Millennia

A new 4X with Paradox’s backing, but is this Civ-like too Civ-like?

PREVIEW Millennia

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE TBC

DEVELOPER C Prompt

PUBLISHER Paradox Interactive

LINK shorturl.at/lK135

Historyis littered with defeated Civilization-likes, from Humankind to GalCiv 4. Try as they might, no one’s knocked old Sid Meier off his perch just yet, even six games in and 27 years on. But that doesn’t mean devs will stop trying. Enter Millennia, a new 4X strategy game from C Prompt published by Paradox Interactive.

For big chunks of Millennia’s demo, I didn’t necessarily need the tutorial tips. On a micro level, plenty of what you’ll find works just like it does in Civ. You’ve got your cities, your settlers, your major competitors and the minor, single-city bit-players you’re competing for influence over. You’ll fend off barbarians and rush for space and resources in the early game, send scouts to explore the frontier, and set workers to improve the resource tiles that surround your cities. That’s not to say everything feels like

Civ. Combat feels a bit more involved, with step-by-step breakdowns of battles cropping up after you conclude them so you can delve into the detail of how you won or lost your fights. Plus, Millennia has done the smart thing and taken one of the best parts of its fellow Civ-like Old World. If you don’t like a move you just made, you can click the undo button to roll it back. That means you can see exactly how you lost a fight before rolling back a ways to try to rectify your mistake.

ITS ECONOMIC SIMULATION SOUNDS MORE ROBUST THAN THAT OF MANY OF ITS PEERS

C Prompt told me that, since the devs know players are going to save scum their way around mistakes anyway, it made sense to just make it a part of the actual game. When I launched an ill-fated attack against a Roman city, I was able to roll it back as if nothing had happened.

NEW AGE MOVEMENT

It’s on the macro level that Millennia’s unique ambitions and ideas come to the fore. In my demo, C Prompt set me up in early Japan. I had one city which had been mismanaged to the point that it had become a cesspit. Although its various other scores were in the green, sanitation was wa