Old World Experiences...

[ZedClampet]

Now that Old World is out of Epic jail, I picked up the game last night and have played it a few hours today. It's still very early, and my brain is fried, but it's certainly a sharp game that most closely resembles Civilization but has a bit of Crusader Kings in it too.

I'm not going to get into too much detail yet because I bailed on the soul crushing tutorial about 60 percent of the way through, and am at the very early stages of my first campaign. I don't even know what the victory conditions are. But there were a few things that I liked.

I liked, for instance, that when you start to build a wonder, it becomes yours. No one else can beat you to it. All you have to do is start building it first. In Civilization, you could be 40 turns into building something and suddenly find out someone else finished it and you get nothing.

And I think I like the card system for researching technologies, but I still have to play it some more. Basically, in Civilization 5, the only one I've played, each technology led to specific other technologies and so on. And after I figured out what led where, I had a blueprint for the technology victory that I could follow every game if I wanted to. In this game, techs are randomized. They still make chronological sense, but you can't predict what will lead to what. You kind of just have to decide what you want right now and deal with the future later. I kind of think that will keep replays more fresh.

I was in the middle of my first war when I decided to take a break, but the combat seems to be exactly like Civilization, which means kind of boring. I would love to see one of these games implement a system similar to a good turn-based RPG.

I don't have a good handle on the court stuff yet. All I know is that my wife is listed with the Debauchery and Schemer traits; so, you know, good and bad. And my children are a mess. I keep changing who my heir is. I might just adopt someone sane if that becomes an option. My leader has been on his death bed 3 times and had a miraculous recovery each time, but he's getting old, and I'm going to be playing a lunatic soon enough.

 

[Zloth]

Ummm, did you mean to put this here:

4X Old World—player experiences

Anyone played Old World… https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p/old-world …released on Epic last May? How is it? Old World is from Soren Johnson, lead designer of Civilization 4 and Offworld Trading Company, so it's certainly got good pedigree. With a high score of 82 from both reviewers and...

forums.pcgamer.com

I liked, for instance, that when you start to build a wonder, it becomes yours. No one else can beat you to it. All you have to do is start building it first. In Civilization, you could be 40 turns into building something and suddenly find out someone else finished it and you get nothing.

I think Civ started giving you all (most?) of the materials you put into building the wonder back to you some time ago.

Is there a way to stop building a wonder in favor of something else? Seems like you could start building The Great Pyramids, then switch production to granaries and farms until you were ready to really build the pyramids.

I would love to see one of these games implement a system similar to a good turn-based RPG.

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[Brian Boru]

What did you think of the 'Orders' system, where there's a cap on your moves every turn—but you can spend multiple moves on 1-2 units if you prefer? That caught my interest, especially for reducing late-game tedium—who needs 1 turn taking 5 minutes?

In Civilization, you could be 40 turns into building something and suddenly find out someone else finished it and you get nothing

In Civ 4&5 you get a lot back, gold in 4, I think same in 5—but it's production you get back in Civ6, haven't checked if it's 100%. It's a Deity strategy in 4 to start building wonders, knowing you'll never get to finish, to build up a pot of gold to upgrade a bunch of your troops later.

techs are randomized

Oh I like the sound of that. The optimal 'beeline' tactics do get old after a while.

my wife is listed with the Debauchery and Schemer traits; so, you know, good and bad

Just curious, which of those is good/bad?

you could start building The Great Pyramids, then switch production to granaries and farms until you were ready to really build the pyramids

That would break the game—tech like mad, reserve all the good wonders…

 

[ZedClampet]

Ummm, did you mean to put this here:

4X Old World—player experiences

Anyone played Old World… https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p/old-world …released on Epic last May? How is it? Old World is from Soren Johnson, lead designer of Civilization 4 and Offworld Trading Company, so it's certainly got good pedigree. With a high score of 82 from both reviewers and...

forums.pcgamer.com

Hmm. That didn't come up in the possibly related topics. I should have just manually searched for it.

I think Civ started giving you all (most?) of the materials you put into building the wonder back to you some time ago.

