Many of us have experienced this: when you ask your mom in the back seat of the car if she can buy you a copy of Civilization (or anything else), she will firmly say that the family already has it, thus killing you with one blow. Millennia is this so-called “family Civilization”.
This statement may sound a bit ironic. This historical 4X game that is a competitor to Civilization is actually not without merit, but the few highlights are overshadowed by the overall weak performance of the game. Just like another similar game before it, At the Gates, Millennia also focuses too much on disrupting the traditional gameplay mode of the Civilization series and neglects to shape its own gameplay.
Similar to the Civilization series, Millennia is also a turn-based empire-building game. The game theme is also taken from real history, and it also has a relatively fictional feeling. I think the biggest problem with the basic gameplay of the game comes from what I call the “plot economy” system. In the game, the player’s city can be expanded to every plot on the map, and all plots enclosed in the territory can produce resources through improvement and construction.
This mechanism seems conventional, but it causes me to almost always use all my plots to produce resources needed to run the city. Many key resources can only be obtained by improving the plots, and basically most plots can only produce a certain type of resource. The mechanism that a plot cannot produce multiple resources has led to considerable restrictions on urban planning.
The final result is that my city looks like a Renaissance version of a crowded sci-fi hive. Every plot in the city land has built some kind of improvement facilities, which is not good-looking, not realistic, not like a real city, and cannot restore the urban development model in the real world.
Visually, it looks like a mess, and the game screen depicts these plots quite rudimentary. Roads will be covered by buildings, and one side of the road where two plots meet looks more blurred. Some residential areas are directly built into the middle of the river as the scale changes. Although the game’s depiction of terrain looks good, as long as you play two hundred rounds, these terrains will basically be covered by various messy facilities.
In the later stages of the game, there are ways to increase the output of a single plot of land, such as processing grain into flour and flour into bread, which can increase food output without increasing land. The construction of the production chain is quite complicated, especially the trade between cities will further complicate this mechanism. I like the extra depth brought by this complexity in the later stages of the game, but this advantage is not enough to make up for the bad experience brought by the “plot economy”.
I even miss the regional mechanism in “Civilization 6” when I play the game. This design can bring a good relief to the situation of building everything in the capital and the over-bloated city.
As for the game’s technology tree, some things are so hidden that I often only glance at the content of the technology tree when I play the game, so that I waited until the information age of that game (about 1970) to figure out how to cut down forests. Since there is no such thing as a prerequisite technology in the game, I don’t want to go back to develop the technology that I skipped in the early era, and I am too lazy to even look at it.
You end up with a steel battleship guarding the coastline on one side and a stick warrior from 1 AD on the other, and you can research modern infantry and skip to level 7 without researching any of the technologies in between. While there are some technologies that you can skip in the Civilization series, at best you can develop in a certain direction, and you will never have tanks and planes but still not unlock forestry. This situation in Millennia is really ridiculous.
I don’t want to complain about the game’s design failures in the review, but some confusing new resources in the later stages make the game more disappointing. For example, oil wells, in order to build such facilities, you need to invest in improvement points called “experts” on the land, which represent the educated people in your country.
So if you want to get experts, you must build more schools, but no, in the game, education is just one of the needs you must meet as your city expands and your society becomes more complex. Education is also different from the “knowledge” in the game. Knowledge represents the scientific development level of the player’s civilization. As for “experts”, they are basically obtained by improving the plots called “think tanks”.
For example, when you have developed all the plains plots, but have not yet researched and unlocked forestry, you can only look at the plots that can be developed and worry. This is strange. I can be far ahead in technology and have the highest education level in the world, but I can’t produce “experts” who know how to build oil wells. Various resources are independent and unconnected, and each resource requires its own exclusive improvement facilities to obtain. In my opinion, this is not only completely unreasonable at the logical level, but also not very interesting in terms of gameplay performance.
As for the city’s demand mechanism, although it is weird, I do like this mechanism of meeting various needs in order to achieve certain indicators. At first, the city’s needs are just food, but once you start to grow, you have to start thinking about public health. Then, the city will move on to education, electricity, Internet, and so on.
Among the many needs, some needs are more important than others. While I’m not sure why social media would increase population growth (it should be the other way around, right?), the demand mechanic is one of the few things that makes Millennia at least a little more interesting.
In theory, the eras are a nice idea. The game’s eras progress periodically, from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance, and then to space exploration and even beyond the real world. You can also unlock other eras with different technology cards, such as the Heroic Age to lead your legend-makers on various missions, or the Conquest Age to conquer with gunpowder to win the game early.
The problem is that unless you specifically prepare to enter or avoid an era, these eras are difficult to unlock or avoid. I never unlocked the Bloody Age, but the Steampunk Ether Age always seems to appear. If you want to dominate the change of eras, you have to develop technology vigorously, because only those who are the most advanced in technological research can decide what era will come next.
The wars in the game are quite exciting and interesting. AI opponents launch a variety of attacks, and while the combat animations look ridiculously outdated, that wasn’t a big deal for me. To be honest, the combat is even somewhat fascinating, but I occasionally get annoyed by the puzzling questions about who gets to go first in a fight.
There seems to be some kind of order to the combat, but it’s always hard to figure out who goes first and how friendly and enemy units choose their targets. Some units will occasionally attack twice per turn, but until combat begins, there’s no telling how a fight will go, aside from the relative strength of the two sides.
I’ll also talk about performance, because it gets pretty awful in the late game. At 499 of the 500-turn limit per game, my Ryzen 7 3700X took a full minute and 40 seconds to get to the next turn on a “large” map (I timed it).
At this point in the game, there were six other countries besides me, and the first 30 seconds of the next turn weren’t even the AI opponents wasting time. It seemed that the game was simply stuck. At this time, whenever I made any clicks or tried to switch out, the Windows system would pop up a “stop responding” window. Considering that sometimes operations such as building buildings will take several turns to repair, I would have to wait for several minutes in vain. With poor performance, it was a relief to see the pop-up prompt near the end of the game.
The game’s opening settings also disappointed me. There are only 18 countries to choose from in the game, and each country has a very weak effect, which is almost a universal bonus effect, and the bonus effect can be switched and adjusted as you want. Players can’t determine the speed of the game. As someone who often plays the “Civilization” series, I think the speed of the game in the early era is a bit too fast.
But to be fair, when I saw the extremely long rounds in the later stages of the game, I was very glad that the game didn’t provide me with the option to slow down the overall time. In addition, the game map customization options are quite limited.
Players can also use national spirits to shape their own countries, gaining effects such as being able to build pyramids or hire warriors. As the game progresses, new interesting mechanisms such as social structure and ideology will continue to be added, adding interesting variables to the game.
However, since the buildings and units you can build are almost the same no matter which country you choose, and there are no leaders who can communicate and interact between countries, the overall style differences between different countries are actually quite small. When you meet those white warriors wearing magical barbarian armor in the game, you may be surprised to learn that they are from Zulu.
Conclusion
I felt the same after playing a game of “Millennia” as I did after playing “Humankind”: it just made me want to play another game of “Civilization 5”. Among the several manufacturers in the category of wrestling turn-based historical strategy games, Firaxis (the developer of the “Civilization” series) has always been the one who did it better. While mechanics like city needs, national spirit, and production chains give Millennia its own unique character, the game’s poor performance cannot be compensated by its few highlights.
Let me summarize by revising a poem by Shelley: In addition, there is nothing left, ruins all around, limited game customization mechanics, terrible late-stage performance, and a cumbersome land economy system, lonely and desolate, stretching in all directions.