Millennia is a relatively new strategy and 4X game that is currently struggling to keep players engaged in Steam despite a strong start during its official launch.
The game is an innovative reinvention of the genre that seems to mix weird versions of Age of Empires and Civilization 6. In Millennia, historical accuracy is only second to imagination and variety.
Millennia Struggles To Keep Player Engagement
(Photo : C Prompt Games, Paradox Interactive / Screenshot taken from official website)
Instead of putting players into a typical strategy game trajectory, Millennia jumps from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, from the Medieval Era to the Renaissance, and from the Space Race to the endgame.
For example, if a player's public sanitation is not up to par and medical care is left unchecked, they will be thrown into the Age of Plague. If they move forward too much with technological advancements, they might accidentally create sentient machines and enter the Age of Robot Overlords.
All of these unique factors were not enough to support player engagement on Steam, as the game had an admirable 8,382 concurrent players on the platform during its launch. However, that number has since dropped by more than half and the game has recently logged a peak of 3,922 users and a new low of 1,583, according to PCGamesN.
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The game has only around two-thirds of reviews on Steam that are positive, which makes Millennia have a "mixed" rating on the gaming platform. This comes as Cities Skylines 2, despite facing massive criticism over a lot of gameplay and technical issues, still has an average of roughly 7,000+ players every day.
On the other hand, Crusader Kings 3, which was launched in 2020, was recently able to attract 20,000 players. Stellaris, which is now eight years old, was able to record 14,257 players. While Millennia is genuinely struggling to keep players engaged, it is trying to shake up the strategy genre and try something different.
Efforts To Reinvent the Strategy Genre
Millennia urges players to become good at nearly every facet of the game and rewards their efforts with things such as unlockables in the menus. These are tied to several different currencies; government, exploration, warfare, engineering, diplomacy, and arts.
Separately from these, players will need to amass research and culture while trying to found and spread their very own religion. When players fight a lot of battles, they can build up a lot of warfare points, which makes them even more powerful in combat, said Yahoo Movies.
These warfare points can then be spent to reset a unit's movement points that turn or instantly heal them, which encourages players to get into more fights and get more warfare points. While that is all good and Millennia works as intended, that is not always the case.
One issue that players have experienced is that by trying to advance quickly to unlock specific tech from the tree, some that were skipped in earlier eras can be completely unneeded. This can lead to moments where players have dreadnoughts defending their coast but are still only taking advantage of Age 1 warriors equipped with clubs, according to IGN.
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