Every game developer is always looking for a way to put a fresh spin on their genre, but when you’re a historical 4X strategy game, you’re having to fight against the passage of time as well. Coming from C Prompt Games and a team of mostly ex-Age of Empire veterans, Millennia’s twist is giving you the ability to branch off from real history into darker or lighter alternative timelines.
The Steam Next Fest demo for Millennia offers just a brief glimpse of what the full game will offer, letting you sample the opening 60 turns of a campaign. That’s just enough space and time to expand your borders, run into a few neighbouring civilisations, get into a few scraps and see how the innovative progression of both historical and alternative ages can start to work.
A lot will seem rather familiar to almost all 4X games on the surface level, from the hex-based tiles that make up the world, to the way that you start off with a single little settlement and grow from there. In our case it was a Manchester, surrounded by walls of clouds blocking our view of the world around us. The first few turns are the same old steps into the unknown, sending little bands of warriors and scouts out to nearby tiles to see what and who is around you. As you do so, you can find nearby villages that you can absorb – they disappear from the map and give you a simple choice of reward – singular nation cities that you can eventually make a vassal, or the thick borders of a rival budding empire.
At the same time as you’re doing this, your first city needs to expand and as you earn Culture points you can, amongst other things, settle a nearby town that grows the definite borders of your nation, letting you make use of more nearby resources. If you’re by the coast, then dropping a town to let you start fishing and building ships will be a great way to start, while more landlocked nations will ideally find some good farming and hunting nearby to start. Each of those has to be tapped into with buildings, boosting their production and eventually starting to feed grander industries – though something for much later in the game.
Alongside this you have larger buildings and city improvements to construct, though initially it’s a choice of these or adding more war units, and as you advance through the ages, you gain more Domains – starting with a Tribal Government, simple Warfare, Exploration and onward. These are their own little tech trees, giving smaller perks or unlocking new unit and building types for you, and you have different trees that can fall under each category. Reaching the second age gave us a choice of a whole bunch of new National Spirits to adopt, with my choice being that of ancient seafarers.
But the main progression comes from how you research and advance through the different ages of technology and history, both factual and imagined. From the Age of Stone you can advance throuh the Age of Bronze once you’ve completed three research projects, but within the demo you can then move through to the Age of Iron, have the Age of Blood or the Age of Heroes, depending on if you or another state reaches the specific criteria first and chooses these darker or enlightening paths. The former requires you to really lean into warfare, to outright kill six units from other nations, while the latter is all about exploring the world and having your scouts be the first to find and claim three natural landmarks.
There’s a pretty big advantage to being the first in line, as you’re able to pick what comes next and determine what positive or negative effects everyone will face through the subsequent 25-30 turns, but they’ll also still have to try and catch up by researching the age (albeit more quickly now).
When it comes to warfare, Millennia is pretty ropey looking at this point in time, and I hope that C Prompt can add a little more pizzazz as we get closer to launch. The structure is simple, with your army stack limited depending on how advanced your nation is – you start with threes, but could later get fours and defending cities will combine your units with the city guards. Each unit then takes turns to attack and be attacked with morale and health being hammered in the process, but as you watch the playback, they’re just arrayed on a simplistic 3D background that looks like something out of an 3D turn-based JRPG, and when there’s sometimes 20 or more turns of units whizzing back and forth, it’s all a bit too bland right now.
Naturally, with just 60 turns, the Steam Next Fest demo ends all too soon before you can get to the second or third big technological shift, but there’s good reasons to play a second or third time to try and step into the Age of Blood or Heroes and see how that first branch away from history plays out.
