Old World (pka Ten Crowns) from Soren Johnson

The current Game of the Week is on a Dual map, interestingly. It’s obviously a smaller map, but there’s still room for a dozen or more cities. I’m enjoying it.

Well bummer. I was enjoying the first 40 years of this game, but…

I have tried both medium and large, and have not seen much difference in how much space there is between major nations. I think Soren’s philosophy is that the pot needs stirring, and that includes troublesome events, but it also includes nations butting up against each other. Hate it when it happens but I have to admit that the couple times I have avoided it, the games were pretty sterile.

Soren posted this talk on twitter.

https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/1265745148572569600

He responded to my question.
https://twitter.com/cpurkiser/status/1265759611220447233

https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/1265858296889647105

The talk is worth watching. The crux of the talk is that games make explicit and promises to players. Often these promises conflict. In the case of the 4x games end games. I think there are several promises:

  1. As you get better playing the game you can up the difficulty levels to make a more challenging game. For most players challenging games are more fun.

  2. You can expand the power of your country, either by improving your infrastructure (growing tall) or building more cities. Much of the fun of the game is striking this balance.

  3. The computer cheats in 'fair" way, starts out with more cities, production bonus, combat bonus order bonus etc. Most of these bonus scale with difficult. But basically it’s playing the same game as you.

So the basic conflict is as you become more powerful, the challenge decreases and so does the fun.
But if you include mechanism, such as ganging up, the increase the computer difficult as the player become more powerful, you violate the fairness promise.

.

Yup, exactly, It is a love/hate relationship. Part of the game is you need to build enough military and devote enough orders to taking over a couple of barbarian settlements. But once you have 4-6 cities taking out the tribes isn’t much of challenge and soon you have a dozen+ cities and are pretty much unstoppable.

I’m in 100% agreement with @SorenJohnson in that the endgame slog is in the “mitigate” area. This isn’t something unique to 4X games, you can see it elsewhere. A basketball team may be up by 50 points by the end of the third quarter but they still play out the fourth. The Nazis were clearly beat long before the war ended.

Gang-up mechanics, rubberbanding, etc. all feel incredibly cheap to me in a strategy game like this. With rubberbanding, it makes me feel like good play is invalidated because you can’t really get ahead – no matter how well you play, they catch up anyway. Gang-up mechanics make it feel far too gamey for my taste and invalidates a lot of the diplomacy and peaceful/builder paths.

Thankfully, I have no problems calling a game a victory and starting a new one, I don’t need to see the end game score or graphs or anything (although the latter are interesting). I’d be perfectly happy if the AI players could collectively determine that the player is so far ahead that his or victory is guaranteed and surrender, offering a way to immediately terminate the game or give the option for the player to continue on if you they want to go through the “slog”. For me, I don’t think any more than that is really needed.

In Old World, I think a computer resign button is probably ok. However, in the case of Civ and even some space 4x games. Part of my motivation for playing longer was to see out airplanes worked out, or seeing the production boost for building the Hoover Dam. That’s even more true for 4x space games like MOO, and Sword of the Stars, there were some real cool spaceship designs I wanted to see in action. (Stellaris was too much of slog for me ever to even think about finishing a game.)

One of the gems of MOO1/2 design was the end game where had to defeat the Antares fleets. Even if I didn’t really want to spend time exterminating my opponent, I would spend a few hours building my latest and greatest ships send them to Antares, for a cool boss fight. For me, it was a very satisfying ending, and I probably finished over 50% of my MOO game. I think the cool end game boss fights are a lot of the appeal to the XCOM franchise also. In the context of Alex’s talk the Antares fight was a really good carrot.

I’m sure @Leyla_Johnson has written some entertaining events for Old World that are gated on some middle or late game tech being researched. It is pity most of us will never see them, because I’m certainly not going play the game out just to see the stories, but if there was some other carrot, I would

Let me throw out a brain storm. I’ve watched a season of the Ottomans, and Instanbul is the most amazing ancient city I’ve ever been too. It was also sieged two dozens times but only two succeeded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sieges_of_Constantinople. How about adding conquer Constantinople as a possible victory condition?. It is vaguely located in the center of the existing countries, so how about you have march your army. to the center of the Map and crown yourself Holy Roman Emperor. P.S siege weapons highly recommended.

I like this idea - I wonder if it could also be made more interactive?

So once it is triggered, the AI takes your turns. But before each year completes, you get to review what the AI has proposed for the whole year - maybe on a whole-world map, with which units have moved where, any combat, decisions made etc. And if you disagree with what the AI has chosen to do, you can step back in and play that particular year manually, and then optionally hand back control to the AI when done.

I don’t see the event about a “withering line” in the new patch notes. I don’t recall getting it before this patch (even when I sorely needed it in the game I lost due to no heir). Lately it shows up a lot, even at seemingly inappropriate times (I an still reasonably young and have two young children). The adopted “heir” slides in at the end of the succession line, regardless of how old they are (I recently “adopted” a woman the same age as the spouse - to which the clerics said “uh, hmmm?”).

interesting, i too had a lot of adoption events in my recent games.

