I don’t think so. Giving orders to unit doesn’t seem to do anything. I can tell my Scouts to go exploring, but they just stay put. It doesn’t matter if I have enough “Orders” left over or not. So I don’t think the Next Unit button does anything meaningful in that regard.
Is your unit fatigued? (Meaning they have used all their standard moves this turn? There would be a bunch of empty circles over its head.) That’s the only reason why a unit wouldn’t move if you still have Orders. There’s supposed to be a tutorial message the first time you try to move a Fatigued unit (which explains about Forced March). I’ll double check to make sure it’s still working…
I figured it out! You don’t left click to move units in this game! You right click instead!
Personally I’ve enjoyed working the thing out via the tooltips and so forth. What just changed for me was switching maps. I only just noticed the pop-ups which indicate the design thinking behind them and so I’m now on a Northern Ocean map (designed for single player) plus I budged the difficulty up a notch and, hey presto!, some of the systems and stuff I could largely ignore before, I definitely no longer can. Was winning with Double victories and getting a bit meh about whatever was happening to various family members and the machinations of tribes, monkeys etc. No longer, I assure you. Great game Mohawk, bravo!
imho if you played Civ or anything even slightly similar, e.g. even Age Of Wonders, then you can pick this up quickly enough.
That doesn’t mean you’ll be good obviously…edit:
for the record, I prefer reading over Let’s Plays and discord :).
ahh, begun the manual has!
Yeah, as someone who plays on a TV, it’s very important to me! UI and tooltip scale is wonderful, and not just that: it’s scaling that doesn’t look awful (looking at you Northgard).
I had an hour and a half with Old World last night and didn’t have a clue what I was doing, and that was before I got into a new game. After a bit of reading, I just clicked on random civilisation because I had no idea what anything really meant. I also rolled with default settings. Once in game, I was quickly overwhelmed. It didn’t tell me how to settle my settlers, or where to settle them and why (I guessed ‘city site’), or what any of the types of cities were or what the icons meant (like culture). I didn’t really know whether this was a left-click or right-click game. Undo and redo would have been handy to know for this reason!
The tutorial about locking tooltips should have been the very first one in my view because it enriches the interface with information and allows you to compare and explore things. I would also loved to have known how to bring up turn events again because a few times I was wondering why I’d choose A over B and ended up going to the mostly useless Old World-opedia only to leave and find the event had disappeared. Eventually I found them hidden under an exclamation mark below the leader portrait but it took a fair bit of clicking around to find it. I pottered about and chose some research somewhat randomly, put a farm and quarry down and encountered some ruins, barbarians, and I didn’t do much more because I was flagging after a miserable day with hayfever.
My general view at present is that, as someone with little experience with 4X and particularly Civ–and I’m rubbish with history too–Old World needs a much smoother introduction and ‘first experience’. I’m no good with real-time strategy and economics but Offworld Trading Company effortlessly got me on board. The canned tutorial stages introduced the basics before pitting you against a competent AI to test what you’d learnt, and that was enough. I feel like Old World needs something like that, even if it’s just to get you started. Maybe a bespoke tutorial campaign so choice is backloaded in favour of introducing the game’s HUD, core concepts and how they relate to each other. I also never read the Offworld Trading Company almanac so that shows how much of a good job the game itself did to get me interested, happily playing and discovering!
A quick guide to Old World for Civ players
I’m going to provide some concepts for people who are finding themselves confused by Old World
Learning. Old World has great tooltips, you can lock tooltips by clicking on the middle mouse button and the drill down. Try it even at the main menu when deciding what civilization to play. For builders, I recommend Egypt or Babylon
Cities
Like Civ, Old World (OW) has hammers, called civics, that are used for production. Unlike Civ, cities in OW have 3 separate production capabilities. Training (red fort block) is used to produce military units. Growth, which is distinct from food (green apples), is used to produce settlers and workers. Civics produce special projects and specialist. Special projects are things like Treasury (which produce gold/turn), Archives (research/turn) and many others. Early on all of your cities should be producing something. Examples, If you are building military units, the unused civics going into the global pool of hammers. If you are building a settler, hammers going in the civics pools, and training goes into the training pool. Unused growth goes into growing the population of individuals cities.
A cities population consist of two types, citizens and specialist. In the early game citizen, produce no or minimal (e.g. 1 beaker/per citizen for Babylon) resources. Specialists do a few things, first, they produce a significant quantity of goods (food, stone, wood, iron, gold). They also permanently increase a cities production capability. Finally, they expand your borders. There are two categories of specialist rural (farmers, miners, lumberjacks, stonecutters) and urban: priest, officers and many others. Note that many families have a bonus for producing certain types of specialist. To make a specialist click on the plus sign over developed (e.g. quarry) hex. Specialist require civics and often food.
