Old World from Soren Johnson

[Commander Cody]

I just picked this up a week or so ago. I think it was on sale.

What can I say? This puts recent Civs to shame. The granularity in the setup options is great. Want the AI opponents to never declare war? Boring, but an option. Want them to have a 50% nerf to declaring war? Not a bad option if you are trying to learn the mechanics and don't want to be attacked all the time.

But the Number One feature I like about Old World is Orders. You have a limited number of actions you can take each turn: build something with a worker, tutor an offspring, move and attack with a unit, promote a unit, add a general to a unit, heal a unit... you get the idea. Building up your order capacity generally has to be your #1 priority and there are several ways to do it. A few wargames have this kind of feature of limited movement of stacks/units, such as some (or all?) AGEOD titles. For 4X games it's fantastic. You'll be penalized if you spam military units. Heck, you don't want to build too many workers, either. You'll need to find a balance.

One week of play and I'm trying to find that balance. This isn't like launching Civ6 sight unseen at the second or third highest level of difficulty and pulling a victory. Anyway, two thumbs up from me on Old World.

EDIT: I just skimmed this thread. Let me note I'm on "The Good" (neutral difficulty) at the "AI 50% less likely to declare war" level. Currently playing as Greece with four AI opponents on a large map (I think--second to largest map). I just figured out I have to leave a unit on the hex after wiping out barbarians or minors on a city site. I lost two or three city sites to Carthage before sending settlers as a result. What can I say except "read the manual, idiot?" I recently took out the Danes, at least within the known world, to build cities. I have a pretty good army but since I have a new ruler, I don't have a lot of orders and thus taking on Carthage to bag a few cities wouldn't be a good idea, methinks. The next step will be to keep all the military units on ice as I use workers and otherwise build the economy.

Cheers,
CC

[Gusington]

I played for about 50 hours...and I was mediocre at best at Old World. But kept coming back for more! I could not pay a higher compliment to a game.