Changes Overview
- Difficulty settings renamed, to make the difference between presets and individual settings clearer. Settings outside the presets are now shown as ‘Custom’ difficulty in game with a breakdown of the individual settings.
- Increased variety of crowning ambitions. This should make winning an ambition victory easier and more varied.
- Grand Vizier rework (Behind the Throne). A big change to Grand Viziers based on player feedback, they now act as governors in all cities without a named governor and only control production in these cities.

Design
Difficulty rename:
- The Advanced Setup Difficulty setting is now called Prosperity
- The Simple Setup Difficulty presets remain as they were
- Difficulty components are grouped together and indented under difficulty mode in the game parameters tooltip
- Difficulty will be listed as Custom for combinations outside of the simple difficulty presets
- Distant raids are now tied to Tribe Level instead of Difficulty
- Achievements related to difficulty are now tied to Difficulty instead of Prosperity
Changes to Ask to Declare War mission:
- Ask to Declare War mission now requires a Leader with the Schemer archetype. Removed mission tech requirement and lowered opinion needed to Cautious. Disabled mission for allies
- Ask to Join War mission added, where you must already be at war with the target. This requires Pleased opinion
- With Ruthless AI enabled, war requests will be denied if the player is close to victory
Other design changes:
- Removed family preferences from crowning ambitions. Most crowning ambition events now allow three choices of ambition instead of two. Along with some bug fixes this should give a much higher variety of crowning ambitions offered
- Alliance Victory is now a setup option. The default is off
- Upgrading a unit now keeps its fortification state
- Gifting, converting, hiring, or recruiting a unit can no longer result in it being in territory where it should not be
- Can now upgrade units inside your team’s cities, even if they are not your own cities
- Achievement ‘Alexander the Great’ no longer requires the Great cognomen, just have to destroy Persia as Alexander
- Removed restriction on marrying Libyans in Rise of Carthage scenario 1
- The Random Improvements option now allows any combination of shrine effects instead of picking a set from a random nation
- Launch Offensive can now be used from a unit with a rout cooldown and it removes rout cooldowns from adjacent units
- Pathfinder trait now gives 50% bonus to Camps and Nets as Governor and 20% as Leader instead of 100/50%
- Swapped maintenance costs of Philosophy/Engineering and Professional Army/Volunteers
- Neutral territory is now defined as either unclaimed, anarchy (city being captured), or owned by a nation or tribe you are not at war with
- Fort defensive bonus, road and exploration river movement, Hero and Fort healing, Scout tree invisibility, all require neutral or friendly territory
- Road and Fort construction requires friendly, unclaimed, or Anarchy territory
- Added regular reminder to complete Influence goal in Learn to Play 3
- Characters with a religion trait (Clergy, Mani etc.) can no longer be targeted by conversion missions
- Conquered cities can no longer be given to a family that has not yet been founded
- Grand Vizier now acts as a governor in cities without a governor and controls production only in those cities. Removed all other Grand Vizier yields (Behind the Throne)
- Grand Vizier managed cities can no longer rush buy (Behind the Throne)
- Grand Vizier courtiers are no longer giftable in MP (Behind the Throne)
- Unpopular trait now gives nationwide 5% rebel spawn chance (Behind the Throne)
Programming
- AI performance optimization
- AI builds fewer duplicate roads
- Improved AI retreat vs attack decision making
- Added more logging for AI unit priority comparison failure
- Hall of Fame games now store the active player so that when you load them the player stays the same
- Improved replay so that it still works if there is data only from the current turn
- Removed improvement dynamic text object from each tile to save some memory
- Bonuses and EffectCities give only EffectUnits, not Promotions. Promotions are only for units that can gain XP
- Unit effects that come from disabled promotions can now be assigned by bonuses and city effects
- Disabled implicit subject conversion for DiplomacySubjects bonuses
- Turn Lock function removed
UI
- Character tooltips no longer show trait effects
- All attacks now listed under Units Attacked notifications (previously kills were not shown)
- Free promotions are now indicated in the city production list and unit type tooltip
- “Death of governor” decision now auto-invalidates if the city can no longer have a governor
- Defeat status now shown when the active player is eliminated in MP even if the game is still ongoing
- Event browser story preview improvements
- Law strategy notes updated
- Added minimize toggle to player goals/ambitions display
- Inverted red/green warning text in some cases for negative yields