Production: Builiding everything in OW, requires time, and most everything requires resources, e.g. A chariot requires 50 food and 50 wood. You can rush almost anything, with anything else (example military units can be rushed with hammers, gold, training, citizens or orders). To do so you need either a particular type of leader, or a specific law. You can buy and sell resources at the top of the screen. If you hold down the Alt key the game will autobuy exactly as much as you need. Not surprisingly, the more you buy the more prices will increase. . It takes a while to research lumbermills so you will often find yourself short of lumber early on. You can chop down trees, which will slowly grow back, but buying is perfectly fine.
Improvements: Farms, and Mines need wood. Quarries need Iron. Urban improvements need stone, and Wonders need huge quantities of stone. In general you want to cluster improvements together, a group of farms, mines, lumbermills because you get 10% bonus for each adjacent improvement. But there are numerous exceptions, farms get big boost being built adjacent to pastures.
Urban improvements are things like temples, theaters, barracks. Generally you can build urban improvements, either in an existing urban hex or adjectant to two or more urban hexes. An easy way to expand the number of urban hexes is with hamlets. Hamlets are very similar to the Civ concept of cottages. They give you gold (at the cost of food) and get more valuable over time. They also are easy way to expand your borders.
Culture: Culture plays a similar role to civ but the mechanics are different. Culture is at a city level. There are 4 cultural levels and you get a bonus when you go from one to another. However, many improvements require a certain culture level. For example, Stronghold require a developing culture and the Citadel, requires a strong culturestrong text
Unique Units. Work the same way they do in Civ. But in order to build them, you need to have done all of the following, researched the tech, built a stronghold, and have a developing or better cultural level.
People; Your leader will be a significant source of resources, for the first 40 turns or so. In addition, there are four other people (advisors), your spouse, the ambassador, chancellor, and spymaster that both provide bonuses, money, training research, etc. as well additional action, like negotiate peace treaties. The slots are unlocked via research. They are a great place to stick your heir to give him/her valuable experience before taking over from you.
Orders. Early on you’ll have plenty of orders but soon you’ll find yourself running out of orders. You can increase orders by increasing legitimacy,(Legitimacy is increased by exploring the map, completing ambition), and many many events, or building pastures and camps on horses, camels, and elephants resources. In the mid-game, many urban improvements will increase the number of orders.
Things not to worry about.
Events: For your first couple of games don’t sweat the events. There are seldom clear-cut good or bad choices.
Religion: religion is pretty powerful, but for your first couple of games if you want to see how it works, go with Assyria, Egypt, or Persia they have a cleric family, and when you found a Cleric city you start a religion.
Discontent and maintenance.
This is a partial list of the stuff, I think would have been helpful to have been written up, when I started.
It’s not realistic in the sense that almost nobody does it, but I don’t see why it’s unrealistic in principle - I mean, we have Youtubers doing it, there’s clearly appetite for it, and a way to do it well. Personally I’m OK with watching Youtube videos to learn about a game before I play it, but I understand people who balk at that. Other than limited time and resource, I’m not sure why strategy developers are so averse to giving players context to what they’re doing in tutorials. It’s not like they generally need to worry about spoilers in the way some other genres do. AI War was pretty good about this, I recall. It walked you through the mechanics in the context of a “real” game and, crucially, explained the implications of what you were doing as it taught you how to do it.
Okay, so my previous post was before I read the rest of the thread!
Maybe if you’re already played it but as a total newcomer the icons alone are confusing enough. A red shield? Is that combat? A chainlink? A bust? A pillar? I’m guessing a hammer is manufacturing, or is it a gavel? And the conical flask is science/research? What are these things and how am I supposed to choose a civilisation based on them when I’ve never played the game before? What’s ‘Opinion’ and ‘Inquiry’? I’m not trying to be obtuse here!
But only once you’ve seen the tutorial telling you how to lock tooltips. Until then tooltips disappear when you try to move your mouse over the buildings or any of the other highlighted text–which is a problem when you’re choosing your civilisation for the first time, and ultimately why I rolled with random civ.
Exactly this, and Tom starting to get it after some 10 hours is very intimidating to me!
