They literally told me i couldn't even talk about having EA to the game or post till 1 day before it came out............ insanity ! Whoever made the decision to suppress advertising the game should be fired lmao.
@@resileaf9501 it's 100% insanity and an insult to all the passion the game creators put into it. They put a ton of work into the game but didn't engage anyone on it.. so weird.
@@orxy5316 Hifi Rush iirc got basically no advertising and is an amazing game. Starfield got a lot of advertising, and well it's a joke of the industry. Amount of advertising =/= game quality
@@thespiffingbrit Yeah, perhaps I phrased it poorly. More I was wondering why they didn't sponsor you, you break/broke Civ all the time and they still sponsored you!
@@thespiffingbrit I'm pretty sure lots of your fellow content creators got sponsored for playing Ara... but take that as a compliment. They knew the game was not really finished and wasn't ready for your treatment :)
@photinodecay relative to the publishers budget they would be expected to be sponsoring hundreds of creators covering all different types of formats from shorts to live and vods
I suggest you wait for Update 1.1 - it will (hopefully) get rid of the micromanagement. The complexity is great, and I love it (German here...), but keeping everything sorted is tedious at the moment. Like - unbearable tedious. I played a few rounds, but only finished one of them. The late game has so many things and so little features to view any of them. You have to click through many buildings in every city almost every turn, if you want to min/max your output.
Hey Spiff, as a long-time follower, this is one of my favorite videos of yours in a while! I really appreciate that you still maintain the "here is why this is so utterly broken" and show off some hilarious imbalance, but that you have the comparison side-by-side ready to go as a demonstration, and then even dive deeper into the mechanics and suggest some overall concerns and issues. You're hitting the same level of "oh my, what a cheeky and hilarious British fellow" while also being a touch more informative and impartial than usual! Bravo, my good sir.
Which isn't a terrible idea to be fair. The only issue is that both of the games are already very complex and trying to achieve that level of complexity from stone age to the future while also not giving the player burnout is next to impossible.
@JK-qi7pp civ is light side of the complexity spectrum lmao. Vicky is light-medium. Other paradox games are more complex, and there's plenty of games that are much more dense than these.
This sounds like Spiff started making his usual exploit video, but found so many issues that it ended up as a rant/review. Still enjoyable to watch though, and I did like the comparison to show how broken a mechanic was.
I do take issue with his explanation here though. Not only is the bonus not as strong as he's talking about, but it's actually not even the fastest way to get a feast anyways. Hunting some types of animals is still quicker, and as everybody starts with a scout (who can hunt), everybody has access to this method. I do think Benito is strong for other reasons, but the feast timing snowball isn't it. Math wise, the reason benito isn't as OP as spiff made it sound is because of how his bonus actually applies. A +150% crafting boost sounds very broken, particularly at the early stages of the game, but it's actually not. The bonus only applies to the crafting production of the Great Hearth itself. What it doesn't effect is the production added by all the input goods that you can spend on a crafting recipe. Because of this, in the comparison, we can see the difference in crafting production between Benito Juarez and Alexander is 129 vs 110. It is a bonus, and a decent one at that, but it's not game breakingly bad. It's also actually a conjunction of 3 different bonuses for Benito Juarez all acting together, rather than just the one, and two of them aren't unique. In addition to the early expert, he also gets +20% to all Crafting Production (this applies only to the building production, like his leader trait), and he has the Stately trait, which can help a bit with early production (this is why he has +1 city production compared to the greeks from the start of the game). While Benito Juarez is certainly a good leader (I'd argue he's in the top 5 for sure, maybe top 3) is he "Unbalanced" or "Game Breakingly Good". The simple answer, the obvious answer, is no. What's more, there are actual exploits in this game that have had to be patched out since release, so this kind of thing is kind of funny to see highlighted, just because some people thought Benito was the strongest leader early on.
You can totally sense that he had high hopes for the game, and I agree, the idea is genius. The devs totally botched balance, and the fact that he could show how bad it is (that even someone who doesn't play these games can notice) with someone who is not even the most broken character in the game says a lot
@@rovsea-3761 yeah, you are very right and Spif only sounds smart in this video to people who don't actually play the game. To people who play, we're not all that impressed that he can manage to start off strong on normal (4 out of 10) difficulty. And his idea that war is irrelevant is just plain backwards.
@@rovsea-3761 i do also take issue with your explanation as Benito Juarez is in fact broken since he's the best world leader in the entire game by a long shot since he allows the player to be constantly ahead of everyone by a whopping 50% which likes spiff says 'grand strategy games are all about snowballing' because in grand strategy games, if your always in the lead that means you are always going to win be default
I will say, as someone who was on the QA team for the game before the game, lack of communication amongst devs and QA team (8 hours a day of dead silence and not socializing... AT ALL, I'm an introvert, but even I need something), and just, how unfun the game was compared to other 4x games I've played. It shows pretty much ALL the issues I had personally had with the project, and after it's release. I will say perfectly balanced 10/10 would be vindicated again!
Not calling you a liar, but if you aren t lying, you are taking huge legal risks. Check your contract, but you are probably under NDA and loyalty bindings...