- User assigned hotkeys now have more flexibility. Assignments can use previously reserved keys and conflict with non-assignable hotkeys
- Crowning ambitions are now indicated with the legitimacy crown icon
- Added some missing keyboard shortcuts to button help
- Improved Choose Governor tooltip
- Pillaged permanent improvements now show a pillaged icon
- Encyclopedia improvements
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed invalid moves adding undo points
- Fixed some events failing to appear with the Ruthless AI setting enabled
- Fixed player connection state UI for single-player network games
- Fixed Thracians in Learn to Play 4 being visible before they should be
- Fixed server games preventing eliminated players from joining one last time to see what happened, and for the game to be saved locally as a loss
- Fixed bug where client could be in a different language to the active player
- Fixed Hall of Fame bug where regenerating was replacing Scenario specific text with Generic game text for Nation, Leader names, and Difficulty
- Fixed Hall of Fame difficulty sorting
- Fixed network messages being sent out of order
- Fixed achievement text that referred to Kushite Cavalry instead of Mounted Lancers
- Fixed Ten Crowns achievement incorrectly counting regents twice
- Fixed improvement pings not appearing when law requirements are not met
- Fixed vegetation help text to correctly state a ranged attack penalty
- Fixed possible array out of range for bad event links
- Fixed bug preventing some Crowning Ambitions from appearing
- Fixed bug allowing ambitions to appear in events with random ambition selections that should only appear in specific events
- Fixed cycle button position not updating shortcut keys and not getting saved
- Fixed some road pathfinding issues
- Fixed player start location bug in the desert map script and made start location picking more robust in general
- Fixed illegal urban tiles placed in mirror maps
- Fixed character ratings appearing with a divider in some cases
- Fixed research popup closing after using Redraw
- Fixed null ref in encyclopedia
- Fixed duplicate Hall of Fame entries when reloading a completed cloud game
- Fixed character suffix bug where a ruler would get the II suffix if a parent had the same name but never was a ruler
- Fixed incorrect suffix on Ptolemy II
- Fixed event system bug that can very rarely lead to valid subjects being deemed invalid
- Fixed tooltip expansion when hotkey changed
- Fixed order yield rates not updating when starting/finishing construction
- Fixed broken Civ Fanatics forum link on main menu
- Fixed AI movement null reference
- Fixed several Portrait Editor bugs
- Fixed load/save bug for mods that give bonus effectUnits
- Fixed duplicated Hittite portrait
- Fixed errors when loading saves with deprecated promotions
- Fixed wrong memory display when giving a conquered city to a family
- Fixed opinion and legitimacy bonus from founding a family seat getting applied more than once in some cases
- Fixed enlist effect not getting cleared after use
- Fixed cases when opinion and legitimacy for founding a family seat could get applied more than once for the same family
- Fixed spymaster context menus sometimes not appearing
- Fixed agent missions and networks menus appearing on foreign spymasters
- Fixed formatting of tile and city tooltips
- Fixed improvements from inactive DLC showing up in build menus
- Fixed invalid improvements sometimes appearing under Valid Improvements filter
- Fixed goals display spacing
- Fixed AI modified collection exception
- Event audio fix
- Fixed trait loss causing unrelated events
- Fixed tribal invasions getting stuck
- Fixed Rise of Carthage scenario 2 goals sometimes not getting offered
- Fixed Rise of Carthage scenario 2 and 3 olive-counting goals
- Fixed Rise of Carthage starting heirs not being Royal and therefore not tutorable
- Fixed Macedonia not getting family promotions on their starting units in Heroes of the Aegean scenario 6
- Fixed bug in Heroes of the Aegean scenario 6
- Fixed Pharaohs of the Nile scenario 2 event triggering multiple times
- Fixed Grand Vizier traits not affecting the cities where they are acting governor (Behind the Throne)
- Fixed some UI instances where the acting governor was being treated as the actual governor (Behind the Throne)
- Fixed unit widgets failing to display icon and shapes not included in their respective default sprite atlases (affects mods)
- Fixed General not getting removed when upgrading a unit to a type that cannot have one (affects mods)
- Text and event fixes
Notes for Modders
- EffectCity.aeFreePromotion becomes EffectCity.aeFreeEffectUnit
- Promotion.aeGrantsEffectUnit is replaced by EffectUnit.aeKillGrantsEffectUnit
- Bonus.aePromotions no longer exists, bonuses should grant EffectUnits instead
Old World is available on Steam, GOG, Epic and Stove
About Old World
Set in classic antiquity, Old World is a historical 4X strategy game created by Soren Johnson (Lead Designer, Civilization IV). Players select a historical leader and use the innovative Orders system to dominate the competition. Leaders are mortal; once they die, the nation’s future depends on their heirs.