I tried to play the full Willem Experience on Immortal. It went great.

By “Full Willem Experience,” I mean not researching Rifling. My variant was that I could only research rifling when it was the last thing I could possibly research -- so sometime after Genetics and Fiber Optics.

I measured up against a murderer’s row of AIs to pad my chances: Hatshepsut, Frederick, Sitting Bull, Roosevelt -- but to keep it interesting: Ragnar and Montezuma.

Ragnar helped me out a bunch in the early game -- he declared on Freddie and ate his armies, which allowed me to roll up most of Fred with catapults. Trebuchets and Elephants helped with Monty, who had declared on Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull then bribed Ragnar into the war and then Ragnar bribed me in.

That left me a weird enclave with former Freddie and Aztec cities pressuring Ragnar’s decent German conquests. Honestly, I should have declared on Ragnar but it was nice to have a friend, you know?

Trebuchets and knights allowed me to take out Hatshepsut, who declared on my after my friend Ragnar declared on Roosevelt and asked me to pile on. That was where I started to feel the pain in my variant: I could have and would have beelined rifles to a quick victory but instead I was trying to get my way to steel and military science.

I made a bit of an error after conquering Roosevelt: he wasn’t contiguous to my territory -- I should have conquered Ragnar and then taken a bite out of Sitting Bull to win the game.

As it happened, either Sitting Bull declared on Ragnar or Ragnar declared on Sitting Bull. Either way, I was prepared for the attack to be against me and so was preparing to rope-a-dope the AI: pull them into my territory, shred them with collateral then march.

But a strange thing happened: Sitting Bull declared on me, out of the blue, while he was at war with Ragnar. I spent a few minutes looking for the peace declaration and didn’t see it.

Fortunately, all I lost was some tile improvements -- although I did have some frantic unit shuffling and purchasing. Railroad really helped too. I managed to take Tenochtitlan, the Hindu holy city, on the last turn of the game, connecting my territory with Egypt.

Next up, I think I’ll try for a legitimate Deity win against some terrible AIs with no restrictions -- and no tech trading.

Screenshots will come later today as will a starting save.

So yesterday while playing mono Death on impossible using the last vanilla release, v1.31, I came across something I had never seen before. The AI used the 11 book Wraith strategy AGAINST me, and it was quite amusing the watch. They were surprisingly competent at it too, sending 2 Wraiths to take over all my poorly garrisoned cities. Check it out for yourself in the attached save.

Did anyone else run into similar situations? I would like to hear more about them.

Attached Files

  SAVE4.GAM (Size: 120.41 KB / Downloads: 0)

Playing mostly on Fair difficulty, I like that the AI now behaves appropriately aggressively towards unguarded and lightly guarded nodes held by me.  But for some reason, I see cases where they conquer a node from the original guardians, and then much, much later (30 turns?) they still have not gotten a spirit to meld with that node.

Is it possible that they have trouble moving a spirit there, when they have a stack of 9 units already on that tile?  Just a thought.  In any case, it is disastrous for them.  Not only are melded nodes crucial, but they have probably their best stack of units tied up and doing nothing.

So I was on my way through the stacks at the public library where I work, finding books for various patrons, when my eye happened across this.  I had to come back later on a break to take a picture.



It's not enough that the author is named Tao Orion. It's not enough that the book's title relates to invasion and inter-species war. It's not enough that its title is in fact [Realms?] "Beyond" the same. The whole purpose of this book appears to consist of research into improved eco restoration!

So my feeling is now that global warming is basically caused by our failure to adjust Earth's ECO slider to the minimum CLEAN. Maybe if we give this author 40 billion galactic credits for start-up costs, then 3 billion more per year, slowly increasing over time until the lightbulb gets far enough into the percentages....

