I you look at the middle 3 icons in the middle row, Growth, Training and Civics, those are also displayed on your main screen showing your totals of those resources and the turn income. BUT, in addition to that, they are also displayed in your city screen where they show the “throughput” of that resource in that city, and that actually controls how fast you build stuff. So if you want to build stuff that takes Growth (Settlers, Workers, Disciples) in a city you want more Growth in that city. Likewise for Training to build military units and Civics to build specialists and urban projects. This is over and above the general use of Civics and Training as “mana” for various strategic abilities (like picking laws or promoting troops.)
The one thing I think that can help get a handle on the economy of the game quick is to under those 3 throughputs. Everything else is basically a stockpile of resources or mana that can be spent as needed. But those three things are bottlenecks, on a city by city basis. The purple Science beaker is also a bottleneck, on a per turn civ-wide basis as it controls research speed. Unlike some other games you usually don’t have easy ways to convert those 4 resources so figuring out how to manage them is fairly key.
The stuff in the left column is fungible through the market (taking a discount/surcharge but still pretty fungible) but the stuff in the middle is more limited.
Also, @tomchick, for the record, the invitation is open to come to Colorado and chatter excitedly at me about Old World. I have an empty chair here next to me which is now yours, like the seat left empty for Elijah.
Oh these are great, thank you. I recall having similar issues to Nightgaunt with the icons.
I dabbled with Old World when it launched on Epic and have been meaning to return to it, which I’m hoping to do soon—maybe in time for the Steam release.
Hurrah! Victory is mine on the next level up than last time.
The game ended in a huge war - Egypt were well ahead of my Carthaginian empire (though, in hindsight, I might have been able to race to the ambition victory I eventually hit through science). It only took bribing Babylonia and Persia (the only other two surviving empires) with enormous piles of gold to declare war on Egypt, and I was able to stall them out long enough to claim my victory.
Things I learned:
One worker per city is not enough once you start unlocking urban improvements
Religions are great, and it’s probably fine just to adopt the first one you come across if you don’t have clerics
I think you basically just have to play a lot of games, and get familiar with all the different things. But it’s mostly realising the interplay between the ‘special’ resources (orders, science, etc.) and the ‘raw materials’ resources (food, wood…) and how they drive each other to greater heights. Science unlocks new and better ways, but it’s all about that cycle of building with raw materials to help generate special resources, which helps generate raw materials more efficiently, or more efficiently convert raw resources into special ones.
Example: quarries produce stone. You can use stone to produce a forum, generating civics. You can use civics (and food) to improve your quarries with specialists (producing more stone, and civics, and science). Science unlocks the ability to build urban improvements on the map that generate civics, and you can use those civics to populate more specialists in a virtuous circle.
There are lots of these little swirling circles of resources, and the strength of the game is in how many and how interconnected they are, and how dynamic the value each of the resources is throughout the game.
I loved Civilization IV and Offworld Trading Company, so I’m excited for tomorrow’s Steam release of Old World (launching at 3AM EST).
The game directory includes the full source code! It’s C#, XML, and uses the Unity engine. I’m curious how the undo button was implemented, so it’s awesome that I can just dive in and find out.
My link collection:
The DLC (6 Greek scenarios + Hittites faction) is free for owners on all platforms for the first 2 weeks.
