- v2.1 Update Now Available - 11 June 2026
Ara: History Untold v2.1 Update Adds National Crafting Policy System, Now AvailableUpdate addresses the most-requested change since launch by letting players set their empire's crafting priorities at the nation levelView the ChangelogThe v2.1 Update for Ara: History Untold is now out, introducing a new National Crafting Policy System that addresses the most-common piece of player feedback since launch: managing crafting across a large empire took too long. With v2.1, players set their empire's crafting priorities once at the nation level, and every crafter follows the policy automatically. The free update is available now on Steam for all players. Ara: History Untold is a turn-based 4X strategy game where players guide a civilization from antiquity to the modern era. Players build cities, run detailed crafting and production chains, lead armies, and shape their nation's culture and reli…
- v2.1 Update Available in Preview - 18 March 2026
v2.1 Update Available in PreviewA new national crafting system, 27 culture traits, religious verses, and moreView the Changelog The v2.1 preview build is now available on Steam. This update brings a new national crafting system, 27 culture traits, new religious verses, and a handful of balance and stability improvements. National Crafting Policy SystemManaging crafting across a growing empire just got a lot easier. The new national crafting policy system lets you set priority tiers and quota targets for recipes at the nation level. All your crafters will automatically follow the policy, so you no longer need to manage each workshop individually.Individual crafters can still opt out and be managed on their own if you want more control in specific cities. The Improvement Panel now includes a three-mode dropdown (You / Shop Owner / National Policy) so you can quickly see and switch how eac…
- Dev Journal #10: National Production Policy in v2.1 - 29 January 2026
Long time no see! Sorry about that. Happy New Year!The sausage factory behind the scenes means that there are often multiple projects happening simultaneously. The Oxide team is busy working towards having a beta version of their near-future RTS: Ashes of the Singularity II. Do me a favor and wishlist that please! If you like strategy games, especially ones with a strong single player effort, and that focus on strategy instead of click speed, you’ll probably like it.A lot of the Stardock time has been finishing up on the remaster of the fantasy 4X series, Elemental (War of Magic + Fallen Enchantress + Sorcerer King). It’s actually in early access and you can go check that out here: Elemental: Reforged on Steam. If you like Ara and want to imagine what a fantasy version would be like, there you go (except no supply chains).The Good NewsWe talked with Microsoft near the end of the year an…
- 50% Off Ara: History Untold during the Winter Sale - 18 December 2025
50% off Ara: History Untold and DLCAra: History Untold is an evolution in historical grand strategy, featuring beloved classic PC strategy mechanics alongside innovative gameplay like a national crafting economy, true simultaneous turn resolution, a non-linear technology tree, and cloud-backed synchronous/asynchronous multiplayer - all with an expansive and vibrant presentation where you can zoom out from surveying the very edges of your empire all the way down to your citizens living their daily lives. In Ara, there are no pre-set paths to victory, leading to endless possibilities. Your choices will define the world you create, your experience, and your legacy.
