Old World

Easily the best 4X game out there. It has a steep learning curve, I recommend to do both the "Learn to play" and "Learn by playing" modes to ease you into it. Once everything clicks, you won't be able to quit :)

I went back and forth on recommending this or not. I wish there was a way to "recommend with caveats" as opposed to yes or no. The main caveat being is if you like going military in 4X games then you will probably love this one. If you don't or somewhere in between then it might be a pass. I'm going to mark it as a not recommend as a counterpoint to all of the other glowing reviews. The good: Orders are interesting take on the 4X genre. I hadn't seen that before. Events are also interesting (and sometimes annoying) but give the game a nice flavor. Relgions are fairly well done. I liked that it only went so far in time as opposed to going to modern times which is hard to simiulate in a 4X game with planes trains and automobiles. The middle Battles are ok. I didn't see anything revolutionary here. Seemed like you have to focus fire or do things like axeman spam. The bad: You have to destroy tribes in order to get ahead. I tried to make peace with them on my first games like I do in other 4X games but it didn't seem to do anything. Then in my later games I would just destroy them and ended up winning by a large margin. Heavy military in general seemed to be the way to go. …

I genuinely believe that Old World is the best civ-like on the market today. Not just because of the character and events systems, which introduce some variety to keep things fresh, but the many twists and design decisions in the game. If you are in any way a fan of the genre, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Like Civ5 for adults. Seriously impressed with how good the CPU opponent can kick your butt. Base game is plenty to keep you occupied, then spring for the DLC if you want to support the active developer team. 780 hours in and I'm still playing. Works reasonably well on Steam deck.

This game ruined Civ for me forever. There is just so much depth and variability here that few 4x games can hope to compare to.

Once upon a time, game developers like Soren Johnson would playtest their games with the team. They would feel what was fun, what was not, what was unbalanced and what was micromanagement. In between doing that, they would find bugs, note systems that didn't provide the information needed to make decisions as a player and over time, they would give birth to a game, like Civilization 4. Unfortunately, this formula has been lost, as have the keys to replay-ability and instead get a game that focuses more on random events and storytelling rather than a world that you build, foster and improve and become engrossed in, because you feel part of it. Civ 4, Remnants of the Precursors, Alpha Centauri, basically the only 3 games in the 4x genre to hold that mantle. If you haven't played them, its not too late, they will last you a lifetime of fun and replayability.