I must begin by saying that I do not have this game yet and have no information about it other than what is publicly available to anyone in places like YouTube. In other words, I am using the publicly available information along with informed guesswork to manufacture a guide to the early stages of the game. This guide is intended for those who may have little or no experience in 4x games and want some help as to what they should focus on in the early stages of play.

I’ve been playing 4x games for over 40 years, going all the way back to Oregon Trail. I have played every iteration of Civilization, and a lot of the spin-offs and clones. There are consistent themes in these games, and so strategies often translate broadly from one game or franchise to the next. My goal with this guide is to offer some tips to those that may be newer to the genre but want to jump right in and play when ARA releases on September 24th. If you begin with a basic strategy and “to do list” in mind, you can focus more on enjoying the cool features ARA has for you without worrying that your strategy is suboptimal.

The next few sections provide background and context that may help you with formulating your strategy. If you just want to skip to the advice about what to build at the start of the game, scroll down to "The first steps".

ARA: History Untold is a 4x game in the tradition of Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991). 4x is a term originally coined to describe the 1993 game Master of Orion, which was kind of like Civilization – but Space. The four “x”es are eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Depending on your personality, different parts of this equation may hold more or less interest for you. The best games mix them all together into a satisfying whole. The not so good ones miss the balance, or just don’t capture the spirit of what these games are about. 4x is about scope – doing Big Things with Big Stakes, typically over long periods of (simulated) time. But also, long periods of real time. This is not Minesweeper. These games last for hours, each time you play. That’s what makes them so excellent.

There’s no need to give an exhaustive history of the genre here. Let’s just say that ARA is the next in a long line of games that are trying to find that perfect balance. Hopefully they succeed. We won’t know until we play it on September 24th.

To begin with, ARA holds to many of the common elements of a “Civ-style” game. You choose a real historical nation to guide through the game, and some real historical figure becomes your “avatar” as the leader of that nation. The choices here are more than cosmetics. The various nations will have characteristics that affect actual gameplay, and so will the leaders. These typically take the form of production or unit bonuses, but if you lean into the role-playing aspect of these games, you can imagine it as your cultural identity. Typically, these bonuses will affect one of the 4 “x”es in some more or less direct way. For much of the recent history of these games, the military has taken center stage, and a lot of the focus has been on the eXterminate aspect of the game. This brings us to the first thing that distinguishes ARA from most of the other games in the genre.

The developers have been pretty clear that their primary focus has been weighted toward the first 3 “x”es, probably mostly on eXploit (my opinion). Instead of figuring out how to get a technological edge on your opponents so you can manufacture and unleash an irresistible force of concentrated violence on your neighbors, this game is about what civilizations spend most of their time doing in the real world – taking care of their own people. Naturally there is competition for land and resources, and combat is certainly in the game. I’m sure if you think driving your enemies before you is what is best in life, ARA will give you the chance to use your air force to strafe your neighbor’s horse cavalry if you get far enough ahead. But this game is aiming higher than that (pun intended), and if you want to get the most out of playing it, you should try to embrace this change (and your fellow humans).

If you watch the available gameplay, one of the things that jumps out at any veteran 4x gamer is the map itself. It reminds me a bit of Europa Universalis on a smaller scale. It’s also animated and beautiful. The other glaring change is a new (for 4x) take on resources. In this regard, ARA appears to have more in common with the ANNO series than with Civ V or VI. So let’s look at these two changes:
• It’s the map! – Thanks, Dora. When you first see this game, perhaps the most unexpected thing (most exciting thing?) is the way the surface of Earth is depicted. This is not the mostly static orderly ranks of squares or hexes that Civ gamers are used to. This map moves. It has also done away with grids and embraces a more organic looking series of regions that follow natural borders and contain native flora and fauna within them. It’s quite nice to look at, and I expect some of us will spend some time just browsing the countryside and watching all the little animations. But it’s more than just pretty. This change is part of the shift away from a wargame philosophy to a resource exploitation philosophy. The map is there for your nation to discover and draw materials from – not as a grid whose primary purpose is to determine the range of attacks or offer opportunities for simplified flanking tactics. The world feels more like a character or a partner in this journey, as opposed to a battlefield playmat. This is just my opinion, and actual gameplay may change my perception, but as someone who loves the eXplore portion of the 4x equation, I’m giddily looking forward to scouring this living, breathing digital world for its secrets.
• Crafting – Yes, I said crafting. Instead of building everything in the game from highly abstracted “production”, ARA asks the player to search the landscape for various materials, and then use these to craft more complex materials. As more technologies are researched, more sophisticated goods can be manufactured, and the player must maintain supply chains of an ever-growing number of resources. In the early game, for example, you may find grains (e.g., rice or wheat) or livestock animals (e.g., sheep or cattle) located on the map. Both resource types can add to your food production, but each of them also acts as an ingredient in crafting recipes for things like trade goods, or items that may offer bonuses to buildings or units. So, players will likely want to employ a strategy of reverse engineering for maximum effectiveness, looking ahead to powerful items you want to produce in the future so you can know which resources you need to locate now. This adds a strategic layer to ARA that hasn’t been present in games of this type before. That’s exciting.

