Old World: Tips & Tricks (Everything You Should Know)

Here’s a rather long write-up, replete with advice, tips and tricks, odds and ends, and lessons I’ve learned from playing multiplayer cloud games over the past few months. Whenever I made a mistake or saw something cool, I tried to note it down. I’ve gone through my notes and put together this guide — which, to be fair, grew quite a bit while I was writing it since everything in Old World is related to everything else 😀

This post assumes basic familiarity with how Old World works. My aim was to elucidate some of the interesting interactions and easy-to-miss mechanics. If you’re not familiar with the basics, I’d strongly recommend playing through the tutorials or reading the excellent old-school manual, which you can find under Extras -> Manual in the main game menu.

Additions, corrections, and comments most welcome — one thing I love about Old World is that all the systems interact with each other in satisfying and elegant ways and consequently there’s always more nuances to learn about.

I’ve also put together a Old World Reference spreadsheet you might find helpful: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rm7G2MH2O61XmV0ONTwPmWjocPvAF3S6qKfrwZJoqyU/edit#gid=1988449226

And have posted VoDs of some cloud games where I tried to explain each turn as I played it: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUdReTPaCH4KSrsfuzqrvpg

Lastly, the game has a very active discord with tons of friendly people willing to help out with questions or to play multiplayer games together. Join at https://discord.com/invite/BNVpEgJ

• Legitimacy is king. Legitimacy is orders (0.1 orders per point of legitimacy — so 200 legitimacy = 20 orders). Legitimacy is family opinion (1 opinion per point of legitimacy — 100 legitimacy is +100 family opinion).
• Legitimacy comes from events and from cognomens. Cognomens are titles your leader earns. The ‘pedia lists them all (in the Cognomen section) and you can see what it takes to unlock them.
• An early game source of legitimacy is also scouting — you get +2 legitimacy for being the first to discover (and name) a landmark, but only +1 legitimacy for finding it later. Scouting a lot can also get you the Explorer line of cognomens, for a nice legitimacy boost in the early game.
• Cognomens can be a very significant source of legitimacy that’s easy to miss — up to +100 legitimacy at The Great.
• You also get legitimacy from previous rulers’ cognomens, with diminishing returns the further back they are (1/2 from the previous ruler, 1/3 from the one before that, then 1/4, 1/5, etc.)
• But new rulers start with no cognomen — just “The New” — which gives +0 legitimacy. Be ready for the legitimacy loss when you’re preparing for succession.
• You can also get negative cognomens from losing units and cities. These are brutal and can be very difficult to recover from. (It’s not usually worth abdicating to get rid of them unless you know you won’t just get another negative cognomen on the new ruler — abdicating is -10 legitimacy on its own).
• You can take advantage of negative cognomens by attacking enemies just when their new ruler has inherited, immediately giving them a negative cognomen, tanking their legitimacy even further, which pisses off their families and causes them to have fewer orders.
• Be wary of your opponents attacking you when you have a new ruler assume the throne. Expect them to!

• You can only build the units the map allows you to. Consider what your terrain gives you before you tech to longbowmen with no forests around.
• Each unit not only has a production cost, it also has an upkeep cost that drains a resource every turn. You’ll need to plan ahead to ensure you can support the units you produce. You can see the upkeep costs in the ‘pedia.
• Avoid units that require upkeep of a resource you don’t have plenty of (e.g. wood-upkeep units when there’s not a lot of forests).
• Wood upkeep in general is toughest to manage because Forestry and Lumbermills come relatively late.
• Chopping is incredibly order intensive since you need to move workers around to forests and chop them, and then wait for the forests to regrow. It’s a d10 roll to regrow, so chopping is effectively 2 wood/turn, assuming you have the orders to sustain it.
• Ranges also take wood upkeep. Be cautious about building too many of them before you have lumbermills.
• Think about what you need. Don’t just blindly build improvements — they take gold upkeep, called maintenance in the game (-2 gold per improvement). If you have +200 food a turn, you probably don’t need another farm if you’re also at +5 stone a turn.
• Balancing your economy properly so you can build the units you want to build and execute the strategy you want is a key part of the game, if not _the_ key part of the game since everything follows from what your economy allows you to do.
• If you have spare orders, you can use Scouts to go on “harvest loops” of valuable orders. But you should also build more workers or more units so you don’t have spare orders!

• The listed price in the top bar is what it costs to _buy_ that resource. Selling it nets you only half (until a very late law, Trade League).
• Prices will move in response to your actions and those of your opponents.
• You can use prices to try to divine what your opponent might be doing — is iron really expensive despite you not using a lot of iron? Expect lots of iron-using units from your opponent!

