A unique game Seriously great game. I've been following Soren Johnson since his work as lead designer on Civ 4, he seemed to really get how to balance a Seriously great game. I've been following Soren Johnson since his work as lead designer on Civ 4, he seemed to really get how to balance a game. Offworld Trading Company was decent but didn't quite click with me, partly just the genre.
However, with Old World Soren and his team have excelled. The game mechanics are beautifully balanced. Techs, resources, expansion, happiness, warfare, religion, your characters who will lead your empire, your armies and govern your cities, it all works together very elegantly.
Potentially there should be a slightly bigger cost to expansion, eg new cities should be a bigger drain until they grow enough to pull their own weight, but in general I think it's a masterpiece. Thoroughly enjoying it. I've been playing on easy difficulty as leader of Babylonia, and am currently years into my year stint with a comfortable lead.
I've I've been playing on easy difficulty as leader of Babylonia, and am currently years into my year stint with a comfortable lead. I've built a dozen cities and conquered a half-dozen more. I've found this game diverting and without major flaws.
It's as enjoyable as any strategy game I've played and I've done at least a half-dozen. This review contains spoilers , click expand to view. Essential Links. By Metascore By user score. All Current Games ». Psychonauts 2.
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Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors. You will receive a verification email shortly. At least at first. Old World is like a post-graduate program for players who already have a bachelor's degree in Sid Meier's Civilization. Despite covering a much smaller slice of history, it takes the Civ template as a starting point and layers a lot of new mechanics on top of it. And for the most part, they're pretty interesting twists.
But they're often presented in ways that aren't immediately elegant or approachable. The most prominent of these is a system of named characters and aristocratic families which adds a sort of " Crusader Kings Lite" dynamic to your internal and international politics. One issue I always had with the Civilization series was that you sprinted through the ages so quickly that a lot of the relatable, human aspects of history could get lost in the mix.
With each turn representing a year or a half-year in Old World, and leaders who grow old and die in realistic time frames, I really got to know and develop feelings for the various generals and court functionaries through scripted events and decisions. In my first game as the Macedonian Greeks, Alexander was blinded in a military training exercise as a child and went on to be a wise administrator rather than a ravenous conqueror.
His grandson would forge a peace with the Gauls by marrying one of their tattooed warriors, but upset some of the more xenophobic nobles in the process. The events are generally well-written, making it easy to understand what's going on and what your options are. I also rarely felt like there was one choice that was clearly better than the others, which is a difficult balancing act to pull off.
More than once, I was asked to pick between something that would benefit the whole nation but upset one or more of the major noble families, or show a little favoritism to keep a potential rival from getting too rebellious.
Compared to Crusader Kings 3, these events are a bit simpler and less likely to have multiple steps, but have just as much potential to majorly affect your plans, like Alexander's little accident did.
I was less thrilled by the consequences for failing to balance these internal concerns, though. The one time I did annoy one of my noble families enough to cause a revolt, they simply spawned a few units of rebels without much fanfare and I was able to put them down quite easily without much lasting harm.
Some of that was luck — my best army was close to home rather than away on campaign. But it still felt a bit anticlimactic. It's more interesting thinking about how to prevent a revolt than it is to actually put one down.
Since every city you found must be awarded to one of the four noble families, you have to think about whether you want to keep their power bases spread out and balkanized, or clustered so they're easier to pin down.
This can be a lot to get your head around, and while there is a decent tutorial and a nested tooltip system, the UI didn't do me a lot of favors there. It likes to present information in a very dense, text-heavy way that seems afraid to cover up too much of the map, even when doing so could have given each detail some much needed breathing room and improved readability by a lot.
I found myself constantly wishing for proper character screens like in Crusader Kings 2 and 3 instead of the cramped little frames we got. Making more use of icons, tabs, or collapsible info panes rather than assaulting us with so much plain text per tooltip would have gone a long way as well.
The other major departure from Civilization is a resource called orders, which determines how much your entire civilization can do on a given turn. While individual units still have a movement range and action limit, you can run out of orders and not be able to use all of them. So a very spread-out empire without enough administrative buildings may find that they have to choose between giving orders to their troops at home to put down a rebellion or maneuvering against a rival in a foreign war.
Overall, I liked the way this allowed smaller, "tall" empires to compete with sprawling and inefficient ones and modeled the difficulties of commanding a vast, ancient state.
But it is also one more resource to juggle on top of all of the usual ones you'd expect in Civ, so at the same time, it contributes to the increased complexity I mentioned earlier. While the menus may get overly busy, the map looks excellent and presents a lot of useful information at a glance.
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