Enough background. What I want to do here is offer a primer for those who will want to jump right in and start Civilizing. Er, ARA…izing. We’ll workshop a better name later. Anyway, I’m going to do my best to forecast some strategic choices one could make, and these should be applicable whether one is playing single or multi-player. (Quick note: ARA offers simultaneous turns, so multi-player should be at least slightly less painful than in many other games.) Once you choose New Game from the start screen, you are sent to the Leader selection screen. ARA is shipping with a bunch of nations and leaders, but of course there will no doubt be those who complain about this or that omission. Don’t worry about this. The devs have said that they anticipate Mod support (though not right at launch), and undoubtedly one of the first things modders will craft are new leaders and nations. It won’t be there on day one, but it WILL be there. So, what leader do we choose?

Veterans of these games may have a favorite nation (hard to keep myself from calling it a “Civ”) that they will want to play on the first run. If it is one of the more commonly represented nations in these games (say, Rome), it will likely be available to you. If it’s a more niche choice (Oompah Loompahs), you will have to wait for mods as I said above. Assuming you do not have an obvious preference, how should you choose?

The best thing you can do is ask yourself what you might like to focus on in terms of your strategy, or which systems you are most excited to play with. From what I’ve seen on gameplay videos, each nation will have a defining trait, and each leader will have 4 individual traits. As more leaders become available, you may be able to play a specific nation effectively in different ways depending on the individual traits of each leader.

As far as I can see, the individual leader traits fall into 7 (8?) categories, which are represented by color-coded icons. Those are:
• Green: Government (domed building) – this area is going to focus on new government technologies and concepts that relate to them. Since the number of cities you can have in the game is determined by your government type, those that want to play a larger nation (“wide”, as we say in 4x terms) may want to look for a leader that has some bonus here.
• Yellow: Commerce (scales of balance) – Infrastructure, trade, and civ-defining elements like Golden Ages come from here. These traits will favor a style based on more rapid population growth and wealth building. Remember that this is not a wargame, so having a large, well-cared-for population will win you the game.
• Orange: Industry (gears) – If getting up close and personal with the nationwide crafting system sounds fun to you, look for these traits. These leaders will outproduce their rivals and will use bonuses supplied by crafted items like feasts and other amenities to outpace the competition.
• Red: Military (sergeant’s stripes) – While the emphasis of this game may not be centered on war, there is still very much the option to win through force projection. If eXterminate is your favorite “x”, this is for you.
• Purple: Religion (candle) – Religions in ARA appear to have many more features than other games in the genre, and if you invest in these technologies, you can continue to add religion-based modifiers to the true believers of your nation throughout the game. I haven’t located any in-depth information online about the religion system (it may exist, I haven’t seen it), other than it is not pre-determined or static – your religion will change over time depending on decisions you make about it. Based on the early review videos, this may be a system that gets fleshed out more in future updates or DLCs.
• Other Purple: Culture (harp) – If a society of educated artists appeals to you, this is where you’ll want to focus. I’ll repeat, the devs have said that they don’t intend this to be a game centered on military conquest, and cultural victories are very much on the table. I think this category may also be connected to the availability of many of the Wonders (ARA calls them Triumphs) you might build, so if that appeals to your style, you may want to pair this with Orange (Production) traits for maximum effectiveness.
• Aqua? Teal?: Science (atom) –Obviously, any boost to technology gathering is often hugely beneficial in these games, but especially in one like this where technologies are the mechanism that drives your nation forward through the various ages of “history”. Of the leaders we’ve already seen, Sappho of the Greeks and Tokugawa of the Japanese offer bonuses directly to science production. The full roster of leaders on release day may offer others.
• Grey. Gray? I’m not really a color guy…: Impact (a scythe?!) – I’m not sure this is something found in leader traits. It is present on the Prestige points screen with the rest of these categories, and this symbol appears in techs like animal husbandry in relation to making meat out of critters. It seems likely it refers to using techs that involve affecting or manipulating the land around you. You get victory points for it, but it feels like there may be trade-offs, and likely there is some sort of environmental impact mechanic, especially in the more modern eras. Even if there aren’t leaders with direct bonuses here, it is one of the categories that generate Prestige points, so you’ll want to pay attention to opportunities to improve your score here.

