I’m a little surprised to find that others experienced a challenge to their min-maxing tendencies. I plan as perfectly as possible, and feel the pain of imperfect choices as they become apparent. Basically, I like my roads to be straight. But one of the reasons I owe Old World a paean is that it accommodates my compulsions with well-designed fudge-factors.
[6 FOOT HIGH NEON SIGN] Undo
Being able to step back a misclick is a great invention in interface history. Good interfaces reduce misclicks and include prompts for input which seems unintentional, which achieves the same end. But Old World lets me just undo the misclick instead of adapt or reload. I value that greatly. Further, undo lets me step back unintentional choices. I frequently misjudge whether I can kill a unit. Instead of choosing between quantifying HP or living with catastrophic arrogance, I can just use undo to explore scenarios. If I choose to have a character Endeared to Me in an event, but I learn seconds later that boost to attitude doesn’t bump me into Upset, Cautious, or Friendly, I misunderstood the tradeoffs. In this way Old World isn’t just curing my headaches, it’s given me a new way to get information about the gamestate which the interface does not convey well. Lastly, end-of-turn autosave + undo lets me step back misplay. I don’t feel good about it, but sometimes I would rather sweep a bad decision under the rug than become a better person. Undo is the biggest fudgefactor.
Orders
The option to buy Orders with military training makes Old World easier to play than any other 4x I’ve played. I can usually afford to suffer the cost of 100 shields if it helps me correct misplay without undoing several choices. Creating a single-player turn-timer as Mohawk Games has done solves so many of Civilization’s problems. And allowing some wiggle room through purchasing Orders is a very smart way to corral the player tendency to maximize at the expense of their own fun, without creating a new source of heartache.
The Orders system reduces the computation the player needs to make. It’s not just the flexibility to buy more, it’s the limitation on activity (choices, moves, character action). Because I can’t do everything I don’t have to solve the 4-dimensional matrix of tile improvements, troop positioning, and higher strategic goals, i.e., given this amount of Orders, do I get a better ROI with invasion or turning Stone into other yields within my existing empire?). I only need to know my priorities. If my army mostly idles on a far flank of my empire because I choose worker roads and building courthouses, so be it. The troops are not ideally placed, but it’s not like I didn’t plan right–each turn is a question of priority. As long as I made the most of those orders within each turn, I can’t second-guess whether my troops are fortified in the right place when brinksmanship turns hot–I was never given an allowance of 3 moves per turn. I was given a finite budget and fairly unconstrained travel distances for troops.
Orders are flexible. If I don’t have enough iron , I can build a mine. Anywhere. What a “sub-optimal mine” lacks in iron it makes up for by being cheaper in Orders.
Global Yields
The sharpness demanded by worker improvement–what the kids call “sim city”-is likewise blunted by Old World innovation. Resources are rarely local. They mostly pile up at the top of the screen, which is not only visible on every screen, another quiet triumph of the interface, but allow you to sim city with only global needs for stone, iron, and lumber in mind. In other 4x games answering the question, “what resource do I need most?” may require revising more than one strategic layer to close the gap. In Old World you can almost always set a worker to narrow the gap that turn. A mine in city 4 is the same as a mine in city 2. It’s always close to optimal play to build the mine where the available worker is.
The compulsive player does seek to have lumbermills where the governor has “Naturalist (+50% lumbermills and grove yields)” of course, and will feel slapped on the hand for letting workers stray into the borders of other families (where improvements of any type take +1 turn & +1 order). But a no point is Old World as punishing as any other game I can think of. You can leave the +0.5 iron for adjacent mines on the floor and be penalized so insubstantially as to play on the hardest difficulty. Fudge it.
There are only two things you can’t get “wrong.” You can’t undervalue Orders or misunderstand what to prioritize i.e., grand strategy. This is what Old World gets so right.
