First playthrough thoughts

[jguy100]

Just finished my first playthrough, figured I would share some thoughts! Ok now I finished my second playthrough, no more distractions

First and foremost, Old World is FUN. It's done a good job of capturing the addictive "one more turn" quality that drives Civ. You are always a turn or two away from accomplishing something important. Whether that's finalizing a trade deal, finishing a wonder, hoping your aging leader survives one more year....And you always want to see what comes next!

Secondly, the music is straight up fantastic. The soundtrack is by Christopher Tin, right? Well, he does not disappoint. This actually leads to my biggest gripe about the game - the music is not enabled by default (you have to research a tech to start playing it!). Thankfully there's a mod that enables it from the start of the game. Problem solved

The game has a nice balance between strategy (the civilization-esque gameplay) and roleplaying (the crusader kings-esque gameplay). And thankfully, the game gives options to tweak how much you want of each. More strategy? Less random event! More roleplaying? Disable the event detail tooltip thingies!

I played both of my games as a peaceful builder. I engaged in a few skirmishes with barbarians, but nothing too grand. The fighting was enjoyable, but my experience on that front is limited.

I played both of my games on the second lowest level of difficulty. The AI completely left me to my own devices, even though they had a lot more points, orders, technology, and military than I did. I was able to stumble into an ambition victory. I will have to try a later game on a slightly higher level of difficulty, to see what challenges they present.

I love how the "help" (civilopedia) section is dynamic. For example, if you look up a wonder, it shows the requirements - and will highlight the ones you don't meet yet!

+1 to "one city challenge" being a default option. It's one of my favorite ways to play civilization, and I'm glad to see it codified in the game.

As much as I enjoyed the game, it wasn't perfect. A few critique:
- I noticed occasional lag, especially when switching in/out of the city view.
- The victory screen was a little anti-climatic, a little underwhelming. Having a short video or a civ-style hall of fame would go a long way.
- Duplicated pop-ups/notifications. At the beginning of your turn, you sometimes get pop-ups you have to exit out of. But then there's also a notification for the same event at the bottom of the screen! Why double up? It's especially annoying when it's about the death of some random character I've never heard of.
- There's a few entries missing from the "help" section that would be nice to have. Like what's Unit Consumption? What's AUC?
- For roleplaying purposes, it would be nice if I could name a religion when I found it
- A way to "search" the map for something in particular would be useful, especially on larger maps. Where's the nearest tribal encampment? I don't know!

All in all, I definitely recommend Old World. Bravo Mohawk Games! Now you'll have to excuse me, I need to flip a coin to decide between playing more Old World and going to bed. What harm could one more turn do?

 

[Dale]

Secondly, the music is straight up fantastic. The soundtrack is by Christopher Tin, right? Well, he does not disappoint. This actually leads to my biggest gripe about the game - the music is not enabled by default (you have to research a tech to start playing it!). Thankfully there's a mod that enables it from the start of the game. Problem solved

Quick clarification that Tin's music hasn't actually made it into the game yet. Unfortunately there is post-prod delays getting it.

I played both of my games on the second lowest level of difficulty. The AI completely left me to my own devices, even though they had a lot more points, orders, technology, and military than I did. I was able to stumble into an ambition victory. I will have to try a later game on a slightly higher level of difficulty, to see what challenges they present.

Quiet work of advice. Difficulty ramps up smoothly to The Strong difficulty. After that there is an exponential growth in difficulty.

+1 to "one city challenge" being a default option. It's one of my favorite ways to play civilization, and I'm glad to see it codified in the game.

Yeah OCC is a lot of fun! Suggestion for first game, Egypt as Saite family. Really fun!

As much as I enjoyed the game, it wasn't perfect. A few critique:
- I noticed occasional lag, especially when switching in/out of the city view.
- The victory screen was a little anti-climatic, a little underwhelming. Having a short video or a civ-style hall of fame would go a long way.
- Duplicated pop-ups/notifications. At the beginning of your turn, you sometimes get pop-ups you have to exit out of. But then there's also a notification for the same event at the bottom of the screen! Why double up? It's especially annoying when it's about the death of some random character I've never heard of.
- There's a few entries missing from the "help" section that would be nice to have. Like what's Unit Consumption? What's AUC?
- For roleplaying purposes, it would be nice if I could name a religion when I found it
- A way to "search" the map for something in particular would be useful, especially on larger maps. Where's the nearest tribal encampment? I don't know!

- We're working on improving performance, specially with flipping in and out screens.
- Any ideas for end of game stuff?
- The popups will highlight information that occurred outside of your turn, or at the start of your turn. The notifications along the bottom will highlight that, PLUS anything that happens during your turn. As you get more experience with the game, and character opinion management, you'll come to rely on both. Especially those random character you've never heard of deaths.
- Unit consumption is unit maintenance, and depending on the type of unit could mean different yields. AUC is Ab Urbe Condita, and is Latin. In Latin it means "since the founding of". General usage dictates from the founding of Roma. 753 BC is 1 AUC (year Roma founded). 2021 AD is 2774 AUC.
- You can name a religion.

 

[jguy100]

Thank you so much!!! The Great Byzantine Empire can finally be Rastafarian, as it was always intended

Do I have ideas about end game stuff? Yes. Do I have good ideas about end game stuff? Well, that remains to be seen.