These 8 categories (in addition to being connected to Leader traits) represent the ways in which your Nation will generate Prestige points, which is the method the game uses to measure your Nation against all the others. You will want to make sure you are looking for ways to increase these scores, and most likely you will need to specialize somewhat to do that effectively. Generally, 4x games don’t reward a generalist approach of focusing on everything at once, and I assume ARA will be no different. So taking your Leader’s bonuses into account, and pairing them with the resources available in your area of the map, you should be able to decide which areas you can excel in most easily. Then you should try to push those scores as high as possible by targeting the buildings, crafted items, decisions, or Triumphs that contribute that type of points. Focusing this way will make your Prestige score “snowball” as the game progresses and keep you at the top of the leaderboard.

Although there’s no way to know all the traits of the game’s leaders before launch, I think it is worth thinking about which of the mechanical systems (crafting, Triumph construction, religion, warfare) interests you the most and make a beeline for the nations and leaders that have traits that will help you explore those areas when the game comes out.

Once you’ve chosen your leader, you are taken to the game setup screen, where you will generate a map to play on. If you have played many 4x games, the features you can adjust will be familiar. The noteworthy innovation here is the ability to adjust the axial tilt of your planet, affecting seasonal cycles and at what latitudes their effects are felt. Could be fun to play around with over several games. The only other thing to note is that you are given a map seed number on map creation that you can record and use again if you want to play the same map in a future game. If you are new to the genre, you are basically deciding how much land, how much water, and whether the land is concentrated into large masses or spread out as islands in an ocean. If you like boats, plan accordingly.

Map generation is usually a matter of personal taste, but if you want to harvest a lot of resources yourself and/or play a more isolationist game, you should probably go with larger continuous land masses and rush your eXploration and eXpansion. If you like the idea of trading and diplomacy, a bunch of islands should give you what you want, since without getting resources from other players you will be limited in what items you can produce through crafting.

Once you generate the map, you will see your starting city location, and all the regions neighboring it. From the videos, it appears that you do not start with a Settler that you can move around to place your first city where you choose. It is chosen for you. This will frustrate some players, no doubt. My response to all these concerns in the modern days of gaming is, “don’t get upset, there will be mods.” In the meantime, the first thing you’ll want to look at in the surrounding territories is what resources are visible, as well as the locations of predators and “goody huts”.

Resources will guide your long-term planning in terms of future city expansion. If you see agricultural or livestock resources, you’ll want to consider those for early expansion. They will lead to crafting elements you can use in the future. Nevertheless, at this earliest stage, focus on the three basic resources you need: Food, Wood, and Stone (FWS). Food is obviously necessary to feed your people, and producing excess presumably accelerates city growth. Wood and Stone are the most common resources you need to build basic structures in your city. After a few turns, you will get your first Claim, which is how your city grows into neighboring Regions. You probably want to target a neighboring Region that has good FWS production for that first expansion. Bonus resources like Rice or Sheep can wait until your 3rd Region unless they are in the most productive neighboring region in terms of FWS.

• Summary: your first Claim should be used on a region with the highest possible FWS production, with Food slightly more important than either Wood or Stone. You can wait until your second Claim to grab a Region simply because it has a resource you want.

