We still had barbarians all around that needed dealing with. You can even spend additional resources on pushing units past the point of exhaustion, giving you an ever greater degree of control as you move pieces around the board. This is fine if you've only got a couple of units as you can move them until they're exhausted and then go about your business, but once you've built up a number of units you'll have to decide who to move where and when it's best to do so. Instead of being limited to moving a set number of spaces, unit movement is drawn from a pool of orders (the size of which is determined by a number of factors).
In one more lighthearted instance, our court was plagued by a cheeky monkey who would steal the possessions of our courtiers, and our decision about how to proceed had a series of minor consequences that played out against the more traditional backdrop of aggressive expansion on a regional scale.Īnother interesting diversion from the norm is the way that units move. It's not quite a role-playing strategy hybrid in the same vein as the upcoming Crusader Kings III, yet leaders have a personality that you can connect with via your actions, with children born and marriages to arrange, rival families competing for attention, and one-off events popping up where your decisions can have a ripple effect. Instead of casting you in the role of one of history's timeless leaders, Old World takes a weathered scroll out of the Crusader Kings playbook with its more personable focus. It's also about people and not national mascots, as we've seen from the vast majority of 4X games in the past where gameplay hides behind a colourful but ultimately soulless figurehead. Instead of taking us from humanity's dawn through to the modern age, Old World does exactly as the name implies and zooms in on the ancient world, on the first civilisations, and on taking those first steps towards modern society. The differences make themselves apparent steadily over time, but the key thing that separates the two is their focus where Civ is a grand tour through the historical record, the Old World is kept on a much tighter leash. In short, you control the leader of a city-state (Assyria, Carthage, Egypt, Rome, etc) and just-one-more-turn your way through history while always working to expand your influence. On the face of it, Old World has a lot in common with Civilization, thanks to a similar UI and a recognisable visual language that ensures anyone who has played the Firaxis series will feel right at home, at least at first. After leaving Firaxis his not-really-that-new-anymore studio first took to the stars with Offworld Trading Company, a financially-driven RTS that put a new spin on an established formula, and now the developer's second game is looking to pull a similar trick in a genre where Johnson has already demonstrated his credentials. Johnson was a key designer on Civilization III and the lead designer of Civilization IV.
It's the reference point for the entire genre, but it's doubly important when talking about Old World as this new historical 4X is the work of Soren Johnson's studio, Mohawk Games. If you've ever played a historical 4X game the chances are you've played an iteration of Civilization, Sid Meier's long-running and ongoing strategy series that walks you through the pages of history until some sort of victory has been achieved by one of its competing nations.