Is victory all about ABC: Always be capturing?

[constans337]

I'm now about 75 turns into my first proper game and I'm starting to think about long term strategy, now that I have consolidated after the opening.

Putting aside ambitions for the moment, which do seem like the easier route to victory (well, if you remember to do them in time, of course ), there doesn't seem to be any in-game mechanism that I've noticed so far that puts a break on city numbers (apart from your general geopolitical situaiton in relation to other nations/tribes). Some games have global numbers, like corruption and administrative capacity (never really liked these, tbh), that give diminishing returns for owning more cities (or planets or whatever), but I've not noticed one in OW yet. That suggests, from a scoring point of view, that you should just keep expanding and capturing cities as much as possible, and keep pumping culture into those cities, as that's the direct route to victory.

Is this correct or am I missing something?

 

[Solver]

If you're not going for ambitions then you win by points, and of course points are best acquired by getting more and better cities.

There's no global number that keeps dropping just because you have more cities, you're right about that. But the family relations, which all-important, may suffer from expansion. If a family doesn't have its preferred luxuries, that's a penalty per city. Any city will have discontent and cumulative discontent worsens family relations. There's also envy, where giving a city to one family usually upsets the other two, though the details depend on the exact families involved. You can certainly ruin your relationship with one (or more!) families by expanding too quickly, and family relationships affect just about everything.

 

[constans337]

Thanks for the response. Ah yes, the interplay between the expanding city numbers and family relations. I haven't encountered that significantly yet as I've been doling cities out evenly (9 in total so far I think) and been keeping the family relations high by other means. Discontent is rising in cities though, so perhaps that will kick in mid-game. I've been letting it slide (as per a post of yours a while back), but decided to focus more on religion and luxuries now to put a bit of a break on it.

This is really a great game and I expect it will explode when it hits Steam, at least with the 4X veterans.

 

[Solver]

Sounds like you're dealing with the interesting choices that the system is meant to provide.

Keeping your families with an equal amount of cities is a valid way to minimize envy, but can force you to forego the best family choices. Sometimes you just have multiple spots for great Hunter, Champion or Statesmen families, so you either miss out on those or upset some other family.

Religion and luxuries are excellent tools for managing relations.

Also, in Old World, you're never quite safe from upheaval. Maybe you're doing well with the families, but then your leader dies and the family heads hate the new leader. Or maybe that powerful neighbor who really liked the previous leader hates the new one and suddenly you're facing a possible war there.

 

[Dale]

Or worse, your monkey goes rogue and kills the heir to your powerful neighbour.