- v2.02 Update Now Available - 30 October 2025
The latest update introduces significant balance changes, tooltip improvements, and technical fixes.View the Full Changelog Below The latest update for Ara: History Untold, v2.02 has been released, bringing a variety of adjustments aimed at enhancing gameplay and stability.Culture & Traits UpdatesSeveral Culture Traits have been rebalanced to improve their strategic distinctiveness. Key changes include increased influence for Field Distinction, as well as raised culture bonuses for Victory Parades and Solitary Brilliance. The Celebrated Empire trait has been adjusted, reducing its culture bonus. Other traits, such as Convincing Doctrine and Religious Authority, have seen increases in their Religion Spread Strength. Tooltip improvements have also been made, including fixes for the Celebrated Hardships trait and ensuring that Capital Pride applies correctly.Trade Production Balance Change…
- Ara History Untold 2.0 transforms the historical 4X with culture and influence - 25 September 2025
As the name suggests, Ara: History Untold 2.0 is a full-scale rebirth for the Civ challenger built by Oxide Games and Xbox Game Studios. The 'Revolutions' update is its biggest since launch, incorporating a full culture system with more than 40 unlockable traits. It also overhauls the way leaders and factions work to make each feel more distinct, and introduces some smart ways to strip out much of the busywork of city micromanagement. If you played Ara at launch, it's a great chance to come back, and if you skipped it originally but are looking for a historical alternative to Civ 7, now's the time to try it. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Ara History Untold gets massive 2.0 overhaul, and it's exactly what it needed Underappreciated 4X game Ara History Untold just got a lot better, and harder Underrated 4X game Ara History Untold has a new DLC, perfect for Civ 7 players
- Ara: History Untold's big Revolutions v2.0 update is out now, aims to improve "nearly every area of the game" - 25 September 2025
A year on from its debut, would-be challenger to Civ 's 4X strategy throne Ara: History Untold has gotten what looks like its most substantial overhaul yet. So substantial that its developers are hailing this Revolutions update as the arrival of Ara version 2.0, in the same tone of voice you might use for someone who's gotten a swanky new hairdo. While the base version had a fair few hangups , the Xbox folks who're keen to see Ara stand the test of time have pushed plenty of updates and tweaks for it since then. Current developers Stardock Entertainment and Oxide Games, aimed to wipe out a number of the biggest gripes earlier this year , and this latest update aims for plenty of further refinement. Read more
- v2.0 Revolutions Update Now Available - 24 September 2025
Ara: History Untold - The ambitious historical strategy game celebrates its first anniversary by adding nation specific units, unique leader traits, cultural conquest, AI updates and much more with the v2.0 Revolutions UpdateView Full Changelog Stardock Entertainment and Oxide Games, in partnership with Xbox Game Studios, released Ara: History Untold – Version 2.0 today. The Revolutions Update is a massive expansion of new features and content.Informed by community feedback, the Revolutions Update adds a new Culture and Influence System, gives each nation its own unique unit, gives greater player control while simultaneously reducing micromanagement, improves performance, includes a major AI revamp and much more.Key Features of the Revolutions Update:Culture & Influence Systems – Cities gain a new quality of life category called Culture. Culture generates Influence, a new currency used…
- Dev Journal #9: A Guided Tour of the v2.0 Revolutions Update - 24 September 2025
Welcome BackFirst, apologies for breaking save games. We even had to break the Preview save games to add the new map generation system for 2.0!Second, wow! I hope you guys like what we’ve done here. Since the original Sid Meier’s Civilization was first released in 1991, there have only been a handful of strategy games that have attempted to take the player through all of human history. It’s hard. I bet you, reading this right now, know something of this. Ara: History Untold not only shows off how military technology progresses, but also how the quality of life of people changed based on what Goods were developed over time.It was how Goods were produced in this game that was both its biggest differentiator as well as its most polarizing feature. Specifically, the user interface for controlling the crafting of goods involved a great deal of micromanagement. Addressing this was our top pri…
- Dev Journal #8: Quotas & Priorities - 18 September 2025
