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

[IHaveHugeNick]

Soren is the man, I'm hyped for this.

 

[Beowulf]

You two guys in the same thread ... ugh, my head.

Avatars should be exclusive.

 

[Citizen]

You two guys in the same thread ... ugh, my head.

Avatars should be exclusive.

Then the alt-hoarders will claim all the good ones and start selling them to newcomers.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Looks folks, the rules are clear. One Man, One Avatar.

Would you like if someone went around with your face?

 

[Space Satan]

10 Crowns - project status: Design Phase.
It seems should this game be released it won't be until 2020

 

[Jacob]

Which is more important? The avatar or the soul?

 

[LESS T_T]

Starbreeze sells the rights to this game back to the developer too: https://www.starbreeze.com/2019/04/...-10-crowns-publishing-rights-to-mohawk-games/

Similar to the case of SS3, it will recoup the development costs, but "at a premium"? (this phrase was not there in the SS3 press release)

STARBREEZE SELLS BACK ”10 CROWNS” PUBLISHING RIGHTS TO MOHAWK GAMES

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (April 26, 2019) – Starbreeze and Mohawk Games have mutually agreed to sell back the publishing rights to Mohawk for “10 Crowns”. Starbreeze expects to be fully reimbursed for costs the company has had in connection with development of the game.

Starbreeze acquired the publishing rights for “10 Crowns” in 2018 and has since then partly financed the development of the game. The title owner Mohawk Games and Starbreeze have now reached an agreement whereby Starbreeze returns the publishing rights for the game to Mohawk and will be able to recoup the development costs at a premium.

“As we work through our reorganization it also means that we will need to look at each and every opportunity presented and make some hard decisions which are the right for the situation we are in. Mohawk has made good progress on the project so far and we’ll be excited to see the product realized when the time comes for its release”, said Mikael Nermark, acting CEO Starbreeze AB.

As previously announced, Starbreeze will focus on its core business of games development and publishing. Starbreeze holds publishing rights for “Psychonauts 2”.

Beta testing is coming up btw:

 

[Space Satan]

Whatever make it to release will do. Someone should make any competition to the cancerous tumor that Civilization franchize became today.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Any more info about this? What I read seemed interesting

 

[Space Satan]

It seems that the game is dead

 

[Space Satan]

Interview with Soren Johnson.
https://episodes.buzzsprout.com/ZtBYWjEtUfCusB2rwHvL6cNr?client_source=small_player
Anyway it seems Humankind will beat 10 Crowns to release...assuming it will ever be released.

 

[Beowulf]

They are looking for testers:
https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=1581

But still haven't shown anything, if I'm not mistaken.
What they are going to test - their design ideas?

 

[Burning Bridges]

the agreement was: "it's almost 2020 and you are still showing concept screens. either we shut you down tomorrow or you pay back all our money with interest, you lazy bums"

 

[Space Satan]

They could hire testers for other projects. This one seems rather vaporware. Or look at Crossroads Inn - long time of radio silence and then a sudden release - buggy, super buggy release, making game unplayable.

 

[Catacombs]

a sudden release - buggy, super buggy release, making game unplayable.

And then have the gall to sell game-fixing patches as DLC.

 

[Beowulf]

It's now called Old World and it's another game about antiquity.

https://explorminate.co/old-world-formerly-10-crowns-preview/

The genre is quite crowded and there are some recent good titles, like FoG:E


and strong entries, like

are soon to be released.

 

[Xamenos]

Spoiler

Spoiler

Oh god. Is no American game studio left uninfected?

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/old-world/home

https://www.pcgamer.com/old-world-4x-preview/

Ancient history's wild stories play out in Old World, an ambitious strategy game from the designer of Civ 4
This new 4X may look like Civ, but it's adding in stories that highlight the personalities and true stories of your rulers.

Egypt played me for a sucker. I wanted to be friends, so the first time they came to me and said their gods didn't like me, I was happy to pay up to try to change their minds. But they kept coming back asking for bigger donations. That may sound like a repetitive AI doing the same thing over and over in a boring diplomacy system, but in hindsight I should've noticed that each time I was paying tribute to a different god, with different flavor text for each new request. I had unknowingly stepped into one of more than a thousand hand-authored event chains which add narrative flavor to Old World, a new 4X from Civ 4 designer Soren Johnson. When Egypt finished filling its pockets with my gold and declared war on me anyway, I really should've seen it coming.

