Old World update #95

The_J

Say No 2 Net Validations
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New update!

Highlighted Changes:

Design
  • Urban tiles now give free roads
  • Wonder locations are now only revealed when finished
  • Robust trait is now +1 Orders as Governor, +0.5 Orders per city as Leader
  • Tactician Leader General: now has -20% attack strength (instead of -20% combat strength)
  • Orator Governors: -1 Discontent/Culture Level
  • Judge Governors: Can Hurry Projects and Specialists with Money
  • Patrons: Each City gets a Literature Luxury
  • Traders: get +2 Culture per Bullion (instead of Orders), On seat founded add Fair
  • Landowners: now get +20 Money per Crop
  • Orthodoxy: Cities with State Religion can Hurry Production (instead of Specialists) with Orders
  • Engineering Law: Can now bridge rivers on both sides
  • Regents no longer change the succession (they only occupy the leader position)
  • Mounted units no longer advance unless they can Rout
  • Adjustments to ship promotions
  • Reduced frequency of distant raids
  • Religion spread is now impacted by the size of the map
  • Hold Court mission now has a 20% chance to find a new Courtier
  • Various fixes to the Carthage Scenario

Programming:
  • Improvements to Multiplayer, including improvements for people have trouble with late game network games locking at the end of the turn
  • Improved visibility of roads, rivers and borders on forest tiles
  • Improved support for mapscripts modding

UI
  • Added performance warning for laptops on battery power
  • Exiting to the main menu via the victory event from a scenario loads the scenario screen
  • Added setting to skip rename landmark popups
  • Disabled network, server, and cloud MP buttons (with a tooltip warning) when no internet connection is detected
  • Improvements to interface for Steam Deck

Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed ignore luxury reminder reset being triggered whenever orders were used
  • Game no longer opens Encyclopedia with F1 if no entry is available
  • Fixed issue where game loss event popup did not always trigger

Full list:
Spoiler :

Test Branch: Old World Version 1.0.61900 Test 07/27/2022
Test Branch: Old World Version 1.0.61995 Test 08/02/2022
Main Branch: Old World Version 1.0.62020 Release 08/03/2022

Design
Urban tiles now give free roads
Wonder locations are now only revealed when finished
Adjustments to ship promotions
Robust trait is now +1 Orders as Governor, +0.5 Orders per city as Leader
Tactician Leader General: now has -20% attack strength (instead of -20% combat strength)
Orator Governors: -1 Discontent/Culture Level
Judge Governors: Can Hurry Projects and Specialists with Money
Patrons: Each City gets a Literature Luxury
Traders: get +2 Culture per Bullion (instead of Orders), On seat founded add Fair
Landowners: now get +20 Money per Crop
Orthodoxy: Cities with State Religion can Hurry Production (instead of Specialists) with Orders
Engineering Law: Can now bridge rivers on both sides
Regents no longer change the succession (they only occupy the leader position)
Mounted units no longer advance unless they can Rout
Reduced frequency of distant raids
Religion spread is now impacted by the size of the map
Hold Court mission now has a 20% chance to find a new Courtier
Carthage 2: Players can now play with higher-tier units such as Dromons
Various additional fixes and adjustments to the Carthage campaign
Independent City Event no longer targets family seats or capitals
Minor fix to the Middle East map
More options for force march setting added

Programming
Improvements to memory usage in units improvements and terrain
Multiplayer improvements including improvements for people who have trouble with late game network games disconnecting or freezomg.
Improved visibility of roads, rivers and borders on forest tiles
Improved support for mapscripts modding
Mods may be set to block all other mods to run in isolation
Mod whitelists have been added for blocking mods

UI
Added performance warning for laptops on battery power
Battery powered laptops will cause significant increase in AI turns
Exiting to the main menu via the victory event from a scenario loads the scenario screen
Added setting to skip rename landmark popups
Right-clicking on non-UI space with a decision popup open minimizes it
Added reminder category counts to reminders tooltip
General improvements to tooltips
Disabled network, server, and cloud MP buttons (with a tooltip warning) when no internet connection is detected
Game now auto-detects players on Steam Deck
Improvements to interface for Steam Deck
Added tooltip help to heir preview UI on family tree screen (portraits, ratings)
State Religion Subheading added to religions category
New icon added to disciples

Bug Fixes
Fixed ignore luxury reminder reset being triggered whenever orders were used
Game no longer spawns new tile/city/unit tooltips while holding SHIFT
Game no longer opens Encyclopedia with F1 if no entry is available
Fixed African Elephant clipping into its healthbar/banner when on a hill
Fixed missing burn/pillage icons for allied tribe units
Game no longer shows trashed techs in redraw tooltip
Fixed mask artifacts from city widget on research popup
Fixed player alliance visibility issues
Fixed issue where game loss event popup did not always trigger
Widows will no longer marry on the same turn
Debt notification now blinks
Minor UI fixes
Various minor fixes to events
Minor fixes to localization

Additional Fix
Improvements to Network MP stability
Fix to cities sometimes displaying in the fog
 
For me the big changes here are
Free roads on urban tiles, nice quality of life fix.
Patrons getting free luxury, and Traders getting free legendary culture tier market building.
The Orator change is very nice too.
 
Just wanted to that I really appreciate the devs continued development of the game and their constant work to improve the game bit by bit. I'm going though my backlog of Switch games right now but I'm still keeping up with Old World and am really looking forward to playing it again with all of the new changes that will be coming up in the future.
 
