Old World is Mohawk Games’ historical 4X4X. eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate — a grand-strategy subgenre about building a civilization over a long arc. strategy game set in classical antiquity, and it is built on a rule that reshapes every turn: the realm does not command every unit every year. Mohawk’s own store description states it plainly — “Orders are a resource shared across your realm. Instead of moving every unit once per turn, each unit can be moved multiple times until fatigued or Orders are depleted.” Characters, families, events and succession all hang off that single budget.
What this covers: How the Orders budget caps each ruler’s turn, how character traits and ambitions drive the event system, and how succession and vassal families hold a dynasty together across 200 years. Why it matters: Most 4X games let you act with every unit every turn; here, choosing what not to do is the core skill, and a ruler who dies heirless throws the plan away. Who should read it: Players arriving from Civilization VII’s Ages system or from the dynastic management of Crusader Kings III who want the actual rulebook for Old World’s people-first systems.
Orders are the action budget, not a movement limit
In most turn-based strategy games the turn is bounded by unit count — every unit moves once. Old World inverts that. “You have a set number of orders you can issue every turn,” the official manual explains, “and pretty much everything related to your units on the map, and a lot of the stuff related to your cities and your Royal Court, takes at least 1 Order to accomplish.” Orders pay for unit movement and attacks, tile improvements, character missions, diplomacy, and event options that demand them.
The movement half is deliberately uncapped per unit. Once a unit has spent three Orders moving it becomes Fatigued; a Forced March lets it keep going “at the cost of 100 Training and twice as many Orders per additional Move.” Most units start with three points of fatigue, while Scouts carry an extra point of fatigue limit and Roman units add another — as does every unit under a Zealot leader. A worker building an improvement quietly draws one Order every turn until the job finishes, which is why a wide construction programme can starve an army mid-war. Cities are the exception: filling a production queue costs no Orders at all.
Unspent Orders do not bank. At the end of the turn the game sells them for gold — the manual puts that at 10 gold each — and only the Elites law, a very late Jurisprudence unlock, lets a nation store up to 100 Orders between years. That one clause is why Elites matters to anyone planning a decisive late-game war: it lets Orders accumulate for a single overwhelming turn.
| Source of Orders | Yield | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Legitimacy | +1 per 10 points | Landmarks, ambitions, cognomens, events |
| Population | +0.1 per Citizen | Each point of population is worth 0.1 Order |
| Pasture or Camp on Horses, Camels or Elephants | +1 each | Also unlocks that mounted unit |
| Pasture or Camp on livestock | +0.5 each | Sheep, pigs and goats |
| Garrison, Stronghold or Citadel | +0.5 each | Also unlocks governors and unique units |
| Serfdom law | +5 per year | Costs +1 Discontent per city per year |
| Decree project | 6–12 per completion | Constitution law or a Statesmen family seat; 40–100 Civics by culture level |
| Buying with Training | +1 Order for 100 Training | One-off; does not raise the annual rate |
| Difficulty baseline | 5 to 10 per year | The Great 5 … The Good (default) 10 |
Because every action competes for the same pool, the annual question is not “what can this unit do” but “which five things matter most.” A war fought on two fronts runs the realm out of Orders long before it runs out of troops, and the builder’s instinct to send every worker out at once is a permanent tax on the turn.
Legitimacy is the multiplier behind the Orders
Legitimacy quietly decides how much you get to do. Discovering a landmark is worth +1 Legitimacy, or +2 if you are the first nation to find it, and the manual’s rule is that every 10 points of Legitimacy yields one extra Order per turn. Population contributes at a tenth of an Order per Citizen, which is why city growth is an Orders play as much as an economy play.
Legitimacy also carries the succession penalty new players notice most. When an heir takes the throne, the manual states, they “lose half of the legitimacy of the former ruler’s cognomen,” while every other source of Legitimacy stays intact. Cognomens — the titles a ruler earns for warfare, city-founding, wonders, exploration and the rest — are therefore an investment in the next ruler’s Orders, not just this one’s. High Legitimacy also improves family opinion, so the same stat that buys actions also buys domestic peace. The official wiki lists the same two levers, noting that fulfilling Ambitions and acquiring better Cognomens is how Legitimacy is obtained.
Characters: four stats, ten archetypes, six trait slots
Every character — ruler, spouse, heir, courtier, governor, general or councillor — is defined by four attributes. The manual gives each a dual role: in a court or governor post they add Civics (Charisma), military training (Courage), gold (Discipline) and research (Wisdom), while as a general Charisma raises the unit’s defence, Courage its attack, Discipline its XP per turn and Wisdom its critical-hit chance. The leader’s and spouse’s stats count for more than a courtier’s.
When a character comes of age you choose an archetype. Only the leader’s archetype produces realm-wide bonuses, but every character’s archetype shapes who gets along with whom and which jobs they can hold:
| Archetype | Attribute shift | What the leader version unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| Builder | +3 Discipline | Workers 50% faster; stack several workers on one improvement or Wonder; add Urban tiles for 10 gold each |
| Commander | +2 Courage, +2 Discipline | Idle military units gain +10 XP per year; hurry unit training in all cities with Orders |
| Diplomat | +3 Charisma | Alliance missions with nations and tribes; +60 relationship with every AI nation |
| Hero | +3 Courage | +50 Training per military kill; units heal while pillaging; leader-generals can Launch Offensive for 800 Training |
| Judge | +2 Charisma, +2 Discipline | Hold Court (Training into Civics); switch laws for 100 Civics |
| Orator | +4 Charisma, −1 Discipline | +40 relations with all religion heads; recruit tribal mercenaries with Legitimacy; +2 Orders per year per Friendly Family city |
| Schemer | +4 Wisdom, −1 Courage | Buy Orders with Legitimacy (2 Legitimacy for 10 Orders); +1 Order per year per war; scouts always invisible |
| Scholar | +3 Wisdom | Tutor Child mission; redraw tech cards when choosing research; Inquiry in the capital |
| Tactician | +2 Wisdom, +2 Courage | All units +2 vision; ranged units invisible in friendly or neutral trees; a leader-general’s attack stuns its target |
| Zealot | −1 Wisdom, +4 Courage | All units +1 Fatigue; cities can always build the state-religion improvement; hurry production with Training in state-religion cities |
A character can hold at most three strengths and three weaknesses at once, and traits stack. A single trait can turn an unremarkable relative into an excellent governor — or a liability you have to manage. That is the point: the manual describes trait management as its own small game, and the honest advice is that some traits simply happen when a ruler’s sister becomes a drunk or an uncle goes insane.
Traits, clusters and the event engine
Old World advertises “over 3,000 unique events,” and the manual is explicit that characters are what triggers them: events offer stat changes, traits, marriages, lovers and missions, and the choices you accept shape the court you will be governing in thirty years. To keep that tractable, events do not always test one trait. They test trait clusters — sets such as Seven Sins, Seven Virtues, Charming, Conspiratorial, Devout or Villainous — so any character carrying a trait inside a cluster can attract the matching event. