Old World (pka Ten Crowns) from Soren Johnson

How do I “adopt a state religion”? I have spread it to 6 cities but I don’t see an option to adopt a religion.

I don’t have the game up, but on the religion screen (F3?), top left, there may be an option to adopt a religion as your state religion. Click on each religion’s tab to see if it’s an option.

Heh, I was worried about the same thing – because in both my last two games, my enemies built Ballistas like crazy. Which are plenty annoying, don’t get me wrong. But now that I think about it, in my first game (on Able), my enemies built mostly Spearmen.

Major grats! As you say, that’s no small feat in this game. I’m sure we’ll all get better at it, and maybe in a while we’ll all be asking Soren to make the hardest difficulties harder. But for now, anything over Strong is a big challenge for me.

I thought governors had to be from the family of the city they govern, but I could be wrong. Family opinion of you directly affects military performance: at one point in my most recent game, all my military units had a 10% penalty to strength (I think) because all three families were annoyed with me. (I was playing the Game of the Week, on Magnificent, and I was struggling to keep both families and foreign nations happy with me.) I eventually fixed it, but ouch. Also, if family opinion gets really bad, rebel units can spawn at the family’s cities: this happened to me too. Double ouch. I think family modifiers do scale with opinion, but I’m not sure. I thought I read somewhere about some interaction between luxuries and families; maybe just that you can buy off families with luxuries. Of course, family opinion affects events and such. And different families have different buffs and debuffs, as @FinnegansFather described. I’m sure I’m forgetting other synergies.

I’m going to have to go over the preceding weeks of posts here to get caught up. I only picked up Old World just before the holiday weekend but this game is scratching my Civ itch in a way that game has not done in a while.

Thanks for the answer to my militia (why?) question. Here are some others and my observations.

Roads. How? I don’t understand the game concept of connected cities. If of the same family they are connected - what does that mean exactly? I tried to create a road between two cities of different families but there was no-mans-land in between and it would not allow me to put a road there.

Luxuries. Someone here mentioned about their use in mollifying other leaders/nations; good stuff.

Religion. I have yet to found one, not sure I understand what is required. Is there a difference between founding a new one or adopting one another nation founded?

Legitimacy and Orders. Finally noticed the correlation between high legitimacy and increased orders and wow! Needless to say I’ll be concerning myself much more with Legitimacy in the future.

Harbors, Biremes. Have yet to build a Harbor. In most recent came I created a Bireme out of boredom; first I have seen in the game.

I appreciate how the technology tree system of not giving you all of the options all of the time keeps you on your toes. But if there is one mid-early tech I try to bee-line it is Forestry for creating lumbermills. I tend to never get too depleted on food, ore or stone (or money) but wood seems to be the weak link almost every start.

One thing that I appreciate Soren making a feature is “role play” available in the options screen. This makes it so you do not know the immediate effect of a choice in an event - instead the game tells you after you make the choice (and I assume a choice can affect later event probabilities that you also won’t have immediate visibility into) To work, the events have to be written reasonably well, but so far they’ve been ok for me. Try it out.

Roads not only speed up movement, but they make connected cities more efficient (I think but I’m not sure it is just the money.) For this latter purpose, they are only needed if the city is not already connected back to the capital by river/water. To build, you must be adjacent to a city or to a road tile that connects back to the city.

I think it depends very much on where you are in the game. Early on, the problem is usually wood, because that takes longer to research. (Although you can have your workers chop, in or out of your territory, to tide you over.) But if you expand quickly, food can be an issue very soon. If you expand infantry quickly, iron becomes an issue. And to play above the lowest difficulty levels, you need to be aggressive with buildings, such that it is not too long before you always have a desperate need for stone. (Also for wonders!)

Glad to hear someone has tried this, as it’s also on my radar screen. I do plan to try it out. First, though, I plan to play the new Game of the Week, which is up now. It’s on “the Just” difficulty, so quite doable.

To build a road, you have to start next to an existing road or city center, I think. You can certainly build roads in no-mans-land, so long as you start from your own road network. One exception: you can’t build anything on sand.

Connected cities suffer from lower maintenance costs and have bonus growth, which helps you build citizens, settlers and workers. To see your road network, press V; bright green indicates where you have roads.

Yes, founding a religion doesn’t necessarily make it your state religion. (You do that by going to the religion screen and clicking ‘adopt as state religion’, and paying 400 civics.) You can adopt a state religion even if you didn’t found it, and conversely, you can found a religion without adopting it as a state religion.

Some people say the AI does build ships, but I haven’t seen many in my games. I had one bireme in my most recent game, and I used it to pillage enemy nets. No enemy naval units opposed me, but Land units did shoot at me.

I agree, wood has often been hard to come by in my early games, and archers never go out of style!

Definitely builds ships, I had Carthage using them in my current campaign.

Finally finished my ‘heir-less’ game - Babylon on The Good (still taking baby steps, I’m slower than a lot of you). I was in good shape when it became clear that 40-year-old what’s-her-name The Barren was never going to produce an heir. So I decided to go ahead and play it out. She finally kicked off at the ripe old age of 87! By that time, I had a 20-11 lead over the next nearest and was gradually rolling up Carthage while maintaining a lack of other wars. The war had gone on 40 years by that point and would easily take another 40 to actually eliminate Carthage - unless I suppose they started running out of units and it gets quicker.

I tried an alliance with the Gauls, who were up by Carthage anyway. Not sure I’ll bother with that again. Their units only move 2 hexes. I used them successfully in the early going to just block off Carthage’s units from mine, but I very quickly passed them by and they could not keep up. After a bit, the Gauls made their own truce with Carthage despite the fact that I was paying them 400 gold/year. I broke the alliance, but there seems no way to cancel the tribute payments (not that I found). So pretty underwhelmed by that as a tactic overall.

The end was not very interesting, but that’s not so important to me. You watch as your units vanish one by one, and the get a You Lost message.

Note that you can build a road adjacent to a road you built in the same turn. So with multiple leapfrogging workers, you can complete them fairly quickly.

Separate post because this is general rather than to do with my last game.

Is it intended that units can keep moving forever once you March, so long as you have orders? I had a bireme march and was able to map the entire coastline in one turn by using all 40 orders.

Are you talking march as in forced march and you burn up shields continuing to move them?

You just pay the 100 shields once - then keep going. and going.

Good question, I’ve used forced march to get into position to attack someone and didn’t notice if it only cost 100 no matter how far I went, I’ll pay attention next time as I assumed it was going to continue to cost me more shields to keep at it.

If it doesn’t I"m betting that gets changed (as it already has once in going from 50 to 100).

Do AI major nations recruit military units in the exact same way as the human player?

I ask because in my current campaign as Egypt I’ve been in a 40 year war with Assyria, and frankly I’m rather fatigued by the battle elements of this devolving into a battle of attrition, especially when I have 18 cities to recruit from and they have 2 and yet they’re matching me on pumping units out and I’m not able to sweep them off the map.

If the game is to have a military focus as a core component of the design, it feels to me at least like I sure as heck ought to be able to blow a 2 city nation off the map in like 5 years. IOTW, I do want the option to win through out right military dominance, but either I’m an incompetent commander or there’s no way I’ve got the time to remove 5 other civs, as it take 5 years to move a unit half way across a large map even with roads. If you factor in unit movement and the rate at which other civs replace units it just doesn’t look feasible to me. No way I could ever take all these nations out in 200 turns, I can’t even take out one nation with a measly 2 cities left.

My conclusion: I’m just a bit dense and it took me pounding my head against the game design to realize it doesn’t actually want you to attempt winning militarily.

I’m starting to get suspicious about the tech card deck, I don’t think the mechanic is as simple as it seems.

My understanding was that those techs you pass on go in the discard pile, so all the other available cards have to be offered before you get another chance at those you passed on. Which also guarantees that a card that is “available” but not offered cannot elude you for a long time. But I do not think that that is what I am seeing.

I think so, but I haven’t seen a dev post directly confirming this. I have read repeatedly that the AI gets a head start at the beginning of the game, even at lower difficulty levels, and more of a head start on higher difficulties: more cities, higher development level (presumably culture and tech, maybe military units too?). But once the game start, supposedly the AI plays by the same rules we do (though it can’t win by Ambitions – or undo moves or reload savegames, for that matter, heh.) (Incidentally, Soren says vision range will increase by 1 in the next patch; that may make AI behavior a bit more transparent.)

I hardly think you’re a bit “dense”! Rather, I think combat tends to favor the defender in this game, even though attackers take minimal damage during their turn. In general you can heal only on your own territory, and that gives an advantage to units defending their own cities. Terrain and improvement features also tend to favor the defender (although hills do help archers on offense). In my most recent game, I gradually developed an economic and military advantage over my closest rival, but it took all my ingenuity and resources just to take two of its cities, and I never did conquer it totally. I think we may see this even more in multiplayer, if players make effective use of forts, harbors and other defensive features.

That said, it is possible to wipe out an AI civ; I actually did so in my first game, on Able, even though I’m not a warmonger. I just stomped on Egypt and took its last city, driving it out of the game.

I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work. I’ve heard people say it works like a deckbuilding game. I’ve played such game (e.g., Dominion), but I’m not sure how they translate to Old World. Maybe you gather up the discards and shuffle them back into the deck before drawing?

Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, it can be done. In my current campaign I’ve taken out two of them.

But I think it’s going to prove pretty difficult indeed to take them all out. So to me at least it feels like it’s not a win condition I can achieve or probably one I should even be aiming for unless I drop back to a small or medium maps and/or go with fewer civs (5 on a large map is looking to be more than I can accomplish because as I mentioned above, took me 40 some odd years to take out a civ listed as much weaker that even at the start of this war had 1/3rd maybe 1/4th the number of cities).

Curious if anyone else would rather have:

  • a probably-win button when the last 20 turns are a foregone conclusion (your civ played by the AI, maybe, in lieu of an Offworld-style buyout)
  • rubber banding to make the ending more exciting
  • the opportunity to up the difficulty for more last-minute challenge and some sort of prestige at the end
  • things as they are.

It’s funny that I didn’t really have these thoughts with any Civ game, but the work Old World does to keep the game interesting makes me hungrier for every last turn to be interesting.

(watching responses closely…)

Definitely not rubber banding or random events to penalize the player. It feels cheap.

I wouldn’t be against a quick sim until end button with the AI taking over your Civ. Maybe the player needs to meet some criteria before it gets enabled.