Your first unit is a Scout, and this unit will allow you to push back the fog and find the opportunities that surround you, whether they are natural resources or other groups of people. The first thing you’ll probably notice in the surrounding Regions are icons that represent Predators (red-lit animal head icons in pre-release) and “goody huts” (a reference to the first Civilization game from 1991 which featured bonus spaces that were actually little huts). You should prioritize the free resources you can gather from huts, but ARA also provides you with resources from hunting and dispersing Predators. If you are hoping to pursue a more militaristic long-term strategy, there may be benefits to aggressively hunting all the Predators in your area, as it may provide you with resources to craft bonuses to your fighting units, and/or buff your units in some way. I’m speculating here, but that kind of operation seems consistent with the rest of the game design I’ve seen.

Given the opportunities the crafting system provides, I would focus on resource gathering and hunting with your initial Scout. Don’t worry too much about pushing back the fog and exploring long distance until you’ve tapped out all your nearby gathering opportunities, and/or you’ve decided to build a second Scout. The tutorial will direct new players to build a Spearman early on, but I think a better use of resources at that stage would be another Scout. Get free environmental resources flowing into your city, so you can take advantage of what you can do with them.

• Summary: use your first scout to move in a circular pattern around your city, collecting any free resources and clearing weaker predators. Do that as rapidly as possible and spiral movement gradually outward from your city. Wait until you produce your second scout to focus on longer range exploration.

One of the biggest differences between ARA and the Civ franchise is the crafting mechanic. Instead of having only one build queue per city, ARA offers layers of possibilities for crafting objects that give bonuses to nearly all aspects of game play. If you want to maximize your nation’s progress, you will get these bonuses flowing early and often, as they will have a compounding effect over time.

To begin with, your home city starts with a feature called a Great Hearth, which is sort of a prehistoric Capital structure. The Great Hearth can craft Feasts, which accelerate city growth. You can subsidize the rate at which your Hearth finishes these Feasts by spending resources, like Food or Wealth. Feasts are applied to your Amenity slot (left side of the City Status screen) and apply their bonuses for 10 turns. In the early stages of the game, I would make sure to craft a new Feast at least every 10 years so you can have them continuously operating, even if you must spend some Wealth or Food to do it. Accelerating your population growth at this stage of the game when you can do it for a very small cost is a no-brainer. If you get ahead of the curve on your Feast production, you might craft some Jewelry, which can offer Quality of Life bonuses when you’re not spamming Feasts for growth.

• Summary: begin crafting Feasts in your Great Hearth right away. Use resources to produce the first one as fast as you can, then only use enough resources to make sure you produce another feast every 9 or 10 turns. Each feast boosts your population growth for 10 turns, and you’ll want to keep them active all the time in the early stages of the game. Once you build your second city, you’ll need to produce 2 Feasts every 10 turns to keep both cities growing.

Unfortunately, the Hearth is quite limited in what it can craft, and as already stated, it should be crafting Feasts more or less continuously anyway. The other early game crafting option is a Workshop. These are important because they will open a broader range of crafting opportunities as you gather more resources of different types. In your first city, I would start off with a Farm as your first structure to get Food production ramped up and make room for growth, then build a Workshop. With the Workshop, you can build Lithic Tools, which can be applied to buildings like the Farm or even the Workshop itself to accelerate their production. Again, this is something you should aspire to have running continuously. If you apply Tools to your Farm, it will increase Food production to somewhat offset any Food you use to accelerate Tool (or Feast) production. If you apply Tools to the Workshop itself, you won’t need to use as many other resources to accelerate production there. Basically, you want to use these systems to create positive feedback loops so you can supercharge your early growth. Make sure your crafting structures (Hearth, Workshop) are working every turn, unless you are really running low on resources and need to slow down consumption. Ideally, if you’re growing fast enough, you should be able to keep the accelerator down and keep producing.

• Summary: build a farm as your first structure. Build a workshop as your second structure. Use the workshop to produce Lithic Tools that can be applied to your farm and workshop to speed up their production. Keep your workshop producing all the time so you always have enough tools to boost production in your buildings.

After a Workshop, I’d produce a second Scout to ramp up free resource gathering and locate your neighbors. Your first scout should continue spiraling out and grabbing any free resources it finds. The second Scout can strike out in a more linear fashion away from your city.

