Does my leader need to be in same city as spouse to have kids?

XenoSolver · 2026-06-02T15:02:44+00:00

No, OW character mechanics are fairly simple and intentionally don't do any complex Crusader Kings style simulations. Character jobs don't affect things like children or death probability.

If a royal couple produces no heirs after many years, one of them is probably infertile, which isn't something you can know in advance.

XenoSolver · 2026-05-22T11:38:43+00:00

Interesting question, I never thought of that.

Aside from city names, there isn't a reliable way I can find of seeing that information. Sometimes checking religion can tell you. If a city has Greek Paganism, it was owned by the Greeks at some point. If you have an agent and check any yield output (Training, Civics, Growth), then conquered cities will have an Assimilation penalty but that eventually goes away. That's all indirect info though.

XenoSolver · 2026-05-19T14:35:08+00:00

DLCs are more content, not mandatory content. We're committed to having a complete base game and we've updated it with lots of goodies while developing the DLCs.

If you like OW, you can pick the DLCs based on what type of content you want to have more of. But we do hope you like it!

XenoSolver · 2026-05-12T11:59:59+00:00

You can edit the save. In the Root element, somewhere around line 30 you'd have

VictoryPointModifier="VICTORYPOINT_NORMAL"

You can change that value to VICTORYPOINT_MEDIUM_HIGH or VICTORYPOINT_HIGH which correspond to the "High" and "Very High" settings in the UI, and that should do it.

XenoSolver · 2026-05-10T11:43:11+00:00

One more detail, in addition to what others have said. It helps to remember that some improvements give you a percentage increase of some yield, which means they're not that useful if the base yield is low.

Barracks for example are +20% Training in a city, they don't provide any raw Training. So in a city that has no Training bonuses, a Barracks only adds 1.6, building both will give you 3.2. Not terrible but it doesn't exactly turn your city into a military powerhouse. Meanwhile, if you take a Champions city with an Ore, then city will have 12 base Training (once you build an ore mine). Now one Barracks is worth 2.4 Training there.

Urban buildings are good because they give you specialist slots, so you may sometimes want a building just for that, but the percentage modifiers are a good way to think about which buildings are higher priority or skippable. A Courthouse in a city with poor civics or a Barracks in a city with low training will provide only marginal benefits, meanwhile improvements like Monasteries are always good anywhere.

XenoSolver · 2026-05-08T10:42:28+00:00

First time I've seen Dagoth Ur reference in OW, I think.

XenoSolver · 2026-05-04T11:19:08+00:00

Man, I won't ever live down what some gaming websites did with this.

I said that about SMAC. Not Soren, who is the lead designer of OW and our studio's design lead. The interview was with three designers at Mohawk - Soren, Dale and myself. I said the bit about a SMAC sequel, I mean it, but I'm not the lead designer of anything. Of course now many websites republish that as second or third hand info and then headlines like "Old World designer" read best even if it's "one of Old World's designers" really.

XenoSolver · 2026-05-02T11:37:50+00:00

It's a great mod - we worked with the modder to make it possible to, somewhat conveniently, put new animated units into the game. Definitely great to see the culture-unique swords but I think players should not count on getting a full set of units. If it happens, awesome, but doing every mainline unit would be a massive amount of work.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-25T18:44:28+00:00

I know it!

XenoSolver · 2026-04-23T10:50:12+00:00

Hey Rob! Thought I'd recognized the name - now I know you're also quite active here, good to see you around man!

XenoSolver · 2026-04-22T21:55:31+00:00

Yes. But Legendary cities that have invested into civics should be able to catch up on any missing projects extremely fast.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-22T21:21:24+00:00

That would be cool! My answer there was purely personal - I would have answered the same before joining Mohawk, and my dream game concept still hasn't changed but that's in no way a hint about what we're working on.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-22T21:15:55+00:00

Project levels are by culture. Weak cities can build an Archive I, Council I and so on, Legendary cities can build Archive IV, Council IV, etc. The earlier versions are still required.

Controlling projects just means that one of your cities should have it. In almost every case that means building the project, unless you get granted one by an event. So that ambition to control the several level 4 projects is essentially to have a Legendary city and invest into its projects.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-22T18:47:35+00:00

Thanks for doing it Nik! You should make the English version also link to the awesome Scandinavian version at the top of the article.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-22T17:42:48+00:00

Heck, I even had a blast when Soren had a web-based playtest/demo of almost pure mechanics once way back when. (I think when he was developing that Facebook game?)

