By the way, I’m really enjoying this series posted by @alcaras, in which he and another high-level player named “nolegskitten” square off over an inland sea map, taking turns narrating their progress:
And while I understand not everyone wants to watch multiple hours of people narrating their Old World game, I can promise some truly exciting reversals of fortune in this series, as well as a real eye-opening look at how the naval endgame plays out! I’ve had my share of exciting naval encounters against the AI, but I’ve never seen anything quite like what alcaras and his opponent, nolegskitten, accomplish in this series. Yow.
Also, here again we can see Old World’s awesome undo feature at work. I’m not sure how common this is in Old World streams – I confess I’m not familiar with many streamers – but for this series, they play their turns, then use the undo button to back up to the beginning. Then they hit record, tab through the “redo” command, and narrate the moves they’ve made as they step their way back through their turns.
[The undo button is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Old World despite trying other games. As we’ve discussed, it literally changes how the game plays, and this is intentionally supported in the design, by elements like the orders system and the deterministic combat. And here you can see what an invaluable tool it is for demonstrating a game!]
It’s also worth pointing out that alcaras leads with what is arguably an exploit, to take advantage of the way technologies are drawn like cards. I don’t know if the strategy is his own, and he’s very up front about wanting to try out something experimental. But it turns out it’s a clever way to give yourself an early powerful religious boost, and it requires a bit of micromanagement.
And here’s where we run into a classic observation about games and interfaces: if micromanagement confers an advantage to one player, is that a flaw? Is alcaras early religious boost an intentional part of the design, or does it take advantage of the fact that Mohawk used a deck of cards to model the randomness of technological progress? That they might not have anticipated what alcaras is going to do here?
The answer seems to be the latter, as the strategy was patched out of the game! Which isn’t a big deal to me personally, as I don’t play competitively and I never would have hit on this strategy (seriously, watch the opening of the first video to see how it works; very smart stuff that wouldn’t have occurred to me in a million years, even though it now seems obvious!). But it’s just a sign of the level of support Old World gets that the exploit had been patched for several days by the time I learned about it. That’s the way I would expect any developer to care about their game.
Anyway, part nine just posted and I’m exciting to sit down and watch it after dinner. Both gentlemen are very good at articulating what they’re doing without resorting to jargon. I really enjoy nolegskitten’s accent – I’ve watched him livestream before on Mohawk’s Twitch channel – and alcaras has a soothing professorial tone that makes these easy to watch.