Some genres, or subgenres, are dominated by a single game or series, and any other game in the area is invariably reacting to it. Whether it’sThe Sims,Dark SoulsorVampire Survivors, these giants of their genre shape the games that come after them. Like followers of those games,Millenniahas its own giant it’s invariably going to be compared against:Sid Meier’s Civilization.
The turn-based, historical 4x genre has long been Civilization’s playground, and while competitors have occasionally taken shots at it, none have managed to dislodge the house that Sid Meier built. Backed by Paradox Interactive, canMillenniatackle it likeCities: Skylinesdid to Sim City or is it another pretender to the throne much like Amplitude’sHumankind?
Millennia’s Through History
Millenniadoesn’t have defined factions or nations the way something like Civilization does. While there are choices at the beginning of the game, this primarily affects the cosmetics of your nation, and a starting bonus that impacts the early game. There’s no Julius Caesar traveling through history as an immortal leader with you, but instead, a nation that slowly builds its identity over millennia from the Stone Age to reaching outer space.
This is both a strength and a weakness ofMillenniabecause it gives the game less character, while providing a more flexible canvas for you to tell your tales through. There aren’t unique units or buildings because of what nation you are playing; instead, the uniqueness comes from what technologies you choose to unlock, what ideals your society follows and how they all interact.
During several Ages, you are given the option to choose a National Spirit, that provides you with elements that define your nation. There are at least one for each of the six domains when you get to make this choice. These can focus on raiding, environmentalism, scholarship or any type of focus your society may have. Each is tied to one of six domains, which are government, exploration, warfare, engineering, diplomacy and arts, respectively. With the spirits, you can then choose what parts of them you unlock, as you use your domain points to unlock them, creating a virtuous feedback loop, as you improve your ability to do something tied to that domain, and get points for doing it often.
The Ages of Millennia
The signature feature ofMillenniais its different ages, and how beyond your general age of stone, iron and the like, there are also variant, crisis and victory ages. These ages help pace the game, and you advance to a new age once you’ve researched at least 3 (or 4 later on) technologies in the age and choose to advance to the next.
These different ages can drastically change the way the game plays for a while. The earliest crisis age, Age of Blood, comes about if you are the one to advance the age first after killing six or more enemy units. During this age, everyone is at war, and there are no more penalties for war, as the game’s focus changes. The age of plague has you fighting outbreaks of plague – losing population, and/or spending significant resources to hold it back.
Victory ages provide ways to move the game to an endstate – potentially much earlier than it would otherwise be reached. The Age of Conquest is the earliest one, requiring your army to be at least 150% as powerful as the second place player’s, providing a way, if you are militarily dominant, to win the game without having to spend as much time in the midst of a slog.
One issue that pops up with this is that whoever jumps to the next age first is the one that decides what the age will be for everyone. Given that going ahead an age is based on research, it makes knowledge even more powerful, especially if you are looking for a variant or victory age – or something to slow down on if you want to avoid a particular crisis age that you will have no choice but to select if you are the first in line.
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A Millennia of Routines
Most of the mechanics inMillenniaare similar enough to what you’ve seen before. You have cities to build up, settlers for new ones, armies you send out and the like. The differences here are in the details, for better and worse.
Regions and their capitals have a fair amount of variety, with buildings unlocked by technologies (and thus tied to Ages), and improvements in the surrounding area. The improvement system is an interesting one, as you may build whole supply chains out of it, as your town cuts a log at the forester, sends it to the papermaker to turn into paper, then the paper to the scribe for a manuscript. Each improvement generates either some core supplies like housing, food, or production, or it gives you goods like logs, paper or manuscripts which can either be further transformed or turned in for supplies.
A region’s supply chain is largely limited to what’s inside the region, but there’s some goods trading you can do both foreign and domestic if you have the right buildings. You could export that same log to a separate region, if that region needs the production from spending it, or where they take the log and turn it into another product.
It creates a real opportunity cost tradeoff on each thing you build, and has you thinking about what you want your regions to do, and how a settled area will shape up in time. What towns you plan on building with their bonuses based on what’s nearby and similar factors. The downside is that it does come with a fair amount of micromanagement, choosing what you build on each tile, and sometimes having to direct workers to do what you want specifically.
You can make use of vassal states instead, which are regions that pay you tribute, but you don’t directly control them. These have several ways of influencing them, as well as governments and spirits that can let you get even more, but it’s not all together satisfying that your choice is between almost no control and a highly-granular control.
As for warfare,Millenniasplits the difference between stacks of doom and a single unit to a square. You can have several troops together in an army, with the number starting at three, and going up at several technological levels. Troops have a few different types such as mounted, line and the like, with different advantages and disadvantages against other types, sometimes unlocked from certain technologies, spirits or other methods. Troops have both offense and defense that gets compared, along with tactics from leader units, and terrain or resolving the battle, which also has a random element.
Fights get shown in an animated pop-up window, which shows troops taking dutiful turns going after each other. While at first this is interesting to watch, and there are amusing contrasts at times of units versus backgrounds, it quickly becomes dull and repetitive. What could have been a distinctive stylish feature is sadly let down by that choice of display into one that I found myself jumping to the end.
All of this can combine into a mid-game slog at times, as you need to check a lot of small details and waiting for things to advance. Some of it is a genre problem, but it is sadly one thatMillenniawas unable to solve.
It Would Take a Millennia to Like This User Experience
One of Millennia’s greater sins is its user experience, or user interface, as what appears serviceable at the start runs into problems with information display and interaction as you play it. A key example of this is that, for some unknown reason, they decided to put the improvement points down in the bottom left corner, all on their own. It opens up to a menu of options, but being way down there, it’s easy to forget about sometimes.
In fact, C Prompt seems to know this, as at times, a big blue arrow will point at the Improvement Points area, as if shouting ‘hey aren’t you forgetting something?’. Use of that prompt, often repeatedly throughout the game, is illustrative of some of the flaws with the UI, where information can be buried or not supplied.
In the simple diplomacy sector, when someone proposes an alliance, you don’t get to see who they are at war at, what their relationship to other factions are or anything else. It’s easy for you to accept an alliance, and find that by doing so, you are now at war with a former ally or neighbor that you had no plans of fighting.
Several ages also have events that put impacts on tiles, like a plague outbreak or arcane energy that can be absorbed. These are hard to spot often after being placed, as the visual effect is light, and it’s another pain in the user experience trying to figure out which of your tiles has a plague outbreak, which if I didn’t retain where it happened during the start of turn change, required me often to open up the city menu to see if there was an outbreak in that region, and then go through my upgraded tiles individually until I found it.Millennia sadly has a number of this type of user experience that disrupts the game flow and makes you wonder why you’re playing it.
Closing Comments:
Millenniais an interesting, if flawed, take on the civilization-like experience that could be so much more with polish and time taken to it. It’s worth experiencing if you like these types of games, but it’s not going to revolutionize the genre, or dethrone Civilization anytime soon. With some polish and the right updates, it can get better, but for now it’s a good, but flawed experience.