"Why I like designing and working on Old World: I'm able to, as a writer, take historical events and turn them into mechanics [and make them] enjoyable," says Leyla Johnson. Before making games, Johnson had a career as a journalist and a US State Department employee, and she now fills multiple roles at Mohawk Games as president and one of the main event writers on Old World. The events system is what leads to sequential narratives like the one I ran into with Egypt—at first they seem like the sort of random happenings that often add variety to strategy games, but in Old World they're much more elaborate, mixing real history with the game's more systemic elements.

"There's so much in history that can make our games colorful without us having to be super creative. History is nuts," Leyla says. "I'm taking whatever I can and trying to make mechanics that fit a game."

Leyla gives me an example: the story of Olga of Kiev, which is told wonderfully in the Something True podcast. Olga was a princess whose husband was murdered by another tribe. That tribe then offered peace: Olga could marry their prince, smoothing the whole thing over. Olga accepted, then killed the messengers and buried them in her court. She sent word to the prince, who was clueless about his slain messengers, that she would marry him, but he needed to send her his finest men as escort. She killed them, too, and continued to act agreeable up until the point she trapped and killed the whole tribe. They were not the smartest bunch.

With the right combination of characters, that real story can play out in Old World. It's not guaranteed to appear, as Soren explains, because you'll need to have the right ingredients: a young heir, a single queen who's not married, barbarian tribes. When you have that combination and make certain choices, it'll lead to this Olga chain.

"A lot of times with game design one of the challenges is you don't want to overdesign something," says Soren. "If you have 50 techs and 30 units, the game doesn't suddenly become better if you double them. Then the game just becomes overwhelming. But the event system is one of these rare places where that's not true. If you add more and more events, it makes the game broader. The player wants variety. So you can have these really specific customized events where this will only happen in this very unique circumstance, someone probably won't see it until the 10th time they play through the game, and that'll be awesome because they'll feel like they discovered something new."

Leyla and Mohawk's other designers have written more than 1,200 events so far, and expect that number to cross 2,000 before the final release. The system they use to create events is also available within the game, so modders can create thousands more.

Old World Orders
I encountered more and more of these events as I played Old World, and enjoyed the personality they added to a game that is otherwise very heavy on numbers. For the first few hours I was mostly focused on collecting basic resources like food and iron, and my progress felt painfully slow. Building units took 5-10 turns, and when I did start getting into combat, it wasn't thrilling coming from my favorite 4X series, Total War, which has massive real-time battles. In Old World, you move a unit near another unit's hex, and click, and their health bar goes down.

But everything started to fit together for me as I learned my way around Old World and started interacting with other civilizations, not just the nearby barbarian tribes. I started studying the tech tree for upgrades that would help me accrue missing resources and speed up my unit production, and when I started facing larger armies, I had to think more about the positioning of my own troops and the bonuses attached to their promotions. One set of spearmen did extra damage attacking across a river; a chariot could take an extra action if it killed a unit with its first attack.

I also started to see the impact of Orders, Old World's other standout feature. Each turn you have a finite number of orders you can issue to all your units and cities. Moving scouts and troops consumes orders, telling workers to build new farms or quarries consumes orders, and many of your buildings, like shrines and garrisons, cost a permanent slice of your overall order production. Early on I had excess orders every turn, because I was only moving around a couple scouts and two or three workers. But once I started amassing soldiers I would run out of orders without moving half my units, and realized how much more tactical I was going to have to be.

"The order system revealed to the team that a lot of the choices you make in a traditional 4X game, you don't make those choices because you want to. You make them because you have to," Soren says. "If you can move every unit every turn, that's just what you're going to do. There's no reason not to. The game kind of encourages you to. But is that actually fun? Does that lead to a good experience, or is it better to give the player the choice of what they want to do that turn?"

The design is meant to put more weight on player choice, and a nice side effect is you don't spend every turn giving every single unit on your map a command. Soren compares orders to action points in board games, but says he's never seen it in a turn-based PC strategy game before. The idea actually came to him about a decade ago when social games on Facebook were all the rage—their energy systems were essentially a way to make people pay money to keep playing, but he saw the potential for a good mechanic.

"Something in my head just made that connection: If you give actions as a currency, what happens if you just stick that into a 4X? Essentially your actions are a resource, just like anything else. Sometimes you get ideas like that that just kinda work. I'd say that core concept was what we started with at the beginning."

Old World's orders and events give it some turn-by-turn structure, and winning the game isn't as straightforward as conquering every square inch of territory. There's a basic "victory point" win condition from expanding your cities, building wonders, etc. But the other way to win is to complete 10 "ambitions," and these include things like building a certain sized army, establishing religion and mythology, and so on. You get to choose ambitions, and depending on how you're playing, the game will present you with different options. After I went on the warpath, I was able to choose an ambition to kill 10 enemy units, for example. These can even tie into the event system, like taking revenge on another faction by capturing several of their cities.

