Crusader Kings + Civilization = Awesome

Old World scratches an itch I didn't know I had until recently. I started playing Crusader Kings II for the first time not long ago, and as a long-time Civilization-series player, it left me wanting more of what I was used to. I liked a lot of the mechanics that were new to me, like the dynasties, characters changing over time and eventually dying, but I also missed some of the main features of the Civilization series, like building and expanding my cities, exploring and conquering vast territories, and large-scale wars with my enemies where unit abilities were more obvious and important than in CK2. Turns out, what I really needed was Old World. It's like the love child of Civilization and Crusader Kings; it takes the best features of both games and implements them into a cohesive whole quite brilliantly. So you might be asking, what are some of the things that are similar to Crusader Kings? Well, for starters, there are aspects of a role-playing game here... You play a leader whose experiences over time can grant or remove different abilities which will affect how he or she governs your empire. You will have heirs who you can (to some extent) mold into the future leader you want to play when your current one eventually dies. Your character isn't a unit that you move around the map, but you can appoint yourself governor of a city or as a general leading a military unit if you wish (in addition to being in charge of the whole empire), again depending on your abilities. You'll experience hundreds of different events on each playthrough, almost all of which give you multiple choices for your response, and some choices may only be available if your character has certain traits or abilities. Any of the responses might be the correct choice in different situations; what works for one game might be completely wrong if you happen to get the same event in your next game (which isn't guaranteed; there are hundreds,or maybe thousands of events, especially if you have the DLCs). You will eventually appoint a council of characters to help you with running things; an ambassador to help your relations with the other great powers and minor tribes of the world, a spymaster to keep covert tabs on what your enemies are up to, and so on. So what are some of the features that are similar to the Civilization series, then? This is where Old World fits the 4X game category. You'll spend a lot of time exploring the world, finding places to build cities and discovering resources, learning who you're sharing the lands with and whether you can get along with them or need to prepare for war. When you find a good place for a city, the next layer of the game opens up for you. As you gradually research new technologies, you'll be able to build many different types of units, buildings, and specialists in each city. You can take the route of the last few versions of Civ and try to specialize your cities to a degree, or you can be more of a generalist. I tend to do a little of both; most of my cities are fairly well-rounded, with a little bit of everything, but I always seem to find a few spots that are ideal for food production, or massive industrial productivity, or that have huge economic bonuses. Since in this game resources are shared across your empire, it's actually easier in some respects to specialize. In one game, for instance, I had a city that didn't have much land that was productive for food, but it did have lots of hills and industrial resources. So it wasn't real good at feeding itself, but because it could get food from the empire-at-large, I was still able to make use of its massive iron and stone mining capacity. It took a little extra time and care to develop, since in this game "growth" is linked to but not the same as food production. That sounds complicated at first, but it really isn't. The game has some built-in tutorial events that can REALLY help a new player figure out how everything works. You can turn them off whenever you want, but I left them on for my first few games because they do a good job of explaining new aspects of the game as they become available to you. It's a not a tutorial in the traditional sense of "Okay, now do this. Then move here. Build this unit next." The tutorial event popups are based on what is happening in your game, so when something new occurs for the first time, you may get a brief explanation of what it means and how you can make use of it. These tutorial event popups were TREMENDOUSLY helpful to me as a new player coming from long experience with Civ. The two games are similar in many ways, but very different in others, so these situational tutorial event popups really help to alleviate any confusion you may have when first starting out. But again, you can also shut them off if you prefer to learn by messing up over and over when you don't understand something. ;) There ARE a few things that I'm not crazy about in this game. One is selecting sites for new cities. They can only be founded on "City Sites" scattered around the map. This sounds worse at first than it turns out to be, though, because each city site has at least one and often three to five adjacent "Urban" tiles which can serve as the center of the new city, and you can pick which one to use. This can have an effect on the starting border for the new city and whether a resource falls within or outside of those borders. It's easy to pick the best one; you simply hover the mouse pointer over each Urban tile while you have a Settler selected and it will show you the starting borders for a city on that tile. I would have preferred a more Civ-like method where you can choose any valid tile on the map, but at least you still have some choice in the matter. This will inevitably force you into conflict with one or more of the world's minor tribes, though, as nearly every city site will be occupied when you first discover it. Minor tribes usually don't coordinate their efforts even with other cities held by the same tribe, unlike the great powers, so it is possible to take their cities one at a time without too much fear of a broader conflict across your entire empire. Some players probably won't like this game's focus on one time period, but it IS called Old World after all. This is one place where it's more like CK2 than Civ; while you will gradually advance to better tech and units and buildings, the late game units are things like Cataphracts, Dromons, Siege Engines, and such. No modern infantry, tanks, or battleships for this game! At first I wasn't sure I liked that, but upon further reflection I realized that the pre-modern era in Civ games was usually my favorite part of the game, so I'm fine with it now. I almost forgot to mention, one thing I love about Old World is the visual style. This is the best looking 4X game I've ever played; it looks better even than the latest versions of Civilization, and that's saying something. A lot of attention to detail went into making the world look lush and inviting to explore. So how should we categorize this gem of a game? It might be a genre of its own; it's not strictly a 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) style game, and it's less of a Grand Strategy than something like Crusader Kings. The way it blends both, you could maybe call it a 4X RPG or a 4X Grand Strategy. Whatever you call it though, I call it one of the most FUN games I have played in years!