The strategy game Millennia was released on March 26 on Steam. MeinMMO author Schuhmann has spent countless games with the 4x game and is enthusiastic. But he also says: With all due love, the ending is a joke. After 10 hours of world conquest, there’s a tired screen. Seriously?
What kind of game is this?
- Millennia is something like Civilization, but you can only own and directly control a limited number of cities, perhaps six to eight. However, these cities can span a vast area and continue to grow even after many hours of gameplay.
- Therefore, it is important where you position the cities and that you have enough space to expand them over 6,000 years.
- Different ages, which sometimes appear and sometimes don’t, provide variety in gameplay. At times, you gain skills that you have always wished for in strategy games: You can build sandbanks where there is only water or flatten mountains. Areas that were previously useless suddenly become valuable after thousands of years.
Millennia has a great learning curve and brilliant ideas
Why do I like the game so much? I was immediately captivated by Millennia from the start, and the fascination has only grown over the past three weeks as I understand the game more.
Because this is not Civilization, not even close, but a city-building simulation, where you have to eliminate neighboring peoples or at least lock them out of your territories so that their little villages do not ruin your plans for massive metropolises that span entire continents.
Millennia has an incredibly satisfying learning curve and is coherent in itself. It even holds pleasant surprises. In each age, new challenges await the player: constantly, the citizens want more, first food and houses, then sanitation, electricity, a religion, and finally even access to the Internet.
It is worth thinking logically and building production chains: Cities have natural tendencies to grow in one direction or another depending on their surroundings. Where there is a lot of forest, you can deforest it and produce paper. Perhaps here the religious or intellectual center of an empire arises. A mining city can extract ore, perhaps becoming the Ruhr area of your own empire.
Meanwhile, standard strategies from other games, such as unrestrained growth or ruthless conquest, come with some pitfalls, as those who grow too quickly will awaken desires in the populace that they cannot fulfill. Those who conquer too much without securing it will quickly have a revolution on their hands.
Whenever you neglect an aspect of the game, it comes back to bite you.
This gives me the thrill: Despite mediocre Steam reviews, I enjoy Millennia very much because I accept the limitations of the game:
- Millennia would be much easier if you could simply demolish conquered cities of enemies to make room for your own cities – but this is not possible; you have to build around the existing enemy cities.
- Millennia would also be much easier if you could take over all conquered cities and control them yourself – but that is not possible either; you are limited to relatively few cities.
This is criticized in the reviews on Steam; it annoyed me at first as well, but by now I have accepted it as a necessary limitation of the game. They make the charm of Millennia.
Complaining about it is about as reasonable as getting upset that the pawn in chess can only take opposing pieces diagonally and can’t just clear away pieces in front of him.
How do the games end? That is the point I cannot forgive Millennia, no matter how hard I try.
Although there are several ways to end a game. After 127 hours with the Steam version, I have found two of the standard endings; either you lead your people to transcendence, which is quite easy, or you painstakingly build a colony ship to Mars before the evil Germans do.
But no matter how you end the game: After an epic game of 10 hours, you get a single dull victory screen, with the message “You have won,” without any statistics, fanfare, videos, or anything.
And then it’s back to the main menu, where you are expected to start the next game, as the game makes clear.
If anyone thinks that “View Map” offers anything exciting for the player, they must be disappointed. You are only allowed to scroll over the map ineffectively and almost in slow motion, admiring the game’s weak point, the graphics.
For all the love and charm that I can find in the unpolished and unfinished game mechanics, the few hours of work to give Millennia a somewhat appropriate ending should indeed have been possible.
Thus, even I, who is utmost positively inclined towards the game, suspect that Millennia should have stayed in development for at least another six months.
You can read my impression of Millennia after the first days here:
I am obsessed with a new game on Steam: I’ve already sunk 40 hours in 4 days