One of the things that makes Old World special to me is feeling the connection between the various characters. The end game timeline shows a nice history, but it is very cold and calculated - no emotion.

To frame the rest of my idea, I want to reference the Civ 3 end game. There's a screen with all the other leaders you played against, and they insult/compliment you based on your victory type (or loss).

With Old World's leader mortality, it's obviously not feasible to display every single other character you interacted with. But it might be nice to have a montage, or even a static screen, with a few of the more important/impactful characters. With some pre-scripted dialog (text) based on their relations toward you, the actions you took against them, etc.

I'm envisioning a Valhalla-type scenario; you and all the other great characters (past and present) are immortalized together in a great banquet feast.

 

[Taefin]

Oh interesting! I personally find the end game slider triggers a strong emotional connection with my empire, remembering the early careers of my great leaders, the world and campaigns they had thrust upon them, the shadow the cast on the late game leaders who aspired took greater but rarely lives long enough to achieve it, one last episode of intrigue as a steward refused to return the throne, how will that ripple through the history of the next 20 years of my empire. But I consider my playstyle something like suboptimal min-max, and OW leaders have been one of the few strong RP connections I’ve had in a 4X game. I’d be interested in something that increases connection with one or more foreign leaders. Aside from the “earn favor with ruler or heir” events I find I don’t play much off the other leaders.

 

[jguy100]

I’m veering a little off topic here, but it sounds like you have an interesting story to share Taefin! Tell us about your rebellious steward

 

[Taefin]

Haha, but I was under the impression that what happens in the late game stays in the late game.

I think this was my strangely peaceful tall Assyria game where I built up 5 cities on a peninsula after Egypt rushed me and stole my second city. I ended up with 6 legendary cities capstone so a few beers and a couple siege towers later we were on the warpath. My “the great” leader decided that the eve of the DV war was a great time to go, and their heir was 17. Uncle so and so had always shown remarkable aptitude for the battlefield so why not hold the throne for a year. As siege towers take a lot of training to move, it seemed like it was time for Assyrian to have a fresh new royal line.

I feel like this was also the game with 3-4 fumbled assassination attempts on the vengeful leader of my military family of a by my spymaster of the same family before finally getting it right for a 30% swing in unit strength just in time to hit the Greek line. … Also when I met my first true love, lumbermill shrine.

 

[jguy100]

Dumb question….What’s DV? Domination victory?

 

[Taefin]

DV here is Double Victory, winning with at least half of the winning threshold score and at least twice the score of all other players.

 

[jguy100]

Thanks…and great story! Darn uncle so and so, ruining nice things for everyone.

 

[PiR]

I actually really enjoy the review game feature at the end.
I don't remember if I've read about HK or OW that the journey mattered more than the end.
It's true, there is not big cinematic appropriate to your victory type as there is in Civ, but to review your historical feats is more important to me.
Some ideas for when we win:

• a music celebration
• making the review timeline a bit more engaging, there is too much text for me to read any, I just look at the map and the leaders pics: there could be some filter on the news we get to have only the biggest events, and have small sound effects when they happen - that would create the customized end cinematic

Not sure this is the most pressing matter where to put efforts though

 

[Josu]

My first thought is that although the game play is absolutelly brilliant I am not sure I will play for longer in short term.
I faced a performance issue in advanced turns, I have times of waiting up to five minutes every end of year. It is absourd.
If it is a problem with the game, I will wait until it solved
I assume that I have a hardware which I adquire not thinking on gaming so I will have to wait until I get a new PC, which I am not considering at the moment.

 

[jguy100]

@Josu is it just the AI turns that take a long time for you, or are you experiencing performance issues elsewhere?

 

[Josu]

@Josu is it just the AI turns that take a long time for you, or are you experiencing performance issues elsewhere?

As always, I have set graphic options to lowest, I can totally live without awesome graphics in this kind of games. I do not search for this in 4X games.
Symthoms are that AI Turns takes long time.
If I click in city production or order unit going to a place, there is also a couple of seconds lag. It is not smooth.
As I said, my pc does not have good gaming specs, so I do not know if it is related to the game or my computer.

 

[Solver]

What are you specs exactly?

 

[PiR]

@Josu see here what helped in my case https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/pc-requirements-old-config-old-world.672227/
I would advise you to enable quick moves, to close all other programs, and check in task manager the bottleneck during lag?
what map size do you play on, with how many AI?

 

[Josu]

What are you specs exactly?

Intel® Core™ i5-1035G4
8GB RAM
Intel® Iris™ Plus Graphics

@Josu see here what helped in my case https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/pc-requirements-old-config-old-world.672227/
I would advise you to enable quick moves, to close all other programs, and check in task manager the bottleneck during lag?
what map size do you play on, with how many AI?

Medium size map, 4AI + 3 thribes.
Enabled quick moves, solved the lags in my turn.

 

[Solver]

Yeah, you're going to struggle because you don't have a real GPU. Integrated GPUs are years behind proper ones in rendering performance, and usually use shared RAM (as Iris Plus does), which effectively means you have less RAM as well. For you it's like having 6GB RAM instead of 8.

You primarily need to minimize animation in the game. Definitely keep quick moves on, set the camera to only follow AI moves when at war, and enable the "Reduced animation detail" option. That should keep the game playable, but your game will definitely get slow as you approach turn 100, as your GPU and effective RAM are below the game's minimum specs.