r/OldWorldGame

Following some time playing Endless Legend 2 since I enjoyed the first game, the thing that inevitably happens every time I try a new 4X game happened again and I found myself coming back to Old World. This time, it was due to missing the tactical nature of the game's combat.

4X games have a tendency to have all these units with a ton of stats and abilities to manage. Age of Wonders 4 is really popular for this reason, and its combat is often cited as being some of the best in the genre. But the thing about Old World's combat system is that every unit has a purpose. There are no filler units, no units you look at and can immediately tell aren't "best in slot" that you end up never building. There's no stack system arbitrarily telling you that if you built 30 archers, sorry, only 12 of them can fight at a time with 12 other archers. Terrain actually matters tremendously, and the game naturally promotes combined arms armies due to the combination of unit counters (axe -> spear -> chariot -> archer) that interact with the terrain, too. The feedback on combat is incredible: spears obliterate cavalry, and having a line of archers sitting on the other side of a river in forts and forests feels fucking awesome. I won because of how I positioned my units and actually used them, not because I stacked so many +2's and 10%'s that my units became invincible or something.

And that's not all, the promotion system further interacts with terrain and positioning, too, and most generals have some kind of transformative ability that legitimately changes how the unit plays instead of simply adding a ton of stats and calling it a day, like a lot of so-called "spells" and "skills" do in other 4X games. The above archers get even nastier when given the promotion to perform better in forests and hills, too and you can promote your army to better fight against the neighbor you plan to conquer.

And the game does all of this without making you dig through a tech tree and finding obscure combinations and technicalities. You never make a spearman unit and then it somehow sucks against cavalry because sorry, you either didn't pick the right upgrade or built one of the bad spearmen that can't actually do their job.

I just don't get it. I know turn based tactics systems can be really hard to get right, but somehow on top of everything else in Old World being good the actual warfare is somehow more satisfying and engaging than any other 4X I've played because it has actual depth and not just a smokescreen of complexity masquerading as good gameplay. Does anyone else feel this way?

This game's immense depth sometimes intimidates me while playing, but today I had a sort of breakthrough while playing a game as Greece that I wondered how others felt about. The typical advice when founding a new city is to have that city make a worker, which makes some degree of sense, but lately I've been wondering that especially past the early game if this line of thinking doesn't start to become a trap. Let me give an example:

You have 5 cities and you're starting to strike out against barbarian tribes. You take a site, settle it for your military family, and now it's 7 turns before the worker is done. Meanwhile, the extra training is just going into your pool instead of making new units. The city nearby, perhaps Landowners or just a city blessed with a lot of growth, could produce a worker in 2 turns instead. It may not be of the same family, so it will cost an extra turn for these workers to actually make the improvements, but this saves a lot of city production turns instead if you can rapidly set up the rest of it. On something like a Champions seat this could be multiple units produced in the meantime, which is a big deal.

If this is something obvious, then I definitely missed it. The tradeoff in extra orders spent is obvious, but the benefits also seem pretty impactful as well. Has anyone else experimented a lot with this concept?