To echo what Adam says, a few months into early access it was already IMO a releasable game. at least by Paradox, Matrix and 2K games standard. At this point it is pretty polished game, and would be at version 2.0 by most strategy game standards. As Tom AAR points out, OW has one big advantage over 80% of the strategy games out there. The AI actually knows how to play the game.
That said accessibility is clearly a big issue, hence things like a manual. To me it is a bit like Kerbal space program, cute Kerbals making amusing faces doesn’t change the fact that rocket science is hard, many things are counter-intuitive. I doubt I would have every landed on Mun, without Scott Manley’s videos.
Old World is a complicated game, and with many interdependent systems, less complicated than rocket science, brain surgery, and quantum mechanics, but more complicated than the plot lines of Game of Thrones.
Agree with others; every part of gameplay feels finished to me. It just turned out to be harder to teach the game to new players through tooltips than Mohawk anticipated, so they’re improving that. Think about how cool it is that the game is done enough that they have all this time to write extra documentation instead of having to finish development on core systems or fixing gameplay bugs.
Hey, and thank you for the mention! :) Just added another vid to the collection and I’m hoping that you guys are finding them helpful!
re: parking on the freebie city sites - I generally don’t…the AI doesn’t seem to prioritize (or even notice them) so I’ve had great success in just leaving them unguarded–about one game in ten or twelve it becomes an issue.
I have had a couple of “colorful” reactions to the AI moving onto one of my “free” city sites but as of now, I’ve got more than fifty hours of content on YouTube and I’ve only had one instance where the AI (Carthage, if I recall correctly) parked on one of the free sites.
As it happened, the slinger unit in question merely ended its turn on the city tile and moved back off next turn.
To clarify the thing with freebie city sites. If the AI has starting development (which it does except for the “sandbox” Able difficulty), it won’t claim city sites reserved for the player in the first 30 turns, or 10 turns with Play to Win. The AI may still move through them and so could temporarily occupy the site, but will leave it again.
Ah cool, I had intuit that you were safe to leave the free site at least for a while. The only 10 turn in play to win explains some of the challenges I’ve had.
Maybe this was answered elsewhere, so forgive me if I’m repeating questions again, but what are “city sites reserved for players”? How do I know if a site is reserved for me? @Velociryx was talking about “freebie” city sites, so presumably it’s something indicated in the game?
It’s decided by the map generator, so theoretically there could be various weirdness on some random maps, but it’s generally simple, the 1-2 unoccupied city sites you see close to your start are reserved for you. Those sites are closer to your start than to any other player’s start, so are considered “yours”.
