Reading in an ebook app—thanks for making a download available. A great pleasure to read so far. I, too, immediately recognized your name from the old SMAC/X section of Apolyton and that amazing guide. It improved my play style immediately. :)
This is a great read - thanks for this!
Maybe the front piece is a little incongruous? Something like a David Roberts artwork would fit the bill better.
Some impressions and errata:
As this is a draft, I’m going to skip any formatting comments except to say that the title font immediately makes me think of 16th century England, which is a bit jarring.
Which two games? I mean it’s pretty obvious but I’m guessing this has survived from an earlier draft.
Wording is slightly confusing.
You might instead be the Queen.
Good read as far as the end of the nations list. Not much I didn’t know in terms of how the game works, but some of your strategic ideas have provided food for thought. I’ll read more later (and provide more errata if these are helpful) but for now it’s time to go and play some more Old World.
Thank you, everyone, for the kind words and the feedback thus far - this is perfect and will absolutely help make the finished book that much better!
I’ve got a Twitch stream to prepare for (ongoing video strategy guide episode), and then, I’ll make the changes and I’ve got a few new additions on deck for today (a section on Diplomacy (using it as both shield and sword) and some more tactical stuff for the combat section.
Updates to follow by this evening!
re: The Artwork - no worries - most of the stuff you see are just placeholders. The team artist will no doubt provide better artwork - I’m just using simple screenshots, paint, and my Deposit Photos account for the cover image.
Unlike Rho21, I am just a dabbler in the game, and the introduction part helped me finally get how orders worked, amongst other stuff that escaped me, back when tutorial message were elusive little things running away once you let them go ;D
I’m really enjoying it — as the super mega noob I am.
@Left_Empty Thank you, and I totally get what you mean - if you’d like to see something live, I’m start the Twitch stream in just a few and will be uploading to YouTube later as part of the permanent archive!
Might want to edit the OP to put the link right at the top.
Definitely this.
I’ve run through the guide once (so far) and am looking forward to applying the strategies in a game soon, thank you!
A comment or two on the doc:
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The manual repeatedly uses UUs as an acronym for civilization unique units (I assume) without ever defining the term. Think you’d probably want to define any specialized shorthand the first time or in a glossary for players who aren’t veterans.
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The font and page backgrounds are maybe fine for physical print (and I’m not sure if that’s the target here). But those are both potential detractors from legibility when most of us read documents on screens, pads, phones, etc. Maybe consider a version without those components?
Thanks!
Diego
Hello and thank you again, everyone! Changes in place and the new sections mentioned earlier (diplomacy and more on tactical stuff/combat). For reasons I’m not quite clear on, when I removed the parchment background, it COMPLETELY hosed the formatting, so…I’ve left it in for now (those two things shouldn’t have anything to do with each other, so…dunno what’s up there but I’ll mess with it more later).
This looks great! I have it open on my iPad, but when I try to download to the iPad, I can’t tell if or where it’s been downloaded. Has anyone successfully downloaded it to an iPad (to read in the iBooks app)?
Yes, I did - after it’s downloaded, there’s a download queue icon at the top of Safari, the pdf file was in the drop down when you click that, and then you can open in iBooks.
You’re a genius! I didn’t know how to do that. It looks great in iBooks! Thanks for your help.
Wait…you can BUY additional orders? That kind of defeats the purpose of the system, doesn’t it?
They’re expensive at 100 training each, so you can’t buy all that many, and buying them means not promoting your units as much or not building as many.
Late in the game you can enact a law to let you buy (and sell) orders with money. Powerful if you have a big treasury (though unit fatigue remains pretty limiting). Many of the endgame toys are pretty powerful though. For instance the law that lets you store up to 100 orders between turns could let you stock up just before a major war.
You can’t buy orders with money until much later in the game. Basically it’s 100 training per order, which is really expensive. You can also buy orders with civics with a schemer leader aslo expensive.
I remember your SMAC guide it was good. I should check out the XCom2 guides).
Here is my comments on draft 1.0
First, overall it’s excellent, pretty much exactly would I’d be looking for as experienced 4x players. I agree with the suggestion to be careful about things like using acronyms like UU. I’m not actually sure if Old World is a good game for newbies to the genre to play.
- Need a section of the advisors. You do an excellent job describing how useful spymasters are. I learned a lot although I by the time the spymaster are available for me the game is generally decided
Please do the same thing for the diplomat, chancellor , and courtier. Explain how the trade mission, intercession, and tutoring missions etc work. Also in some cases they are strange percentages like 68.1% that would be nice to have an explanation. - Need a section on attributes. It’s all fine to say that attributes don’t scale linearly but what really is needed a table
For something like from -5 to 15 showing how much beakers 8 wisdom generates, how many civics a 5 Charisma generates, how much training a -2 courage equals , and much money 7 discipline makes. etc.
Then note that heirs, advisors get 1/2 and your first 4 heirs and courtiers get 1/3 of the totals.
Secondly, you need to similar table for the advisors. One of the most counter intuitive things in the game is that generally speaking the most important attribute for an advisor is not the one you’d expect.
So for example intuitively diplomats need high charisma. No actually charisma is the least important attribute for a diplomat, the most important is wisdom which effect foreign leader opinions, discipline which impacts growth per city is the second, courage tribal 3rd and Charisma is the least important since it just gives you a flat 2 civics/point. Similarly, wisdom is the least important attribute of a spymaster, even though scholars or schemers can be spymaster. .Charisma or courage are the most important
3, Finally I think section on ambition and victory conditions would helpful. It explain how victory points are generated, how the double victory point early victory works. Then a strategy guide on picking ambitions would be great. I know that some people are trying to tank Tom’s AAR game, but let’s just say overall I’m not overwhelmed by the wisdom of the crowd in picking ambitions.
I consider myself, a pretty good OW player (Glorious/Magnificent) and I agree with at least 90% of your strategy hints, and suggestion how to play various nations.
An excellent manual which conveys much useful info (even for quite experienced OW players like myself) and particularly of course for new players. The manual rightly acknowledges that many will be coming from Civ experience and helps them get round the differences. Equally important, the manual is clearly written with enthusiasm for the game (not always the case with game manuals!) and this enthuses the reader too. It’s a bit rough round the edges at times (not surprising as it seems to have been written with commendable speed since launch) but Strollen’s good suggestions above and no doubt others will make it even better than it is. Great job!
- one small correction - you say that finding a landmark with your scout produces 1 point of legitimacy. I believe it’s 2 points if you’re the first to discover it and 1 if not.
Looks like it’s been a busy evening, and thank you once again, for the great feedback! Will get busy incorporating these and have another update to the file by end of day! :)
And @Strollen, let me know what you think of the XCom2 stuff! Two separate guides there, and I sure had a blast putting them together!