Old World Quick Questions and answers (and FAQ)

[Taefin]

Thanks Dale, you are awesome for being so involved on this forum! I’m off to get some elephants for the first time!

(Also lol, I can’t keep the difficulty names straight, the 3rd to highest is called the Glorious.)

 

[Dale]

Thanks, Dale. I have tried what you said, using all combinations of clicking, but still No Joy. Am guessing it is a Mac bug. I have submitted a Bug Report:

I am using a Mac w/ the current verion of the OS (Big Sur 11.5).

1. I cannot get any unit on the map to move anywhere. They will do things in the hex they are in (found city, build Road, clear forest, and farm), but refuse to move. This is w/ Workers, Scouts, and military units. I have tried all the combinations of Right- and Left-clicking on the units and destination hexes. The Orders show this is ok to do, but No Joy. No unit is sleeping or fatigued, and no auto moves setup. I have also tried clicking using various keyboard combinations (Alt, Control, Shift, & Command) and nothing happens..

Hey @Kevin Rohrer I just saw on reddit someone had this exact issue on an iMac M1, and they said they changed their mouse settings and now it's working. Sorry, they didn't say what option they changed in mouse settings, but maybe worth a look?

 

[Dale]

Thanks Dale, you are awesome for being so involved on this forum! I’m off to get some elephants for the first time!

(Also lol, I can’t keep the difficulty names straight, the 3rd to highest is called the Glorious.)

No probs. I've been a long time poster here at cfc, so it's been a bit of a "home coming" I suppose you could say.

I had to update my avatar to my in-game persona. I'll come back to my Biggles avatar when we do "Modern World" (not an official acknowledgement of anything)

 

[Taefin]

Oh wow, Carthage plays really nice, between having one root to Strongholds tech complete from the start, extra gold and recruiting tribal units. I delayed getting quarry’s and completely neglected ironworking, using my mercenaries with elephants to attract attacks and deal chip damage to set up rout chains for the elephants. Panic adds to the rout mini game nicely and 5 elephants hits with the power of at least 10 units, probably more considering it’s easy to get them all upgraded and paired with generals.

One question came up this game: What are the restrictions on monasteries? I adopted Judaism from Rome and built monasteries in all my core cities, but noticed I couldn’t build them in my newest cities. Do they require the city to have a Jewish citizens, which I likely don’t have out there? I haven’t looked into how religion works too much, but it may help to add any such requirement to the tooltip.

 

[nolegskitten]

Oh wow, Carthage plays really nice, between having one root to Strongholds tech complete from the start, extra gold and recruiting tribal units. I delayed getting quarry’s and completely neglected ironworking, using my mercenaries with elephants to attract attacks and deal chip damage to set up rout chains for the elephants. Panic adds to the rout mini game nicely and 5 elephants hits with the power of at least 10 units, probably more considering it’s easy to get them all upgraded and paired with generals.

One question came up this game: What are the restrictions on monasteries? I adopted Judaism from Rome and built monasteries in all my core cities, but noticed I couldn’t build them in my newest cities. Do they require the city to have a Jewish citizens, which I likely don’t have out there? I haven’t looked into how religion works too much, but it may help to add any such requirement to the tooltip.

Yes, you need to have the religion in the city to be able to build monasteries, temples, etc. I think the tooltip already indicate the missing requirement ("missing : Judaism" or something like that), but I might be wrong. I'll check in game.

An exception to this : If your Leader is a zealot, you can always build religious buildings from your state religion.

 

[Taefin]

Yes, you need to have the religion in the city to be able to build monasteries, temples, etc. I think the tooltip already indicate the missing requirement ("missing : Judaism" or something like that), but I might be wrong. I'll check in game.

An exception to this : If your Leader is a zealot, you can always build religious buildings from your state religion.

Ah thanks. My zealot leader did kick the bucket that year (rushing with training was sublime!) and I’d only established Judaism in two cities. I didn’t see any red text in the tooltip but the info might be in there. 80% or how I’ve been learning this game is scanning for red text and it’s working quite well.

