Tom burner account confirmed
dadgummit
I have no idea what you are talking about. What do you mean? How is he teaching people how to play games? He writes manuals?
He’s done it on YouTube plenty!
But you said you didn’t want to watch Let’s Plays. There are plenty of YT/streamers that do great tutorials. No offense to Tom, but some of them are even better at it than he is.
Go watch Quill18’s lets play.
Does he have one from within the last year?
No, but the basics haven’t changed.
There are newer ones on YT as well. If you want to learn the game, there are resources. Or just wait a month, there will be tons of guides and Let’s Plays.
Definitely doesn’t count as a manual (!!!), but I covered some of the basic in my Q&A stream today:
Thanks Soren! I’ll take a look.
And, c’mon, I know it’s not 1990, but having a manual isn’t CRAZY for a 4X in 2021. In fact… it’s kind of normal.
I will definitely watch that, Soren, but it’d be great if you made some tutorial vids like you did for OTC (those were amazing).
I’ve gotta say I didn’t expect 20 posts about whether it would be better to learn the game with a manual. If it’s not worth the effort, then wait it out until there is some documentation. I didn’t find it too bad and when I had questions I got them answered on the discord. Not my optimal way to learn, but not too much of a hurdle for a game this good.
If I had a dollar for every time ‘manual’ was mentioned in the forum today I would easily have recouped the purchase price of Old World. :-)
The tooltips tell you everything you need to know. What you’re lacking is context that comes with experience with the game. There are no risks with picking a family, which would become apparent in your first playthrough.
Let’s go through Egypt.
So, the benefit of the family seat is you don’t need horses/camels/elephants to build those units. If you have those available in your starting city anyway, that’s kind of a waste. For the rest, their cities are considered connected by traderoute (don’t need to build a road to them), give +2 training per turn, and new units start with Saddleborn. Obviously this family is a choice if you’re wanting military.
Family seat allows you to buy tiles around the city, pretty self-explanatory if you’ve played a Civ game before. You also start with +2 Citizens. Are there juicy resources/tiles away from your city (it shows you what the borders will be if you settle)? Might want to pick it. For all their cities you get extra pop growth per year and culture from Crop Resources. Do you have crop resources (tooltip will tell you what those are) around your city? Might be a good pick. The extra growth provided in their cities can be a nice boost and means more/faster specialists, faster production of workers, settlers, etc.
The clerics’ focus seems pretty clear. You found a religion and you can build Disciples much faster in the family seat. You get a reduction to unhappiness and religious buildings get bonuses. Want to know what those buildings do? It’s there in the tooltip. You can build Urban improvements on sand. This is going to be useful if you… have a lot of sand around you.
Sages are clearly tech. When you found the seat you get a free tech and the Inquiry project. All cities get a bonus to specialist research and a couple Civics per turn. Urban specialists (those built on urban tiles like amphitheaters, libraries, etc.) are a bit cheaper to build in their cities.
There you go. I feel like everything you need to know is in the tooltips. I don’t know how you could understand how important each one of those aspects are to you without some experience playing the actual game. It’s not a puzzle game with one way to play it, everything is contextual. You get that context by playing the game.
Okay, so I’m very early in (I’ve never played more than 15 or so turns, about to start my first real/earnest game now) but picking Babylon I see these four options.
To me this looks like with this family established you gain +2 Training per turn (mousing over shields this is used to promote and upgrade units). Newly build ranged units will now begin with Sniping (mousing over this tells me it’s +20% bonus attack within your borders).
Moving along, Camps and Nets will yield double output. Being the Family Seat (which is what you get when you found this with your starting city, I think) unlocks Hunt (this seems to be an upgradable thing that can be repeatedly “built” in the city for bonuses to Culture).
Next when I found this seat I’ll gain +50 Iron, Stone, and Wood.
Character Tendencies (Hero, Tactician, Schemer) seem to be more common with this Family.
Units seem to prefer exploration and are happier inside our territory (citation needed).
This family seems to be upset if you don’t have Furs and Honey (thankfully I seem to have Honey in this city, once I tech up to it).
Mostly, what @KevinC said above.
I absolutely appreciate that you were game enough to take my challenge, but like, I can read the tooltips, which (for the most part) is what you just did.
I’m drawing a distinction between “reading tooltips” and “learning how to play a game.”
I felt like I must be crazy until Tom posted his diary. I guess I don’t know how to explain what I’m missing other than the dissection metaphor I made earlier. When I’m first learning a game, I DON’T want every number and bit of jargon in front of me.
I want someone to carefully lead me through not just what everything does, but why it matters. That means revealing information at the right time, in the right way. It’s telling a story. Not dumping an encyclopedia on my head and running away.
That’s hard. Obviously. I realize that. It’s why nobody did it for Old World.
I wouldn’t care except I love Civ 4, I love Soren, I love what this game seems to be trying to do. I wouldn’t be posting this if I didn’t really want to learn this game – but I don’t have the patience Tom had to reverse-engineer its systems for 10 hours (and he still seems to only be scratching the surface!)
