Old World Cities Guide: Specialists, Production, Culture & More

Cities are vital to the success of any empire in Old World. They provide all the necessary resources and production needs necessary to reach victory and become the most famous and influential faction of Antiquity. Cities themselves have a lot of components and it’s important to get familiar with them to best optimize them for maximum efficiency.

Here are the main features of cities in Old World:

– Family
– Production
– Citizens
– Specialists
– Discontent
– Culture
– Improvements

And here’s everything you need to know about cities in Old World.

 

Family

Every city has to be associated with one of the major families in each faction. Each family gives specific bonuses based on the family’s overarching trait, which can help in specializing a city towards a particular role. For example, a Hunters family gives massive benefits to hunting camp and fishing net improvements within the city’s borders, which provide a lot of food and growth resources. In addition, the first city given to a family counts as a special Family Seat, which provides even more bonuses to the city for greater specialization potential.

 

Production

Aside from providing raw resources from constructed improvements to the faction stockpile, cities have three separate production project options:

– Growth
– Training
– Civics

Cities can only ever produce one item at a time, but each item will be associated with one of the three previously mentioned production options.

Growth is an abstract resource that represents the city’s ability to sustain and grow new units of population, called citizens. The Growth production rate also defines the speed at which civilian units are recruited. For example, workers, settlers, caravans, and city militia are all classified as civilian units and will be produced using the Growth production rate.

The Training resource is associated solely with military units. The higher the Training production rate in the city the faster units will be recruited and ready for action.

The Civics resource, unlike the other two, isn’t related to construction but instead goes towards completing citywide projects ranging from festivals that improve growth and reduce discontent, all the way to science projects that speed up research and help discover new technologies more quickly, as well projects that train citizens into specialists.

 

Citizens

An idle unit of population is called a citizen in Old World. Citizens are the least valuable type of population as the only benefit they bring is a minor increase in faction order production.

 

Specialists

Citizens become much more valuable when they’re converted into specialists. Specialists are trained civilians that massively improve the resource gain of the improvement they’re linked to. Moreover, depending on how close the improvement is to the outer borders of a city, a specialist can actually expand the city’s borders, giving more land to place improvements on.

 

Discontent

All cities have a constantly increasing level of unhappiness, classified as discontent. Once discontent builds to a specific threshold the overall unhappiness level of the city goes up, which increases the gold maintenance cost of the city. Various city projects, laws, and random events can help reduce discontent.

 

Culture

Culture is a resource produced from citywide projects or specific improvements, such as shrines, temples, and groves. Culture accumulates over time just like discontent and will increase the city’s culture level once a threshold is reached. Once a city’s culture overall level increases it will give access to improvement upgrades, new city projects, and will trigger a positive event.

 

Improvements

Raw resources are primarily generated through city improvements – worker-constructed projects that provide a benefit of some kind. They can accommodate a specialist, which further upgrades the resource yield of the tile in question. Improvements can be classified as either rural or urban. These classifications mostly play into improvement tile yield adjacency bonuses, however, urban structures can be limited by the city’s overall culture level.

City management in Old World is an engaging puzzle game inside a grand strategy 4X game and can initially be daunting due to the different resource production rates, idle population, and unhappiness levels. Equipped with the knowledge in this tutorial, players can now spend more time on deliberating city placement and production chains, setting up their resource engine to reach victory.

READ MORE: Old World Commands Guide: Legitimacy, Orders, Forced March