Okay, so maybe not. [EDIT: Besides, Sol's research can't go into Planetology right now: It got hit with the Plague event!] But I kind of love that this book exists and I happened to see it on the shelf. Also, I'm playing a game as the Mrrshans that might be fun to report. I even thought about posting it as a fun little challenge game (or an Imperium if interest was high) until I played far enough to discover that [spoilers redacted in advance]. And although it's still a little sporadic, I've had a bit more time to visit the forums lately (as you may have noticed) so maybe I'll post something on this game....

I'll start.

I gave all the heroes 8 more hp across the board to help counter my deep dislike of the current implementation of Crack's Call unpreventable damage. Also, so melee heroes can still engage end game Supernaturals a few times without getting annihilated.

I reduced the magical ranged attack strength of Sprites and Ghouls by 1. Those lairs full of 9 ghouls / sprites were always very hard to crack early, often after I'd cleared out things like Chimeras. I find that while not quite as OP... Nature wizards can still cheesy farm out most Arcanus Sorcery nodes full of Phantasmal Beasts / Warriors with zero losses much earlier than other wizards.

I gave all spearmen Stealth=yes. They are now excellent scouts which give the exact composition of lairs and don't violate wizard pacts to keep nodes by wizard pact frenemies cities. I have yet to lose a city to a rampaging stack of undetectable 9 AI spearmen (nor ever even seen such a thing). Really a great change for the underused unit.

I've made lots of other changes, but these seem the most solid to me of them all. Play tested these to death. Literally. Death. (and Nature).

I have now bought MoM in some incarnation or other more times than any other game ever.

Original CD. Another CD back when 1.31 was the thing. Steam. GoG. I will probably check out the good graphics "preserved game play" one when it's released as well, and desperately wish Seravy had an art team.

The GoG version is much more convenient if you want to get around that crap Steam launcher which screws with your modding.

When did you first discover MoM?

Now that the map is finalised, I thought it best to start a fresh lurker thread.

The Odd & Wonderful Old World Online Weekly (OW OW OW)

Hello, I'm a huge fan of this game and have accumulated a respectable amount of experience in it. Well OK, a completely unreasonably excessive amount of hours.

With release, a lot of people are now discovering this game, been coming back to it, or wonder what it's all about.

The game is very rich, similar enough to other 4X games to make people think they know how to play it, and different enough that it usually ends up in disaster. The game has been built by a small team, and has changed very quickly during the entire year of early access, so there are not yet great guides out there to help you out (and some existing guides/walk-through/VODs might be a bit misguided sometimes).

So, as it takes an inordinate amount of time to write or make guides, I propose to organize interactive Q&A/tutorials/learn the game sessions.

The format would be as followed : Session streamed on twitch, every Saturday from 8PM CET (2PM EST) at https://www.twitch.tv/nolegskitten, with a focus on a theme/area of the game. Of course, I will be happy to answer any questions you might have about the game, so long as I have the answer :-). The game(s) streamed would be used to illustrate the points we're talking about, and I'd be happy to restart or switch to new games or load saves if it serves the discussion.

If you want to make it more fluid/interactive, I will also hang out on the official Old World discord in a voice channel (not fully decided on which one but probably "The Oracle"), so feel free to join and we can voice chat, ask questions directly, etc.


For the first session, I think a focus on game setup (difficulty levels, maps, options), interface & the early game would be in order, but that will include some discussions of most game mechanics as well.

That's it, not need to subscribe to anything (well a twitch or Discord account would help if you want to chat :-) ), of course if we end up with a million people there might be a need to have a kind of filter, but we're not there yet ;-).

Here are a handful of subjects we could have a focus on, in no particular order. Feel free to chose or suggest yours as well !