The sign of a good reviewer is being able to see that it will appeal to a specific audience even if they don't like it themselves. With that said, if I wanted to play a production game I would play a production game, not a 4X.
oh, when you said "snowballing" that reminded me: once, when i was playing an older Civilization game, i moved a scout unit into a spot with a "random event" trigger... and i got an extra SETTLER unit! effectively giving me a second city on the third turn!
If there's one thing I learnt; it's to send Spiff a copy of my game if I make one, with a basket of Yorkshire Gold, some homemade jam for scones, and a note that reads "Break this in 5 days to deploy Jerome "
@@thespiffingbrit Put in my first hundred turns. Made it to the bronze age after researching everything, currently #1 on Duke difficulty after a +50 prestige bonus from making the book of gilgamesh. Seems they fixed Mexico's start in the 1.06 patch already, I can't force the creation of feasts down to 4 turns, only 5 when starting out. Mexico is still ridiculously strong due to the huge gold per turn bonus early game, which I've been leveraging by gold rushing everything I can. I'm really enjoying this game. I think it might be more of a hidden gem destined to become a cult classic, as I can see this becoming a very good multiplayer game. (Reminds me of Stellaris in it's early inception.) - at the very least, it's far better than Millennia in that regards. My only real issues are the janky poor-man's total war movement of units on the world map, not being able to upgrade units, and everything taking an extra turn to take effect despite the pop-up telling me I built something/claimed something/made a book. I couldn't even figure out what the Book of Gilgamesh did until the next turn, and I saw the +50 prestige bonus. The UI isn't exactly perfect, but it definitely works better than Victoria 3 even today. Honestly, this game just feels like how Victoria 3 should've been. It's really scratching that production management itch. It certainly doesn't replace Civilization 6, but it's definitely more enjoyable to me than Millennia, Endless Legend and Humankind. Thanks again for introducing me to the game. I seriously didn't even know this was out. The marketers should be ashamed.
Місяць тому
@@DairukaSutain the upgrade of units is being taken care of in the next patch. I still haven't bought it, but I will once they iron some of those kinks out. Oh! And the next patch has a real Earth map, so there is that =)
I'm from Mexico and let me tell you... The government doesn't have that kind of money XD What happens is that Benito Juarez is such a legend that the developers had to make him OP 😹 Look for the stuff he did on wikipedia, he was wild!
@thespiffingbrit and people in the civ 7 streams were saying ara is better. The only cool system in the game is the supply chains, and even then, it's not as good as other factory simulator games. Considering civ 7 had a tab for factories in one of the videos when they showcased resources, I feel like maybe the modern age might have some form of production chains of a more simpler resource upgrade system in place.
Maybe we could wait for some bug fixes and patches before we try to discredit the passion of the team that worked on the game. This industry hates developers.
Hey there! I was a dev on this game, and can offer a bit of insight as to why it turned out...Like *this*. The reason it feels like these mechanics weren't tested...Was because they weren't! The production chains and things were added in the last three-six months by two people who overruled the rest of the design team, which means they didn't get extensive testing in the alphas and betas that players got access to. Instead of buckling down and testing things (like leader traits to make sure they were balanced), the devs were overruled left and right to add in this last minute complete change to mechanics and...Well...Time ran out. Kind of sucks, but glad I got out when I did! 10/10 video, Spiff. Would love to see you dominate as Big Daddy Benito 9000 again...Maybe the game would have been better if we'd gotten money from the Mexican shadow government.
Microsoft stuffed up again… I was looking forward to this when it was announced back in 2022. Correct me if I am wrong, but weren’t the team aiming for a 2023 release. If so… I am highly concerned about the management on the game.
@@john63andthe13 Yep, the game was definitely supposed to come out earlier. MUCH earlier. For the first time, I wouldn't blame Microsoft for how this game flopped. Not entirely, anyway. Your concerns are VERY valid.
Also agreed to keep an eye on what was essentially a backdoor into France, but instead they immediately surrendered to the Nazis and threw that door open for them, and then to add insult to injury the French were the ones who ended up saddled with the "surrendered immediately" reputation.
i am German and I absolutely agree with this man (not even offended in the slightest) he just speaks the truth and nothing else. He also plays perfectly balanced 👍
The day Spiff actually finds a perfectly balanced game before getting his chance to play it will be the day hell freezes over. Knowing that, i enjoyed the fun red herring you gave at the beginning and i think they should sponsor you for sharing the game with others 😂 many people in the comments are taking a bite because of your video! Keep having fun doing what you do. It's good to hear that in your videos and I hope it is translating well into you enjoying non-work life too.
You know what this game reminds me of? Does anyone remember that old story about two writing students who were given a collaborative story writing project - a man and a woman ? And the man wrote story beats about a sci-fi war with space ships and chad commanders and the woman wrote about drinking calming tea and meditating but it was the same story so it ended up horribly disjointed and turned into more of a war between the two writers, taking turns ret-con'ng each-others' story beats when it was their turn to add more to the story.
I played this for 2 weeks in the X-Box-Game-Pass-Trial when it came out. In additon to the points you brought up, I was frustrated by how bad the AI was at waging war. Like they have more units but they just have half of them idle in cities far away from the front while I kill everything with my doomstack without taking any losses. Because damage is evenly distributed over all troops the winner usually loses nothing and can just heal up afterwards. The main problem on higher difficulty-levels was not getting eliminted in the first era. Once you survive that it's very difficult to still lose.
