Ara: History Untold | Beginner's Guide - Tips & Tricks

Ara: History Untold is a captivating strategy game that immerses players in the rich tapestry of ancient and modern civilizations. Set across vast landscapes, the game challenges players to build a nation and achieve domination by having the most influential nation. With its deep strategic gameplay, stunning visuals, and rich historical context, Ara: History Untold offers a truly immersive and rewarding experience for strategy game enthusiasts.

This comprehensive guide aims to equip players with the knowledge and strategies needed to start in Ara: History Untold. Whether you're a seasoned strategy game veteran or a newcomer to the genre, this guide will help you navigate the complexities of Ara: History Untold and achieve greatness. This guide is also meant to give a general overview rather than an extremely specific step-by-step tutorial.

Starting Out

When you start a game, your location is randomized, so the immediate area around you might not be the best place, but you’ll have to make do. Your focus during the early game should be on your city's growth and exploration. 

At the start, resist the urge to put your Scout on auto-explore. Instead, focus on the thrill of discovering the world around your city. Engage in battles with predators, uncover caches, and you might just stumble upon a valuable item that could turn the tide of the game in your favor.

You should try to focus on increasing the level of your city without having to build in your first region. You see, your first region should exclusively be used for building dwellings. At the start, your food demand wouldn’t be extremely high, so you can get away with not building any farms. The reason you do this is because the first region benefits greatly from dwellings, so building dwellings there should be the focus. 

There is an important exception, however. If no region within a 2-region radius primarily produces food, basically, it has 4 apple icons and 4-5 buildable zones; you should ignore the previously mentioned clause and build farms [for now]. 

Regardless, your build order at turn 1 should be Scout> Settler > Spearman. You should have enough resources for the, but if you don’t just wait until the previous production is finished, you should have enough by then.

Once your second Scout is produced, you should set him to auto-explore; if you’re daring enough, micromanage both scouts to explore different areas. Right now, you’re looking for the best places to set up shop with your settler. In case any neutral tribes or other nations come knocking, you have your spearman to handle things.

In Turn 1, you should also assign the Feast amenity and start production on another one in the Great Hall. You should also use your wealth to boost the production. The Feast amenity is exceptional in the early game, so use it all the time.

Once you can take over another territory/region, you should try to get yourself one with 4 food and 4-5 building zones. If you can’t find both, focus on one, preferably the one with 4-5 building zones. At the onset, you should build a lot of farms paired up with granaries to boost production. You should also build at least one workshop so you can start creating items.

Your research should be relaxed here; you don’t really need to skip anything, so try to grab everything in the first two eras. Don’t worry about lagging; there is very little way of boosting research this early, so most nations are on the same footing. Your first research should be the one unlocking the workshop and the granary. So, keep that in mind while researching.

When sending out your settler, make sure the zone you claim has at least a few natural resources around it, or far more preferably, on it. Also, ensure the region has five building zones and is fairly far away from your first city. 

The primary bottlenecks you will face when trying to grow and expand cities are not having enough food generation in the cities or not having enough people. Build dwellings and use amenities, paragons, and experts to boost your food production. With succeeding eras, you will have the opportunity to upgrade farms and build wells for explosive growth.

Eventually, you will need to start worrying about the military, and here, your best bet is the wedge formation. Use it with spearmen to deal with most things. If you play your cards right, it usually shouldn’t even matter.

In the first Act, and really, in all acts, the best way to get Prestige is by creating Triumphs. So, that should be your primary focus. Try to build the Triumphs in regions without any natural resources and those that have only two zones.

As you progress through the eras, you’ll get into the flow of things, and your gameplay will start to vary and diverge a lot based on your leader, Religion, and location. You just need to make sure that you never stop focusing on growth and always keep a steady supply of food within cities. You also shouldn’t neglect any field, even if your leader makes you bad at it. So, just because you are Genghis Khan, you shouldn’t completely forget about building Academies.

Tips & Tricks

Moving on to the little things that you can do to improve your game. These are often minor things that won’t directly affect anything if missed. However, over and over, it compounds into missed potential.

Use the specialized tabs

The crafting tab allows you to look into the production improvements and see what they are producing, change the production, and so on. You can change certain production and see if any improvement isn’t producing an item or good. The tab immediately after that lists all the goods and items in your inventory, and it quickly lets you evaluate what you need and what you don’t.

The improvements tabs after selecting a city give you a view of your improvements neatly organized one after another. This allows us to upgrade them en masse and assign goods to them easily.  You can also assign and remove experts. This allows you to manage your improvements far more efficiently, especially in the late game, where you’ll have hundreds of improvements to manage and multiple cities to oversee. In a game that gets especially overwhelming in the late game, all of these make it so much easier to manage everything, especially when you actually have over 200 items to manage.

Supplies

Supplies are specifically 4 items you can assign to an improvement that allows you to give additional benefits to that improvement. Unlike the items you can add to specific good production, these do not get consumed, so you only ever need one in your inventory, and those get used once you place it in the supplies of any improvement. The supplies are actually the best ways, by a great margin, to improve the production of that building. Supplies can also be easily moved around, so the players who like micromanaging can maximize how these supplies are utilized.

Units, Formation & Tactics

The game gives you three main methods of specializing and improving your forces, and the key here is synergy. Certain units just work well in certain formations, which also gives you access to certain tactics. You can pair an elephant unit with two horse units, but that unit is neither an effective damage sponge nor a fast mover. So, you’ll also have to keep that in mind. 

You should also remember that each unit you deploy, in whatever formation, you have both monetary and material upkeep. Naturally, as the game progresses, this upkeep will get higher for more expensive and better units. So, you shouldn’t raise units randomly. Furthermore, once deployed, these units cannot be put back into the reserve, so you’ll either have to keep them as an active force or permanently disband them.

Raising Forces

The game has an interesting mechanic where once you raise an army, it will be sent to your reserves, wherein you can bring it out to your active roster. The units may be raised from any city, so it doesn’t matter what improvements it has or what bonuses it might contain. The actual bonuses come when you bring them out of the reserves. The primary benefit is that if you bring them out from a city that has a high quality of life and, specifically, high security, the force strength will increase. Naturally, other improvements can further boost this.

Quality of Life

Maintaining a high quality of life is not just a method of gaining Prestige. Having a high Quality of Life in specific categories gives you additional bonuses that scale incredibly well, so you should really pay attention to that. The best way to boost the Quality of Life is by using amenities and improvements. There is, of course, one other way, Religion.

Religion

Despite being underdeveloped, the religion system does wonders about giving you buffs and boosts. At a certain point, they’ll be your greatest asset. See, every few turns; you will get to assign an edict to your Religion; you are essentially creating new scripture, which gives you specific bonuses. So, you have to choose between three, and the other two won’t be accessible again. 

You might be inclined not to bother with religion, but these bonuses are incredible and help improve nearly every aspect of your game. So, remember not to neglect religion but to utilize religious improvements.

Finally, you shouldn’t skip a tech just because you don’t think you’ll need the items they give access to. Remember that not all items can be unlocked via multiple techs. The most prominent example is the chariots, which you need horses to make. Of course, you might not always have horses around, so it’ll be tempting to skip out on the tech. But you can always trade for chariots, which you need for building a specific Triumph. So, if you don’t get the item unlocked, you’re also locked out of building that Triumph.

Check out our review and other guides on Ara: History Untold:
- Ara: History Untold Review
- Ara: History Untold | Prestige Guide: How to Earn a Lot of Prestige
- Ara: History Untold | Act 1 Research Guide: Best Techs To Research & Skip