- Economy (getting, spending, selling, buying resources, improving your production)
- Urban planing
- differences from Civ 6 (or other games, but Civ is probably the other 4X I have solid knowledge about)
- Tech/Research
- Specialists
- Relationships, characters and diplomacy
- Strategy and war (when are you ready for war ? or for defence ? when to declare ? who to attack ?)
- Combat and tactics (of course. Including promotions, terrain effects, naval combat, logistics)
- Wining the game (Victory types, Culture, Ambitions)
- Silly challenges (One city challenge, playing at "The Great", handling "The barbarian hordes")
- Advanced level combat (combat puzzles, fighting seemingly superior forces, etc)
- review/commentary of a game (not sure how to set that up, but if you want to suggest your video we could do that)
- etc.

Finally, I'm not a pro streamer: just a huge fan of this game, so I will ask you not to expect a pro-level microphone, a face cam, or super high quality bitrate. But I am knowledgeable about the game, enthusiastic about explaining it to anyone and I speak a close approximation of English that usually proves to be good enough. I also love you already.

The Old World discord community is also awesome, with many friendly and experienced player. We also enjoy easy interactions with the dev team. Don't hesitate to join with your questions, suggestions, bug reports or just to lurk around ;-).

This also imply that we might have other experienced players (or devs ? who knows) who might join during these sessions.

I'll also try to see if I can make written guides, but that might take some time and streaming is pretty easy to setup (and more interactive).

That's it folks, see you Saturday July 10th (8PM CET/ 2PM EST) if you're interested !

I've had a wizard cast dispelling wave on me 5 turns in a row, each time wiping out hundreds of mana in buffs. Beside wizards that spam cracks call, this has got to be one of the most annoying, un-fun things that happens in CoM.

But to be fair, I've been abusing the hell out of this as a player. I also have the same two spells. Both of them give a 2x multiplier on dispel power, resulting in the ability to just completely wipe out any enchantment. As a player, it's a cheat code. Ariel showed up with a fully buffed Life stack? Just send in your cheapest unit and toss off a max power dispelling wave. I've saved my cities with that multiple times this campaign. To add insult to injury, my city has philosopher's stone so they can't even re-buff in case they still initiate the battle after losing all their enchantments...

tl;dr: I don't see why one school of magic gets two spells, both at uncommon tier, that do the exact same thing (buff dispels). Seems like the dispel enhancements should either be split up to different rarities, or (better) different schools to encourage synergies.

The addition of 2 rare and 2 very rares slots allow space for more global enchantments. I am concerned about how much globals can stack with 10+ players (i play with no more than 6)

Call of the wild is a good addition, allowing indirect attacks via neutrals and reducing difficulty of getting treasure

Inner Power is a solid way to boost a few specific types of units. I’m not a big fan of how it chooses to improve chaos best rare (efreet) specifically resistance +2. I think adding immolated units allow interesting combos with immolation. If so resistance bonus would need a nerf to +1. Keep in mind there are many global unit buffs in chaos now and chaos-only effects like warp reality. These can get out of hand (see next)

Blazing eyes is my least favorite new spell. the amount of sheer destruction even gargoyles or chaos channeled cavalry can do is incredible. It is also cheap to research when it should have the highest research cost. Also, it continues this trend of chaos being about buffing units.
we have only an uncommon global in chaos that impacts combat. I would love a piwerful very rare tier. 
*Maybe one that allows casting 2 spells per turn
*Maybe one that starts all combat with magic vortexes (pure chaos)
*maybe one that replaces fate mastery firebolts with warp lightning or doom bolts
*maybe one that strikes random overland units with a potentially killing warp lightning

The death very rare globals also appear a bit underwhelming with more subtle effects such as giving yourself weapon immunity or weakening enemy powers, creating a less than stellar end game. I wonder if a big of rearranging could be needed here
*summon demon and an improved zombie mastery could switch.
*Imagine if zombie mastery adds related effects to create undead units like
-zombies and undead gain +1 move and other stats
-zombies grant 1 mana income
-undead no longer have maintenance cost
units converted to undead result in a skill point boost

I also wonder if one of existing death globals contain also a minor anti-diplomacy effect that could affect alliances between wizards

Other new globals seem to fit in just fine and have important less redundant roles
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