“A Civ-like with neat ideas, but half-formed fundamentals and messy execution make your decisions feel less than impactful,” wrote contributor Ian Boudreau in our Millennia review from March 2024. Sounds like the kind of thing updates might fix, but alack, there shall be no more. Paradox have announced that the 4X strategy Civ-like’s eighth patch, out now, will be its last.
“With this patch, we are sadly coming to the end of an age,” reads a Steam blog post from former Paradox Interactive community manager Katten. “This will be the final patch for Millennia, thanks to C Prompt for their work and support of this game. We at Paradox will no longer be active on community platforms for Millennia, but you can continue counting on us for support needs, and the game will remain available to play indefinitely.”
You can read the full patch notes here. I wouldn’t say it’s going out with a whimper, but this definitely isn’t a bang. The update spans some general fixes for stuff like borked unit healing and visual errors, together with fixes for localisation. They’ve also added mod support for custom Age Paintings, and made modded Action Cards more consistent when loading save games.
I’m not a Millennia player, but I don’t think there’s anything on offer there that magically makes the game essential. The recent Steam user reviews are mostly disappointed faces, but Millennia does have a few defenders.
In our review, Ian was both enticed and frustrated by the game’s branching alternate-history format, which lets you unlock wacky epochs such as steampunk and aquatic ages by researching the right techs. This sits alongside more familiar 4X anachronisms, such as kingdoms making it all the way to the Renaissance without discovering horse-riding. I love the sound of it all, but as Ian explains, the system’s drawback is that only one player can unlock the next age for all of other players, so if you pile research into a particular Age and somebody beats you to the punch, you’re screwed.
It should be a source of hectic competition, with sessions kept lively by the pressure to switch approaches when somebody rudely initiates the Age of Beehive Hairstyles or whatever, but in practice, it just seems to have annoyed a lot of people. Though possibly not as much as some more pervasive issues with the UI and graphics, or core systems such as diplomacy.
Millennia launched before Civilization 7 – also rather a divisive game, with age mechanics redolent of Humankind. Seems like doing age progression better has been on the minds of a lot of 4X designers lately. If you’re looking for a new empire builder to sponge up the leisure hours/keep you from your annoying family, maybe try Endless Legend 2, which recently entered early access. There’s also Ara: History Untold, which recently received one of those bombastic 2.0 updates.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
