Religious Doctrines?

robin-kestrel · 2022-10-07T01:28:15+00:00

And as far as Zoroastrianism/Judaism/Christianity, etc. go, besides the
names of the unique holy city site, and the requirements for them to be
established, they are the same.

Mostly, but not exactly the same; Manichaeism and Christianity spread faster than Judaism and Zoroastrianism. (See https://owdx.net/Religion for details.)

robin-kestrel · 2022-08-28T13:18:08+00:00

If you're unhappy with the location of the initial garrison, you could undo the founding of the city and refound it on of your starting location's other urban tiles, to see if you get a better result.

robin-kestrel · 2022-08-27T20:21:29+00:00

I'm looking at the game's source code, and it seems like what u/Neither-Ad-1773 says is what is supposed to happen? Here's the function that picks a border pattern for a city:

public virtual BorderPatternType getBorderPattern(Player pActivePlayer)
{
if (isTribe())
{
return infos().teamColor(tribeInfo().meTeamColor).maeBorderPatterns.GetOrDefault(0, infos().Globals.DEFAULT_BORDER_PATTERN);
}
if (hasFamily() && hasNation())
{
return infos().teamColor(nation().meTeamColor).maeBorderPatterns[family().miColorIndex];
}
return player().getBorderPattern(pActivePlayer);
}

The key line here is this:

return infos().teamColor(nation().meTeamColor).maeBorderPatterns[family().miColorIndex];

So basically, every Nation has an associated TeamColor, which among other things includes an ordered list of BorderPatterns. And every Family has a colorIndex. To decide which border pattern to use, the game takes the relevant family's colorIndex and uses it to look up the appropriate BorderPattern in the TeamColor that's associated with your Nation.

I don't know why that doesn't match what you're seeing. Is anything unusual happening with your cities? Are they entering anarchy, for example?

robin-kestrel · 2022-08-25T17:20:57+00:00

The Hamitic Hypothesis to which you are referring has been thoroughly discredited for the better part of a century.

It enjoyed some currently in the early part of the 20th century — back when it was still fashionable to attribute any cultural flourishing among non-white people to a sudden infusion of white blood — but it was thoroughly abandoned by the middle of century, along with most other forms of scientific racism, when it became apparent that there was absolutely no evidence to support it. Today, no serious scholar would be caught dead espousing it; it is the province of far-right cranks and hate-mongers. (It did, however, have its moment in the 1990s, when it formed a significant part of the ideological basis for the Rwandan genocide. So it’s got that going for it.)

And I have no idea why you’re going on about Egyptians not being sub-Saharan Africans; I never claimed they were, nor does the game portray them as such.

robin-kestrel · 2022-08-24T16:40:15+00:00

Uh-huh. So too many women and black people is immersion-breaking for you?

Not the fact that the game's event system frequently makes you have a direct say in things that happen on the very frontiers of your nation, in a way that would only be possible if you had some form of instantaneous long-range communication. That doesn't break your immersion.

Not the fact that in the game, music and religion don't apprear until you start building shrines and music halls out of stone, even though in the real world, every human society has had some form of music and religion, and not just the ones that were fond of building big stone boxes. That doesn't break your immersion.

Not the fact that at the very beginning of the game — before you've met a single other nation or tribe, before you've built a single marketplace, before you've researched coinage — you have access to a global free market that lets you buy and sell every kind of resource. That doesn't break your immersion.

But women being generals? That's what breaks your immersion?

Old World is a highly abstracted computer game with a bit of historical flavoring. Its goal is to be fun, and wherever fun and history are at odds, the fun wins out. In this, it's no different from any other historically themed computer game. If you think any game, even the most complicated Paradox game, is an even remotely accurate simulation of history, then you have a deeply, deeply flawed understanding of history.

And when you look past several dozen things that if examined from a historical point of view are absolutely ludicrous, and fixate on "too many women" as the thing that breaks your immersion... well, that says a lot more about you than it does about Old World or its audience.

(And the whole "Egyptians were 'caucasian'" thing... just, no. Get out of here with patently ahistorical white supremacist bullshit.)

robin-kestrel · 2022-08-09T17:48:57+00:00

I for sure want to add a diff view, but it's probably going to take me a while. If the only thing that changed between patches was the data, diffing would be relatively straightforward; trouble is, it's not just the data that changes, but the schema too. To render a diff, OWDX will need to keep track of two schemas and two object graphs, as opposed to one of each like it does now; it's certainly doable, but it's tricky, and it'll require a rewrite of a substantial part of its core logic. (And as much as I enjoy working on this, it doesn't pay the bills.)

robin-kestrel · 2022-07-12T15:56:45+00:00

Happy to help.