Good changes:
  • Urban tiles now give free roads --That's a big help.
  • Orator Governors: -1 Discontent/Culture Level -- I never know what orators are really good for.
  • Patrons: Each City gets a Literature Luxury --They needed something, not certain if this it.
  • Regents no longer change the succession (they only occupy the leader position) --Thank heavens. It was a weirdly sinister way that all regents were portrayed as usurpers from the get-go.
  • Hold Court mission now has a 20% chance to find a new Courtier -- More than most anything else, the game needs to give players more ways to build a court.
Questionable changes:
  • Robust trait is now +1 Orders as Governor, +0.5 Orders per city as Leader -- I can see lowering the Leader benefit. The Governor benefit was fine.
  • Traders: get +2 Culture per Bullion (instead of Orders), On seat founded add Fair -- ??? Traders are kind of a lame family as-iss. Not worth founding except when Bullion was present. Now, not even that. Please, stop stripping orders from the game while giving culture bennies left and right. For that matter, howzabot trader go back to being good at making lots teh MONEY?
  • Landowners: now get +20 Money per Crop -- Oh, see these are supposed to be the premier money makers now? Definitely will deferring traders and patrons for landowners now.
All else, whatevs. :)
 
I tend to agree with steveg700. Whilst the regular update and patching cycle is appreciated, the endless tinkering to the game's mechanics aren't so much. It makes it very difficult for folks to develop strategies, because in a few weeks they could be totally obsoleted. What's the deal with the Trader bonus now giving culture? Why have the developers declared war on orders? First slavery, then robust and traders having orders nerfed, too. Also, Landowners were already a top-tier family, now they're even better? Clerics and Traders are still little more than, "I'll just try them for something different" material rather than actually fitting into any strategy.

And where are the much needed upgrades for the awful late-game performance? All I can see is "Improvements to memory usage in units improvements and terrain" - does this reduce the lag and turn times in the later game?

Kind regards,
Ita Bear
 
And where are the much needed upgrades for the awful late-game performance? All I can see is "Improvements to memory usage in units improvements and terrain" - does this reduce the lag and turn times in the later game?
For me yes. Late game on a big map with 8 players is still inevitably slowed down, but it has become much better - I was at a point where first the turn times increased to several minutes, then the game started to behave weird (no more saving, movement troubles) and finally crashed. Since the update, no more weird behaviour/crashing and resonable turn times for taking the game to its limits (haven't exactly measured, but probably below half a minute)
 
Traders have amazing workers!
The limitless roads thing is nice, but you can make those workers from a single city. They're not a compelling reason to keep founding trader cities.

And honestly, it's not so much that those workers are amazing as they provide abeyance from a rather needless one-road-per-year restriction. I can live with it because sometimes workers simply have nothing better to do than build roads.

I tend to agree with steveg700. Whilst the regular update and patching cycle is appreciated, the endless tinkering to the game's mechanics aren't so much. It makes it very difficult for folks to develop strategies, because in a few weeks they could be totally obsoleted. What's the deal with the Trader bonus now giving culture? Why have the developers declared war on orders? First slavery, then robust and traders having orders nerfed, too. Also, Landowners were already a top-tier family, now they're even better? Clerics and Traders are still little more than, "I'll just try them for something different" material rather than actually fitting into any strategy.
Yeah, there's a reining-in of orders, while culture generation is the "safe" play, the ubiquitous consolation prize.

Orders are a precious commodity for certain, but I don't see the problem with bullion giving an extra order. Maybe someone is thinking this makes orders too location-dependent...except that already happens with horses and elephants. Maybe limit it to when there's a specialist. Then again, I didn't get why the original benefit of extra gold was problematic.

Traders are now only generating income from getting hamlets upgraded faster. Not great. The founding city gets the caravan project, maybe each trader city improves the caravan? Of course, the real sticking point is that the Old World is not oriented towards trade as something actionable. No active working of trade networks, no processing or selling of commodities made possible via improvements or technologies. Merely the passive generation of coins. Makes it a little harder to build on, as its passive resource generation that tends to snowball into the realm of excess (at least when combined with aggressive city expansion).
 
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I don't understand why there are still so many balance changes needed after a year of early access and a year of full release on epic. What have the early access players been doing?
Constant performance optimization and bug fixing is more necessary.
 
I don't understand why there are still so many balance changes needed after a year of early access and a year of full release on epic. What have the early access players been doing?
Constant performance optimization and bug fixing is more necessary.
I guess the steam release increased the playerbase quite a bit - and that alone (plus maybe more hardcore startegy players within this group) brings up new strategic approachs, of which some then proof to be too good. I have no problem with constant balancing happening, as the performance improvements and bug fixes happen, too. The idea that better "everyone in the team" should work on X and (not on Y and Z) doesn't work out anyway, as people have their special roles and e.g. someone coding the game rules may just not be able to help fiying performance (which maybe related to graphics or something).

Also, this is not only the case for OW - Civ games receive updates for years as well, including balance changes for things being problematic since release. Which isn't even enough - Civ6 would still need more patching... So on the whole, I'm very happy with OW being patched regularly including balancing issues :)
 
The idea that better "everyone in the team" should work on X and (not on Y and Z) doesn't work out anyway, as people have their special roles and e.g. someone coding the game rules may just not be able to help fiying performance (which maybe related to graphics or something).
This is so true, and very relevant.

I can pump out new game systems, mod browser fixes and game bugs till the cows come home, but gfx system performance improvements, new events or artwork? NFI??!!??
 
Better yet, the two of us could work together on new artwork and get even less of it done!
 
I don't see things going well for the game if we were responsible for art.
 
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