A lot of games have been attempting to get a bite of Civilization’s vast audience in recent years, such as Old World and Humankind. The next to try is Paradox’s Millennia, which covers 10,000 years via a historical 4X. Although, as a new trailer shows, history might include battling alien invasions or rogue AIs.
It also now has a release date: March 26th.
Millennia – Official Pre-Purchase Trailer
Most historical games are some form of alternate history, because it’s not like Gandhi actually launched any nukes at anyone, but I like that Millennia is introducing wildcard what-if scenarios.
The aliens, or technologies like zeppelins and steampunk machinery, are delivered via the different ages the game’s timeline splits into, and different ages will appear in different playthroughs. The most exciting line in the trailer above is: “You could go into a crisis age, like the Age Of Blood, and immediately see an impact all across the map.” Sounds awful, I love it.
Katharine got to play Millennia in September last year, in which she encountered some of these crisis ages herself by triggering the Age Of Plague.
“In this case, my region (and title city) of Kyoto had been neglecting its sanitation for a long time, presumably because we were too busy fending off my hostile Roman and Barbarian neighbours. Alas, I only just about got there by the time by demo ended, so I didn’t get to see exactly what effects I’d have to deal with, but other crises include the altogether more apocalyptic-sounding Age Of Floods, [designer Ben Friedman] tells me, or the (possibly) more light-hearted sounding Age of Luddites, where technology has been rejected by your people. Thankfully, these Crisis Ages aren’t permanent. You can work to get out of them and into a newer, brighter kind of age, and you’ll receive several warnings that things are starting to go off the rails long before your crisis kicks off in earnest.”
Oddly, Millennia’s new release date of March 26th was originally going to be the day we were sentenced to Paradox’s coming management sim Prison Architect 2. It was delayed into May yesterday.