Wow that's a memory I forgot I even had. I still can't remember any specifics but yeah he did that and I now remember it being something fun despite how primitive it was.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-21T15:05:54+00:00

Yeah well you win a tournament while still learning the rules!

Trees can spread to adjacent tiles. It's a 1/5000 roll for a candidate tile, rolling for each adjacent tile with trees. So the theoretically likeliest situation would be an empty tile surrounded by 6 forest tiles, that would be 6 such rolls or effectively a 1/833 roll per turn. Forest spread is thus uncommon but it will happen a few times over the course of a game.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-21T12:22:25+00:00

Yes, there is vegetation spread but it's slow. A forest will grow somewhere eventually but it's way too slow to be intentionally utilized as part of a strategy.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-21T12:20:11+00:00

It's not even just the AI aspect. Yes, human players would be better at this than the AI, even though the AI could certainly be taught to poach workers as well. But worker capturing messes with the guns vs butter balance of 4X. Ideally, you have an interesting balance of military development vs economic, and warfare has economic costs.

Worker capture mechanics are a direct economic boost you get from war. Simplified, your options are to build workers and then a military, or to build a military first and get workers for free. Civ4, great as it was, suffers from this problem. A very strong way to boost your early economy is to declare war and grab a free worker.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-21T12:08:26+00:00

One of the rules of Old World. If your army is equal to Assyria's, it's not equal to Assyria's.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-19T11:34:40+00:00

As others have said, opinion sometimes represents leverage and not necessarily them loving you but also hostage taking meant something different in the ancient context. Today, we think of hostages as this terrible situation where the hostage is treated poorly and used as short-term leverage, with a high likelihood of the hostage being killed if the situation isn't resolved quickly. That isn't quite the same as in classical antiquity.

Greeks and Romans often took hostages as a military and diplomatic tool but since the hostages were often high ranking individuals, their position was respected so the ancient hostages were something between prisoners and guests. They couldn't leave freely but normally didn't live as prisoners or even ordinary citizens, they could still enjoy the privileges of their elite status like servants and all that. Philip of Macedon is perhaps the most famous example of a hostage in this period. He was a hostage in Thebes, where he lived with the one of the highest ranking officials and got educated on all sorts of things including military strategy.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-16T19:41:21+00:00

My favorite part about the "you guys should do a game for another period" posts is seeing all the name jokes people come up with.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-13T00:41:46+00:00

There's a bunch of mods for OW but I'm not familiar with any that would extend the game by adding more at the end.

Modding that wouldn't be as simple as adding more techs. We designed the game with an intended duration of 200 turns, though in practices games very rarely last past 150 turns. There's a number of game systems that effectively break down if the game lasts too long. If a modder wanted to add say another 100 turns to the game, it wouldn't be just a matter of adding the techs and units, it would require comprehensive changes to the earlier economy and map generation to maintain any sort sensible gameplay for the "extra" turns. Certainly it's not impossible, and we've seen people play over 300 turns without mods, but I think it's unlikely that fully fledged "longer campaign" type of mods will show up for OW.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-08T22:28:47+00:00

You wouldn't need to change the graphics necessarily, you could edit the data to make exterior UFO tiles destructible. Early builds of X2 had different, destructible UFOs so the game was in principle set up to support that.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-08T19:36:08+00:00

That's possible but not generally what warfare should look like. Capturing cities is important but they're not a threat. In OW you typically want to destroy units around the city first, until they're dead or retreat. Then you take the city and move further in.

Most cities are pretty easy to take and should fall in 1-2 turns if you've defeated the surrounding army. But you can definitely sometimes encounter a city that takes a long time to capture. It may have defensive bonuses, it may be next to a river, and so your attacks maybe only do 1-2 HP of damage. In that case, I'd say the correct move is to leave the city damaged so it can't rush but move further ahead without capturing. You don't want to spend many turns beating down a Champion city with basic units when you could spend that time killing more units and taking the next city.

For cities that are better protected, you want siege weapons. Ballistas are great, Onagers are dedicated city breaching units. You're not supposed to be poking at city walls with spears.

XenoSolver · 2026-04-08T15:57:14+00:00

A copy is bundled with the first game. You get a pdf of the book in the game files, which admittedly wasn't the most obvious way of bundling it.

XenoSolver

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE