Old World (pka Ten Crowns) from Soren Johnson

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.

My favorite idea would be a win by TKO mechanic, whereby you are offered the victory screen if the game figures your victory is a foregone conclusion. And that would be based on internal calculation involving a large point lead and opponents being weaker/much weaker than you and having a clear path to victory (say, needing 4 points and having two wonders underway, and two cities within range of going legendary).

Endgame slog gives 4x a bad name, and I cannot think of anything which would go far in preventing it.

I really like the idea of TKO, although I guess in some way the ambition system almost works like that.

I hadn’t heard the term rubber banding before, I assuming it means upping the difficulty level as the human player does better. I’ve played a lot of Hearts of Iron IV, and there is a mod called Expert AI. Which has variety of ways of doing this as the invader conquers more they get more free troops, production bonus etc. and bonus for fighting in their own territory. So I definitely like it.

Here is a suggested mechanic, which I think has historically roots. Most of the ancient campaigns always started of well the sharp, charismatic general easily took the outer provinces, but as the got closer to the capitol the fighting got tougher. Many campaigns basically ended on the outside of the capitol, Constantinople, Alexandria, Athens, Romes etc. Now partly, it was because these cities were heavily fortified. Also the troops were typically the best in country, the imperial guard etc. But just as important is the troops at this point knew if they surrender they’d not only be killed but so would their family, the were literally fight to defend their culture.

Right now you get 10% bonus for fighting in friendly territory. I think bonus should scale with culture level (weak, developing, strong) and difficulty level at low level its 5% defensive bonus per culture and medium 10% at the highest levels 20%. So at the top difficulty levels if the capitol city has legendary culture, than units defending get a 4x20% or 80% modifier.

The second mechanic, I’d like to see is a bit of gang up on the leader. In Civ IV, IIRC there was modifier to diplomacy if you were leading. I haven’t seen evidence of this in Old World.
Right now I’m leading in my Glorious level difficulty game, and they appear to be letting me just steamroll the minor tribe cities at some point two or more of them should declare war on me, because I’m getting too powerful.

I’m not sure if the same thing should happen if you get like the 8th ambition, but definitely some form of warmonger penalty should exist.

Unless this is handled better than I’ve seen it done before it holds little appeal to me. As a player running a successful campaign while I"m working to close out a win to then find i’m being penalized for doing a proper job of it by triggering some pile on would annoy me no end.

While I had no issues with realm divide in Shogun 2 because I learned to artificially adapt to it, it is easily the most hated design decision CA made for that game.

It is a fair point. In theory, it would make for a more competitive end game. In practice, when it has happened to me, I do get annoyed. Really, China, and Egypt you are going to declare war on me and some how invade with your WWI infantry and artillery, against my modern armor, after you get through my Navy and stealth bombers, good luck with that plan. It often backfires, instead of just finishing up the spaceship or UN victory, I decide I don’t want to fight the pointless war and just quit the game immediately.

So if it is done it should be done while it can still make a difference in the game.

I have mixed feeling about the end game slog. On one hand, I feel it is too bad that developers went to all the trouble to create the late game techs, and laws, and I never get to play with them. On the other hand the beginning and middle of the 4x games are always the most interesting. I’d say 10% of my Civ IV were competitive past 1800, but the were some of my favorite games.

I feel Old World has the potential to create a higher percentage of interesting end games, but it is not there yet.

Ah, the age-old question of the AI playing to win versus playing with a consistent personality. I always find it very annoying when an AI ignores centuries of peace to attack the player (or even just to vote against them) because they are seen as a threat due to the artificial concept of victory. On the other hand, a game shouldn’t just be a victory procession once you can predict the behaviour of the AI. A difficult balance to strike (as Soren knows well).

I was wondering about some sort of system where on each ruler’s death you could choose your heir to make the game easier or harder (in exchange a score boost).

Another system might be to ensure that your civilization will face a “crisis” at some point with each of your rivals. For a sworn enemy this would probably be a war that needs to be won conclusively. If the war is inconclusive you will sooner or later be forced to face them again later. For friends a diplomatic event chain of some sort, perhaps, leading to a personal union or permanent defensive alliance or something. Either way this would give the impression of overcoming rival civilizations to stand as uncontested leader of the known world. Difficult to do without interrupting player agency though.