Old World takes place in classical antiquity focused around the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East where you lead one of seven Nations who left their mark on history.
For any fans of the Civilization series, you'll feel right at home with Old World. It feels pretty much the same and looks very, very similar. It has all the same trappings as the aforementioned game but with some interesting twists. Twists mainly borrowed from other 4X games like Crusader Kings and even Europa Universalis.
What Old World does different is introducing dynasties and family units. Something that has never been in any Civilization game. Religion is also quite different in Old World. Whereas religion is just like commerce or culture in Civilization and can be relatively easily farmed with the right upgrades and buildings, in Old World it is a bit more nuanced. You will need to keep an eye on what is happening with the religion and appoint leaders and convert important characters to stay in power and keeping things running smoothly. By promoting the religion, you and your family is part of, running the nation becomes easier or at least less costly.
Each nation has a unique pagan religion which is founded and spread by building a shrine. Pagan religions are not able to be spread to other Tribes or Nations. You´ll have to evolve your Pagan religion into World Religion since Pagan Religions don’t have the disciples, improvements, or theologies of world religions and can´t spread. The four world religions (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Manichaeism) are founded when a nation achieves each one´s specific prerequisites, or when founding the family seat of the clerics. Cities with that religion can then build disciples, which are capable of spreading the religion to other settlements. These disciples can also build monasteries, temples, cathedrals, and holy sites of their religion. Finally, disciples can establish a theology for world religions. You’ll need to keep your wife and kids happy with you since their opinion of you will affect how they react to your decisions and policies. In essence, keep them happy to make your conquest easier.
Every character, Religion, family, and foreign leader has an opinion of you. Other nations and tribes also have a diplomatic relationship with your nation, which is influenced by their leader’s opinion of you. A character’s opinion affects the cost of their mission, their combat effectiveness as generals and the discontent of their cities as governors. The opinion of the heads of families, religions, nations, and tribes will affect the opinion of those entities have of you as a whole. Influence missions give you the chance to improve another character’s opinion of you. Another thing that is handled differently by Old World are cities and villages. In Civ, you build a settler, which you then send out to find a suitable site with the resources you want or need. In Old World there are City sites that you need to conquer first by sending a warrior to kill some barbarians, and when they have been disposed of you can send a settler to settle the city site. After the city has been established, you can build workers and warriors, amongst other units. The workers can build improvements like farms, shrines, mines and quarries that opens up a specialist spot for citizens but unlike Civ where you can just put citizens in any spot as long as you had citizens available but in Old World you have to have a citizen available and then you train them to be a farmer, miner or a stonecutter, and then needing to wait for the city to generate more citizens before making more specialists. All in all, Old World is Civilization with nuances and added features like the dynasties for example.
There is so much to unpack here that is not possible in a week (which is the time I got to review this game and thankfully I have years of experience in this genre of games that it was much easier for me than someone not with said experience). But Old World is shaping up to be a pretty decent contender in the 4X genre market, which is getting quite saturated with good titles in the past few years. In terms of bugs and how well the game runs, I have to say I did not experience any bugs so far and as for performance, Old World beats out the competition in loading times hands down. For me when I load a game in Civilization I can go to the kitchen and make my self a coffee cup and the game would still be loading, with Old World I can barely make it out of the room before the game is loaded. In conclusion if you like Civilization and Crusader kings/Europa Universalis you can’t go wrong with Old World. Classic 4X strategy with dynasties and nuanced political system will keep you in the Old World for just one more turn.
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