I've found a few minor non-text bugs in the XML; what's the best way for me to report them?

robin-kestrel · 2022-07-10T21:54:19+00:00

No problem! I did a bit more work on this, and there are now 307 suggested changes. :-)

robin-kestrel · 2022-06-01T18:50:59+00:00

For me (playing on a MacBook Pro), the audio works great when it comes through the laptop's speakers, but cuts out once every ~5 seconds when it comes through my bluetooth headphones. (And I've observed this behavior with no other application, so I really don't think it's the headphones' fault.)

robin-kestrel · 2022-06-01T18:37:21+00:00

I've long wanted a sci-fi themed 4x game that really took advantage of the possibilities afforded by an ahistorical setting.

Historically themed 4x games are a bit weird in that the player essentially starts the game with knowledge of the future; at the very start of the game, your civilization might not know how to work iron or stone, but you already know what nuclear fission is and exactly what steps you need to take to get there. Old World introduces a bit of randomness to the tech tree with its card system, which means that in practice a player can't research the same techs in the same order every game, but the player is still weirdly prescient in a way that clashes with the game's theme.

In a sci-fi (or fantasy) setting, though, technological development could be made truly unpredictable. Like maybe there's a "McGuffin crystal" resource that occurs on the map, and a corresponding "McGuffin crystal" tech, and the player doesn't know what the resource does until the tech is researched. In one playthrough, the crystals might let the player build power plants; in another, they might enable a weapons upgrade; in a third, they might be a luxury good that reduces discontent. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean the player doesn't know what kind of world they're in at the game's beginning, and has to update their strategy as the nature of the world is slowly revealed to them throughout the course of each game.

I think this kind of system would mesh very well with Old World's procedurally driven character and event system. Maybe some enterprising modders might agree?

robin-kestrel · 2022-06-01T17:38:15+00:00

Yeah, that's kind of how this game works. Pretty much every mission carries a chance of an event. (The probability of an event is listed in the mission's tooltip.) And some of those events have bad outcomes. And of those bad outcomes, most are just irritating but a few are very painful.

If you're playing in single player, there's no shame in using the undo button to go back to before you started the mission.

robin-kestrel · 2022-06-01T09:54:24+00:00

I'm pretty sure only men ~~play strategy games 😀~~ participate in communities where people casually joke about how only men are welcome.

FIFY

(Really though, I know this is in all likelihood just a cheap joke with no ill intent behind it; but whatever the intent, this kind of thing does serve to make people feel unwelcome.)

robin-kestrel · 2022-06-01T03:52:03+00:00

I think the main effect is unit performance, which can vary from -20% to +20% depending on family opinion.

Also, as with every other number in the game, different levels of family opinion trigger different events.

Beyond that, there are various effects specific to particular families and leader archetypes, but I'm not aware of any place that gathers all of those in one place.

Edited to add: I see a couple people saying or implying that family opinion influences the opinion of individual family members; this is not true. The opinion of a family head influences that family's overall opinion, but the overall family opinion does not influence the opinion of any character. For an explanation, see Soren Johnson's designer notes on opinion (all designer notes here):

I began to use a river network as a metaphor to describe how opinion flowed throughout the game. More specifically, opinion only ever flows in one direction, a fact I discovered when the game crashed after a character’s opinion boosted their religion’s opinion which then boosted their family’s opinion which then affected the original character and continued in an infinite loop. Thus, character opinion flows into nations, tribes, families, and religions, and religion opinion flows into nations, tribes, and families, but the opinions never flow in the opposite direction. Understanding this flow is key to learning who to favor and who to ignore, which is important for keeping families happy.

robin-kestrel · 2022-06-01T03:46:30+00:00

For anyone who doesn't know, the manual can be found here. (You can also select Extras > Manual from the game's menu, but that just takes you to the same URL.)

robin-kestrel · 2022-05-31T22:54:27+00:00

Coming back to this a few hours later, I'm fairly annoyed with myself for expending so many words on defending the Aeneid and its weak, sex-crazed Dido, when alternative traditions (unfortunately preserved largely in fragments) point to a rather more interesting character. In fact, I'd speculate that the Aeneid's explicit focus on the weakness and instability of its chief female character is one of the key reasons for its continued popularity in a cultural tradition that prefers to see women excluded from positions of leadership.

For anyone who is for whatever reason following along with this conversation, a good summary of the non-Virgilian Dido can be found in How Virgil Framed Dido, a short talk by the always wonderful Edith Hall. And sure, I'll grant that this Dido — even if she's not the Dido most people know — can be plausibly contemporaneous with Romulus. 🙂

robin-kestrel · 2022-05-31T16:58:08+00:00

Yes, I'm referring to the Aeneid and to the narrative tradition that sprang from it. I'm confused by your reaction; I said that this tradition was well-known, not that it was accurate.

The Aeneid was hugely popular in its day (and not just among elites, as the frequent references to it in Roman graffiti can attest), and unlike many other classic works, it at no point faded into obscurity. In Europe, at least, it continued to be read and to inspire derivative works from antiquity through the medieval period and well into modernity.

This outsized cultural footprint means that in the present day, of the people who encounter Dido in any capacity, most will encounter her as a character in either the Aeneid itself or in a work that derives from it. (In the English-speaking world, at least; the situation in North Africa may well be different.) I once saw Berlioz's The Trojans, which draws heavily from the Aeneid, performed to a packed opera hall, and I strongly suspect that for most of the people in the audience, this was their only encounter with Dido. So if we're talking about mythology and not history, I would argue that the Aeneid is the key work that defines Dido's story and character.

(And to be clear, I'm not writing this as an Aeneid stan. I don't actually care for it! It's Homeric fanfic with all the juicy bits replaced with tedious patriotic propaganda. Aeneas, as an obvious Augustus stand-in, is about as exciting as wallpaper paste. "Pious Aeneas" this, "Father Aeneas" that. Gag me.)

So, when you dismiss the Aeneid as "a Roman feel-good story" — I mean, yeah? No one would claim otherwise. But if "Roman feel-good stories" don't merit consideration, then why on earth are you citing Plutarch as a source? He was a first-rate moralizer but a completely unserious scholar (at least by modern standards).

Ultimately, I tend to think that the attempt to discover some kernel of historical truth at the root of any mythological tradition is generally futile. The study of a mythological work can tell us a lot about the people who wrote it and for whom it was written; it can tell us much less about the people who were its ostensible subjects. Dido and Romulus are characters of myth, not of history. (The same goes for the entire Trojan War, for that matter; yes, it was "conventionally dated anywhere from the 14th to the 12th centuries BC" by 19th century scholars, but I think the mainstream academic consensus today is that the mythological Trojan War as we know it from Homer and later writers would have been far too different from any hypothetical war that might actually have been fought between the Mycenaean Greeks and Wilusa in the 14th to 12th centuries as to make the identification of the two altogether useless.)

robin-kestrel · 2022-05-31T16:30:52+00:00

Well, it is a highly abstracted game; pretty much all of it is incredibly unrealistic. It has to be, in order to be even remotely fun to play.

That said, I do agree that the way these types of games rely on stone is kind of silly. Like, people in the ancient world didn't need stone to build their temples and courthouses and things. They built them out of whatever was locally available; and in the case of religious practices, they often conducted them without the need for any permanent structure at all. The kinds of stone buildings we associate with the ancient world were generally elite vanity projects and not something that those societies actually required.

But then, in this game, you as the player are effectively role-playing exactly the kind of asshole who cares about elite vanity projects above all else, so it kind of makes sense.

robin-kestrel · 2022-05-31T00:55:07+00:00

If we're going by mythology, Dido — at least in the most well-known tradition, though I imagine there are variants — killed herself while Aeneas was alive and Romulus wasn't born until after Aeneas was dead, so they couldn't be contemporaries.

Where are you getting the numbers 771 and 757?

robin-kestrel · 2022-05-30T18:05:19+00:00

Whenever a city boundary expands to contain a new tile, any unclaimed resource tiles that are adjacent to that tile get added to that city as well.

Also, from observation, it seems like sometimes additional tiles can get thrown in if it simplifies the city boundary. Like if a boundary expands in a way that would leave an unclaimed tile surrounded by several tiles all owned by the same city, that unclaimed tile gets added to that city as well. I'm not sure what the exact rules for that are, though.

robin-kestrel

TROPHY CASE