Version 2.0 keeps players in control without the overwhelming micromanagement.The crafting queue is gone.The crafting quotas and priorities system is in.It is very straightforward:Set how much of a thing you wantDecide what priority it has, if any, of the things the crafter can build.There is no step 3.This lets you set your nation up as a well-oiled machine. Once you set it up, you will never be interrupted with a “crafter idle” message again because they are never idle – unless you want them to be due to having enough of whatever item they were crafting and you want those resources to go elsewhere.Let’s take a look:Crafting at the city levelHere we have a weaver. This is one of the more complicated supply chains in the game and yet now, it’s just so obvious and simple once you get past the excessively gridded looking UI.So here I always want to have 25 rope in my nation. That’s becaus…
- Dev Journal #7: Culture & Influence - 11 September 2025
Culture & Influence in HistorySoft Power. Strategy games favor focusing on warfare, but culture and influence have mattered far more in shaping the world. While this may seem, to some, to be a change in the post-World War II era, it has been true going all the way back to the Bronze Age: culture and influence matter.Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson made cultural influence a major focus of Civ IV, forever changing 4X strategy games. In fact, when we teamed up to make Offworld Trading Company, we wanted to make a game in which you had to achieve your ends using what amounts to culture and influence.Now, when Ara: History Untold shipped, it included a religion feature. The goal, successfully achieved or not, was to use it as a means to get more prestige. As a player, I want multiple game mechanics to choose from to achieve my strategic objectives. When they put me in charge of A…
- Ara History Untold gets massive 2.0 overhaul, and it's exactly what it needed - 10 September 2025
Last year, Ara: History Untold came out, providing a new entry to the historical strategy genre. In the time since, similar projects have also launched, Civilization 7 most noteworthy among them, and Ara has seemed to come and go without garnering much fanfare. With Civilization 7 a bit of a disappointment and games like Europa Universalis 5 still a little way off, Ara looks to be in a good position to capture new attention with the announcement of its massive, wide-ranging 2.0 update, Revolutions. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Underappreciated 4X game Ara History Untold just got a lot better, and harder Underrated 4X game Ara History Untold has a new DLC, perfect for Civ 7 players If Civilization 7 let you down, underrated 4X game Ara is getting a big overhaul
- v2.0 Revolutions Update Coming September 24th - 10 September 2025
Ara: History Untold v2.0 Revolutions Update Expands Historical Strategy Through Culture and InfluenceAmbitious historical strategy game prepares for first anniversary by adding nation specific units, unique leader traits, cultural conquest, AI updates and much moreStardock Entertainment and Oxide Games, in partnership with Xbox Game Studios, announced Ara: History Untold – Version 2.0 today. Dubbed the Revolutions Update, version 2.0 is a massive expansion of new features and content.Informed by community feedback, the Revolutions Update adds a new Culture and Influence System, gives each nation its own unique unit, gives greater player control while simultaneously reducing micromanagement, improves performance, includes a major AI revamp and much more.Key Features:Culture & Influence Systems: Cities gain a new quality of life category called Culture. Culture generates Influence, a new…
- Dev Journal #6: The Great AI Awakening - 4 September 2025
The Truth about AI in PC Strategy GamesMultiplayer will not save your game.Strategy games must have computer opponents as a first-class game mode. They aren’t there to be “practice bots”. Even in games that are allegedly “multiplayer-centric”, fewer than 20% of players will press the multiplayer button, let alone actually play it.Yet many strategy games just handwave, putting in interesting computer opponents. You, reading this, know the folly of that, and yet they still do it. Why?There are two main reasons why computer strategy games tend to have bad computer opponents:The game design kept changing until the 11th hour, making it impossible for the engineers to have the time to write a competent computer opponent.The engineers making the computer opponents are not necessarily great strategy game players.Ara: History Untold shipped with pretty decent computer opponents, for the first ac…
- Dev Journal #5: The Great Differentiation - 28 August 2025
How do you make nations more unique?When we began discussing Ara: History Untold 2.0, we asked: how do you make 40 different civilizations feel genuinely unique while maintaining strategic balance?The answer went deeper than a few superficial differences. We discovered that giving players ways to leverage systems and explore new tactics yielded the most rewarding experiences. Distinctive traits and unique units give Nations personality and don’t just challenge the player to find new routes to victory, but to be on the lookout for their opponents' approaches.This journal documents our journey through the systematic overhaul that transformed Ara from a game where Nations were largely cosmetic variants into a rich tapestry of truly distinct playstyles and historical authenticity. This effort became the single largest content expansion in Ara’s development history, and it’s part of a FREE u…
