4X Old World - historical 4X strategy by Civ 4 designer (formerly 10 Crowns)

[cvv]

This game seems interesting, what's the KKK on it?

Apparently the best 4X since the old greats like MoM, AC or MoO.

I don't know, I couldn't stand Crusader Kings with all that soap opera dynastical bullshit, it's keeping me from buying this.

 

[mediocrepoet]

This game seems interesting, what's the KKK on it?

Iz gud.

Well, it's good if you like Civ anyway. It's basically Civ with some CK like events and such.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's better than Civ in every possible way.

 

[3 others]

It's the best contemporary civ-like and a wonderfully designed game overall, but plagued by inexplicably taxing (graphics?) performance and adherence to modern eqalitarian genderbender ideology.

If you have a rig that could run a recent FPS, and don't find the idea of historical girl generals absolutely haram, give it a shot. Otherwise don't bother.

 

[mediocrepoet]

It's better than Civ in every possible way.

And yet it's still the best shorthand description for the thing. It's basically Civ+ other features.

 

[cvv]

historical girl generals

Ah yes, let's build, autisticaly painstakingly, the ultimate historic 4X but also let's turn history into a clownworld.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's not like you have enough generals in the first place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Kane]

and adherence to modern eqalitarian genderbender ideology.

It is not that easy. The gender-egalitarianism is required the way the game is designed.

Characters in OW do not work the same way as in CK. For starters, there's a whole lot less of them. But on the other hand you want as much as them as you possibly can because they translate into a real advantage in the game, ex. you ideally want a general on every unit. At the end of the day they are yet another scarce resource you have to carefully manage. Which is good.

But that leads to an obvious problem. To create new characters you need one male and one female. Now lets say they produce 50% male and 50% female descendants. What happens if you enforce "realistic" gender roles? You have 50% less available resources! 50% less generals!

This problem is not trivially solvable.

You could put gender specific mechanics into the game, which in the current state of the game would mean you have to create a lot of jobs for women. This would blow up the game considerably with additional mechanics. And it would not solve the fact that you would still have 50% less generals. I call this the CK solution.

You could turn everyone male and gay. Then you make babies Kronar style, which is arguably worse than the current state from the point of realism. I call this the GAY solution.

This game was designed for competitive multiplayer by competitive multiplayers. In fact, the multiplayer was first and the singleplayer came later. I cannot stress enough that this is the only correct way to design a strategy game.

One (very logical) consequence of that is that every system in the game is super constrained, the character system being no exception. So any change with regards to inheritance and/or the job market will have strong repercussions in the game. Unless you turn of the entire character system (there's a toggle in the options).

----

Together with Shadow Empire, Old World is the best Wargame on the market currently. I say Wargame, not 4X, because it is a Wargame (albeit with heavy 4X elements).

 

[Lacrymas]

It's both a 4X and a wargame. The combat is indeed deceptively complex. You'd think lancers are the be-all end-all of combat, but that's before you come across Babylonia with its archers that decimate your troops and take your precious cities because you refused to employ their grand vizier ( )

 

[3 others]

and adherence to modern eqalitarian genderbender ideology.

It is not that easy. The gender-egalitarianism is required the way the game is designed.

Characters in OW do not work the same way as in CK. For starters, there's a whole lot less of them. But on the other hand you want as much as them as you possibly can because they translate into a real advantage in the game, ex. you ideally want a general on every unit. At the end of the day they are yet another scarce resource you have to carefully manage. Which is good.

But that leads to an obvious problem. To create new characters you need one male and one female. Now lets say they produce 50% male and 50% female descendants. What happens if you enforce "realistic" gender roles? You have 50% less available resources! 50% less generals!

This problem is not trivially solvable.

You could put gender specific mechanics into the game, which in the current state of the game would mean you have to create a lot of jobs for women. This would blow up the game considerably with additional mechanics. And it would not solve the fact that you would still have 50% less generals. I call this the CK solution.

You could turn everyone male and gay. Then you make babies Kronar style, which is arguably worse than the current state from the point of realism. I call this the GAY solution.

This game was designed for competitive multiplayer by competitive multiplayers. In fact, the multiplayer was first and the singleplayer came later. I cannot stress enough that this is the only correct way to design a strategy game.

One (very logical) consequence of that is that every system in the game is super constrained, the character system being no exception. So any change with regards to inheritance and/or the job market will have strong repercussions in the game. Unless you turn of the entire character system (there's a toggle in the options).

----

Together with Shadow Empire, Old World is the best Wargame on the market currently. I say Wargame, not 4X, because it is a Wargame (albeit with heavy 4X elements).

I agree with all of this, and wrote something similar back when the game was released. From a game mechanics perspective, there is no easy solution because the current character system is such an integral part of its design. Personally, if starting from scratch, I might have attempted to have the "wife" of a character just be a modifier of some sort but then again I wouldn't want to get rid of female heirs either so the complications start to just pile up immediately.

I'm playing with the Limited Gender Roles Mod (created by one of the Old World devs - they're not immune to this type of critique), which just disables women from being able to lead armies but changes nothing else in the game so each generated Court Soldier has a 50% chance of being female and your court fills up with useless Hero archetype girls who have nothing to do except idle around as Agents once you get a Spymaster running.