I’d hold off on military unit production until you really need it. The tutorial will tell you to produce a Spearman pretty early, but I’d ignore it unless you have hostile units actually visible in your area. At most, produce a single Spearman for city defense, but even that may not be necessary. I’m not sure if there are roving barbarians in this game unless you intentionally anger Tribes you find, and I wouldn’t even be super concerned about Rival nations unless it’s Shaka or Montezuma or someone similar who might have militaristic tendencies. Remember, this is not a wargame.

• Summary: after your workshop, build a second Scout. Send it straight out away from your city to look for neighboring Tribes and Nations. Keep circling your city with your first Scout, working gradually outward. Don’t build military units unless or until you see hostile forces on the map somewhere.

After your second Scout, you will probably need to build a Dwelling, especially if you’ve kept your Feasts active and your city is growing quickly. You will want to keep an eye on your population growth, making sure first that you are producing enough Food to feed everyone (and building more Food production if you are not), and also making sure that you have enough housing space in your city for your population to continue to grow. Work hard to keep Food and Housing ahead of growth so you can get your city as big as possible, as quickly as possible.

If you have Food, Housing, and Growth all working together nicely, you may want to consider building a Settler now, so you can found a second City. Unlike a lot of other 4x games, in ARA you do not need to found your second city in close proximity to your first, and in most cases you probably shouldn’t. Cities in ARA sprawl, claiming surrounding Regions one by one as the game progresses, becoming quite large on the map. If you build them too close together, you may limit your growth potential because they are fighting over the same Regions for expansion. It’s hard to say exactly what you should do for your second city because that will be almost entirely dependent on the particular map you are playing on. Generally, you should consider resources that you want to acquire, the presence of Tribes (which will disappear at the end of Act I and may join you if you have a positive relationship), and the presence of competing Nations. I would prioritize resource gathering (especially Food if your original city doesn’t produce a lot of it, then Wood or Stone if one or both of those are deficient in your first city). If your first city is producing a strong supply of FWS already, then you can focus more on other map resources you find. If you find yourself with a hostile neighboring Nation, you may need to focus on placing your second city where it gives you a defensive advantage (like a choke point) or alternatively in the opposite direction, further out of harm’s way.

• Summary: once you have 2 Scouts, it will probably be time to build a Dwelling so you have enough housing for your Feasting population. After the Dwelling, this is probably a good time to build a Settler and found your 2nd city. Usually, you will want to found that city where it has access to resources you need, and far enough away from your first city that they won’t be fighting over the same Regions for expansion.

Where you go after the Settler is probably somewhat dependent on what Tech choices you’ve made, and what your strategy is for producing Prestige. I like the Logging Camp (Ropemaking) for increased production. The Hunting Camp looks like it provides a small amount of Wealth generation, so maybe that’s a selling point if you are developing Commerce as your strategy and/or have some specific need to generate more money. Granary and Watchtower may be useful if you are pursuing strategies of intense growth or military expansion respectively. If you are trying to build a Triumph, you’ll need to craft certain resources to build it, and you will want to see if there are specific buildings you need to have to produce those resources.

Regardless, your primary concern should be to make sure your first two cities are growing as quickly as your Food supply will allow, and hopefully you second city can become self-sufficient pretty quickly (while using Feasts for steady growth). Once that second city is stable, you’ll want to build another Settler to found your 3rd city. There is more flexibility with the 3rd city to build it somewhere with less FWS production if you are trying to gather a specific resource on the map. As long as your first two cities are FWS powerhouses, your third can be a little deficient if there is a good reason for it.

Three is the max number of cities you can control under your initial government style, Chiefdom. You should try to reach that cap as quickly as your resource production will allow. Later, you will discover new government Techs which will raise your city cap. Whenever you adopt one of those new governments, you should be prepared to build Settlers to increase your number of cities to match the max allowed as soon as possible. The more cities you have, the more resources you can produce and the more Prestige points you can generate. Growth is everything, keep expanding.

• Summary: once you’ve founded your second city, you’ll want to focus your building on things that support your core strategy (e.g., science, war, commerce, or Triumphs). Focus on growing the population quickly and getting the second city self-sufficient as soon as possible. Once it is, build another Settler and found your 3rd city. If you get two healthy cities humming along with good stability, maybe take a flyer on the third one if it’s a suboptimal location but it has a cool resource. After all, the point here is to have some fun – it can’t always be about winning.

