Comment by buzzardbait | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buzzardbait | Hacker News Reader

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I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles.

It's set entirely in the ancient time period instead of having multiple ages, which I find this to be a strength since units and technologies remain relevant throughout the entire game. Also, ethical sales practices: the base game is very complete and DLC only adds small changes unlike most games in this genre (looking at you Paradox). The game's also on GOG, which itself is a green flag in several ways.

The developers are active daily on all support channels (Discord, Steam, forums etc). I've seen people attach saves asking for help, and a dev always respond a couple hours later in great detail.

As one of the OW designers, and a daily HN reader, this is an unexpected but highly pleasant mention of the game here!

Ah yes, the famed Solver! You're known for your inhumanly rapid responses to every Old World related discussion on the Internet but I didn't expect you to show up here.

I'm first and foremost a computer nerd, about the very target audience HN is for. Which also happens to be the target audience the early Civ games or Old World are often for!

> I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles.

Civ also does everything you mentioned - ie their units will flank and retreat. Is the AI markedly better than Civ?

The AI is just one of many things I like about it. In short, whatever Civ does, Old World probably does it better, all without giving mega-bonuses to the AI.

It has a lot more going on than Civ (1 turn in OW is equivalent to about 3 turns of Civ), but somehow it's a lot more polished. There's a free demo, feel free to try it. It's often on deep discount as well. It has a 200 page manual. I find that skimming a manual gives me a good feel for a game before I play it.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hb4dmDKxpf3pJJtpdFA4y4OOY-d...

The lead designer is Soren Johnson, who was also the lead designer for Civ 4, so if you liked that particular iteration you might like OW.

I'll take a look. This is the first time I heard of OW and I'm a pretty big Civ fan so thanks for the recommendation!

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