When you said in the beginning, that no one heard of this game, I already thought about writing a comment like "We have a pretty big Strategy/Colony Sim community in Germany and that I heard of this game because of the German creators I follow"...and then 4:15 happened xD I'll now continue watching, keep up the good work and greetings from Germany :D
The thing about Ara is that I don't think it's entirely accurate to say it's a 4x game, I think it's in its own genre separate from games like Civ, Endless Legend, Millennia, etc. All of those games are fundamentally about shepherding an empire through history, everything is measured in terms of how it lets your empire expand its extraction of resources to achieve one of a number of specific, discrete goals. Ara isn't really about managing an empire, but about managing a population. The extractive part of the economy is minimal in contrast to focusing on production chains, there are multiple big eye-catching Standard of Living bars that you try and maximize through everyday amenities, the goal for most of the game is to have competitive prestige; meaning that your lands and people are not a means to achieve a specific end but an end in-and-of themselves, etc. That's why it's so tragic that they basically didn't advertise the game at all, since in the absence of curated expectations people default to thinking it's a "civ-killer", thereby attracting people who would want no part of it, without attracting the crowd that would enjoy it.
When I showed the UI and micromanagement aspects of this game to my friends, only ONE person liked it out of around 12 people. Everyone else got frickin PTSD staring at the supply chains after I told them that you do all that in each little territory. Micro is cool, just NOT for the average player.
The AI does not cheat in warfare, at least not in the way SpiffingBrit says. In the game you can combine multiple units into a formation. The unit cap counts towards formations. Spiffing brit is only making formations with a single unit, instead of three units (the "wedge" the AI has has three units in it). So essentially he is handicapping himself by reducing his armed forces to a third, because he isn't creating formations, which I believe are explained in the tutorial. I have looked in the game files for how difficulty affects the AI bonuses and I didn't see anything affected land forces cap. I have won on the hardest difficulty twice.
Spot on, I have been playing this game for a number of weeks now and SpiffingBrit doesn't even understand the basics of the game, he has a very bare bones knowledge of it. It is click bait at best. Give the game a try on Game Pass, play it and it you don't like it uninstall it, you don't have to buy it outright.
It's probably worth pointing out, in response to the tennis balls at the end of the video, that when Wizkids and Fanpro took over the franchise, the original tabletop game on which the MechWarrior franchise was built, was renamed "Classic BattleTech" and abbreviated to CBT. Given that you're comparing the *other* CBT to an overly-complex turn-based strategy game, that fact feels surprisingly relevant right now xD
Enjoying a cup of Yorkshire Tea Gold in a large Swedish glass, accompanied by crystal-clear water. From Poland. 😎 I have spent a decade working in software R&D teams across various fields. I've completed two projects for British companies. You are like a professional QA team packed into one person.👌
The grain problem in ARA is exactly what Millennium did well, the whole game is about building a civilisation path that thrives in the given environment and there's almost always a way to do that.
You can circumvent this issue with meat or fish. Just that you have to plan around that if you Spawn without grassyplains and focus the techs for those.
11:20 what I'm hearing is the same problem that HUMANKIND had where everything ultimately revolves around pops as if you don't have pop advantage then you're lacking in literally all fields. Thus pop growth methods are your first second and maybe third priority.
I do really like how the tiles are broken up and you can make cool synthesized districts that really specialize in doing one thing really well. It also can lead to some really pretty city layouts. I do not like unit movement or combat though. I get they used Crusader Kings delayed arrival method, but it just doesn't work the same or feel right in a turn based setting. The production trees are kinda cool at first, then grow to be a bit much. Ofc it's not nearly as overwhelming as something like the production tree in hoi4 for a new player just getting in. I like what they were trying to do with this, and I'll be keeping my eye on it.
For me, it's always a red flag when former developers of "beloved game" go to make a competing game in the same genre as the team they quit/were fired from. Far more often than not, they show you exactly why they were let go when that game releases.
0:44 Yeah, that's Microsoft game studios. Both feet are firmly on the brakes at all times over there. Management is obviously doing everything it can to stop their video game studios from producing and selling any video games.
I did INITIALLY suspected that this was sarcastic, but i quickly put that idea away, and just belived that you WERE being genuine! I Will never EVER Make that same mistake again!
@@carltonleboss Yes as well as Macedon instead of Greece. And we see that inaccuracy every single time when civ or civ-like game is being released. I'm not sure if it's laziness of incompetence on side of developers, but it sure is annoying.
Ok this is at 2:28, with no idea what's happening in the next 16+ minutes. (though I have several assumptions since it a Spiffing Brit video) Mainly Yorkshire references 🙂🧐 Well Done Developers!!
its like a 200m sprint race everyone equal but you have the starting gun and a long Pinocchio nose to reach the finish line before they knew the race is all ready won and over, like over an hour ago.
If I can summarise this game in a single word it is *Baffling*
Dev's didn't do shit for attention... so SpiffB made them best commercial ever.
Maybe they didn't drink enough tea while developing it.
@FrankTovey-j5m How does it feel to live in France? (this is a Quill18 joke, don't shoot me)
I'm just over five and a half minutes in and I just have to say I have seen this game before.
