite all of that, I feel like a lot of core mechanics are really really good in Civ 7. The UI was pretty unpolished to begin with, but thats fixable, I mean they hired Sukritact. The most visible problem to me, the lack of Civs, is something that is already guaranteed to be addressed through DLC, and I will happily buy every single one of them. I think 2-3 years down the line when the Civ count is doubled, the game is going to start feeling really good, and we will start to escape that trap of feeling like we lack options. The only downside to all this, is that with the amount of detail and care they put into each civ, it does feel like we will be waiting a couple years to see an adequate amount of Civs. But assuredly, it will come, Firaxis is a big company, we all know launches are rough, and the game gets better with time because the devs listen.
I think for a lot of people like me who were initially very skeptical of Civ 7, you may actually find yourself enjoying it a lot more than expected when you give the game a try, and I am pretty optimistic about its far future, even with some of the doomering I have been seeing online lately about player numbers. ARA on the other hand, is an interesting story to say the least. The game has abysmal player numbers, and has been very slow in its development, but I still love it, and I think there are reasons for some people to give it a second chance or at least watch the game in-between updates for Civ 7. But I want to be frank about the stuff that concerns me there as well.
ARA: History Untold
The Good
The biggest differentiator Ara has from Civ is that it has a pretty detailed city building and economy system, it probably doesn't hold a candle to something like Anno, but its a pretty refreshing and interesting mechanic in a 4x format, and it definitely never leaves you feeling bored during your turns. It was a bit unwieldy on launch, and there still isn't good tutorials for how it works now, but there have been quite a bit of updates to streamline and automate various parts of it so you can focus more on grand strategy as opposed to micromanagement. Jumping back and forth between Ara and Civ, City building in Civ just feels kind of opaque, and resources feel inconsequential in comparison to Ara. When you see a valuable resource in Ara you suddenly start thinking about all sorts of possibilities for how you can improve your economy and build your town around that resource, whereas in Civ its just kind of another item to slot that boosts some numbers. And if my biggest complaint about Civ 7 is the Civ numbers, that definitely does not apply to Ara. Ara started on launch with 40+ civs, and you can play with as many as 36 of them in a single game. The map doesn't use hexs, but rather irregularly shaped tiles with sub regions, which allows you to have a really detailed Earth Map, which the devs threw full support into developing early on. I also felt challenged by the AI in the early game in ways I have never felt in Civ, not even in Civ 7 in the middle of a crisis. The AI is fairly good at war in Ara, and strategic blunders can easily lose you cities or trap you in dire straits, which for some may be frustrating, but for me made the game interesting. The AI can put up a fight numbers wise in Civ, but militarily they never really compete much, not the case in Ara.
The Bad
The elephant in the room is that this game had a pretty bad launch. Microsoft is notoriously awful at marketing, and they rushed the game out undercooked. I think a lot of people can lodge the same complaint at Civ 7, but Ara came out before Civ 7, so I think a lot of people were willing to write off Ara expecting Civ 7 to be much better, then after Civ 7's rough launch most people just steered away from Ara because of its bad reviews or simply because they forgot about the game. Where Civ 7 has been very vocal about its continued updates to improve the game despite its undercooked launch, Ara has been both very slow and very quiet about its updates. Many issues regarding the awful micromanagement were fixed, but no guides were really released on how the new system worked. A ton of player complaints have been heard and were getting worked on by the devs, but the only way you would ever know about them is if you followed the devs comments on discord, add on top of this Microsoft was kind of refusing to let them release updates at a regular pace. In many ways I think Ara is already a pretty good game, it just needs a lot of tuning and some extra meat in places, all of which the devs have made very clear they are aware of and on the same page as the player base with, but... only on discord, and their slow pace of patches has led to pretty dangerously low player numbers, that we don't even know if they would be able to complete there vision. There have also been some hardware issues for some users, although none of those affected me at all. What has affected me though, and to some this may be quite small, but it affects my playstyle disproportionately, is that the earth map which had so much potential given their map generation, is just... too small. This has negatively affected a lot of people I try to get to play with me on that map since its very cramped. But its supposedly getting fixed in the next major update.
The Hopeful
I think the devs know very well what needs fixing, and are already doing a lot to fix the game. They have said they are guaranteed development support from Microsoft for the next year at least, but the level of support is still somewhat dependent upon sales. Its easy to be pessimistic about a Microsoft game nowadays, but it seems the company is fairly self aware that Microsoft marketing sucks, and that they are bottlenecking their game's development, so part of what has led to their radio silence recently has actually been from them reorganizing, and hiring another company to help with publishing, which it seems are in the final stages of integration. The game has frequently been going on sale at a pretty affordable price (Its on sale right now at 40 dollars USD), and we already know some of the major features coming in the near future (Like, within the next month) include: doubling the tile density to greatly increase map sizes, performance improvements, micromanagement fixes, AI city settling improvements, and the implementation of all the balance changes made popular in community mods. They already have a DLC planned for this summer to help beef out some of the more bare bones features as well and help fund a more radical overhaul later in the year. All in all, the game is not developmentally dead yet and if the devs can make good on their promises for upcoming updates, I think this game is quickly going to start feeling really good for its budget price of 40 bucks on sale. (also, side note, you can trial the game via Microsoft's Xbox Game pass even cheaper, but I think only steam sales count towards their development budget, so if you like the game definitely get it on steam).
In the words of the Ara devs, they wanted to make a game that learned from Civ 5 and 6. And I do think the game feels like a mix of Civ 5 and 6 in places that Civ 7 totally moved away from. For people that went back to Civ 5 after trying Civ 7, I think Ara may be a pretty good game to give a second chance to, and even some initial Civ 6 fans like me. With the direction change with Civ 7, and some of their own innovations both Civ 7 and Ara do feel pretty different now though. And I think they can both continue to excel in different areas.
Anywho, this is already a long post: TL;DR I think Civ 7 is going to be really good when it gets a bunch more civs, I think Ara is going to be really good 4X game on sale for Civ 5 fans and city builder fans whenever they release their planned updates over the next month or two. (Its on sale rn and you can play the game on gamepass)
I think other 4x games are cool too, but they all came out way earlier and are already established niches, discontinued, or different genres (Fantasy as opposed to History). But I am still interested in specific features you maybe think could fit well in Civ 7 that exist in other games.