 

[steveg700]

I can confirm from my last game that you are correct, it opens up the opportunity for swift to appear, but I found it ~50% whether it came up immediately. A swift chariot with my leader as general really helped rack up the 10 kills by general ambition!

Yeah, I haven't had lot of luck with getting Swift to show up myself.

Another question of mine: Are there any downsides to appointing an heir. Just finished my first game since release, on Able (3rd from highest) and it was a tremendous help toward winning an ambition victory to appoint as heir my youngest available adult successor. There is a 4 pt legitimacy penalty, but having the time to build up to 15-20 skill point leaders with tons of legitimacy of their own seems to more than make up for it.

Admittedly my default heirs had picked up weaknesses and soured to me, on top of becoming pretty old, so perhaps I just haven’t learned to develop competent middle-age heirs yet.

Does anyone know if appointing a new heir has any family happiness consequences? I didn’t look very closely but I lost hundreds of happiness when my “the Great” leader died.

As Dale mentioned, there is a big attitude penalty. But if it's going to help you win it's kind of a transitory issue. Governors who are upset or angry do impose discontent on their citizens. Can't say if there is any similar penalty for generals or agents.

Families like leaders with cognomens, so going from a Great leader to a nub would likely result in a loss of family opinion.

 

[Killer Rabbit]

@nolegskitten I’m still hoping you build out that FAQ! This is a complex game and I think there’s a lot of people who’d read it because there’s a dearth of info explaining how everything works!

 

[Tokira]

I've played two games so far, the first one as Rome and the other one as Greece. In both games I had issues with getting my leaders to produce heirs which led me to ponder if I'm doing something wrong. Despite getting married at the age of ~20, my heirs and their wives don't get any children. For example as Greece, Philip and his wife never had any children apart from Alexander (who of course was already born). The game even prompted me to adopt children due to diminishing bloodline, which was a nice nod to what happened in the past to many Roman emperors, for example. Then, when Alexander took over he didn't have any children with his wife until they both were 40. At that point I had them divorce, got a new wife of ~20 years of age for Alexander and they had one child, Derdas, when Alexander was only about eight years from his death at 56.

The adoption system is a nice addition, but unfortunately the adopted heirs are often not very good. So far they've always been adults with poor stats. One didn't even have any stat points at the age of 18. Due to this, I'd like to have more offspring for my leaders so I could groom better future leaders.

My question is: how does fertility work in the game? I assume that it works as a %-chance to have off spring at the start of every turn. I also assume that having a good relationship between the spouses, having them be at about the same age with each other and being young all boost fertility. Are there other ways to increase fertility? I also wonder if sending your leader and/or their spouse to a military mission as generals makes it impossible to have children, since logically being away from your spouse would make it physically impossible. Is this something that has to be taken into account?

 

[Taefin]

Someone else will probably have a more complete answer, but I haven’t noticed any trends about leader assignment and having children. My leaders have given birth while serving as general, admittedly pretty badass, so I am guessing the theory/narrative is individuals go back and forth from the front rejoining the army for major battles.

It sounds like you just had bad luck with heirs these two games. One of my Persia games I just could not get an heir, and it really sank my science game since I usually turn the first heir into a scholar for the immense return on a few points of science early on.

I’ve noticed in a tooltip that spouse opinion applies a multiplier to children chance. Also, later on most of my leaders have children prior to becoming leader themselves, but (playing on realistic lifespan) plenty of times I still end up with a young ruler with few heirs who has to rally a floundering empire with two now-very-unhappy families.

 

[Tokira]

Someone else will probably have a more complete answer, but I haven’t noticed any trends about leader assignment and having children. My leaders have given birth while serving as general, admittedly pretty badass, so I am guessing the theory/narrative is individuals go back and forth from the front rejoining the army for major battles.

It sounds like you just had bad luck with heirs these two games. One of my Persia games I just could not get an heir, and it really sank my science game since I usually turn the first heir into a scholar for the immense return on a few points of science early on.

I’ve noticed in a tooltip that spouse opinion applies a multiplier to children chance. Also, later on most of my leaders have children prior to becoming leader themselves, but (playing on realistic lifespan) plenty of times I still end up with a young ruler with few heirs who has to rally a floundering empire with two now-very-unhappy families.

