Hi I would like to play something similar to civ marathon. Is "Turn scale" the proper setting? Or it just makes the rulers live longer? Or there is the "Points to win": so if I increase this and disable Ambition victory will this be like marathon? In case none of these slow down the gameplay, is there a mod or an xml file to edit or whatever?
Old World Marathon
- Thread starter bitula
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For both AI and Player? Or just the Player?
Ambition victory is a separate setting. So you can disable that if you want - ambitions will still show up but they will not lead to any victory.
Obligatory disclaimer, games of Old World usually last less than 150 turns, and we had 200 turns in mind as a soft limit. Nothing is preventing you from playing longer, but if you go much beyond 200 there's every chance that things will get weird.
Obligatory disclaimer, games of Old World usually last less than 150 turns, and we had 200 turns in mind as a soft limit. Nothing is preventing you from playing longer, but if you go much beyond 200 there's every chance that things will get weird.
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Weird things like Skynet takes control of your longbowmen?
Leyrann
Deity
Out of curiosity, why is this? Can't you just increase all production costs, improvement build times, tech costs and so on with a set modifier just like Civilization does?
Btw: Bought the game last week and I'm having an absolute blast. Already went and bought all DLCs as well.
One major reason is, the orders system would be affect by different game speeds in various undesirable ways. For example, it would effectively be much more expensive to build improvements if a "Marathon" farm took 8 turns to build. That would mean 8 less unit moves, which is a big sacrifice.
Civ can "just increase costs" because Civ doesn't have any empire-wide resource that is spent and reset every turn. OW has that in Orders, a fundamental game mechanic, so game speed as a setting wouldn't easily work. That's not the only issue but it's the main hurdle to having such an option.
Civ can "just increase costs" because Civ doesn't have any empire-wide resource that is spent and reset every turn. OW has that in Orders, a fundamental game mechanic, so game speed as a setting wouldn't easily work. That's not the only issue but it's the main hurdle to having such an option.
Leyrann
Deity
But the counterpart is that unit movement is effectively cheaper on slower game speed. If city production and tech takes twice the time to complete, that means units effectively move twice as fast in relative pace. And because orders are 1/turn, this also means you get twice the number of orders in the time a city produces something or a tech completes.
In fact, the increased order cost for improvements gets canceled out completely.
Let's say I'm sitting at a static 5 orders per turn, and I need 4 turns to build an improvement, complete something in my city, or research a tech - all the same for simplicity's sake - and I have 2 warriors and 1 worker. The worker is building an improvement. Across the four turns the worker needs to build that improvement, my two warriors get to use two orders each, for a total of eight orders. Say this is what they require to move across my empire.
Now, we create a x2 game speed. So, it takes 8 turns to build an improvement, complete something in my city, or research a tech. Thus, my worker is consuming an order every turn for 8 turns. That means each of those 8 turns I have 4 orders for other things. My two warriors each get 2 order per turn for 8 turns, and in the time it takes to build that improvement, complete a production in my city, or research, a tech, they can move all the way across my empire... and all the way to the other side again.
This behavior is 100% identical to slower game speeds in Civilization. Orders are a per-turn resource, but they are no different from units getting to move once, workers removing 1 turn from their "turns until finished", or anything else like that. The only difference is that the combined pool of units moving, workers spending a turn building an improvement, units upgrading and so on has an additional limit separate from the individual limits - but still a per-turn limit just like those others.
(side note: I don't actually care about slower game speeds all that much, the game speed as-is feels fine to me, I'm just making this argument because I'm pretty sure it's possible, and other people might enjoy it)
The difference is that on this slower speed, attacking someone else becomes way stronger. If making an attack with one unit is four orders (three moves + attack), then an improvement on normal speed costs you one attack, on the slow speed it costs two attacks. Even worse with later-tier improvements that could cost you as many as four attacks. That's a very big cost that is best avoided by playing super aggressive and neglecting the long-term buildup.
It can be done, sure, but the pacing of Old World is such an important part of how the whole puzzle fits together that somehow players don't seem to enjoy changes to that. There's a mod out there to make techs take longer, and it's far less popular than Civ's slower modes.
It can be done, sure, but the pacing of Old World is such an important part of how the whole puzzle fits together that somehow players don't seem to enjoy changes to that. There's a mod out there to make techs take longer, and it's far less popular than Civ's slower modes.
Leyrann
Deity
That's absolutely true. But the exact same is true in Civilization. Just because there's no orders, and thus you don't have to choose what you do in a given turn (I love the mechanic btw), warfare does become a lot stronger on slower game speeds because it still takes the same number of unit actions to conquer a city despite building or researching something taking twice as long.
Although now I'm wondering, could you perhaps alleviate this issue partially by changing, say, damage dealt based on game speed as well? Just spitballing here; thinking about game balance is basically a hobby for me.
I do think that there's definitely a sweet spot in terms of speed that just works best, and Old World hits it quite well. Whenever I have urges to play Civ or a modded version of it on a non-standard game speed, I can trace it back to balance issues in one spot or another (or, in the case of Caveman2Cosmos, the devs having elected to split the difference between "more content" and "more turns" and just adding up to 10x slower speed for the people who like the Marathon experience, lol).
Right, so even Civ suffers from war getting more powerful on slower speeds, and OW would suffer much more from that thanks to orders. So it's even harder to get the balance somewhat right. OW would also have to tie a slower speed to a slower turn scale for increased character lifespans (to avoid leaders dying before they can build much of anything), and increased lifespans already make the game easier in other ways. I'm sure it's a puzzle that could be given a somewhat satisfactory solution but it's far from easy and there are many hurdles to overcome, which is why that's relegated to mods.
Yes, but it is similar issue as in civ games, where you have advantage versus the AI on marathon speed in battles because there is more time to micromanage the army, including eg.: gaining promotions. Because there is no separate AI code for slower speed in civ as well. So would be nice if you'd added it anyway, maybe with a big red popup warning about possible balance issues. I mean basically even if primarily you'd be warring, the game is much longer and ultimetly you wouldn't lose on city mangement either.
Leyrann
Deity
I suppose I can see relegating it to mods. Dev time will of course always be a trade-off between working on one thing versus working on another, and alternate game speeds are by definition auxiliary, rather than core, functionality.
I might give the slower turn scales a try though, as I felt like characters were dying a bit too quickly in my first game, yet in my second game, where I enabled longer lifespans, I felt it took a bit too long (although admittedly I've seen very few AI characters hit the age of 87 that I hit on my first ruler). How many turns per year do the various settings actually have?
Verrucosus
Warlord
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"How many turns per year do the various settings actually have?"
"Semesters" has two turns, "Seasons" four turns per year. You can even combine those with longer lifespans, giving you lots of time with a single ruler. As I understand it, the turn setting does not involve any adjustments slowing down experience gains. If that's true, characters might end up with much higher attributes than under standard settings, so there would be balance effects.
"Semesters" has two turns, "Seasons" four turns per year. You can even combine those with longer lifespans, giving you lots of time with a single ruler. As I understand it, the turn setting does not involve any adjustments slowing down experience gains. If that's true, characters might end up with much higher attributes than under standard settings, so there would be balance effects.
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There's definitely balance effects. Semesters is easier, Seasons is much easier. On Seasons, you're quite likely to still have your first leader in charge after 100 turns, so you get to accumulate a lot of legitimacy and very high leader stats all the way to the the lategame.
King Jason
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Yea to be honest I think some of you are seriously understating the impact of stuff that just arbitrarily increased the length of the game, you'd have to hit every possible system, like cognomens too but then how does that work? Do you slow down cog credit you get from ambitions or do you double it?
The cognomen system alone gives me a headache to think about when suddenly everything takes twice as long to build. I actually think you'd have to do the inverse and cut the cog requirements in half - yet you'd have to do this for all of the cogs that ARENT military based... in which case for military or movement based (exploration) ones you'd probably have to make them twice as hard.
So half the cognomens would need to be easier to achieve, while the other half would need to be harder, and we hope we're hitting the mark right.
That's just one system that interconnects everything, and there a like a dozen more.
The devs release some settings for players to tweak based by popular demand, but these i don't think are addressed holistically with respect to overall game balance..
So i guess they wouldn't have to do that with a "marathon" game either.. so i guess if seasons can break the game balance, i don't see why "marathon" couldn't either if players really are hankering for twice the game length. Personally i think the fact that OW is quicker than other games in the genre is a huge perk.
I have tried the double tech cost mod or whatever it is - it wasn't that bad. Scholars become significantly stronger as a result since it's way more powerful to control your position in the tech tree.
which also might exacerbates the difference in the ability of the player to target key techs like scholarship better than the computer probably can.
Im inclined to think that a marathon mode would be way more catastrophic on the eco system of the game balance than seasons time scale is... and seasons already feels incredibly out of whack.
The cognomen system alone gives me a headache to think about when suddenly everything takes twice as long to build. I actually think you'd have to do the inverse and cut the cog requirements in half - yet you'd have to do this for all of the cogs that ARENT military based... in which case for military or movement based (exploration) ones you'd probably have to make them twice as hard.
So half the cognomens would need to be easier to achieve, while the other half would need to be harder, and we hope we're hitting the mark right.
That's just one system that interconnects everything, and there a like a dozen more.
The devs release some settings for players to tweak based by popular demand, but these i don't think are addressed holistically with respect to overall game balance..
So i guess they wouldn't have to do that with a "marathon" game either.. so i guess if seasons can break the game balance, i don't see why "marathon" couldn't either if players really are hankering for twice the game length. Personally i think the fact that OW is quicker than other games in the genre is a huge perk.
I have tried the double tech cost mod or whatever it is - it wasn't that bad. Scholars become significantly stronger as a result since it's way more powerful to control your position in the tech tree.
which also might exacerbates the difference in the ability of the player to target key techs like scholarship better than the computer probably can.
Im inclined to think that a marathon mode would be way more catastrophic on the eco system of the game balance than seasons time scale is... and seasons already feels incredibly out of whack.
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