And also @Brian Boru

Yeah, I'm sure you all are correct. You're both going to think this is odd, but I played 231 hours of Civ 5 in Steam. Played most of the games on the highest difficulty, never lost, and never paid that much attention to resources. I mean, obviously I paid some attention, but I was obsessed with time. I only paid attention to resources as they related to various facets of time. So when I had a project get canceled many turns in, to me it was a disaster. For that reason, I didn't really build the wonders.

Is there a way to stop building a wonder in favor of something else? Seems like you could start building The Great Pyramids, then switch production to granaries and farms until you were ready to really build the pyramids.

Yes, you can stop building the pyramids, but I don't think the AI would wait on you to come back around to it. That's the sort of cheese that isn't usually missed by developers.

 

[ZedClampet]

What did you think of the 'Orders' system, where there's a cap on your moves every turn—but you can spend multiple moves on 1-2 units if you prefer? That caught my interest, especially for reducing late-game tedium—who needs 1 turn taking 5 minutes?

They get tired and refuse to move anymore, so there is a character move limit. Honestly, orders messed me up a few times. I have a tendency in other games, like Total War or even Civ, to set a unit to move far beyond where they are capable of moving so that I don't have to deal with moving them a little bit each turn. When I did that here, it ate up most of my moves for all of my characters that year. So I had to keep reminding myself not to do that.

There were a couple of situations where orders came in handy, but I'm still early game and the traveling is pretty easy.

 

[Brian Boru]

set a unit to move far beyond where they are capable of moving so that I don't have to deal with moving them a little bit each turn. When I did that here, it ate up most of my moves

Ack—I do the same multi-move, so that's an issue.

How does it roughly compare to having one move per unit? I assume not much difference early on, starts to bite when you have a good few built up.

 

[ZedClampet]

Ack—I do the same multi-move, so that's an issue.

How does it roughly compare to having one move per unit? I assume not much difference early on, starts to bite when you have a good few built up.

You keep getting more and more orders, but I can't tell you exactly how that works. I'll look it up next time I play. I had two scouts, 6 workers and 5 military units, and I didn't even notice it most of the time. My military units were stationary most turns, and my workers were never far from their next assignments. I did burn all my orders a couple of times moving my military to intercept enemy units. Oh, my scouts were on auto-pilot, and I don't think that movement counted. I'm about to get ships, which will be interesting since they tend to move farther anyway.

I'm going to have to pay more attention to more things in this game than I did in Civ 5, which is awesome. Civ 5 was far too predictable and easy. I got away with ignoring 70 percent of the game. I just mean the AI. If I had played against people they'd have killed me, but I'm just a vs. computer kind of guy :}

 

[Brian Boru]

Thanks for that

I'll look it up next time

In your own time, I won't be playing anytime soon.

 

[ZedClampet]

One thing that is bothering me a little bit is that I think Civ's maps, once you start building, are easier to quickly get a visual handle on. Maybe it's because I just stared playing

Thanks for that
In your own time, I won't be playing anytime soon.

Okay, so my son only had a half day of school today, and he wanted to play a co-op game of Old World. Just as a quick note on co-op, apparently you don't get to play the Crusader Kings portion of the game in multiplayer. But back to my point, which is orders. I still couldn't find any concrete info in-game on orders. I googled it and there's a long video someone made. I'm not in the mood for that at the moment. So I still don't have the answer, but I do know one thing. We are 40 percent through the game. I have tons of resources, etc. so I feel like I'm doing okay, and I went to war with a large city state that had about 10 cities, and I absolutely do not have enough orders (at my current skill level) to both conduct this war and do anything else. My workers have been sitting idle for about 15 turns now. The only thing I have forced myself to do during this time is to create settlers and get them to the destroyed cities to take them over (you only have so many turns to do that). But the people I'm fighting stretch from my southeastern border to my northwestern border, and it's just been a logistical nightmare. But I'm getting better at it.

My idle workers aren't that big of a deal because I was blitzing the world with workers before this war started, and I'm in decent shape, but it's been tough. Every turn I have to make very difficult decisions on which units to move, and some have, at times, simply sat idle and took damage. And units can only heal in friendly territory, so you have a lot to think about there. How far do you move them towards home? Do you just try to get them out of range? Damaged units retreating means other units may struggle to do anything useful this turn. It's tough.