@robertpanasuk1156 you win the bet please go to Yogscast headquarters to claim your prize
They literally told me i couldn't even talk about having EA to the game or post till 1 day before it came out............ insanity ! Whoever made the decision to suppress advertising the game should be fired lmao.
That is probably the most baffling approach to advertising I've ever seen.
@@resileaf9501 it's 100% insanity and an insult to all the passion the game creators put into it. They put a ton of work into the game but didn't engage anyone on it.. so weird.
The game is bad, that is why they didn't advertised it
@@orxy5316 Hifi Rush iirc got basically no advertising and is an amazing game. Starfield got a lot of advertising, and well it's a joke of the industry. Amount of advertising =/= game quality
I heard of that game once and never ever got any ads, reviews or even news about it while following some game news pages lmao
Game publishers watching Spiff play their games must feel like that clip of pages printing out directly into a paper shredder
More like seeing dollar signs if it's a half decent game. He turned me onto mechabellum and a few other games I'd never heard of
Huh what's that blue thingy 😂
No such thing as bad publicly
Dont think Microsoft feels anything
@@Brian-tn4cd greed for our money and personal data
When I started the video I was kinda wondering why it wasn't tagged as an ad. Having finished the video I can see why it isn't tagged as an ad.
Well I wasn't sponsored for a start :D I don't think anyone was...
@@thespiffingbrit Yeah, perhaps I phrased it poorly. More I was wondering why they didn't sponsor you, you break/broke Civ all the time and they still sponsored you!
"Why?... Why?!... WHY?!!!... Oh, that's why..." - _Sheldon Cooper_
@@thespiffingbrit I'm pretty sure lots of your fellow content creators got sponsored for playing Ara... but take that as a compliment. They knew the game was not really finished and wasn't ready for your treatment :)
@photinodecay relative to the publishers budget they would be expected to be sponsoring hundreds of creators covering all different types of formats from shorts to live and vods
Spiff absolutely kills me every time he does something like mention Civ IV developers when the image on the screen says Civ V. Never stop.
to be fair I met the devs and many did work on civ 4 so its not wrong we just used the wrong image example :D
@@thespiffingbrit will any of the interns get executed?
@@johart309 at least 3 will be ritualistically sacrificed
@@thespiffingbrit The best possible disciplinary punishment
@@thespiffingbritperfectly balanced. Very nuanced, very productive.
Spiff: "This is the most perfectly balanced game in the universe... PSYCHE!"
Me: "They had me in the first half, not gonna lie."
I won't lie, production chain complexity got me interested. I'll keep an eye for it. But untill then, the factory must grow.
I laughed out loud when I heard him saying that that will keep Germans busy for years, cause it is sooo true.
I agree, it is a magnet for germans like the factory and it MUST grow.
"Inefficency is a sin."
But yes, factorio has so much more to do in space age.
We even have multible quality levels of every single Item.
I suggest you wait for Update 1.1 - it will (hopefully) get rid of the micromanagement. The complexity is great, and I love it (German here...), but keeping everything sorted is tedious at the moment. Like - unbearable tedious. I played a few rounds, but only finished one of them. The late game has so many things and so little features to view any of them. You have to click through many buildings in every city almost every turn, if you want to min/max your output.
@@Eragon7331 Doesn't look like it will ever be as elegant as Settlers II
as a Mexican myself i was perplex to see Benito Juarez appear on the spiffing brit gameplay , so i salute you with my tea !!
he beat the french. that earns him a spot.
Weird he doesn't have any combat bonuses, given he led Mexico through two wars and won them both.
@@carltonlebosstrue
Hey Spiff, as a long-time follower, this is one of my favorite videos of yours in a while!
I really appreciate that you still maintain the "here is why this is so utterly broken" and show off some hilarious imbalance, but that you have the comparison side-by-side ready to go as a demonstration, and then even dive deeper into the mechanics and suggest some overall concerns and issues.
You're hitting the same level of "oh my, what a cheeky and hilarious British fellow" while also being a touch more informative and impartial than usual! Bravo, my good sir.
Someone on the team really said "I wish I could play Civ and Victoria at the same time".
I was thinking "Civ and Satisfactory" myself
I'd like to see somebody try combining Factorio with Crusader Kings 3
Which isn't a terrible idea to be fair. The only issue is that both of the games are already very complex and trying to achieve that level of complexity from stone age to the future while also not giving the player burnout is next to impossible.
Best parts of Civ, Victoria and bit of simcity and stellaris, yes
@JK-qi7pp civ is light side of the complexity spectrum lmao. Vicky is light-medium. Other paradox games are more complex, and there's plenty of games that are much more dense than these.
This sounds like Spiff started making his usual exploit video, but found so many issues that it ended up as a rant/review.
Still enjoyable to watch though, and I did like the comparison to show how broken a mechanic was.
I do take issue with his explanation here though. Not only is the bonus not as strong as he's talking about, but it's actually not even the fastest way to get a feast anyways. Hunting some types of animals is still quicker, and as everybody starts with a scout (who can hunt), everybody has access to this method. I do think Benito is strong for other reasons, but the feast timing snowball isn't it.
