The answer, from me, is Yes.
Oh yeah, this one is good stuff. After playing 50 hours I’d happily pick it up today at full price, hell I’d pay 60 bucks for it because every time I finish a campaign, win or lose, I just want to start another one.
I like that you have to make decisions between guns and butter. It’s why in my current campaign when two majors came after me my development stopped because I didn’t have the orders left for workers.
As for how I deal with it, more often than not I make choices based on looking for the decisions that increase this.
Oh, you can finish campaigns! I assumed it wasn’t really that complete - how far along is this? What’s left on the road map?
I’ve never finished a campaign! The game usually falls apart before then - either I lose, or the mechanics clearly need work, or the game starts crashing. But I usually play on test branches, and I get further every time.
Oh yeah, I’ve finished multiple campaigns. There’s a year or so of polishing going on, but this thing is ready to be played (more so than many so called finished games).
While I’ve run into errors that flash up on the screen, I’ve yet to encounter anything that stopped me from finishing (this is test branch).
I do think this is a pretty good game, but there are some things I’m not crazy about.
-
I like how the economy works a lot. I enjoy balancing the resources (money, food, iron, wood, stone, science, civic, training). There is a global marketplace to buy and sell resources, whose prices adjust based on how many are being bought / sold. City improvements are build right on the map and there seems to be a nice variety on how the land can be developed. Lots of different resources to give those hexes a resource bump. I like the specialist system which allows further customization of resource production (as population grows you can train these citizens to provide ‘extra’ work on an improvement built on a city hex).
-
The cities support specializing production. Some cities may be good at producing civilian-type units like settlers and workers, disciples. Some can specialize in military units and others civics projects (improvements that don’t appear on the map that can boost certain things).
-
A random selection of wonders are available each game to help keep things fresh and I like how these are gated by a city’s culture level of a city. Culture grows by building things like amphitheaters.
-
The order system is cool in that you only get so many actions per turn, so you may not be able to assign all of your workers and utilize all military units each turn. Now, I haven’t been very orders constrained yet but they tweak that and I haven’t played with the recent build.
-
The AI is already better than typical 4X games and we’r still a while from release.
-
It’s funny but one of the main things that is supposed to differentiate this game is the thing I don’t like that much, the family system. I find it tedious to deal with, marrying off people and getting a constant stream of events for how you want to educate the kids.
All in all thought I like the game.
Oh wow, thanks for all the thoughts and info, that’s very handy and fun to read. I think it sounds worth grabbing while I can, maybe even throwing in a few games over this holiday weekend. Though I may, like most Early Access games, just put it away after the weekend and revisit at launch or close to it.
You and me both. Which might also be why CK2 failed to get its hooks in me. I can care about a character or two but pretty soon it just becomes a parade of names and I really just want the dialog to go away so I can get back to the other stuff I enjoy more.
I’ve got a different take I guess. I don’t find it that time consuming to make decisions on this and I’ve got the information in front of me to make the decision on. So I just view the family part as more of the impactful decisions that come along the whole campaign.
In fact I’d lean into it. I don’t find that typically really pissing off one family has proved all that impactful. So I mostly train them and use them to get benefits to resources I need.
Exactly! :-)
I also failed with CK2 because it felt like I was constantly looking at lists of names so I could set up marriages.
Luckily there is enough good stuff in Old World to make the game enjoyable despite this. Maybe if they were more varied it would be more tolerable? So people would feel more unique instead of just - they are good charisma guy, she’s good discipline lady, etc… Occasionally you get someone who boosts stone production and I’m like - ‘they would be a great mayor in this city!’.
I think you nailed it, for me. Bear in mind I’ve intentionally only dabbled in the game thus far, but I quickly got bored with the decisions presented to me. I think the character dynamic is potentially really cool but I just don’t feel like it’s there yet. Character options in my limited experience were not interesting decisions whereas actions I was taking on the strategic side were. So every time I got prompted on another child (wait, was this the tactician kid or was this the future Littlefinger?) it felt more like a distraction as opposed to an opportunity.
