You should also be harvesting wood (once per square so it regrows) if you can find any spare orders. Doing so doesn’t end a worker’s turn so they can move off and build an improvement too (or chop more wood).
this is one of the few mechanics in the game that i dont like.
Oof, yeah, that wood harvesting thing seems weirdly micro-managey for this game, but hopefully forestry will resolve the issue. I didn’t even get the option to pursue it until turn 80, though.
Mm, it’s a strange compromise. I suspect the idea was to make the resources a bit more asymmetric, pushing the wood-gathering improvement later in the tech tree than others but providing a way to exchange orders for wood before that point. (As well as money for wood, until it becomes too expensive.)
I find it can be a good idea to push for that tech quickly (though certainly you pay an opportunity cost against things that would help you sooner). You have to be aware of it and select the prerequisite techs though, it will take ages to show up if you just pick what looks best at any given moment.
I strongly suspect the AI doesn’t target it, hence the price of wood always being sky high fairly early on. That’s another advantage to getting your wood production up quickly: if you have plenty to spare you can always sell it.
It’s weird to me that wood, of all things, should be the hardest thing to come by - especially for civilizations that appear to be sitting in the middle of forests.
Which makes it, arguably, the easiest thing to come by. It’s literally growing on trees! But I think you’ll find it’s that sort of asymmetry that helps bring so many elements of Old World to life. This isn’t your father’s food, stone, iron, and wood!
So here’s a tough one: can I play a multiplayer cloud game with someone using the GOG version if I have the Steam version?
I’m thinking of picking up a copy of this for my dad, who really enjoys this kind of game, but want to make sure we can play it together. He’s only got a GOG account, so I want to check cross-platform (cross-store?) functionality.
Have you got a sense of how fast those tiles regrow? It seems to be slow enough to pose a real problem for a wood-hungry empire. I’m starting a new game, though, because I think I made enough “learning the game” mistakes in my current one that I’ve worked myself into a corner in more ways than one.
I vaguely recalled it works like harvested resources, which I believe have a small chance to regrow each turn or something like that.
But I could be entirely wrong, the manual says “in 20 turns or so”, so perhaps there’s a fixed number.
As it hasn’t been posted here in a while, here’s a link to the manual thread:
You can’t create a Play-By-Cloud game with players on a different platform. But you can host an Old World persistent server with your Steam version and have your dad join it with his GOG version. After the game has started, you, as the host, input the host password at the lobby screen (this enables host-only functions within the game), enter the game, bring up the in-game menu screen, and select the option to convert the game to PBC. Voila!
This might also work hosting a network game instead of an OW persistent server, but I’ve never tried that. But I have done what I detailed above.
Thanks. Asynchronous tends to work best for us, but it’s good to have options!
I’m still trying to figure out the economic balance here. I can build improvements so much faster and easier than I can staff them. Is it worth building them without staffing? Or is that a waste of resources? If the latter, what should I be doing with these workers - just skipping them when they’d otherwise overbuild? Or am I somehow mismanaging things such that this situation shouldn’t be arising to begin with?
Build as many improvements as you have spare worker turns for; you will never fill them all with specialists. Pay particular attention to quarries, stone is always in short supply later on as all the urban buildings use it.
That’s relieving to hear because it’s what I’ve been doing and, honestly, kind of seemed like the only thing I could do.
Don’t think of specialists as staff; think of them as your middle class. You determine the size and flavor of your middle class by the specialists you build.
There might be a better term than “middle class” for what’s being expressed in terms of gameplay, but that’s how I’ve come to think of it. Not quite the anonymous peons working the land, but also not quite the upper crust elites represented as individual characters.
But, yeah, you definitely don’t need to fill all your improvements with specialists. This isn’t like, say, Rollercoaster Tycoon where each janitor station needs a janitor. Part of the economy gameplay in Old World is picking and choosing your specialists.
But watch what adding the citizen as a specialist will do to enhance the improvement’s production of a resource. Not all are equal and you’ll want to maximize yield or place them strategically to expand borders, perhaps. And you’ll want to watch global yields to ensure that any future improvements you want have the resources available to allow you to build them.
I personally find money to be at least as important as any of the resources, as it has the most flexibility on how you use it. Buying scarce resources, especially when you can buy & sell at the same price (if you go that route), and hurrying projects with money without happiness penalty can really take you places. I love when my yearly income outstrips what I spend and I can just toss money at every event and improvement I need.
My usual problem is not remembering to leave space for those particular improvements or wonders that need specific land types or to be near to a particular urban area, etc. Honestly, I don’t want to spend the time to map it all out ahead of time, so I just go with what I need in the short term and deal with the problems later. Still seems to work out for the most part.
OK, I know urban improvements and staffed rural improvements expand borders, but I don’t exactly know how it work. So is it actually geographic? If I have a quarry by the edge of my controlled territory and staff that, it’s that region of the border that expands? Does that mean a more central improvement being staffed doesn’t impact my borders at all?
Does this require a particular tech or leader type? That would definitely help a lot!
Not knowing the possibilities and requirements yet I’ve no doubt I’m hopelessly screwing this up. :)
Thanks Tom, that does help me conceptualize things - it’s not that those sites are empty, it’s that they lack an expert running things as efficiently as possible.
Whoops, sorry about that. You were right, it’s just the improvements themselves that expand borders, not the specialists. Got carried away there. Borders do seem to expand towards key resources over non-resource land by default and I’ve not looked into it deep enough to know if there’s a way, outside of buying tiles or building improvements, to direct the expansion. Maybe others will know.
It’s from a law: Monetary Reform, usually a late game law. But if you have the money and the game’s still going at that time, you can 1 year most everything without penalty. It’s wonderful.
I wouldn’t worry. I found, aside from my few questions here, that muddling along and learning as I go has made the game more fun that trying to do everything the ‘best’ way. It has so much depth to it, truly a gem of a game.
My understanding is that urban improvements expand borders, but rural improvements only expand borders with a specialist. At least, that’s what the tooltips say.
I’ve noticed that and really appreciate it, except when my opponent’s borders vacuum up things I was trying to reach first!
I’m sure I haven’t gotten that far, I keep starting games, learning a lot, then wanting to restart so I can apply that knowledge. It sounds great, though!
I’m really enjoying it, and I very much appreciate your help.
Yeah. And when you hover over a rural specialist in the cities build menu it’ll even preview the border changes that specialist will give.