And I completely love it. There's so much to think about. So much strategy involved. It's fantastic.

 

[ZedClampet]

I played a little of Old World today, very little, and got a little frustrated with it. Because the game expects you to keep expanding ever outward, I basically had no choice but to go to war. The city-states expand just as much as you do, and they were all around me. I could have hunkered down, but to what purpose? Hunkering down doesn't help you win. So I went to war and cranked out military units, settlers and workers like mad.

But as that particular war was ending, and I was deciding who to attack next, the game just started feeling a bit like a slog. I had maybe 18 military units and maybe about the same in workers. I had a bunch of cities, not sure how many. I had the option to automate the workers, but that seemed like a bad idea to me, and I had the option to put the military units into a sort of holding pattern, but I was constantly mobilizing to intercept raiders who could come from any direction. So every turn I was moving 30-something units and choosing what to build in at least 3 or 4 cities.

When you combine the above with my nebulous understanding of the victory conditions (the game doesn't have definitions for all the terms it uses), it got a little stressful.

But I do have to admit that my king's son being Alexander the Great is pretty cool. In Civ5 Alexander was sort of an unfortunate caricature. I always included him in my custom games even though he annoyed me with his petty taunting. I rarely built much military until about the 60 percent mark of the game, and it drove him crazy that I was so weak.

 

[Brian Boru]

raiders who could come from any direction

Is that someone you were still at war with, or more like Civ's barbs?

game just started feeling a bit like a slog

Yeah, that's the bane of 4X past mid-game. Maybe when objectives are clearer, it'll be better—let's hope.

 

[ZedClampet]

Is that someone you were still at war with, or more like Civ's barbs?

It's barbarians. The game just calls them raiders when they enter your territory. I've destroyed all the barbarian camps I can get to. I don't know where they are coming from at this point, but I'd have to cross someone else's boundaries to find them.

To make matters worse, I'm having bad luck with the technology card system. You need 4 laws to be able to build a stronghold, which gives you access to better units. Laws come from particular technologies. I check each technology to see if it will give me a law before I make my selection, but so far I only have 2 out of 4. Everyone's units are more powerful than mine, so I have to have twice as many units.

The last raiders that showed up had two units of elite horsemen. I can't even make horsemen yet. I had to send 6 units to get rid of them. That uses a lot of orders.

I'm kind of afraid to go to war again because everyone else seems to have crossed that threshold now, but I probably won't have a choice. The AI is sort of psychotic. I'm at war with a couple of factions, but I don't know where they are. The new faction to my north declared war on me, but changed its mind without ever attacking, so I have a peace treaty with them. I don't know if that lasts a certain amount of time or not.

As of now, I finally understand all the victory conditions, but I don't have a feel for what needs to be done to really achieve them.

Yeah, that's the bane of 4X past mid-game. Maybe when objectives are clearer, it'll be better—let's hope.

I'm not as irritated at it this morning as I was yesterday. I looked up the terms I needed to figure out the victory conditions.

UGH. I just glanced through my other posts and realized that sometimes I'm talking about my co-op game and sometimes I'm talking about my solo game, and I'm not making any differentiations between the two.

They are both playing out the same way though. I've just finished my first major war in both. My country is a mess in both. I'm being crowded out by city-states in both. Barbarians/raiders are a constant nuisance in both. Etc.

 

[Zloth]

Is there a way to start the game with a large'ish map but few opponents? I often go well under the recommended player count just so I can expand for a longer period of time before I have to start dealing with others.

 

[ZedClampet]

Is there a way to start the game with a large'ish map but few opponents? I often go well under the recommended player count just so I can expand for a longer period of time before I have to start dealing with others.

Probably is an option to do that. I just left everything as is, but I'll definitely check that next time.

 

[Brian Boru]

The last raiders that showed up had two units of elite horsemen. I can't even make horsemen yet. I had to send 6 units to get rid of them. That uses a lot of orders.

I've had that with Civ6's barbs too, showing up with units better than anything I could build. That was in my early 'Where am I, what's happening?' games—now I beeline knocking out their camps asap.

You like to dive in, so maybe reroll and knock the difficulty down a notch for next few learning games.

