Old World

The best description for this game would be a mile wide but an inch deep. There are a number of different mechanics in this game, some are good and some are bad but most of them are just kind of pointless. Unfortunately, the bad parts of this game outweigh the good by a fair margin. The Good: The city building and improvement planning are legitimately good. Planning out where the districts should good, debating whether or not you should build or mine, a quarry, or farm on a tile, or exploring to find good city sites are fun and enjoyable and would probably be enjoyed by most 4X players. Unfortunately, that's kind of all it's got going to for it. The "meh": I would probably place most of the game's mechanics into this section if I had to. They're not really bad, they just don't really do anything either. For instance, every other character in the game has an opinion level of your character. The opinion level affects how much damage a general can do to other units or can affect how likely they are to try to overthrow you. That all sounds fairly basic until you realize some characters will dislike you no real reason. A hero archetype (character class basically) will start off with a flat -40 opinion for a builder archetype so you basically start off in the hole with anyone that's even slightly different than your character. The same thing even extends to other empires as a whole where you can get a opinion loss simply for being "too close." Stack that on top of the archetype opinion loss and you can have Rome with a like -60 opinion on your empire the second you step into office. There are some other strange things in the game, like how border expansion works or religion as a whole, but a lot of them are just kind of annoying more than anything. I would also put the orders mechanic in here. I see what they were going to for with them but I just don't really like them. The bad: There are a handful of mechanics in this game that are truly just bad and make it simply frustrating to play. The worst offender, by far, are the random events. I've seen a few other reviews call this game CK3-like with its roleplaying system but the "roleplaying" in this game just is getting an event that boils down to "good A and bad B" or "bad A and good B" or "good A [i] and [/i] good B but requires you to have a single specific trait that can only be gotten in a completely different random event." Like, sorry Rome. We can only buy these doodads from Greece because our leader doesn't know how to divide resources up. Oh what's that, you hate us now? Cool, I'm sure nothing bad will come of that. Those aren't even the worst ones either, at any given time your character can just get sad or some nonsense and suddenly you've lost a point in commerce and now you're losing money and its not because of anything you did and there's no way to prevent it. Most random events just seem to boil down to picking the least bad option. However, there is one single mechanic that pushes the game into unfun territory: the combat. Jesus Christ, the combat in this game is so absolutely terrible it makes me want to bash my head into a wall. I even use the term "combat" loosely because I'm not sure if you could even call it that. Unironically, the best strategy in this game seems to be spam slingers and then finish the unit off with cavalry. I'm not even exaggerating here, that's exactly what the AI does and there's nothing you can do against it because, apparently, rock beats sword, shield, and bow. There's no reason to build melee units because they get pelted to death by rocks despite having a shield. Plus, they don't do any kind of reciprocal damage so if they get attacked by a melee unit they just sit there and say "guess I'll die." There's also no reason to build an archer when I can build two units of slingers with a more easily obtainable resource, in less time, for only slightly less damage, until they crit of course. Speaking of which, WHY THE ♥♥♥♥ ARE THERE CRITICAL HITS IN THIS GAME?! It's just such a strange mechanic to have in a game like this. This actually makes defending actually detrimental (which is bizarre since historically it was much harder to invade than defend). Anyways, if all that wasn't bad enough, it feels like the AI is able to move units halfway across the continent as much as they want and can maneuver into places you would never expect them to be able to where they can then focus down a unit in like three hits, if that. Meanwhile, your units seem to struggle to do anything to the enemy units. Here's basically how a war plays out in this game: the AI moves units you had no idea existed the previous turn up to 20 spaces somehow and wipes out some of your units. You retaliate and kill one of theirs. The AI moves yet more incorporeal units to frontline again and kills even more of your units. You struggle to kill one of theirs. Repeat until the war ends or you rage quit out of frustration. The only real way to win a war in this game is survive until the AI gets bored or have overwhelming numbers. Oh, and remember the random events I mentioned earlier? Well, if one of your units with a general gets attacked, that general can just randomly die, so that's fun. If they ever revamp the combat so it's not so much of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this game would be pretty fun but until then it's just frustrating more than anything. I'll just leave this bit here as a final tidbit: You can start up a game as Egypt and be locked out of constructing the pyramids purely out of RNG, which should let you know what kind of game this is.