The Historical 4X genre has been stuck in a rut for a while now. The Civ series is seemingly too big to innovate much at this point, and even normally creative studios like Amplitude have had trouble breathing new life into this kind of game. Old World, a title from Civ 4 lead designer Soren Johnson, has thankfully found ways to freshen up this formula while still preserving all of the things that make it great. It's impossible to list everything the game does to shake things up, but I will list a few of the ones that stuck out to me:
Cities - Cities can no longer be placed anywhere, and must be settled in per-designated locations. In addition, most of the development you will do with your cities doesn't take place in the city interface like in Civ, but on the map. Buildings like temples, courthouses, and libraries aren't built with an arbitrary production resource, but are placed directly on the map by workers taking a set amount of turns to complete. While cities do still have a production capacity of sorts (There are actually three: training, civics, and growth), the things you build with it are usually much less impactful than the things you build with your workers. Even your wonders are built with your workers. This is balanced by the fact that your workers use up your order resources every turn, so you can't just spam building projects without the bureaucracy to handle that.
Orders - Speaking of orders, they are a new resource that allows you to take various actions in-game. This includes moving units and building improvements, but also things like interacting with your court and doing foreign diplomacy. The order system sounds limiting, but in practice it frees up some of the micro-management that tends to happen in these types of games in the late-game. Overall I think the order system adds so much to the experience.
Characters - This game has characters like Crusader Kings. This means that your ruler will grow old and die, to be replaced by their heir. No more immortal god-kings ruling your empire for all time. This impacts the game in many ways, for example your personal interactions with AI leaders will determine how their nation views you.
Setting - This game is called "Old World" for a reason. It takes place specifically in the ancient era; the latest technology in the infantry section of the tech tree unlocks swordsman, so don't expect anything past that. This keeps the game more grounded and focused, and I think it was a good call to limit the time period in this way.
This was easily the best 4x game I have played in the past few years. The only thing holding it back from perfect is some technical issues. I haven't experienced any bugs but the game does run slow even on better machines, especially as the game goes on. I re-installed it to my SSD which helped a lot but it's still a little sluggish. Even still, I would recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre.
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