Thanks! I'm glad to hear that leader assignment doesn't seem to affect fertility. While it might be realistic, it's kind of a bummer to weigh between having your leader lead the troops/govern a city with his/her great stats and having offspring. From a narrative perspective I like how this system emulates the ancient empires in which the person of the leader really had a huge impact on the game - sometimes with dire consequences. From gameplay perspective it adds an element of luck, though.

I just finished my third game as Egypt and this time I had much better luck with the royal family. Since Egypt starts with Hatshepsut already having a daughter and a son-in-law, the royal family tree ended up being a lot wider than in my games as Rome or Greece. Unfortunately it was the son-in-law who ended up having lots of children and I failed to tutor all of them (partly for economic reasons in the early game), but that's rng I suppose. Luckily the game doesn't seem to care so much if the heir is your child, uncle/aunt or whatnot. I just need to pay better attention to tutoring and to have a back-up plan if the game provides lots of heir options. As Egypt I always had 2-4 heirs, where as in the previous games I only had one - if even that.

 

[Taefin]

Oh I need to try tutoring my heirs next game, that extra point or two becomes so valuable with the nonlinear scaling.

 

[Dale]

My question is: how does fertility work in the game? I assume that it works as a %-chance to have off spring at the start of every turn. I also assume that having a good relationship between the spouses, having them be at about the same age with each other and being young all boost fertility. Are there other ways to increase fertility? I also wonder if sending your leader and/or their spouse to a military mission as generals makes it impossible to have children, since logically being away from your spouse would make it physically impossible. Is this something that has to be taken into account?

Fertility does have randomness in it, but you can impact the chances. The higher your spouse's opinion of you, the higher the chance. So make sure she's "friendly". There are some traits that negatively impact, such as Gay (-50% chance). Exploring, Imprisoned, Fugative, Missing, Under Asylum, Captured, Exiled, Deserter, Clergy, Horse, Rebel and Ascetic block any offspring totally. So if your Leader ends up with any of those traits best to get another Leader.

If your line "dwindles" then the game is made to offer options, such as adoption, bastards (through events) or I've even seen another wife offered (Polygamy is a thing in the game).

 

[Taefin]

I always make sure to keep my spouse enriched with all the personal training he asks for, being endeared always keeps his yields useful. In love? That’s like having an extra court scholar around!

 

[Leucarum]

Are there any plans for old world to be available off the epic game store? I'm curious but don't want to have yet another game store to go through.

 

[Dale]

Are there any plans for old world to be available off the epic game store? I'm curious but don't want to have yet another game store to go through.

We are currently focusing on patching the game and improving performance and will be revisiting the question of other stores/platforms later.

 

[Leucarum]

We are currently focusing on patching the game and improving performance and will be revisiting the question of other stores/platforms later.

Thanks very much for the quick reply, the game definitely looks interesting.

 

[Dale]

I should note that "revisiting the question of other stores/platforms later" is a subset of:

We have some exciting plans for the future of Old World. This will not be a 'release and move on' game. We have a number of sets of plans for the game which we will announce over time. We just need a little more time for balance tweaking and performance improving before we can announce anything.

 

[user330977]

Hello folks,

Some random questions that came to mind when I was playing last.

1. What happens if I found a family seat with Clerics (the family that give a religion upon founding) but all religions have already been founded? An unlikely situation to be sure, but I think it could in theory happen?
2. Is there a way to tell units to heal until fully healed, or must the player click 'heal' every turn?
3. Say I am Rome and I marry a Carthaginian. My child will be 50% Carthaginian. If they then marry another Carthaginian, their child will be 75% and so on. Does this have any effect other than the "heir/leader is Carthaginian" bonus relation?
4. Related to the above, is it ever worth marrying into a tribe? It always seems better to marry into a family for the relation bonus or a foreign power to secure a border.

Kind regards,
Ita Bear

 

[Taefin]

3/4: Being at war worth the nation someone has partial membership applies an opinion malus. I usually don’t marry into tribes I don’t plan to ally with.