Ara: History Untold looks a lot like Civilization until you realize there's no hexes: 'We're not playing a board game, we're actually trying to simulate some of what we see in real life'

As much as it resembles Civilization, soon-to-release grand strategy game Ara: History Untold is different in some big ways. The biggest might be its simultaneous turn resolution, which is detailed in one of developer Oxide's dev diaries. That one I clocked a while back, but I somehow missed another major difference even though it shows up in almost every screenshot: Ara's map isn't divided into a regular grid or hexagon pattern.

Instead, Ara's worlds are divided into irregularly-shaped regions. This was pointed out to me in a recent interview with Gabriela Leskur, Ara's narrative and experience lead, and Matt Turnbull, executive producer in publishing at Xbox Game Studios.

"I'm a big fan of Risk, but we're not playing a board game, we're actually trying to simulate some of what we see in real life," said Leskur. "One thing that's unique is that we have these dynamically generated regions. So, they're not hexes, they are irregularly-shaped based on things that you see in nature. They're along rivers, along coastlines. They're these unusual shapes that reflect how we see cartographers have done things in our history, and also the actual natural world itself."

These regions are the units of land that cities claim as they grow, and military forces occupy them one after another as they move across the map. So in those contexts, regions work similarly to a regular grid, except that the size and shape and number of sides varies. Things get more complicated when you get down to sub-regions called zones. 

Leskur says she thinks of regions as pizzas. If you're moving troops, they move around at the full pizza scale—from one region to the next—but land improvements are built on the slice scale, and like pizzas, regions aren't all divided into the same number of slices (aka zones).

"I'm thinking strategically as I'm expanding my city," said Leskur. "I do so by claiming nearby regions. And I look at, 'OK, how many zones are in this region?' If I want to build a very impressive Triumph, which is something like the Pyramids of Giza, I probably want to do so in a region that has only two zones—only two slices of the pizza cut straight and half—because I'm sacrificing the whole region to build that very impressive triumph. Whereas, if I want to claim a region to use for farming, for as many improvements as possible, I probably want a five or six slice pizza region, because each one of those zones is a place where you can build an improvement."

Another strategic consideration is the number of edges a region has, which dictates how units can move. "Every hex is bordered by six tiles," said Turnbull. "And our regions in Ara are bordered by four or two or seven—it depends on the size, the shape, the natural features, whether there's coast, whether there's rivers, whether there's a sea, and so all of those components also kind of add to the intuitiveness of it, of building out a world, and of conquering territory, and of defending territory with armies."

At the highest level, the decision to go with regions instead of hexes comes back to Leskur's comment about aiming to simulate a world rather than a tabletop board game. Zoom in on a region and you can see "individual people waving at you" and animals appropriate to the region's biome, which run away from your cursor—a bit of interactive flavor. (You can see some of that in the video above.)

And when you zoom out, "does this look like a world, or does this look like a board game I won?" asked Turnbull. "The answer we're trying to get to is, this looks like my world. I built this world. This is mine now, and it reflects the story that I've told and the choices that I've made."

Oxide has gone into more detail on this subject and numerous others—there's a crafting system, too, for example—on the official Ara: History Untold website. 

Despite all that work to educate grand strategy fans about the game, Ara feels like a wild card to me. I'm not sure how it's going to be received. Civilization 7 is around the corner, and that's been the focus of much more attention recently than Ara, which is out this month. Taking big, obvious departures from the Sid Meier games does feel like the right gambit, though. If it seemed too much like Civ, the audience might just decide to wait and see how Civ 7 turns out, but these peculiarities get me curious to find out if Oxide has discovered anything exciting that Firaxis hasn't.

Ara: History Untold will be out on Steam, the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass on September 24. Despite being published by Microsoft, it's only coming to Windows. (Civilization 7, on the other hand, will release simultaneously on PC and consoles.)