Ewww, there are monkey events in this game?
Do not want.
-Tom
What if you can literally shoot a monkey?
Old World doesn’t really have guns, but you can get rid of the monkey. It is more fun to see what the monkey does.
what about bows tho
Lots of bows, actually it’s one of my few complaints about the game. In general, bows are significantly superior to melee units. The main exceptions being a few country unique units like Rome.
Greece has a unique melee unit as well. Also, now ranged units cause less damage the further away the target is. (Not sure when this change went in, but definitely post Early Access release)
I hadn’t played Old World in many months and decided to fire it up. Still as good as I remembered. I played on the difficulty where I was on even footing with the AI. I was behind by quite a bit on the victory point scoreboard, but I won an ambition victory. After my initial expansion I played pretty peacefully, just defending against the occasional war and using diplomacy to secure peace.
I really enjoy the economy aspect of the game - the food / growth, military production and civic production. It just seems to allow for good specialization. Same with the actual resource production - taking advantage of adjacency bonuses and production boosting improvements. Of course the orders system is really cool. I tend not to have a lot of military so I tend not to be limited in what I can do, but I can see that it would have interesting affects in civil vs military actions. I probably can’t get away with my usual play style on a harder difficulty level, so I would be forced to engage more with tougher order decisions.
When I was attacked by the AI they conducted themselves in an intelligent way - coming in force, sometimes pulling back injured units, concentrating fire.
I still think the dynastic / character features take up too much time. It seems like someone is constantly needing to be educated, ‘leveled up’, married off. By the end I start to dread getting interrupted so many times by these and other events when I really want to be building my next improvement or getting those enemies out of my land. Next time I’m going to turn the event frequency down to low. I also see that there is an option to turn characters off, but I’m not sure I want them off, I just want them to need less attention. That option also removes families from the game.
At the difficulty level I played at ‘The Good’, I didn’t really need to pay too much attention to the character choices - who governs what cities, who marries who, who gets the council positions. I’m curious to see if they become more interesting choices at a harder difficulty level. I’d also need to figure out what type of characters fills what roles the best because I’ve just been winging it.
There are plenty of things I don’t understand yet and can’t find info for in the help, such as “What effect does the character opinions have on me?”
I like the look of the map and the music and technically the game is very solid in the first half of the game. It gets noticeably more laggy in the latter half, or if I’ve been playing a while. Restarting the game helps, but late in the game the performance isn’t great on my core i7 6700k, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1070.
I’m enjoying the game, but yes, it does feel a bit like playing Civ with a Dynastic Soap Opera popping in every turn or two.
I agree to an extent that’s probably why I completely bounced off of Crusader Kings. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to turn it off. It is been a while since I play the game much past turn 100. The handful of games I’ve completed ended in the turn 120-150 range and the lag wasn’t bad. I hope it’s not gotten worse. My system is identical to yours except 32 vs 16 Gig of RAM.
Seems like a bit of a misstep. I get wanting to copy elements of Crusader Kings since it’s popular, but those games are really free-form RPGs rather than strategy games. Just taking the Civ formula and isolating it to a particular era is enough to remove much of the abstraction (armies taking years to move, battles lasting millenia etc) and make the game far more grounded, detailed, and strategic.
I quite like the dynastic elements in the game and I’m happy they’re included.
However for those that don’t, in the advanced setup menu (at least on the test version) you can turn off characters.
I like the dynastic elements but at a certain point I do find the constant interruptions to be an annoyance. I think perhaps you should only be prompted for education when it comes to your heir and not the rest of your kids. It’s fine early game when the scale is smaller, but when your empire gets bigger and you have a bunch of things to deal with each turn I just find it to be a hassle. “Yeah, sure, study Commerce. Whatever.”.
Either that, or expand on the system to flesh it out further to make that a deeper part of the game so the decisions were more interesting to me. I’d be fine with that direction too, but where it sits right now just kind of gets mildly annoying at a certain time as I’m trying to focus on things that feel more important/interesting.
We’re adding a half-year turns option this week that will have characters but less events overall (as they grow slower - less kids to go to school). Same number of turns overall to win the game.
Oh that sounds pretty interesting. How do half-year turns impact other aspects of the game like tech and building time? Do they scale so it still takes the same number of turns?
Having slower dying/replacing characters and fewer kid events might work really well for me. Looking forward to trying that.
Holy cow, I was thinking about suggesting that and I thought it may be too big a change so I didn’t! I know, I know easy for me to say :-)
I think that will be a nice improvement Soren as I really enjoy most aspects of the game except for the volume of events / character decisions.
That’s a nice option to include. I personally think the decisions have deep roots in the map- and economy-level strategy, but sometimes you just want to stay on that map for an afternoon. :)
Hey Gang,
Besides a risk of injury if actually in battle, does having my leader “generaling” a unit far away from the capitol effect my capacity to rule (via events or passive effects if stationed in the capitol)?
I think they can’t spawn progeny because the spouses are too far away
There are a variety of events that are written for your leader as a general (try attacking an opposing leader general’s unit!), so the game effects are largely through that system.
Okay, so my leader being a general can trigger some events, but are there events that can’t be triggered while they’re off being a general?