Speaking of winning, one of the major sources of Prestige points, (which are how you win the game) is each city’s Quality of Life rating (QoL). This is where ARA really tries to take the focus away from slaughtering your neighbors like the helpless AI sock puppets they are, and instead incentivizes you to prioritize taking care of your own people, and act… you know… Civilized.

Early on, minor bonuses are available from some structures and from basic Amenities you can manufacture to increase the 5 QoL ratings (Happiness, Health, Knowledge, Prosperity, and Security). Mastering those Qs is what this game will ultimately be about, so we will all have to pay attention as the game progresses, and we find new Techs that offer opportunities to increase them. The challenge will be that as your population grows, and as the level of technology grows, your people become gradually more demanding. Like modern people who lose their actual minds if something happens to their cell phone, your citizens will rebel against you if you are still providing them with Stone Age living conditions in the Renaissance.

Obviously, I can’t tell what all the specifics will be in the later parts of the game, but I would remind you, dear reader, that specializing is the key here, not trying to be all things to all your citizens. It is important to try to keep all QoL ratings high enough that you aren’t getting penalties for them, but your Prestige does not have to come from all of them equally or anything like it. If you keep 4 Qs at 41 and the 5th at 100 in all your cities, I suspect you will pile up points at a pretty good rate. Also, if the average score of the 5 Qs in a city is high enough, the city gets a bonus to ALL of it’s production. That could be extremely powerful, so you will want to keep an eye on that when deciding what structures to build or what resources to produce and use as Amenities in your cities.

• Summary: mind your Qs. Increase Quality of Life scores in your cities to produce Prestige and to give bonuses to production. This is how you generate points and avoid falling behind.

What happens if you fall behind you ask? Well, ARA has introduced a mechanic they call Culling, which basically means that as time moves forward through the Ages, the nations that fall to the bottom in Prestige points disappear – they are Culled. It’s a very vivid metaphor, since the term is most often used to describe a process of destroying sick or superfluous animals to protect the rest of the herd. It’s brutal, but it does create an image. A kinder analogy might be the relegation of teams at the bottom of the English Premier League (for example). That’s not a perfect analogy. Anyway, you don’t want this to happen to you.

If you lack confidence in your ARAbilities, the devs have thoughtfully provided an option to turn this feature off for the player (not the AI) at game creation. If you are new to this genre, it’s probably not a bad idea for your first game. Eventually you should turn it on though, because it feels better to succeed when there are actually stakes if you fail. This mechanic has sparked some minor controversy among some on the discussion boards, but I think they are overreacting because it is unfamiliar (people complain because there aren’t new ideas in these games, then they complain when new ideas are introduced…).

As I understand it, the devs put this in the game to help with some things that are often problems in the latter stages of 4x games. One of those is game performance, but more specifically, I think they were trying to remove the ahistorical and (in my opinion) somewhat boring part of a 4x game where the player has moved ahead of many of the AI nations and for lack of anything better to do, builds a doomstack (powerful army) and wipes them from the board. It’s not pretty, nor is it exciting. It’s a chore.

What the devs decided to do, and I think it is brilliant, is to have those failing nations disappear as full nations in the game and instead become the ruined remains of themselves. Picture the remains of Roman civilization all over the Mediterranean world. That’s not a perfect analogy for what we’ll get in game, but (again, as I understand it) there will be ruins of the departed nations that create opportunities for acquisition, but also for things like archeology. If this plays out anything like how I picture it in my head, it will be awesome and add a novel dimension to mid- to late-game play. We’ll see what it looks like once the game is out, but I am very intrigued by it and can see it adding a lot of excitement to a game if you are nearing the end of an Age and your score is near the cutoff mark.

• Summary: make sure to stay out of the bottom of the Prestige rankings when it is getting close to the end of an Age. If you don’t, it could be Game Over.

This is probably enough to write about a game none of us have even played, but hopefully newer players (the intended audience) found some things here to help them think strategically about the opening phase of the game. I’m very excited to play ARA, and I hope anyone reading this is interested enough by the potentially great depth of the game to be excited as well. After all, if you’re anything like me, you are constantly searching for that next game that makes you want to play “just one more turn” forever.

I’ll see everyone on the discussion boards on September 24th (or maybe 25th, if I can’t stop playing…) and we can share first impressions.

Good luck!

TBL