Math wise, the reason benito isn't as OP as spiff made it sound is because of how his bonus actually applies. A +150% crafting boost sounds very broken, particularly at the early stages of the game, but it's actually not. The bonus only applies to the crafting production of the Great Hearth itself. What it doesn't effect is the production added by all the input goods that you can spend on a crafting recipe. Because of this, in the comparison, we can see the difference in crafting production between Benito Juarez and Alexander is 129 vs 110. It is a bonus, and a decent one at that, but it's not game breakingly bad. It's also actually a conjunction of 3 different bonuses for Benito Juarez all acting together, rather than just the one, and two of them aren't unique. In addition to the early expert, he also gets +20% to all Crafting Production (this applies only to the building production, like his leader trait), and he has the Stately trait, which can help a bit with early production (this is why he has +1 city production compared to the greeks from the start of the game). While Benito Juarez is certainly a good leader (I'd argue he's in the top 5 for sure, maybe top 3) is he "Unbalanced" or "Game Breakingly Good". The simple answer, the obvious answer, is no. What's more, there are actual exploits in this game that have had to be patched out since release, so this kind of thing is kind of funny to see highlighted, just because some people thought Benito was the strongest leader early on.
You can totally sense that he had high hopes for the game, and I agree, the idea is genius.
The devs totally botched balance, and the fact that he could show how bad it is (that even someone who doesn't play these games can notice) with someone who is not even the most broken character in the game says a lot
@@rovsea-3761 yeah, you are very right and Spif only sounds smart in this video to people who don't actually play the game. To people who play, we're not all that impressed that he can manage to start off strong on normal (4 out of 10) difficulty. And his idea that war is irrelevant is just plain backwards.
@@rovsea-3761 i do also take issue with your explanation as Benito Juarez is in fact broken since he's the best world leader in the entire game by a long shot since he allows the player to be constantly ahead of everyone by a whopping 50% which likes spiff says 'grand strategy games are all about snowballing' because in grand strategy games, if your always in the lead that means you are always going to win be default
Clicked so fast I almost forgot my Yorkshire Tea 👌🏾☕️
I am very disappointed
@@thespiffingbrit And thats "almost" cant imagine the reaction to a coffee drinker :O
@@vesai1 Guess I am glad that coffee gives me terrible mood swings.
better be GOLD yorkshire 😁
0:16 "If you're a major studio working on a brand-new game, just cancel it" Those words are far more true than probably anticipated 🤣🤣🤣
How so?
@@alexandrub8786 aaa games for the last half a decade have been awful with few exceptions
@@honeybadger6275 oh, i thought that Bathesda nnounced that they halted the production of ES6
@@alexandrub8786 Major studios are losing major money on failing games. AAA games are giving AAA loses.
@@alexandrub8786 I wish, at this point I would rather they never make another elder scrolls game.
I will say, as someone who was on the QA team for the game before the game, lack of communication amongst devs and QA team (8 hours a day of dead silence and not socializing... AT ALL, I'm an introvert, but even I need something), and just, how unfun the game was compared to other 4x games I've played.
It shows pretty much ALL the issues I had personally had with the project, and after it's release. I will say
perfectly balanced 10/10 would be vindicated again!
Not calling you a liar, but if you aren t lying, you are taking huge legal risks.
Check your contract, but you are probably under NDA and loyalty bindings...
@@etienne8110 Did they even leak any confidential information though?
@@The_mrbob saying bad things about your company can open them to pursue you for disloyalty.
It s often in worker contracts.
You never read yours? 😅
@@etienne8110 I don’t have an NDA
@@The_mrbob because you re not in the industry.
I actually really enjoyed the pseudo-review format of this one. Good work, Spiff.
@@nitiratp glad you liked it :)
Yeah. Me too.
More videos like this pretty please.
2:30 Well done developers
Well done devs
Well, done devs
Well done developers
Well done devs
Well done developers
The sign of a good reviewer is being able to see that it will appeal to a specific audience even if they don't like it themselves. With that said, if I wanted to play a production game I would play a production game, not a 4X.
oh, when you said "snowballing" that reminded me:
once, when i was playing an older Civilization game, i moved a scout unit into a spot with a "random event" trigger...
and i got an extra SETTLER unit!
effectively giving me a second city on the third turn!
I've had that happen. It was very balanced... except when the AI got it... then I didn't like * cough * it wasn't balanced.
That only happens if you play on lowest difficulty with the same chance as anything else. Otherwise you can't find settler in the village
@@ashemrus That explains why I haven't had that happen in a while... is that for Civ6 or been a thing for previous Civ games?
@@hermanphilips4617 I don't remember if it was the case in civ 1 and didn't play civ 2 much, but in civ 3 -5 it was the thing
@@ashemrus I guess I should step down the one difficulty to experience it again, lol. Hey, maybe I could win on the lowest...
Spiff is the game breaking equivalent of the Lock Picking Lawyer.
@@Clasteau Who does this make Master Lock?
Bethesda
If there's one thing I learnt; it's to send Spiff a copy of my game if I make one, with a basket of Yorkshire Gold, some homemade jam for scones, and a note that reads "Break this in 5 days to deploy Jerome "
As one of the 10%. I am happy you told me about this game. I bought it immediately.