I don’t think @justaguy2 is expecting full mastery or understanding right out of the gates, but, like me, would appreciate a solid foundation upon which to start building that. Right now, it’s a very mushy foundation depending on previous experience, with scattered tutorial pop-ups, a busy (but nice) HUD and overwhelming detail that means very little to someone new to the game. I very much felt like I was bumbling through last night and would have dearly loved a guiding hand.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Offworld Trading Company had an excellent introduction and set of tutorials, or at the very least it was enough to get me started and fired up to learn more through play. I want Old World to have a similar ramp at the bottom of the learning curve.
I also totally appreciate how difficult it must be to introduce an intricate 4X game to a pleb like me!
Yeah, AI War’s (long!) tutorial was really good at leading you through the experience and introducing you to the beats of the game. I can’t imagine trying to process it without something like that.
I believe it is working yes, I recall seeing that and liking the idea of fatigue, ‘forced marching’ and how it doubles order cost.
Haha, right? That’s why I think undo and redo would be a handy tutorial pop-up to accompany this!
Yeah, I’ve always preferred game info/manuals to be neatly bundled into the game itself (like Age of Wonders 3, Age of Mythology, Chaos Reborn, The Unholy War), with proper external manuals being a close second, rather than hard-to-reference and time-consuming Let’s Plays, or haphazardly updated/maintained Wiki sites. Ew, Discord?
I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who was a total newcomer. I wasn’t born with innate knowledge of how to play the game or anything like that. :D
I think it just comes down to different mindsets and it’s one that I don’t understand (and that’s totally okay, not saying its wrong to have that mindset!). I was able to just jump in and play and things fell into place pretty quickly. Answers to questions like what are gavels/shields/etc came when I opened a city screen where I could see what each was used for. From what I gather from this thread, that kind of thing isn’t a step people want to take. They want a manual or Let’s Play to detail everything before they start their first game. For me, the UI, tooltips, and other in-game resources were enough so that I could just play and gain understanding as I went.
Shield is Training. It is used to produce military units as well as promote and upgrade them.
The link is the icon for connected to the capital. Like in other civ games (IIRC) it provides a happiness bonus.
Gavel is used for Projects and specialists in cities and to enact Laws. Projects are things like city walls, inquiries (to see what that does click the link in the tooltip or the in-game “civilopedia”), festivals, etc. Specialists are created/assigned via the city screen. Click the + over the tile you want them to work, kinda like assigning where your citizens are working in Civ except more permanent. Laws are things like Vassalage, Serfdom, Centralization, etc. There is a menu for them in the top left so you can view them all. Tech tree shows you what techs unlock them.
Opinion refers to things that affect the opinion/relations of that particular family. Some families like particular resources or want to have the most cities or units in their territory.
I laughed. Well done.
Congrats Soren & Leyla. Looong project.
Yeah, it turns out I had been right clicking to “unselect” units, and inadvertantly giving them orders, whereas left clicking to give them actual orders did nothing.
The reason why I finally figured out the right click/left click thing is that there was some kind of shining artifact outside my cities, and I wondered, I wonder if I need to take a unit to that, or that it’s close enough that I can just see what it is? Maybe if I just right click on that tile, it will tell me why there’s a shining tile there? So I right clicked and it gave me an event of some kind, it was an area where lava was flowing out of the ground.
But a few turns later, I was like “hey wait a minute”, my slingers were standing on that spot. That’s why they had been able to unveil what it was! But I thought units couldn’t be moved in this game? How the heck did I move a unit? That’s when it hit me that the right click had done that.
I also blame this thread. Someone upthread had said something like “you can right click on anything to get context sensitive help within the game”. Something to that effect. So I had the idea of “right click = help” stuck in my head.
I think they said middle click. To freeze tooltips.
I’m pretty sure right clicking on a link in a tooltip takes you to the 'pedia entry. Unless it doesn’t.
Thanks for the pointers Kevin! And yeah, I’m hoping it falls into place quickly too! I always do a fair bit of exploring when I get into any game to understand as much as possible but Old World seems a lot more intricate and detailed than pretty much anything else I’ve played aside from things like Dominions and Solium Infernum. I’ve only played Civ V in the Civ series–and not for long either–so my 4X experience is limited to Age of Wonders 3 and Endless Legend, both of which seemed pretty smooth at the beginning. In all honesty, it’s probably Offworld Trading Company’s introduction that has set a precedent for Mohawk and Old World!
You’re welcome! Feel free to ask away about anything else that crops up either in this thread or the QA thread @Sonoftgb just started. I’ll do my best to try to answer but be forewarned I’m no pro at the game, just have a few games under my belt is all. I’m sure more knowledgeable members of the community will chime in as well. :)