The first and most notable difference comes in the form of orders. Orders drive the game in OW, and in a very real sense, they are your most precious resource.
Guide to Orders System
Foreword
Inmost other 4x games, if you wanted to, you could cycle through and move every unit you have, every turn. Good luck with that in OW, except maybe in the first few turns of play (and sometimes, not even then).
Explanation and Overview of the Orders System
You have a set number of ordersyou can issue every turn, and pretty much everything related to your units on the map, and alot of the stuff related to your cities and your Royal Court, takes at least 1 Order to accomplish, and sometimes more than one.
Want to move a unit of your troops? You’ll have to spend one or more orders. Want to improve a terrain tile? You’ll have tospend one or more orders now, and every turn your worker is building a given improvement, the game will quietly auto-deduct one order on each of those turns, limiting what else you can do.
So, get used to not being able to do as much “stuff” as you’d liketo on any given turn, because you’re going to be constrained by how many orders you can issue.
The good news is that there are lots of different ways you can increase your orders count, from exploring the map and discovering landmarks to gain Legitimacy (+2 if you’re the first to discover a landmark, +1 otherwise), which gradually increases the number of orders you have available (each 10 points of Legitimacy you earn will generate an additional +1 Order), to building certain tile improvements with your workers that grant additional orders, and even enacting certain laws (like Slavery) which can increase the number of orders you have to work with, at a price.
You can always see how many orders you have currently, and how many you’ll have next turn by looking just to the right of your character portrait (lowerleft hand corner of the screen when you’re looking at the game map).
Note the area circled in yellow:In addition to that, hovering your mouse over the “+10” (the number of orders you get next turn) will show you exactly what’s generating your orders, and clicking on the scroll graphic just above the number of orders will allow you to buy additional ordersif you’ve got the resources to do so.
At game start, most of the alternative options for buying orders will be greyed out because they require certain character archetypes or laws to be in place before they become active, so if you find yourself in need of a few additional orders, your main means of paying for them will be tapping into your Training Points.
The long and the short of it though, is that nothing happens in the game without Orders. They define how much “stuff” you can do on any given turn. When you run out of orders, that’s it, so you’ve got to think carefully about how you’ll spend them.
Do you want or need to conduct diplomacy this year? Do you have idle workers and is your economy in need of a boost? Are you currently fighting a war, and if so, are you fighting offensively or defensively? All of those thingswill influence how you choose to spend whatever number of orders you’ve got from one turn to the next.
Another important thing to remember before we delve too deeply here is the fact that the game does an admirable job of helping new players understand what’s going on via tooltips. Most tooltips contain links to portions of the game’s help file that explain concepts in more detail. To be able to click on those links (or at least hover over them) you’ll need to “freeze” the tooltip. You do this by holding down the shift key on your keyboard.
Be the first to comment