Millennia review

What is it? A Civ-like with a new spin on nations and victory conditions.

Expect to pay £35/$40

Developer C Prompt Games

Publisher Paradox Interactive

Reviewed on i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB, Windows 10

Steam Deck Unsupported

Link Official site

The thing about plagues is that they tend to catch everyone off guard. That was certainly the case when I triggered a plague age in Millennia, decimating the Roman Empire's population and prompting a hurried examination of the sanitation buildings in all my cities' construction menus. But since these undesirable ages are triggered by the accumulation of chaos and unrest in the first place, it wasn't as though my Roman empire was in great shape before the coughing started. 

I'd been fighting off copious barbarians for so long that unrest had been growing across all my regions. So much so that I inadvertently triggered a chaos event: a rebellion, which spawned pikemen and cavalry units next to every regional capital. That meant I had to commit even further to channelling all my resources into a military offensive on several fronts, which raised unrest even more, until the plague doctors arrived and my population dropped by a third. An absolutely brutal sequence of events which, in equal measure, earned my begrudging respect for the game and made me want to delete it immediately. 

Millennia is, as you'll have noticed, quite a lot like Civilization. Like Amplitude's Humankind, it promises an enticing shakeup of the decades-old formula and offers a fresh spin in particular on how nations work, how eras are ushered in, and how you achieve victory. 

And on paper, that's very seductive. For anyone who's lost hundreds of hours to Firaxis campaigns over the years, there's certainly a justification for an outsider to turn up and remix Civ's tenets. The tiresome combat, the way the late game silts up as you watch numerous units complete their boring, pointless moves from hither to thither, the same, well-worn victory strategies we've