Hope you enjoy it. The Devs are working on a major update that should hopefully iron out a few of the bugs and weird UI choices
@@thespiffingbrit Put in my first hundred turns. Made it to the bronze age after researching everything, currently #1 on Duke difficulty after a +50 prestige bonus from making the book of gilgamesh. Seems they fixed Mexico's start in the 1.06 patch already, I can't force the creation of feasts down to 4 turns, only 5 when starting out. Mexico is still ridiculously strong due to the huge gold per turn bonus early game, which I've been leveraging by gold rushing everything I can.
I'm really enjoying this game. I think it might be more of a hidden gem destined to become a cult classic, as I can see this becoming a very good multiplayer game. (Reminds me of Stellaris in it's early inception.) - at the very least, it's far better than Millennia in that regards.
My only real issues are the janky poor-man's total war movement of units on the world map, not being able to upgrade units, and everything taking an extra turn to take effect despite the pop-up telling me I built something/claimed something/made a book. I couldn't even figure out what the Book of Gilgamesh did until the next turn, and I saw the +50 prestige bonus.
The UI isn't exactly perfect, but it definitely works better than Victoria 3 even today. Honestly, this game just feels like how Victoria 3 should've been. It's really scratching that production management itch. It certainly doesn't replace Civilization 6, but it's definitely more enjoyable to me than Millennia, Endless Legend and Humankind.
Thanks again for introducing me to the game. I seriously didn't even know this was out. The marketers should be ashamed.
@@DairukaSutain the upgrade of units is being taken care of in the next patch. I still haven't bought it, but I will once they iron some of those kinks out. Oh! And the next patch has a real Earth map, so there is that =)
I'm from Mexico and let me tell you... The government doesn't have that kind of money XD What happens is that Benito Juarez is such a legend that the developers had to make him OP 😹 Look for the stuff he did on wikipedia, he was wild!
Just looked him up. Absolute Chad.
The music change at 12:08 really highlighted the descent into micromanagement madness.
The brit is marketing the game just by himself
Spiff does not recommend this game
@thespiffingbrit as marketers say "all attention is good attention" :p
If anything it is a warning to stay way from the game
@thespiffingbrit and people in the civ 7 streams were saying ara is better. The only cool system in the game is the supply chains, and even then, it's not as good as other factory simulator games. Considering civ 7 had a tab for factories in one of the videos when they showcased resources, I feel like maybe the modern age might have some form of production chains of a more simpler resource upgrade system in place.
Maybe we could wait for some bug fixes and patches before we try to discredit the passion of the team that worked on the game. This industry hates developers.
4:20 I feel called out.
Greetings from Berlin ;)
Same!
Hey there! I was a dev on this game, and can offer a bit of insight as to why it turned out...Like *this*. The reason it feels like these mechanics weren't tested...Was because they weren't! The production chains and things were added in the last three-six months by two people who overruled the rest of the design team, which means they didn't get extensive testing in the alphas and betas that players got access to. Instead of buckling down and testing things (like leader traits to make sure they were balanced), the devs were overruled left and right to add in this last minute complete change to mechanics and...Well...Time ran out. Kind of sucks, but glad I got out when I did! 10/10 video, Spiff. Would love to see you dominate as Big Daddy Benito 9000 again...Maybe the game would have been better if we'd gotten money from the Mexican shadow government.
Haha sounds real enough.
Probly won't fly in a bigger tea though
Microsoft stuffed up again… I was looking forward to this when it was announced back in 2022. Correct me if I am wrong, but weren’t the team aiming for a 2023 release. If so… I am highly concerned about the management on the game.
*sniffles* No one appreciated my intentional team typo
@@john63andthe13 Yep, the game was definitely supposed to come out earlier. MUCH earlier. For the first time, I wouldn't blame Microsoft for how this game flopped. Not entirely, anyway. Your concerns are VERY valid.
@@hikari1690 I appreciate you, don't worry.
17:52 as a Dutchman i appreciate this mockery of Belgium, that rebellious province who convinced themselves they are independent.
thank you
Indeed, we can all agree whom the Swamp Germans truly belong to. To the Germans, of course.
How dare you sir, the Dutch are the annoying loud family member. ♥
belgium... why is this a country anyway, they don't even have a language 😂
Also agreed to keep an eye on what was essentially a backdoor into France, but instead they immediately surrendered to the Nazis and threw that door open for them, and then to add insult to injury the French were the ones who ended up saddled with the "surrendered immediately" reputation.
@@ae4164 the fuck did u expect Belgium to do bro,it was the fault of the french to not put the fortifications on the belgium border
I‘m finally on time for a spif video
Fr
And then there are buildings with a national capacity limitation.... which can be bypassed by conquering an enemy city . Perfectly balanced.
Oh yes.. My 4 capital palaces.. good times.
2:58 I had to double check in the most cartoonish way possible that you indeed said EVA PERON, im dying
Lo sé, desopilante
2 and a half minutes of straight sarcasm. Well done.
i am German and I absolutely agree with this man (not even offended in the slightest) he just speaks the truth and nothing else. He also plays perfectly balanced 👍
Is it just me, or is the Union Jack at 18:14 flying upside down? You may have to have your British citizenship revoked Spiff!
