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- Diplomat is an excellent base to discover the game.
- She has a brother adding a backup for lineage management.
- Ability to hire tribes isn't uber but it's still an ok option.
- There's 4 special buildings, they are a bit later, but right when a serious stability boost is welcoming.
- The two special units are elephants, good stuff.
I wonder if a negative isn't a high chance of death at low age, 50 years and 60 years with option of long life. Better to play with semesters.
Rome
Greece
Hatti/The hittites
Egypt
Carthage
Babylonia
Assyria
Persia
No, the game does not pretend that Rome was ruled by women (because it does not claim to be historically "accurate"), but it allows this provided that you pick a succession right allowing it (but you are free to pick the "absolute cognatic"-law to prevent it) and also women can act as generals. There are though modifications which disallow female generals (or even completely that women having other occupations)
That makes total sense, I like when they add sandbox freedom to a game so that you can change the laws to make it possible... however the female generals comment is a pretty clear sign to me that the game is charged with a political agenda. With VERY few exceptions, that just didn't happen for 99% of history. I just hate it when they force a modern political agenda into a game I am playing about ♥♥♥♥ 2000 years ago to zone out and try and take a break from the never-ending culture war in every other aspect of our lives. Life is too short and there are too many games to waste my limited free time "learning" about ancient female generals. Also, the mere fact of making a game about the past means by default that the game claims some degree of historical accuracy. Not quite sure how you do the mental gymnastics of making a game about a historical period where all the geography, names, etc. match the historical record, but then claim it doesn't claim to be historically "accurate." It would be like a flight simulator where you fly unicorns.
The game has Rome (750BC), Assur (2600 BC), Babylon (1900 BC), [all dates approximate] contemporaneously founded. I don't think it is a game about an historical period (it also has only 200 years to go from start of the iron age to having cathedrals, crossbows, watermills, etc.).
The store page clearly states this is a "historical strategy game", not an "historical simulator". It has a historically based theme, but makes no pretence of sticking to historical accuracy.
If you feel you have been misled by the game advertising you can bring that to the attention of the trading standards where you live, and let them make judgement and they will take the appropriate action.
I didn't buy it yet. There are so many games with political agendas in them nowadays that I research them to be sure I can switch off and enjoy them without getting a lecture. To be fair, I am still on the fence about old world... it looks cool, but it is unclear to me if the game LETS you change laws so that women can become generals (in theory possible) or if the game is automatically populated with a bunch of ahistorical female generals and leaders (immersion breaking as a shuttering frame rate)...
p.s. The game is described like this: "historical strategy game where you lead your dynasty over generations of rule against rival kings and queens." I don't know how some of you read that and do the mental gymnastics of trying to make a difference between historical and historical simulator. If a historical game is not simulating history, it is by definition a fantasy game. Seems like you are just playing with semantics and ignoring the original question.
You have historical simulators, that would be games such as Crusader Kings. In those games, historical accuracy is the main focus, they take care to represent real kingdoms, real maps, real technologies and societies close to how they were. Historical simulators don't normally let you conquer the world (unless you "break" the game) because nobody ever did, and they don't drop wildly inaccurate events on you.
Then you have history-themed games where the setting is historical but the commitment ti historical accuracy is a lot lower. This is where Old World fits, or Civilization. You have historical nations, names and some characters, all remixed to maximize replayability. Gross historical inaccuracies should be obvious within minutes in such a game. From randomly generated maps that don't resemble Earth to characters coexisting from different periods (how in Civ you have Peter's Russia or Ashurbanipal's Assyria in the same age, or in Old World you have Hatshepsut and Alexander alive at the same time), to blatantly ahistorical gameplay developments (France building the Pyramids, Babylonia founding and spreading Christianity).
Other games don't have a historical setting at all, they're set in a fictional fantasy or sci-fi world and the concept of historical accuracy does not even apply to those.
In the game are succession gender laws. These laws determine whether males or females are excluded totally, allowed when none of the other gender exist, or equally. Generally you cannot change this law in game, but some events exist that can change this law depending on your choices.
There is also a mod which extends these gender laws to cover generals, and other job roles. For instance, with the mod you can set that only males can be leader, generals, and other roles. Or only females. Or many combinations in between such as only male leader and generals, but equally for other roles.
