With Civilization 7 just around the corner, you’d be forgiven for having a real itch for a great 4X game, and the latest Old World update might just be the solution. Built by Mohawk Games and published by Hooded Horse, it blends all the exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating that you love with more personality-driven events and drama in the vein of grand strategy games such as Crusader Kings 3. Whether you’re already a fan or have yet to try it, the fresh Old World update makes its ambition victory easier to achieve, reworks Grand Viziers from its most recent DLC, and clears up some confusion around difficulty settings.
Old World is a 4X game that might have flown under your radar against the sheer might of Civ 7, but if our recent Civilization 7 preview has you desperate to play something right now, it’s certainly a solid challenger that’s worth trying. Its penchant for more character-led storytelling around families and dynasties brings a dynamic that Civ’s more grand-scale focus generally doesn’t touch upon.
In its new update, Mohawk Games has expanded crowning ambitions, giving you more choices in many of the events to increase your potential options. You should find more such ambitions available, and that increased variety should make it a little easier to reach the ten completed ambitions required to net yourself the eponymous victory (a more goal-based way to win than simply wiping out your opponents or racking up more victory points). You can also choose whether you want to enable shared alliance victories when setting up a game.
Grand Viziers, introduced with the Behind the Throne expansion pack, have been heavily reworked based on player feedback. They’ll now take charge in any of your cities that are without a named governor, but will only control the production in those specific locations. All other Grand Vizier yields have been removed, and the cities they’re managing can no longer rush buy.
Mohawk has also renamed several of its difficulty settings to help improve clarity between presets and individual settings. The ‘advanced setup difficulty’ setting is now called ‘prosperity,’ difficulty components are now grouped together, and settings outside of the simple presets are now displayed as ‘custom.’
This latest Old World update is out now. There are even more tweaks to be found in the full patch notes courtesy of Mohawk Games, such as requiring a scheming leader to be able to use the ‘ask to declare war’ action, or needing to be on friendly or neutral territory to take advantage of territory-specific bonuses such as added defenses and faster movement.
Whether you’re looking for the best grand strategy games, or the best strategy games in general, we’ve got our top picks for 2025 for you.
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