My irritation with this also partially stems from the discourse during Old World's release where it was presented as a more grounded counterpart to the flagrantly woke Humankind (that I still haven't played, no idea if that's true), and being immediately hit by a completely interchangeable genderbending jobs system in a classical age 4X was very grating.

Also, I just recently finished a game of Old World for the first time since its release and the performance after turn 80 is still horrendous, even after upgrading to a new laptop in the meantime. Maybe it's all the improvements that pile up over the course of a game, maybe it's the AI empires grinding war plans with their 40 orders per turn in the late game, but just getting through the final 50 turns is such an ordeal in Old World.

But that's okay, I'll still keep playing this garbage. Old World is, after all, both the best contemporary wargame, and the best contemporary 4X.

 

[Lacrymas]

The performance is most likely due to Unity.

 

[3 others]

The performance is most likely due to Unity.

Well, sure. Unity has a well-deserved reputation as a platform for lousily optimized games, and Old World certainly is one. It's still surprising because Soren Johnson is a programmer-designer and I'd expect his team to be able to implement proper object culling mipmap shared shader occlusion thingamajigs and whatnot - and maybe they did as good a job as possible, I certainly don't have the ability to tell one way or another.

I'm eternally glad for the existence of Neon White, though. Aside from being a modern classic in itself, it's living proof that it's actually possible to make Unity your bitch.

 

[Kane]

My irritation with this also partially stems from the discourse during Old World's release where it was presented as a more grounded counterpart to the flagrantly woke Humankind (that I still haven't played, no idea if that's true), and being immediately hit by a completely interchangeable genderbending jobs system in a classical age 4X was very grating.

Well, the truth is that Soren stepped down in 2020 after being called a misogynist worse than Hitler or something and installed his wife as CEO, who immediately started terminating people to turn Mohawk Games from a prestigious white men only club into a diverse clusterfuck, so the irritation does go beyond in-game mechanics.

I also think it is safe to say that we won't be seeing another good game from Soren. Sad but such are the consequences of cutting off your own balls. Likewise, the performance issues will likely never be fixed because that too requires competence.

Also, I just recently finished a game of Old World for the first time since its release and the performance after turn 80 is still horrendous, even after upgrading to a new laptop in the meantime. Maybe it's all the improvements that pile up over the course of a game, maybe it's the AI empires grinding war plans with their 40 orders per turn in the late game, but just getting through the final 50 turns is such an ordeal in Old World.

I don't think the problem is with some mechanical/AI calculations because it also runs like crap in cloud games (which are turn-by-turn). It's that the graphics (unit animations, particle effects...) do not scale at all. A typical Unity issue. Unity is fine for shitty indy 2D games/tech demos. But once you start rendering serious amounts of polygons it just fails. Unity is not for real games.

 

[Lacrymas]

I think there are some more egregious things than diversity. Like the fact that diversity doesn't matter much. It's shockingly easy to marry a tribesperson, it only costs 2 legitimacy, yet it gives you a lot of benefits with that tribe, many more benefits than marrying a member of a family. There's also the rainbow mafia, but that doesn't matter at all either. In my last game, I got Sappho very early, married her almost immediately and got a child from her the next year. I've seen 0 events regarding non-straight sexualities. I can blackmail the straights for days for basically no reason, but the gays are immune to political maneuvering I guess.

 

[Kane]

I think there are some more egregious things than diversity. Like the fact that diversity doesn't matter much.

Shhh, it is enough when the DEI-lords *believe* it is diverse.


Gotta pass the people's bureau of equity somehow.

 

[Anthedon]

How is the AI in this?

 

[Lacrymas]

How is the AI in this?

Very good, actually. Probably the best AI in a 4X ever.

 

[Desiderius]

How is the AI in this?

Better than most players (including this one).

 

[Anthedon]

Sounds like high praise. I still play CivIV multiplayer with a couple of friends against Immortal/Deity AI. And even after decades of playing it's still a challenge (alcohol might be a factor here). All the other 4X games we tried over the years had absolutely garbage AI, that's why I asked.

 

[mondblut]

tribesperson

Your opinions are duly noted, totally non-woke, non-biased not member of rainbow mafia.

 

[Lacrymas]

tribesperson

Your opinions are duly noted, totally non-woke, non-biased not member of rainbow mafia.

Yes? You can marry а tribesperson as both a man and a woman, sooooo.

 

[Lacrymas]

Sounds like high praise. I still play CivIV multiplayer with a couple of friends against Immortal/Deity AI. And even after decades of playing it's still a challenge (alcohol might be a factor here). All the other 4X games we tried over the years had absolutely garbage AI, that's why I asked.

Old World does other things to make the AI better too. They start out more advanced than you, with more cities, and they always play on The Good, so they'll have more starting resources and orders than you if you play on a higher difficulty. On top of that, you can't realistically avoid conflict in this game, so you can't ignore warfare and training units. The AI also gets updated constantly by the devs.

 

[mondblut]

tribesperson

Your opinions are duly noted, totally non-woke, non-biased not member of rainbow mafia.

Yes? You can marry а tribesperson as both a man and a woman, sooooo.

There are no "tribespersons", you pozzed cuck. There are only tribesMEN and tribesWOMEN.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm sorry the conventions of the English language offend you? And it's tribespeople.

 

[mondblut]

I'm sorry the conventions of the English language offend you?

That's not English, aidsperson. That's IngSoc, and I'm not speaking it.