- Dev Journal #4: UI Enhancements in v2.0 - 21 August 2025
I’m a UI guy. Most of my work over the years has been on software such as Fences, Start11, WindowBlinds, IconPackager, and countless other programs designed to improve the Windows experience.On Ara: History Untold, one of the first things we noticed was that the text and icons were blurry. Not a lot, but just enough to feel like an itch you couldn’t scratch. In fact, the entire UI carried that slight fuzziness. The cause was the game rendering at 720p under the hood and then scaling up to whatever resolution you were actually running. There are valid reasons to do this, but the tradeoff was the blur I just described.For 2.0, we did a deep dive into the UI rendering system so that text and icons now render at the screen’s native resolution. Here’s a look at before (v1.41) and after (2.0 preview): What it means for playersMany of us, and yes, statistically, you grew up playing the Civiliz…
- v1.41 Now Available - 19 August 2025
The latest update for Ara: History Untold, v1.41, builds on the positive reception of the previous patch by introducing several quality of life improvements aimed at enhancing gameplay and usability. Full ChangelogGameplay and Balance UpdatesOne of the most significant enhancements in this update is the ability to upgrade undeployed units directly from the Create Army screen. This streamlines the process of preparing your forces for battle, allowing for quicker strategic adjustments.In terms of city management, players will notice that siege units now capture cities four times faster, while cavalry units have been adjusted to conquer cities five times slower. Additionally, cities reaching Level 10 will gain an extra amenity slot, providing more options for managing city happiness and growth. Notably, nations will now receive an additional army when a city reaches Level 2, a change from…
- Dev Journal #3: What's Next for Ara: History Untold? - 28 July 2025
Ara: What’s Next?Last month’s release of Version 1.4 seemed to be well received. It marked the first update since we assumed responsibility for Ara: History Untold so we were pretty excited and nervous. It’s been a great experience! The teams at Oxide and Microsoft have been wonderful to work with and now we’re ready to start talking about what’s next.Who are you?You probably don’t know me but I know you. Or at least, I’d like to think I do because in real life, I suspect we’ve have a blast chatting about the history of these kinds of games. You probably liked Alpha Centauri. You probably could debate the merits of Civilization IV vs. V vs. VI. You may even be a player of Humankind and Millenium and Old World. And of course there’s Stellaris, Crusader Kings, Sins of a Solar Empire, Colonization, Master of Orion, etc. And all of these games bring different things to the genre. In a previ…
- Major v1.4 Living Strategy Update Now Available - 18 June 2025
Version 1.4 "The Living Strategy Update" Adds a new Living Strategy game view, improves AI, reduces micromanagementView the Full Changelog Now Get Ara: History Untold for 50% Off! Stardock Entertainment and Oxide Games, in partnership with Xbox Game Studios, today announced the release of a major update to their ambitious new turn-based strategy game, Ara: History Untold today. This update marks the first significant content release for the title since Stardock assumed direct oversight of the game's ongoing production last month. Titled the "Living Strategy Update," version 1.4 has been developed based directly upon months of extensive community feedback and introduces a substantial array of new features, gameplay enhancements, and quality-of-life improvements. Key new features of Ara: History Untold version 1.4 include: Living Strategy View: Now the primary default gameplay viewpoint,…
- Untold Scenarios DLC Now Available - 18 June 2025
New DLC pack includes unique Scenario play that features both historical and alternative history settings for more event-driven strategic challenges https://store.steampowered.com/app/3495280/Ara_History_Untold__Untold_Scenarios/Stardock Entertainment and Oxide Games, in partnership with Xbox Game Studios, today announced the release of the Untold Scenarios DLC for the historical strategy game Ara: History Untold. Untold Scenarios includes several different situations to choose from, which place you right in the center of critical moments in human history as well as some hypothetical “what-if” scenarios that explore interesting alternative historical settings! Key features of Ara: History Untold - Untold Scenarios include:Historical Scenarios: Players will experience detailed recreations of significant historical periods, such as the Bronze Age Collapse, the Clash of Hemispheres, and Eu…