What is advantage or disadvantage of placing city improvements on ‘urban’ tiles? Every city has one main tile and from 2 to 4 interconnected urban tiles more or less… why ever put a building on a tile I can put any other improvement on?

and is there any rhyme or reason to why the game suggests an improvement on a particular tile?

Furthermore, I believe a technology allows workers to create more urban tiles, so what’s that about?

I get it every game early. I thought it was way to ensure you have more characters for other families.

The recent patch notes offer one advantage: “Building an Urban improvement on a non-Urban tile costs more Stone.”

Beyond that, I often want to use non-urban tiles for specific purposes: tree tiles for lumbermills, lush tiles by water for farms or aqueducts, arid tiles and mountain-adjacent tiles for quarries, hills for mines, and of course Wonder-qualified tiles for those Wonders.

Conversely, it’s often a good idea to build an urban building on a non-urban tile. As I’m sure you know, many cultural improvements require an improvement to be next to TWO urban tiles, and I often have trouble finding such spots by midgame. This is also a reason to get the ability that permits workers to create urban tiles. (I thought that ability was conferred by a leader or governor trait, but it may also be a tech or law.) If I don’t have that ability, I sometime end up building hamlets or aqueducts just to create urban tiles in the middle of the countryside, so that I can then build my colliseum / university / whatever.

Finding a hill that’s next two urban tiles can be challenging mid game in many cities to build a wonder. I always want to have a city that looks all nice farms, urban improvement, quarries and mines all nicely located next to each other. Instead my cities look like Houston or LA, one giant hodgepodge mess.

Spock,

Because you cannot place non urban improvements on urban tiles I think is the key. And improvements which require proximity to two urban tiles, when placed on an urban tile, are practically guaranteed to be in touch with two when you count the one it’s on. (Even if it doesn’t count the one you’re on it’s like 80% to 90% of urban tiles touch two others.)

So whether you start by building on urban tiles, or come back and fill in urban improvements on the urban tiles themselves after using all the surrounding countryside, it seems like a good play.

But I have to say, I didn’t start thinking about it in such depth until your reply, so thanks for that. :-)

Given the time period of Old World, I think it would be fitting to have a barbarian invasion.

So, you cleared the map, but they regrouped away from you, far away (off map.)

Or it is a nomad invasion.

Hell you could make it the Sea Peoples showing up.

hi, been lurking for awhile… just wanted to have a lil rant.

I hate it when it asks you if u want to set an ambition for your heir, and you put it off so that he chooses it himself (when he’s on the throne), only to find out 10 turns later the game has already chosen an ambition for him, and its so unnobtainable that it just screws your whole gameplan… reload auto from 10 turns back… ok i’ll choose it early so i don’t get screwed over.

I hate it when i’ve gotta choose which general is better than the other general and the only indication that one is better than the other is one monarch becomes endeared and the other doesn’t. what the hell opinion rating does endeared give? I either toss a coin and or look at both nations and pick the nation that has the lower opinion and hope that endearing that monarch is adding an opinion boost.

I hate it when my 18yr old daughter gets marraige proposals from men in thier 40’s… yet my 18yr old sons don’t get marriage requests from women in thier 40s. It goes both ways, but never seems to happen in old world.

I like the sexism event, would like to see more controversial or taboo subjects in the events system.

I hate it when i get 3 ambition options and none of them are remotely obtainable, yet i have to pick one, i can’t just click no, none of these, i’ll wait for a better selection (even if i have to wait 5yrs i’d rather wait than have to pick any of those 3 you offered)

/end rant

ambition: have 2 elder monks… hmm i’ll give it a shot.
train disciple= 4yrs
build monastery=3yrs
go into city, halt all production, train an apprentice, master and then elder monk
apprentice =8yrs
master=12yrs
elder= 15yrs

can only have 1 monastery per province… ok
do it all again in aother province

so 40-80yrs to complete. 40 if i do them both at the same time thereabouts, but more likely at least 50-90yrs to complete…

yeah… not taking that ambition again… crikey

It was either that, conquer 10 enemy cities, or have 4 wonders, (i’d built 1 all game)

Welcome to the forums!

Yeah, I don’t think they have ambitions totally worked out yet. It’s the second way to win, with the “main” way being points, and it seems to me that in the end, it is probably more effective to just go for the points. Even if the early ambition choices are reasonable, the later ones tend to so large that you’d have to win on points to achieve them.

Ha, this seems to be one of Soren’s pot stirring masterpieces. The whole point of it being to push you towards friction with someone, so that things will get “interesting.” But you CAN see the meaning of “endeared”: middle click on the mouseover screen so as to freeze it, then mouse over “endeared.”

These times are not immutable. It’s not a great idea to take ambitions requiring high civic output when your city is producing about 10/year.

You can rush buy the monks, so that you can complete the task in 12-20 years. In fact I routinely rush buy the 2nd acolyte in order to start my religions.

That said, I have experienced find my heir had ridiculous ambition which I don’t have any control over. I do always choose an ambition for my heir there is no reason not to. It is good thing to be working on two ambitions simultaneously.

I’d be curious to hear what the data shows on how campaigns are being won.

All of mine were points.