• Know your victory condition. Are you planning to win on ambitions? Conquest? Points? Double victory?
• Try to figure out your opponent’s victory condition. Beware Ishtar Gate-powered Double victories!
• You probably need to build more military units. I can’t emphasize this enough. Old World is fundamentally a war game at its heart. Yes, you don’t have to always fight, but having the option of military power is very valuable.
• Key non-tradable yields to prioritize, in rough order of priority:
• Orders — If you don’t have orders, you can’t do anything. Orders are life. More orders lets you do more things. The sooner you get more orders, the more things you can do (like do things that get you even more orders).
• e.g. Building a garrison on turn 10 instead of turn 20 gets you 5 extra orders. Whenever your economy can afford to, prioritize city improvements that give you more orders.
• City-based training — This is how you make units. You want to be able to build more units faster than your opponents. Sufficient numbers of units solve many problems. You do not want to run out of units while your opponent still has a lot of units!
• Barracks everywhere you want to produce units. Ranges too once you get Lumbermills and can support the wood upkeep.
• Once you have 2 Barracks and 2 Ranges in a city, you’ll want to work toward (ideally) Apprentice Officers x4 at least everywhere, better specialists if the opportunity cost isn’t too bad (Master is +3, Elder is +4, but they cost more civics to make), you have Judges, or you have tempo and aren’t getting attacked.
• Science — Because of how combat works, stronger units are better. Like much better since they are more order efficient, pack a bigger punch, and are harder to kill. You need science to unlock research that lets you build stronger units.
• Civics — Incredibly useful for so many, many things. Laws. Hurrying production. Appointing Governors. Appointing Councillors. Steal Research missions. Pacify City missions. Religious Conversions. I’m probably forgetting something, Civics have so many uses. You can never have enough civics.
• You can’t do everything. So don’t try. Pick what you’re going to do and build your nation to do that.

• Ore is the most important special resource to settle. Prioritize it!
• Make sure to focus on training in cities that have ore and ideally found those cities with a military family.
• Marble is very important of Statesmen/Sages seats because it can give you city-based civics, which you want for those Seats’ special projects. Marble is also great in your capital since you can sometimes unlock capital-specific projects (Decree via the Constitution law, Inquiry via a Scholar leader)
• If you found your capital as Patrons, you can buy Decree / Inquiry via the Patrons’ ability to hurry production projects with gold. (Or, for Greece, Olympiads, to super-charge your capital’s training production).
• When settling a city, keep in mind rivers.
• Rivers can provide a defensive bonus (it’s -50% attack to attack across a river, unless a unit has the Amphibious promotion)
• Rivers offer an easy way to connect your cities to each other. No need to build roads if you have rivers.
• Hills are also worth settling on since ranged units on hills get extra range and building improvements on hills takes an extra turn (but settling a city on a hill is just a benefit)
• Remember that certain wonders (Oracle, Necropolis, Acropolis, Mausoleum) require hills, so don’t settle on a hill if you want to build one of those in that city and don’t have any other hills near that city
• Towers (Walls -> Moats -> Towers, requires Martial Code) can also get you one extra range which can make your city a terrifying fortified platform for an Onager or a Mangonel (hello 7 range Mangonel if you put one in a Towers city on a hill)
• Coasts are also worth keeping in mind. Coastal movement is the most efficient movement in the game. The more coast you control with your borders, the easier you can move units around. Prioritize settling city sites that have access to the coast (the city doesn’t need to be on the coast itself, it just needs the borders to be coastal).
• (via u/spdr_123) For cities in the back only resources access matters. At the frontline defensive considerations are more important. Limit (good) attack tiles against it and watch for hills the opponent can put onagers/mangonels on. Even if you grab that far out resource towards your opponent, if there’s already enemy units on the front you’re only going to improve it if you’re so strong as to not be attacked at all.

• You can “buy” specialists with gold if you have a Judge governor. Considering they otherwise take many turns to build, this is a great thing to do, especially for Officers in high-training production cities (to minimize opportunity cost of not building units)
• You can think of Specialists in terms of how long they take to “payback” the investment, compared to what else the city could be doing (opportunity cost). Also remember they give science, which can add up over the course of a game.
• For example, building an Apprentice Officer in a city that produces +12 training might take 5 turns. That means you “miss out” on 12
• 5 = 60 training that could go into a unit (it instead goes into your global training pool, which is useful too, but unit production is one of the chief constraints in this game). Since an Apprentice Officer adds 2 training, that means it takes 60/2 = 30 turns to “pay back” the lost training-for-units production that you forwent by making the Apprentice Officer.
• Buy that App. Officer with a judge and produce it in one turn, and suddenly it pays itself back in 12/2 = 6 turns — a much better investment!
• Of course, you might not always have the resources to build the unit you want. In that case, investing in a specialist then might be a good idea.
• Remember also specialists yields get scaled by buildings / governors. I go into how this works at this point in my Training video:

Combat