I think of those little people as my future governors, ambassadors, generals, etc.
My current game might actually end up a loss due to lack of an heir. Original King’s daughter is now well into her 30s, with no children and she has no surviving siblings. So I recently divorced her King-Consort and set up a new marriage. Of course, he might not have been the problem.
I do find myself having trouble sticking to long-term plans in the mid-game. I’m usually just reactive. You have to start with any battles, obviously. Then I find myself with “crap, I hardly have any stone - build quarries wherever I can”, and so on. But that’s on me - I should have planned ahead better.
Another wrinkle I like is the random-draw tech tree. The tech tree is the same every game, but you only get offered 4 to choose from each time you start new research. You can’t just rush for X every game. This game, it took forever to finally get lumbermills up and running.
The one-time bonus techs also make for interesting decisions. I couldn’t pass up that free Arkadian Archer, knowing that it would never be offered again, yet it just sits in my capital because the front is very far away. Should have passed it up.
This is my favorite game of the year so far, and I think you’ll like it, but of course tastes vary. I think it’s every bit as fun as Civ IV and CK2. I really love the orders system: I like that the game forces me to decide which unit to move (or build with). (Orders are easier to come by on the lowest difficulty level, but they have real bite past that.) The tech card system is a good innovation too. And as @gruntled says, the option to choose a one-time bonus tech – which is trashed if you don’t use it – adds yet another interesting decision. Do I spend two research turns building that free chariot that may just sit at home for lack of orders?
I like the family system more than @robc04 and @KevinC, but then I really liked CK2. I do agree that it’s not necessarily the strongest part of the game, at least not yet. Personally, I’d like to see the devs add a lot more crazy to the personality mix. I want some psychotic relatives, some murderers and cheats and two-timers and whatnot. As well as the occasional awesome person. More whimsical traits, like odd quirks or diseases. There’s a little of this but not enough.
In the meantime, for those who find the family system less fun, I wonder if turning down event frequency might address this?
For myself I don’t really want to turn down the frequency or see the events less (except maybe in the near term), I’d mostly just like to see the system become more involved and provide me with more situations where I’m making interesting decisions. Very limited sample size, but my initial impression was that my decisions were pretty much “this kid will be a general” and the rest were kind of obvious from there, or just didn’t provide a meaningful/impactful choice.
Right now my first impression is the strategy portion seems really engaging, the family stuff failed to interest me and just became a task I had to do. Hope to see more development there.
I like the family system*, there’s interesting decisions and trade offs to be made: E.g. on potential spouses, do I go for the stats or take the general archetypes? Powerful generals can make a big difference, especially in the early game for Civs that don’t have steadfast or sniping as automatic promotions. Clearing out barb settlements is crucial to establishing a sound base which can be done with one unit and a capable general. Otherwise waiting 8 years for a city to build a unit more often than not results in tribes taking them over - and there are times that being surrounded by Numidian or Scythian tribes can kill a game right quick (worse even than a major civ.) I do wish the tribes waited a few more years before they start taking over everything, I’ve been tempted to turn them off but then since they’re a major thematic portion of the game that feels wrong.
(*But I’m also a fan of CK2 and “roleplaying in my head” where I spin little stories for different characters. I know that’s a sub-optimal and marginal play style but eh. That said I absolutely loathe the illegitimate child event that I get almost every damn game if the primary heir is female. )
I agree with this in the early game but by turn 50 or so the family decisions just don’t seem important enough for the time to take up
Got my first barbarian alliance, and I am a bit disappointed. I had pictured a rather dangerous situation where you and the barbarians both occupied the area, and it was really, really important to stay on good terms with them, unless you kept adequate troops nearby, but that they would help defend the city from others. Now I find that once you send a settler, it is simply your city and their troops leave.
Seems like a missed opportunity.
The power of barb alliances is that you can move their units to attack civs you are not at war with.
!
2345