Soren Johnson has published a new blog post, this time about “Opinions”, have a read here.

This blog post is mostly about how in the Civ games, you would mainly need to deal with threats from the outside, and the only thing which internally is causing issues is unhappiness and related concepts. This is a very simple mechanic, and he wanted to make this more interesting for Old World, so they have added more mechanics to the game, the opinions of the families living in the cities.

An excerpt

“One of the defining features of 4X games with an Eternal China Syndrome is that the conflict primarily comes from external sources, from barbarians and rival nations. With certain random maps or diplomatic situations, players can often be in a position where they are largely unchallenged, and without any other pressure, the game slowly slides into auto-pilot. Old World addresses this problem by adding internal pressure from families and religions, each of which have their own opinion of you, just like a foreign power.
Making internal opinions matter requires a pair of mechanics – how the opinion is determined and how it affects the game. Designing the latter was the easier task as family opinions could simply affect cities and units if they each had a specific family type. Thus, each new city would be assigned a family, and units produced by that city would also be attached to that family. Then, each city and unit could get various bonuses and penalties depending on the opinion of the family itself. Cites belonging to a friendly family have reduced Maintenance, units of an angry family have a combat penalty, and so on. Perhaps most importantly for family opinions thematically, an unhappy family has a chance of producing rebel units which are capable of capturing cities if not defeated.”

Discuss this blog post in our forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/soren-johnson-on-opinions.673289/

Follow this discussion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/civfanatics/status/1438427846041645062

The developers of Old World have released a new patch.

Besides various bug fixes, the game now includes a manual and a tutorial!

Discuss this patch in our forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/old-world-patch-september-15.673281/

Follow this discussion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mohawkgames/status/1438249262496686081

PCGamer has published an article about the top 100 games, which you should be playing this year. While this is time-wise tight, with an average of 3 days per game, you need to make a selection, so we are very happy that this is not too hard: Old World has been included in the list! From the article:

“Fraser: I’ve been waiting a long time for a historical 4X game that can give Civilization a run for its money, and here it is. Mohawk Games has taken all the best parts of the venerable series, but focused on antiquity rather than all of human history. Every turn represents a year, which allows Old World to take a more intimate approach, exploring characters instead of just empires. 

There are plenty of innovations, like an Order system that teaches you to prioritise what actions you want to take that turn, but it’s definitely the Crusader Kings-style characters and abundance of narrative events that feel like the most important addition. Leaders age and die, get married, have children, plot against rivals, and you’ve got a whole court of people to worry about. It’s Civ reimagined as a life sim and RPG. 

Evan: As you said, the lineage system adds a layer of passive storytelling that I didn’t know I wanted in a 4X. Very interested to see how the next Civ responds to Old World.”

Other honorable mentions from the list, of interest to our readers, are probably “Anno 1800” and “Crusader Kings 3”, which should be enough to fill up this year.

Discuss this article in our forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/pcgamer-%E2%80%9Cthe-top-100-pc-games%E2%80%9D-including-old-world.673257/