Old World: How does X work? Post your gameplay questions here!

I take no offense Tom. I’ve pretty much been ignoring many of the character features in my prior games, except for obvious things that I need to do - trying to improve family relations, using the chancellor to lower discontent in cities, etc… This is the first game I was really trying to engage with the characters. I tend to go down rabbit holes and think if I see some bit of data (like that laws effect opinion), then I should pay attention to it. I need to go with the flow more instead of thinking everything is important. I appreciate your input :-)

Old World is so rich for that, isn’t it? I can literally spend an hour taking a single turn because I like poring over all the little narrative details that come together in my games (aka “Tom Chick attempting to stream Old World”). It feels alive in a way that a Civilization or Crusader Kings map can’t.

Anyway, don’t let me tell you how to play! I just hate to think you’re getting overwhelmed by details of middling importance. :)

-Tom

A post was merged into an existing topic: Old World (pka Ten Crowns) from Soren Johnson

How do I change state religion?

Also, I love the in-game music. Especially the Bulgarian State Television Female Choir. Especially Ei Mori Roujke.

Like the music, I think you need to unlock it. It’ll be somewhere down at the bottom of the tree, perhaps halfway across.

There will be an “Adopt as State Religion” button for every world religion. Select the religion you like, and the button will be on the upper left of your screen. If there are extenuating circumstances, the button should indicate why it can’t be pressed.

-Tom

This is a little inconsistent with the UI for almost every other similar task, which can be accessed through one of your council, OR through the context menu for the “target” of the action. Change state religion can only be accessed through the latter as far as I could tell.

I think it would make sense to make “change state religion” have your ruler as the “subject” of the action, to make it consistent with the UI paradigm for most other things in the game.

The potential confusion here is that your leader’s religion might not be the state’s religion. His personal religion and your civilization’s religion are two entirely different parameters. Associating them in the interface might make it easier for you personally to find the button, but could it also lead to confused inferences about religion? :)

I’m guessing Mohawk has had this very discussion, and they made a decision after hashing out the pros and cons. I don’t pretend to know the best answer, though.

BTW, the changes to cleric families currently on the test branch seem like they’re going to introduce significant changes to playing religious nations.

-Tom

Oh good! The cleric changes could give me a reason to dive back on.

So plain old addiction isn’t reason enough? ;)

I was happily addicted for quite some time, and then decided to take a break, so not addicted at the moment. Might become so again, though…

I have short breaks from the game but keep coming back. This is a combination of it being a brilliantly designed game and the devs’ unflagging dedication to improving it. Compared with a year ago it is a better game now and I can see that trend continuing.

I’m a bit rusty, and I have a basic question which I probably would have been able to answer myself at one point. :) If I’m jumping back into a fairly advanced game – turn 100+ – and I want to find which cities have which specific buildings, uh, how do I do it?

For instance, I can see from the records screen that I have 3 strongholds:

But what I want is a way to locate them. I can, of course, manually go through each city screen to find them. I can hit shift-M for the Improvements overlay and then I can search the map for the three “stronghold” labels. Which works okay. But am I missing better ways to determine which cities have specific improvements?



Also, I don’t know if there’s some issue with my system, but the “Expand Tooltip: [Hold ALT]” function doesn’t work for cities.

nonresponsive

It works just fine for units, but it’s completely unresponsive for cities. I noticed this when I was thinking the more detailed tooltip would have info on improvements, but if so, I can’t access it. Is anyone else having this issue?

There’s no way I know of to get a list of cities with an improvement. The on-map overlay is the usual way of looking for those.

I see there’s an intermittent issue with Alt for cities. It should work if you first hold down Alt and then hover over the city instead. There’s no improvement list hidden there though!

And that works fine, but I wanted to be sure I wasn’t overlooking some shortcut.

Ah, that got it! Thanks, @solver! Although I generally don’t know I want the expanded tooltip until after I’ve moused over the city. :)

Although this thread is about gameplay, I have an off-topic question about…graphics settings!

I’ve got everything cranked up and Old World runs just fine on my 3080, of course. However, sometimes when the map has moved and the graphics are refreshing, there’s a “melted ice cream” effect on some of the textures. They look smeary and lo-res for a while, like they’ve been poured over the map. They’ll eventually update and look normal, so it’s almost like a kind of lag?

This is a really minor thing, and although it doesn’t bother me, it sometimes catches my eye. If I wanted to minimize this, does anyone know what setting I should turn down? It’s not something I’m used to seeing in other games, so I’m not sure how – or even if – “melted ice cream textures” can be addressed with a graphics setting.

EDIT: Here’s an example of what I mean:

melted textures

Contrast the hexes along the top with the smeary hexes along the bottom. It’s a very minor issue, but I figure there’s got to be a setting that will address it.

Don’t think you’ll find a setting for it. This is an artifact known as ‘texture pop-in’ and is basically a result of the time it takes for the high-res texture(s) to be read from your hard drive and loaded into video memory.

Since you’re already running a pretty good video card you may be able to minimise it by upgrading to a faster hard drive if that’s where the bottleneck is. You can use crystalmark to get an idea of what your transfer speeds are (read is most important for this).

Mine for comparison (a gen4 wd_black):

CrystalDiskMark_20230212235757

(NB I can’t guarantee anything of course, so maybe don’t rush to spend your money if it isn’t actually a big deal for you - some game engines are just worse for this sorta thing than others, too)

I don’t think there’s a setting or an upgrade that would help much - we’re intentionally lowering the detail on the off-map part to decrease VRAM use and to make moving around the map smoother. As a result, there is some texture pop in, which the game didn’t have half a year ago, but it allowed us to get some very significant optimization into the game.

I run off an M.2 SSD myself, which as fast as drives get, and sometimes see the pop-in .

Looks like the ALT thing is a current bug. As for the improvement list, locking the city tooltip will create a list of improvements if you mouse over the word “Improvement(s)”:

Talk about having a feature that only you know about!