@@hoopy_2944 an editor has just been executed
It's a sign of distress
The day Spiff actually finds a perfectly balanced game before getting his chance to play it will be the day hell freezes over. Knowing that, i enjoyed the fun red herring you gave at the beginning and i think they should sponsor you for sharing the game with others 😂 many people in the comments are taking a bite because of your video!
Keep having fun doing what you do. It's good to hear that in your videos and I hope it is translating well into you enjoying non-work life too.
Kinda cliché, but I think the phrase "Can't see the forest for the trees" fits pretty well.
1:55 'Alfer and Beeter test'😂
You know what this game reminds me of?
Does anyone remember that old story about two writing students who were given a collaborative story writing project - a man and a woman ? And the man wrote story beats about a sci-fi war with space ships and chad commanders and the woman wrote about drinking calming tea and meditating but it was the same story so it ended up horribly disjointed and turned into more of a war between the two writers, taking turns ret-con'ng each-others' story beats when it was their turn to add more to the story.
Why would you even write about tea and meditation? What would you even write about that?
Finally, a Game us germans can enjoy and keep on playing, a productivity simulater
The Great City Of Cabimas 14:14
Such a wonderful geography
I played this for 2 weeks in the X-Box-Game-Pass-Trial when it came out.
In additon to the points you brought up, I was frustrated by how bad the AI was at waging war. Like they have more units but they just have half of them idle in cities far away from the front while I kill everything with my doomstack without taking any losses. Because damage is evenly distributed over all troops the winner usually loses nothing and can just heal up afterwards.
The main problem on higher difficulty-levels was not getting eliminted in the first era. Once you survive that it's very difficult to still lose.
The last time I was this early, the sun would never set on the british empire.
And do you know why? Because the sun sets in the west and the British Empire was in the east!
Lol same
It still doesn't due to the islands the UK owns across the world.
Just as I ran out of new things to watch from my subs - BAM!
Thank you.
"Never heard of"? I wanted to comment that I have. I'm German!
Only to then get called out no two minutes later..
BRILLIANT!
When you said in the beginning, that no one heard of this game, I already thought about writing a comment like "We have a pretty big Strategy/Colony Sim community in Germany and that I heard of this game because of the German creators I follow"...and then 4:15 happened xD
I'll now continue watching, keep up the good work and greetings from Germany :D
The thing about Ara is that I don't think it's entirely accurate to say it's a 4x game, I think it's in its own genre separate from games like Civ, Endless Legend, Millennia, etc. All of those games are fundamentally about shepherding an empire through history, everything is measured in terms of how it lets your empire expand its extraction of resources to achieve one of a number of specific, discrete goals. Ara isn't really about managing an empire, but about managing a population. The extractive part of the economy is minimal in contrast to focusing on production chains, there are multiple big eye-catching Standard of Living bars that you try and maximize through everyday amenities, the goal for most of the game is to have competitive prestige; meaning that your lands and people are not a means to achieve a specific end but an end in-and-of themselves, etc.
That's why it's so tragic that they basically didn't advertise the game at all, since in the absence of curated expectations people default to thinking it's a "civ-killer", thereby attracting people who would want no part of it, without attracting the crowd that would enjoy it.
💯
@@nathanharvey8570 Yep, it's definitely not a Civ game. It's much closer to ANNO
The Germany reference slew me, I have some Euro board games made in Germany and this is exactly the kind of person they are made for.
Spiff drops a video right AFTER I finished my tea. I guess it’s time to brew a second cup.
12:00
I'm saving this soundclip for later. Spiff crying out "I CRAVE THE OATS BROTHER." Is just too funny
Belgium - "the Europe's favourite little speed bump" genuinely caught me off guard 😂
0:49 "..and is worked on by veteran civ 4 developers" while the text on screen says Civ 5. Oh Spif, you so silly ;)
I was drinking a beer when this came out. But I needed my Yorkshire tea gold. Turns out tea in beer is surprisingly delicious
You are right
I had absolutely no clue this game existed
Yep. This video is literally the first I'm hearing about it.
For a very good reason its a pile of shit
Ive been loving Ara, love that you made a vid on it :)
When I showed the UI and micromanagement aspects of this game to my friends, only ONE person liked it out of around 12 people. Everyone else got frickin PTSD staring at the supply chains after I told them that you do all that in each little territory.
Micro is cool, just NOT for the average player.
i love the super autistic managing of spreadsheets in Victoria 2.
noone else does.
developers keep forgetting that not everyone is like me.
this game is not micro anymore,
it atomic
i like micro and im dying in act 2
You realize the next step is to hold a grand tournament with your friends to see who's the best Ara: History Untold player
Spiff the type of guy to start a video like “I figured out how to exploit quantum quirks to track your opponent in real time!!”
The AI does not cheat in warfare, at least not in the way SpiffingBrit says. In the game you can combine multiple units into a formation. The unit cap counts towards formations. Spiffing brit is only making formations with a single unit, instead of three units (the "wedge" the AI has has three units in it). So essentially he is handicapping himself by reducing his armed forces to a third, because he isn't creating formations, which I believe are explained in the tutorial.
I have looked in the game files for how difficulty affects the AI bonuses and I didn't see anything affected land forces cap. I have won on the hardest difficulty twice.
