Well now I feel like an idiot, but thank you for pointing out this amazingly useful feature that I managed to totally miss!
OK, youāve all been amazingly helpful, so hereās another one: any guidance on rate of expansion and how many cities you ultimately want to end up with? Is this the kind of game where more is better?
Border expansion has a whole bunch of rules but the general principle to keep in mind is this. An expansion around some tile (due to an urban improvement or specialist) gives you every adjacent tile. Then chaining rules apply - if any of those newly acquired tiles is adjacent to a special tile (resource or urban) then the special tile is also given to you. This can theoretically chain across the whole map.
This is one mechanic that is quite well described on the official wiki: Border expansion - Old World Wiki
In addition to hoping for an answer to the āhow many cities and how fastā question, Iām lately also trying to figure out what the point of paganism is. It looks like it just gums up the works for the major religion I founded, so would I be better off not founding paganism in the first place? Is it an early game hedge against not being able to found a major religion? Is there value to having it coexist with a major religion in your empire?
Pretty much. Youāre limited in what you can hold militarily and, after a few cities, you might find family opinion drifting too. There isnāt a hard city cap, which means youāre going to have to learn to judge what you can hold successfully from experience - which is quite compelling, but not very beginner friendly!
With paganism, you have complete control of its spread and you get it early. It offers happiness/culture bonuses as all religions do but you can get access to those earlier. It takes a bit of work to keep multiple religions happy but you can definitely do that, in which case paganism can be a useful addition to a later world religion.
Also, the shrines which spread paganism are very valuable themselves. Theyāre urban improvements that ignore the usual urban requirements, so you can use them to effectively spread borders, and many shrines provide significant direct bonuses.
On huge maps, I would normally go for 5-6 cities and then run through the game with that, splitting them mostly evenly between the three families. But, in a recent game that I mentioned here, I bought up the Numidian tribe that I had an Alliance with, expanding to a dozen or so cities. I didnāt find it that much more difficult to manage, only time-consuming to ensure that everything is protected and that I could generate enough resources (or money) to cover off the needs of the cities.
I will mention that I donāt specialize my cities like many do, even though the concept of families usually points you towards a certain growth or production over others. I build what works and what fits and let the results speak for themselves.
And I agree with @Solver about the pagan shrines. Even in games where Iāve been ignoring paganism, I use the shrines to boost border growth . Then again, I always go with Polytheism and like having multiple religions in my nation.
You want paganisms for the shrines. Shrines with Polytheism (build shrines wherever you want) can be very useful.
I suspect it depends somewhat on the settings, but for the regular game, my experience wrt cities is the more the merrier - as long as you do not set yourself up for a multi-front war. By the time youāre expanding past 5-6 cities, you should have most of the resources unlocked, and it does not take more than 2-3 resources being harvested for the city to turn a profit.
Thanks folks, I confess I hadnāt realized how great shrines are, but suffice it to say that now I get it.
Hereās another one: how the heck is strength calculated? I feel like Iām building a LOT of military units but all of my opponents still show as being āstrongerā or āmuch strongerā and based on past experience that strikes me as a dangerous state to be in. Do generals matter? Training? Officers? Iām really stumped as to why the game thinks this army is weak when I feel like half my national production is going to military units.
I think it just simply calculates the strength of the military units - at least from what Iāve seen, comparative strength has often seemed accurate in raw numbers.
The AI builds a ton of military units - I tend to find it hard to keep up. The easiest way to even out the odds seems to be trimming their numbers down the hard way.
Iām trying to avoid a war, honestly, as I usually do in Civ games - and it seems that building a lot of military is a necessary component to avoid needing to use it. This is what got me in my first game, I was economically strong but couldnāt take the weakest nation on the map militarily, so I became everybodyās fat rich target.
I wonder if thereās anything in those million game setup settings that tamps down AI military production a bit?
Strength consists of:
Combat units, the sum of their unmodified strength, with water units only counting for 2/3.
Cities, with their weight in the calculation gradually increasing as the game progresses. At the start of the game, one city is worth 10 points (so equivalent to 2 Axemen), linearly increasing to 20 points by turn 100.
City defenses, with each defense being worth as much as it provides HP. Thatās 10 points for each of Walls, Moat, Towers.
Now thereās something Iāve been totally neglecting, since I didnāt realize it factored.
Still, keep in mind the game is intentionally designed to require a military. Peaceful victories are definitely possible but, compared to Civ, we have a somewhat more predictable but also much less forgiving AI behavior. In Civ6, you have to play on the top two difficulties for the AI to try and threaten you, and theyāre not really capable of doing much beyond the initial rush.
The AI in Old World will exploit weaknesses. If youāre a juicy target and youāre not friends, they will go after you. So the two main tools to preserve peace are to build a strong army of your own and to maintain a decent relationship with the AI. The AI will not declare war outright if Pleased, and gets more likely to declare as your relationship gets worse.
Thereās a Passive AI setting which we added after seeing some vocal demand for it, and with Passive AI they will never declare war first, but I would say thatās not how the game was designed to be played.
And thatās completely fair. I wouldnāt want to neuter the AI with the āpassiveā setting, Iām just trying to figure out how to keep up. I suspect the city defenses are a big part of the problem, Iāll try correcting that and see where it gets me.
Building more walls will definitely help, in terms of your strength rating and also walls are genuinely helpful in defense. But for anyone coming from Civ, the number one adjustment to make for OW is that you need to build many more units. Weāre seeing the same pattern quite consistently, Civ players at first tend to build too many projects (Festivals, Forums) and too few units.
Understood. I have to admit, the concept of getting into a war with one of these turn 100 great powers is kind of terrifying even if I have a sufficient military to be competitive. The sheer number of units needing to be shuffled around would beā¦ time consuming. And I suppose that given military parity, whoever has the most orders tends to win.
What @Solver said is spot on (of course). Coming from Civ, thatās exactly what I tried to do, focus on building (although, not so much festivals/forums) over military because I play peaceful games. I still do, actually, but making it peaceful has more or less required me to be strong militarily and nice to everyone to avoid being a target. I love it when the rest of the world is all angsty towards each other and Iām sitting there with my crew just raking in the money and pumping out improvements, all the while exploring my beautiful rectangular huge maps.
The key to having so many military units is just putting them into sentry/fortify duty along borders, some with forts, and upgrade them when appropriate, with a significant subset just sitting in barracks or ranges or temples (?) so they get xp while sitting around. Tribes are usually worse for me than other nations because they have no sense of self-preservation going up against my clearly superior nation.
So yeah, OW pushes you into a certain type of gameplay, but keep the difficulty where it works for you and play the way you want. Itās entirely possible. Iām glad it is, because I wouldnāt have stuck with it if it was all war all the time.
Thanks, thatās useful perspective and encourages me quite a bit since itās how I tend to play (not that occasionally getting kicked out of my comfort zone and into a war is a bad thing).
As someone that likes big maps I am just so pleased with the maps in this game. Even on medium (which Iāve been using for my learning games) thereās enough room to create a real sense of exploration. Just one of many things Iām really enjoying about it.
I dunno, I kind of appreciate all those city sites theyāve been keeping warm for me into the mid-game. :)
Speaking of map sizes, the premade Old World and Imperium Romanum maps are larger than random Huge maps. Though they donāt have as much sense of exploration IMO since theyāre familiar real Earth geography.