A cursory look at the landscape of the 4X strategy genre on PC will inform you that tactically-minded gamers have never had it better. The latest entry in what appears to be a genre in danger of overcrowding, Millennia from publisher Paradox Interactive and developer C Prompt Games nonetheless looks set to carve its niche with a variety of fresh mechanics and features that will entertain even the most stalwart of armchair generals.
On the face of it, Millennia would appear to be a loving ode to the sort of sophisticated and long-form strategy beats that Sid Meier’s massively popular Civilisation games have long pioneered. Scrape the surface, however, and it’s clear that the title is also quite able to provide something unique to help elevate beyond it just a skilful take on what we’ve seen already. With that in mind, here is what Millenia brings to the 4X strategy genre.
Much More Nuanced Combat
One of the more noticeable aspects of Millennia’s design that feels a touch fresher than some of its genre stablemates is how combat is handled. Chiefly, Millennia allows wannabe generals to combine multiple unit types on a single hex, creating some neat offensive and defensive synergies as a result. A good example of this would be meshing together long-range units, such as musket units or archers, with a sturdier defensive unit to ensure that in the event those long-range units are rushed, they can soak up the abuse and retreat. Brilliantly, after each skirmish, Millennia also provides a real-time action report which not only provides a broader view of the scrap but also provides a deeper and more granular level of insight into the effectiveness of your tactics thanks to a precise readout of damage, casualties and more.
The National Spirits System Provides Additional Replayability
Beyond the innovations that Millennia brings to the fold in terms of combat, developer C Prompt Games has also implemented a neat little mechanic known as National Spirits which adds yet further value and replayability to the overall package. Though each civilisation that you can choose comes with the sort of preset attributes, strengths, weaknesses and quirks that you might expect, National Spirits provides you with sufficient creative latitude to introduce new inventions, unit types, diplomatic behaviours and more. In essence, this means that by leveraging the National Spirits in varying ways, you can play the same civilisation multiple times and yet have a different experience on subsequent playthroughs. Neat stuff indeed.
The Undo Button Lets You Correct Mistakes
For anybody who has played the likes of Civilisation VI or Humankind, saving every two minutes to protect yourself from a potentially catastrophic blunder in tactical decision-making is pretty much par for the course. Millennia, however, takes a slightly different approach to this situation. If you happen to have made a diplomatic tie where you shouldn’t have or sent an expeditionary force somewhere only for them to find themselves extremely dead, a handy undo button lets you rewind time and correct your mistake. Though the system could potentially be abused by the less scrupulous, the undo button earns its keep for allowing honest players to correct legitimate mistakes due to accidental button presses or other such unintentional blunders.
Alternate Ages Are Millennia’s Ace In The Hole
By far one of the most distinctive features that Millennia brings to the 4X strategy genre is its Ages system and how it affects how each playthrough unfolds. Like any genre effort worth its salt, Millennia has you moving from one Age to the next owing to the amount of research that you undertake within your current Age – a mechanic that will prove familiar to anybody who has played similar games. Where Millennia changes things up however, is that as soon as a civilisation breaks into a new Age, so too does every other civilisation at the same time, regardless of their circumstances. This also feeds into the superb alternate ages mechanic that C Prompt Games has brought to bear here.
Though Millennia’s Ages are themed according to history – with the Iron Age, Renaissance Age and others all featuring prominently, you can also go somewhat off-piste in terms of history, causing the timeline to splinter and one of these alternate Ages to trigger. They are a hypothetical take on what would happen if, at certain key points, an outcome other than that established by history occurs. For example, if the internal combustion engine was not created you could find yourself being thrust into the Age of Aether where steam technology is revivified and becomes the de-facto technology of the era.
Whether you’re in the Age of Aether, Age of Blood (where the world is consumed entirely by war) or the Age of Plague (you can guess what this one involves), these alternate Ages provide unique challenges as they all include their own unit types, buildings, bonuses, penalties and bespoke hazards that you wouldn’t encounter normally.
City Building That Doesn’t Use Worker Units
One particularly deft idea that Millennia brings to the genre is the notion that city building can be achieved without the need for separate worker units. Representing a significant shift from other genre efforts, where the creation of buildings and structures is exclusively facilitated by separate worker units, Millennia instead simply asks you to build new structures and improve them by allocating construction points to whatever it is that you want to do. And that’s it. The upshot of this is that the only visible units you have are your military units so the map becomes a lot less cluttered and thus much clearer to parse.
Millennia’s city-building nuance also extends past just its jettisoning of traditional worker units, too. Though you can build resource-giving structures on single tiles, such as bakeries, farms and so on, you can exponentially increase the productive output of those structures by linking them up with similar structures on other tiles. An example of this would be to build a mill and bakery, with the former to output grain which is then turned into flour so that the latter can bake bread that provides a greater food resource output than either of those two structures could achieve separately.
Now you know just how Millennia differentiates itself from the 4X masses, why not pick it up with a discount over at the Green Man Gaming store. If you do so, you might just find yourself in the Age of Savings.