Spot on, I have been playing this game for a number of weeks now and SpiffingBrit doesn't even understand the basics of the game, he has a very bare bones knowledge of it. It is click bait at best. Give the game a try on Game Pass, play it and it you don't like it uninstall it, you don't have to buy it outright.
It's probably worth pointing out, in response to the tennis balls at the end of the video, that when Wizkids and Fanpro took over the franchise, the original tabletop game on which the MechWarrior franchise was built, was renamed "Classic BattleTech" and abbreviated to CBT. Given that you're comparing the *other* CBT to an overly-complex turn-based strategy game, that fact feels surprisingly relevant right now xD
That Belgium comment was cold blooded.
Algebra in antiquity is like quantum physics in the Napoleonic era
Enjoying a cup of Yorkshire Tea Gold in a large Swedish glass, accompanied by crystal-clear water. From Poland. 😎
I have spent a decade working in software R&D teams across various fields. I've completed two projects for British companies. You are like a professional QA team packed into one person.👌
Dropped my tea in surprise at this upload
This game feels like something that must be inflicted on Valefisk's 'friends'.
The grain problem in ARA is exactly what Millennium did well, the whole game is about building a civilisation path that thrives in the given environment and there's almost always a way to do that.
You can circumvent this issue with meat or fish.
Just that you have to plan around that if you Spawn without grassyplains and focus the techs for those.
11:20 what I'm hearing is the same problem that HUMANKIND had where everything ultimately revolves around pops as if you don't have pop advantage then you're lacking in literally all fields. Thus pop growth methods are your first second and maybe third priority.
Civ is the exact same way, more pops means more workers which allows you to build building and units faster.
I almost believed Spif for a moment about the game being balanced. Good one.
I actually knew about this one from Potato McWhiskey
Spiffing Brit is the LockPickingLawyer of videogames.
Gut gemacht, Spieleprogrammierer.
I do really like how the tiles are broken up and you can make cool synthesized districts that really specialize in doing one thing really well. It also can lead to some really pretty city layouts.
I do not like unit movement or combat though. I get they used Crusader Kings delayed arrival method, but it just doesn't work the same or feel right in a turn based setting.
The production trees are kinda cool at first, then grow to be a bit much. Ofc it's not nearly as overwhelming as something like the production tree in hoi4 for a new player just getting in.
I like what they were trying to do with this, and I'll be keeping my eye on it.
Gut gemacht, Entwickler
Yay nothing like listening to a new spiff video, while at work
Balanced as all things should be
For me, it's always a red flag when former developers of "beloved game" go to make a competing game in the same genre as the team they quit/were fired from. Far more often than not, they show you exactly why they were let go when that game releases.
0:44 Yeah, that's Microsoft game studios. Both feet are firmly on the brakes at all times over there. Management is obviously doing everything it can to stop their video game studios from producing and selling any video games.
I did INITIALLY suspected that this was sarcastic, but i quickly put that idea away, and just belived that you WERE being genuine! I Will never EVER Make that same mistake again!
2:24 well done developers ..... Hu..?!?
Spiff woke up this morning and chose violence
The best part of this is that Spiff revealed he's played Dominion 6
"Leopold of Birmingham"
Me: "Nice job deve-"
Spiff : "Psyke!"
Me: "Oh...😅"
No marketing? Sounds like civilization beyond earth and we all collectively don't know how it went.
Thanks to you, I have sworn off coffee and now only drink Yorkshire Tea! ☕
Spiff, you got a new microphone? You got that sexy crystal-clear NPR (national public radio) voice now.
What a perfect way to start my Saturday thank u daddy spiff ❤
I was about to say “how is that possible, it’s still Friday” and then my dumb arse remembered that there are other time zones
To be fair. Not marketing a game which only 10% of people will enjoy seems kind of smart!
I don't know why, but when I watch one of your videos, I normally fall asleep. It's relaxing.
Oh yes, Alexander of Macedon, ruler of Greece, starting city Athenai.
I'm glad I haven't heard about this game.
Should have been Pella, surely?
@@carltonleboss Yes as well as Macedon instead of Greece. And we see that inaccuracy every single time when civ or civ-like game is being released. I'm not sure if it's laziness of incompetence on side of developers, but it sure is annoying.
Good timing, I’ve just made a bucket of Yorkshire Tea.
2:27 well done devs.
Ok this is at 2:28, with no idea what's happening in the next 16+ minutes. (though I have several assumptions since it a Spiffing Brit video) Mainly Yorkshire references 🙂🧐
Well Done Developers!!
Well done developers
(I actually like this game)
its like a 200m sprint race everyone equal but you have the starting gun and a long Pinocchio nose to reach the finish line before they knew the race is all ready won and over, like over an hour ago.
I like Ara. Its actually quite addictive.
He's right about the micromanagement. I'm definitely gonna love this game mechanic, but those expecting Civ level management will be overwhelmed.
when will spiff cover an UNbalanced game?
every game is balanced when he shows up, is there even such a thing as an unbalanced game?
Would be funny if he made a video in which he would make the unbalanced game balanced again
Love the warband music in the background
"Well Done Developers!"
I clicked this video and somehow my coffee turned into tea???
Viva la Mexico!