I’ll back out of this thread for now, because I don’t need to dominate it and I think everyone gets my point.
Then what you’re looking for is a lengthy Let’s Play where a streamer walks you through the actions they’re taking and why. If they’re not out now, I’m sure they will be.
And what I’m saying is the tooltips give you what you need to play the game. But for it to “click” you need some context. That context came pretty quickly to me just by playing the game. When I wanted to train and promote a bunch of units, I realized I was short on the Training resource. Ahh, here’s Ramesside with +2 training/year for free with each city. Oh, and that’s what a Barracks does, it gives Training per turn. Now I know what I want to focus on if I need to ramp up my military.
I don’t know, I just don’t think having mastery (or at least full contextual understanding of what means what and why you might want certain things in what circumstances) over a game’s systems before you start to play the game is realistic in a new strategy game. Waiting for a streamer to walk you this his/her thought processes is one way to go, but the game provides you the info to pick it up as you go. I found the game was very conducive to building that mental map as I played with the tooltips and prompts it provides in-game.
You know when you first posted, about how this game was too hard to learn, I did an eye roll. What’s he talking about,. Old World has fantastic tooltips which made the game a breeze to learn. So then, I saw Tom review and I thought well maybe it wasn’t that easy to learn.
I went back and read the forum comments from May 2020 shortly after the game entered early access.
I came across this post from myself from May 2020
Documentation
This a great game, that just needs to be more accessible.
The primary way people will learn this game is tooltips. You have a great tooltip system, and you just need to keep reminding people that they can freeze tooltips, using the middle mouse button.You do need more tooltips. Obvious new ones to include: buying tiles, religious units building monasteries, Ships can transport troops. Plus some little tidbits, like not all wonders appear in all games.
I know people don’t read manuals so you can skip writing on them.
People do use google and many will read Wiki’sThe current help system is woefully inadequate and is just rehash of the tooltip info, and the UI is painful. I’m glad you add a search function, but no one does search as well as google so it is pointless to try and do one, IMO. Most importantly the help system doesn’t lend itself to the high-level overview that @Piemax2, copied from Reddit in post 504. This is exactly the type of information that would be perfect on Old World Wiki on the topic of tips for Civ players. I hope you junk the existing help system and considers this alternative.
I think Paradox. starting with Hearts of Iron IV and several other games, just junked the traditionally help system and instead it just opens a browser window, to the HOI IV wiki. Paradox employees were initially the main authors of the wiki, but probably for the last couple of years, most of the work is done by members of the community.
To me of the biggest advantage is I can simply google stuff and 90% of the time it will redirect me to the correct wiki page. Sometimes, I don’t have time to play the game, but mind is still thinking about strategies and I want to know something, quick like what is the tech requirement for a Turretted African Elephant, or even what is the new name for it.
So anyway my apologies to you and Tom, for thinking you are were all too impatient, too slow. I really hope @SorenJohnson and @Leyla_Johnson take the feedback from you and Tom and even mine to heart.
To update my 14-month-old post.
I still read manuals, Shadow Empire manual was the only thing that made the game a ridiculously complex game, at least somewhat playable. A manual would be good at least for some people.
I went back a looked at resources for new players available on Discord. Honestly, it’s not good. There are 16, ~15 minutes tutorials, from early access days. I thought they weren’t good back then and would be even worse today. A couple of other strategy guides for specific areas, like how to pick the right families. The beauty of Wiki is these can be updated/discussed and kept up to date. None of this seems to happen on Discord
Tom nailed it with this.
But a new player just jumping in, expecting to have his hand held like in other strategy games, expecting to be shown what he’s got before him? I don’t think it’s going to make a very good first impression on people who want to know the rules of a game as they play
Not to mention those of us who prefer to know the rules of a game before we play (too many strategy games operate under the premise that your first several playthroughs are for learning the game instead of actually playing the game; as a boardgame, I find this intolerable).
Personally, I get enjoyment from figuring out how the complex system works, but not everybody thinks figuring out complex games is fun.
I feel really dumb because this is where I’m stuck too. I have no idea how to end the first turn of just make the game go forward.
Oh cool. I’ll look around the interface more. It’s all really full of stuff, and hard to parse because there’s so much screen real estate.
EDIT: Loaded my saved game, and I don’t see any tutorial popups anywhere.
I really have no idea how to handle the concept of a turn-based game with no “End Turn” button anywhere. I’ve never encountered this problem before.
EDIT2: AAAAHA! I think I found it! Look at where my cursor is.
“End the Year”. It’s a little tick mark to the bottom right of Nebuchadnezzar’s face.
There’s a Next Unit prompt which indicates you may have units you haven’t issued orders to.
You have unspent orders, so Next Unit is what you click to see which unit can use those orders. When you are out of units and/or orders and no events need your attention, Next Unit becomes End Turn. This is something you can adjust in the options, iirc.