Before some of these systems came into focus, I worried Old World was a little too slow and missing the sort of interactions that can make strategy games like Civ such rich engines for player-generated stories and diaries. But once I realized the events I encountered weren't purely random bits of color, but were key to how the story of my civilization was developing, I started to see the potential here. Even on an indie budget, Old World does lots of little things to create atmosphere and build your affinity with your ruler. Every event decision you make, and you'll be making them often, can alter your economy or science or politics, or attach traits and titles like "the Wise" or "the Bold" to your ruler. Another smart feature is how it handles your heirs—you choose how to educate them when they're young, so when they come of age they're not faceless members of your family. They're characters you've already invested some care into.

The early game where I floundered around a bit is still very much being tuned, and though Old World has some tutorials already, the Johnsons say there's more to come to teach new players what to do. That's one aspect of the game they'll want feedback on when it goes into Early Access, which is planned on the Epic Games Store before this summer (so think late May or early June).

Why Epic? 10 Crowns' original publisher Starbreeze went into bankruptcy a year ago, forcing Mohawk Games to go on the hunt for another source of funding. Epic was interested. "We're very grateful for the deal they gave us, because it allowed us to expand and recruit the people that we were definitely in need of," Leyla says. "We're a small studio, and we were working with a much smaller budget. That allowed us to expand and really make the game better."

The Early Access release isn't to get more funding, but to start getting community input on Old World via Discord, forums, and by streaming the game and paying attention to how other streamers react to it. "We want to know if we're making the right decisions before we finalize it," Soren says simply.

Right now Mohawk Games is a team of 11 full-time developers and about 10 more contractors, and it's impressive how big and deep a game they've made, despite some rough edges here and there. Soren says that thanks to the number of veterans they have on the team who worked on Civilization 3, 4, and 5, they can get a lot more done. "To me the important thing is … I don't think I'm making any game design compromises with the smaller team. But it does mean that there's a lot of presentation stuff you just drop. We're not going to have animated leader heads, we're not going to have Wonder movies. All that stuff is cool, but it's also, to some extent, fluff, and it makes it harder to do stuff that's different and innovative."

With Old World's emphasis on making history playful, and Humankind's new take on how cultures evolve through the ages, it's an exciting time for games that look like Civilization, but are very much doing their own thing.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...d-world-the-new-4x-from-civ-4s-soren-johnson/

Preview: shape nations and annoy kings in Old World, the new 4X from Civ 4's Soren Johnson

I booted up the preview build of Old World expecting a game much like something from the Civilization series. Probably not unreasonably, given that lead designer Soren Johnson is well known as having been co-designer on Civ III, and then lead designer on Civ IV, before starting his own studio, Mohawk Games, in 2013. And for sure, this game, which is about founding and growing an ancient empire, certainly looks the part. There’s hexes, and cities, and goats and crabs and the like scattered around the map, along with groups of spearmen towering above the trees.

But by the end of my first turn, I realised Old World was not a Civilization game at all, despite its looks. Which left a pretty major question: what was it? Scratching my head over the next hour, I saw elements of Crusader Kings-style “grand roleplaying”, resource-based cost/benefit calculations familiar from economic strategy games, and choice-based narrative elements familiar from interactive fiction games, all built onto a familiar 4X structure. In the end, after a few more hours of “one more turn” (it’s taken that much from Civ, at least), I could only conclude that Old World is entirely its own thing. And I like it very much.




It’s a game about resources. There are the classic staples like stone and wood, which you’ll need to build improvements like mines, shrines and wonders in the hexes around your settlements. But then there are more esoteric resources such as legitimacy, civics, training and growth which, rather than being abstracted (such as happiness or revolt risk in recent Civ games), are tracked just as if they were piles of rocks or logs.

It reminded me more than anything else of Offworld Trading Company, Mohawk’s debut game about economic domination of the solar system. And once I started thinking with an OTC mindset, Old World clicked immediately. After founding your empire (there are seven to choose from, all plucked from the ancient and classical period in which the game is set), you’re faced with a relentless stream of small decisions to make: do you dedicate this city to mining or urban growth? Do you plunder this ancient ruin, or learn from the writings on its walls? Do you accept the Scythian emissary, or send back their severed head? Each decision will have a tangible benefit to one resource total, to the detriment of another, and it’s up to you to make sure you’re making a beneficial trade each time.

