Ara: History Untold is a blend of 4X and grand strategy which can make for a complicated time. Even if you’re familiar with games like Civilization, you’ll want to read some of these tips and tricks to understand Ara better.
I put together this guide after getting my first win as The Songhai Empire taking around 26 hours to finish it. I blame myself for building a large nation using the Empire government to get a higher city cap. And as such, having a ton of things to do each turn.
Tip 1 – Don’t Underestimate Quality of Life Stats
Ara: History Untold is a complicated game where you can spend countless hours adjusting your economy. One such way is via the Quality of Life stats in every city. There are five that have benefits and negatives depending on how positive they are. The five Quality of Life stats are: Happiness, Health, Knowledge, Prosperity, Security.
Buildings and amenities influence how positive and how negative they are. Depending on how your empire is going, you may want to lean into certain stats more. For example, higher Security strengthens your military in that city. So that can be useful for border cities. Or increase your Happiness to build quicker and have increased harvests.
Tip 2 – Use Supplies and Accelerate Production
Equip buildings with Supplies and accelerate your production to improve your economy. For example, you can equip a Granary with a Wheel to craft Grain Stores quicker. But you can also fill three more slots with Supplies like Ceramic Parts, Rope, and Power. The cool part about Supplies is that they aren’t consumed when used this way.
Crafting buildings have a section specifically for accelerating production. This is tougher since it creates a supply chain where you’ll have upkeep. Using the Granary example, you can use one Rice Grain per turn to speed up production. While the tutorial touches on these topics, I felt they could use more emphasis. One last bit is when you’re in a city, click the top-right tab that says one of the following: Zones, Improvements, Crafters, Harvesters. Swapping to Improvements makes it easier to equip Supplies to many buildings.
Tip 3 – Crafting Stations Don’t Require a Resource to Function
Something I didn’t understand immediately in Ara: History Untold is how certain crafting stations work. For example, I built a Butcher Shop but didn’t have animals to butcher for meat. So I didn’t think I would get anything from it. However, you don’t need animals to start producing Cured Meats.
The only negative is that it will take longer to make them if you don’t accelerate your production. Which you can use animals or wealth to do. Such as Domestic Sheep, Cattle, Venison, etc. If you don’t have the necessary resources available, you can try trading with other nations.
Tip 4 – Picking the Best Place to Settle
Choosing where to settle can be difficult but the game does a decent job of guiding you. When you create a Settler and click the Settle button, it’ll highlight regions and provide info when hovering over them. Better regions are highlighted more heavily. But, you may want to prioritize certain resources or expand toward a nation to gobble up territory first.
Regardless, each region has a Zone, Yield, and Resource rating. Unfortunately, I haven’t noticed a way to enable this view without a Settler. Anyway, the Zone rating is based on how many zones that region has. Yield revolves around available yields like Food, Timber, etc. And Resource is based on resources like Pigs or Gemstones.
Tip 5 – Drill Down on Colored Words For Information
Players familiar with grand strategy games won’t be surprised by this tip and I believe the tutorial touches on it a little. Any time you see a word or number with a different color like yellow, green, red, etc., you can hover over it.
As long as you wait a second after hovering over one, you can hover over another word in that tooltip. This is a good way to learn a lot and find certain buildings too. I love using this when searching for what buildings are consuming a resource or producing it.
Tip 6 – Understanding Military Caps Better
Ara: History Untold’s military system confused me so I know I’m probably not the only one. Early on, you’ll have a low Land Forces Cap that represents how many groups of land units you can deploy. For example, a Land Forces Cap of five means you can deploy five groups. This can be five Legion formations each with four units in them, making up 20 units.
You’ll need to research certain technologies before you can take advantage of new formations to get larger group sizes. But, once you do, you can have a much larger military. I originally thought the cap represented individual units. Such as having five archers for a cap of five. Fortunately, this isn’t the case.
Tip 7 – Disbanding a Unit Doesn’t Undeploy Them
Adding to the confusion is how deploying and disbanding units works. It’s relatively simple but confusing if you’re used to other games. Unlike Civilization, you can’t upgrade a unit to the next tier. As a result, if you want to replace them, you’ll have to disband that group.
This doesn’t put them back into your reserve. Instead, it removes them and you’ll need to recruit new units to deploy. The benefit of disbanding is you’ll no longer need to pay their maintenance fees. These can get aggressive later when dealing with Gunpowder and Fuel. Fortunately, reserve units don’t require maintenance.
Tip 8 – Don’t Worry About Falling Behind in Prestige Early On
Winning and persisting across each act revolves around gaining prestige. You may notice early on that you don’t have a lot and that the AI is jumping ahead. If you’re new to Ara: History Untold, don’t worry, the acts are really long. This means you’ll have plenty of opportunities to make up that gap and survive.
My first playthrough was on the default difficulty of Viscount and I finished significantly ahead of the other nations. While higher difficulties are bound to be more challenging, try not to panic in the early game.
Tip 9 – Take Advantage of the Inventory Tab
The top right of your screen has several useful buttons for managing your empire. One of my favorites is the chest icon that opens your “Inventory”. This shows the net difference between your production and consumption of resources and goods. It’s a useful way to quickly see if you need to tweak your economy.
If you don’t want to click into the Inventory tab, you can also hover over the gold icon or crate icon at the top right too. However, these don’t show the net difference between production and consumption.
Tip 10 – Queue Up Buildings to Save Time
Expect to have turns in the mid to late game where you have over 20 new actions. When it gets crazy especially if you’re like me with a large empire, you’ll want to queue up buildings. This saves time instead of trying to remember what you wanted to do for each city.
With that said, you will have to spend the resources immediately to queue up each building. Even though you can cancel it to get them back. In addition to this, you can also undo any moves you may have done that turn. The tutorial explains briefly how there’s a pointing hand button near the bottom right corner to see your actions/orders.
That’s all there is to this list of tips and tricks for Ara: History Untold. Hopefully you learned something new and are ready to build a successful empire.
Jeff is a journalist with over 10 years of experience writing, streaming, and making content about video games. With an associate degree in journalism, he’s a sucker for RPGs, survival games, roguelikes, and more.