I like to try and learn one system with each mini-game—50-100 turns. Economy this one, military next, city growth next etc. Then up difficulty to around Normal and explore the mid game. But of course I'm approaching it as a potential game I'll play for many years, so early piecemeal learning suits me.

 

[ZedClampet]

You know, I never looked up the score until just a few minutes ago, but I actually have 50 percent more victory points than the next closest civilization. That makes my decision easier. I'm declaring victory and starting over. The reason is because I absolutely hate where I am on the map. I'm completely land-locked and to my south is this incredibly large desert that isn't good for anything. Next game I'm going to pay more attention to how I'm situated before I get too far in.

One kind of odd thing is that I got an achievement a few days ago for having 5 developing cities. Only 12 percent of players have that achievement. Either lots of people who bought the game aren't actually playing it, or people aren't generally expanding as much as I am because I've continued expanding my number of cities pretty aggressively since then. But, anyway, I can't decide why only 12 percent have 5 or more cities. Someone isn't doing it right, probably me.

 

[Brian Boru]

this incredibly large desert that isn't good for anything

There might be a setting in the map selection. Civ6 has Arid, Standard, and Wet—I think it's 'Rainfall' setting. I changed that to Wet after a few starts, much less desert now.

 

[ZedClampet]

There might be a setting in the map selection. Civ6 has Arid, Standard, and Wet—I think it's 'Rainfall' setting. I changed that to Wet after a few starts, much less desert now.

Yep, I saw that setting last night, but didn't think to do what you suggested. I got rid of the fog of war, though, and started a game, then asked for a new map (there's an in game option to start over with the same settings but a new map) and the second map was much better.

I tried to reduce the number of non-competitive city-states, but that's not an option. There is the option to get rid of all of them and have more barbarians, but that sounded really annoying. It sounded so annoying that I got rid of the barbarians entirely

So no fog of war and no barbarians should help me considerably. I was probably going to gradually lose that first game, so this time I can concentrate on putting myself in a better position for the mid-game.

 

[Brian Boru]

My fav 4X YouTuber has a vid announcing the new DLC, but of main interest to me and y'all is probably that he says most of Old World's early problems have been fixed thru the regular dev updates. So if you bounced off it before, should repay a revisit now.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0-I22CgbZE

 

[Brian Boru]

A 3-hour vid on the DLC The Sacred and the Profane:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pog_g6uq7qs

 

[Zloth]

My turn. I'm deep into the fourth tutorial but haven't started a game proper yet.

One note on the above: some generals give the option of healing outside of home territory.

 

[Zloth]

If you're coming in from other 4X's, for pity's sake keep the difficulty down, because there's a lot of learning to do. It's not really that the systems are terribly complex, it's just that there's quite a few of them and you are going to need to learn how they relate to each other. How important is it that individuals in families like you? How important is legitimacy? Which should I mine first, stone or metal, or should I be cranking out farms? How easy is it to get tribes to like me? If I betray a tribe, will other tribes find out and stop trusting me? It goes on and on...

I started on The Just, which is one step harder than the trivial difficult, and I'm still barely keeping up. (I was doing pretty good until I took a 50/50 shot between a good trait and Cursed, then got the curse. Soon after, a stray stone fell and killed my heir, then an illness killed my husband/family head/religions head at age 33.)

 

[Pifanjr]

If you're coming in from other 4X's, for pity's sake keep the difficulty down, because there's a lot of learning to do. It's not really that the systems are terribly complex, it's just that there's quite a few of them and you are going to need to learn how they relate to each other. How important is it that individuals in families like you? How important is legitimacy? Which should I mine first, stone or metal, or should I be cranking out farms? How easy is it to get tribes to like me? If I betray a tribe, will other tribes find out and stop trusting me? It goes on and on...

This made me add the game to my wishlist.

I started on The Just, which is one step harder than the trivial difficult, and I'm still barely keeping up. (I was doing pretty good until I took a 50/50 shot between a good trait and Cursed, then got the curse. Soon after, a stray stone fell and killed my heir, then an illness killed my husband/family head/religions head at age 33.)

That's quite a potent curse.

 

[Zloth]

That's quite a potent curse.

Yeah, basically:

View: https://youtu.be/rxZc0tyTqEg?t=28