Spoiler

Perhaps the most interesting resource in the pool, and the one which makes Old World stand out most from the 4X genre as a whole, is Orders. In most expand ‘em ups, you move each unit once each turn, and that’s that. In Old World, you have a pool of orders (replenished at a variable rate each turn depending on parameters such as your ruler’s legitimacy, the technologies in play, and dozens more), which you can split at will between your units. You might choose to blurt all your orders to a single scout, moving them three or four moves across the landscape until they hit their fatigue limit, or you might focus your whole order pool on a few military units fighting war, or you might go hard on workers building improvements. It’s a novel way of breaking a tradition, and offers flexibility while keeping turn times relatively snappy.

Another big divergence from 4X staples, and the one that reminded me heavily of Paradox’s Crusader Kings games, is the importance of character. In Old World, you’re not playing as a single immortal ruler, or as a vaguely personified nation, but as an actual living person who gets older with every year-long turn, and who will eventually die, passing your POV on to their heir. These rulers have their own sets of traits, tendencies, strengths and weaknesses, independent to those of your nation itself, and their own ambitions too. They might want to see a proliferation in farmland, for example, or to prosecute a successful military action, and fulfilling enough ruler ambitions over the years will not only net you some hefty benefits, but even offer you one route to winning the game.



Your player character doesn’t exist in isolation, either. They have a whole modelled family tree, all of whom are entwined in personal politics with each other, and with their counterparts among the nations representing your allies and enemies. At one point, playing as the Romans (Ghoastus forced me to), I was accosted by the Persian king Cyrus, who had been insulted by his son, and had to decide who to back in the argument. In the end, I went with the son – sure, it would ruin diplomatic relations with Persia for a decade or so, but old Cyrus was getting on a bit, and so it was in my longer term interest to cosy up to his son.



This was one of many, many, many events which happened to me over the course of my game. Lead writer Leyla Johnson (Soren Johnson’s collaborator at Mohawk as well as his wife) has put a colossal amount of research into writing the game’s library of decision-point happenings, and there are getting on for one and a half thousand in game at present. Many of them are based on events from history, and coincide with the historically modelled family trees in each empire, while many are pure fiction. But on the whole they’re pithy, varied, and tend to pose tough, meaningful decisions.

Some are one-offs, presenting a simple trade-off between one benefit and another, while others will set in motion chains of event that will affect your empire for generations. And they’ll affect your character, too. If you keep taking an inquisitive, non-violent approach to problems, for example, you might earn the cognomen “the Scholar”, and your ambition might become to create a certain number of libraries or the like. And while it’s all tied into Old World’s meticulous bean-counting base layer of resource management, the event system manages to evoke a robust sense of storytelling with the lasting nature of its consequences.



Apparently, the game will even have a “roleplaying” mode, in which you can choose not to have events inform you of the resource consequences of taking various options, and have to make decisions entirely based on your gut feeling, and your sense of your ruler’s character. And while it certainly won’t be a playstyle that lends itself to optimal expansion, it’s one that will lend itself very well indeed to historical simulation, because people do really, really weird things.

I’ve got lots more to say about Old World, as I’ve been able to play it a lot more than I usually get to with games before release, and I’ll be posting more int he next week or so, based on an interview conducted with Soren and Leyla over the weekend. For now, though, you should know that Old World is coming to early access on the Epic Store some time “before summer”. You can watch the trailer (with voice work recorded by the Johnsons themselves in a stroke of pandemic ingenuity) below, or head to Mohawk’s site for more information:

 

[Tigranes]

Civlike by Civ4 designer with CK-style events? OK, that's a good start.

 

[Xamenos]

And it's an Epic exclusive? Fuck today's announcements have been one disappointment after another.

 

[Space Satan]

My issues with this:

• It's a blatant CivV ripoff, both in style and gameplay, goddamn they even copied circular completion meters for buildings and other shit, yet they advertized their games as a BRAND NEW and unique both in terms of gameplay and UI
• It seems to be the same 1UPT that gave so much cancer to CivV
• VERY limited time period.
• Epic, fuck this

SO far Humanity looks MUCH more promising and interesting as a sandbox game.

 

[Ranarama]

Anything that Stardock touches turns into shit

Eighth time is the charm.

 

[vonAchdorf]

And it's an Epic exclusive? Fuck today's announcements have been one disappointment after another.

Without Epic funding it, it wouldn't happen it seems.

 

[Beowulf]

Well, I don't mind smaller timeframe.
It will be more of a 4x strategy game than civilization game.

But I'm not sure if they are shooting themselves in the foot with that approach - early access as Epic exclusive?
It's rather cheap at the moment, but who will buy it on epic while it's still not finished?

 

[Hellraiser]

Epic store can go fuck itself.