The OW discord and steam forums have some insights as to the games owners political agenda that you can read online, example of why female generals abound, religions that exclude females now are headed by females, children's education age is uniform for both sexes at modern levels as is the marriageable age of females who dont strat reproduction till married at a modern age, ( game could have used historical accuracy but chose to replace it with its woke idea, so with some effort you can text edit age ranges etc to give better immersion) ability to simply chose not to have slavery and instead have free society and a host of other revisionist concepts are to be found in game, because thats the kind of game the owners wanted to make. You are not the first to find female generals immersion breaking as im sure you found by a word search on steam/discord. Why this is so is to be found by the co owner of Mohawk.
Leyla
"We do not want women to be submissive to men in OW or for children to get married. We also do not want to reward anyone for owning slaves or for choosing child labor, yes it is looking at history with a modern eye because of the platform we hold, we have a responsibility that make us weigh in on what we offer our players and how to present it. We never claimed to be objective"
If female leaders is that immersion breaking for you, and the forum posting on female generals, shows your not alone in this, then prob best wait till its on a really good sale before a purchase. A small minority also have technical problems with lagg etc, increasing the number of characters and removing females from positions of authority as mil leaders of units, might well mean you find your also getting more lagg than you might expect.
AI will have female generals for all nations in game, you can limit yourself to having only males as military leaders as a another layer of difficulty, as this means the several AI will have access to larger pool of military commanders which you can only counter by having as many families as possible so as to generate more male leaders.
Otoh hand the AI is one of the very best in a 4x game, the game mechanics work very, very well, so looking past the woke agenda is easy enough when the game playing experience is this good.
Thanks for responding. I didn't expect a DEV to say anything. I understand your perspective, now let you tell you mine (I am curious about our respective generations, e.g. who is older): I disagree that being able to conquer the world in a historical game is not historical, VERY unlikely, yes, not ahistorical, no. YOU or I, a person playing the game in 21st century are what is not historical, but the game itself should be. The whole point of playing an interactive historical game is so you can create alternate histories, the player by definition is ahistorical so if the player's actions didn't change the game's setting because of the choices that the player makes, it wouldn't make any sense, they might as well go and watch the history channel instead. When I bought Civ 1 from Egghead software on route 22 in New Jersey back in the glory days of PC gaming, there was no way in which Babylonia could found and spread Christianity and while France could build the Pyramids, nobody forced you to... I remember at the time as a youngster actually learning about some of the world wonders and inventions that were a part of history from that game... From my perspective, Civilization stopped being primarily a historical game at Civilization IV, the last two games have been fun (to some degree), but the insertion of immersion-breaking elements related to partisan contemporary political discourse (the undue emphasis on global-warming and related natural disasters as well as the fantasy elements of using unimportant or imagined female leaders, as well as including ahistorical exaggerations of minor civilizations to make seem on par with genuine regional or world powers) make them feel more like a fantasy carton than a game about history. To be clear, I am not even saying I disagree with all the messaging in those later games, I am just saying I want a break from hearing about it in the few precious hours I have away from work and family. Ultimately what I am saying is that all games set in a historical setting are by definition historical. The degree to which that history is altered for gameplay purposes is normally not immersion-breaking and tends not to change the SUBSTANCE of said history. The degree to which it is altered for a contemporary cultural / political reasons or a ideological partisan agenda is almost always immersion-breaking. Having female generals in ancient warfare is very clearly the latter. It adds nothing meaningful to gameplay and only serves to make the game less historical for no reason other than sending a political message that comes across as a tired lecture at this point, particularly if I need a mod to restore that element of historical accuracy... Or to say it another way, all games set in historical time periods are historical, but some games are better than others at being historical because when the player interacts with them, they respond in a way that reminds the player that they are in that period of history. One day, a DEV is gonna figure out that if you let people change these settings in a menu, you can make everyone happy. Speaking of which, sorry for the lecture, but it is your own fault for having responded to an Oxford-educated historian :-)
I really appreciate this response, saved me a lot of googling. That literal lecture from Leyla (so cringe to imagine how proud she is of all the virtual children she has saved from virtual child labour...) outside of the game makes very clear to me what sort of lectures to expect inside the game. Sounds like a fun game about history made less fun by the insertion of a modern political agenda. Sigh.... Well, life is too short, I will wait until someone makes another game like this (shouldn't take too long and its not like I dont have another 2000+ games without political agendas waiting to play on my to-do list anyways.)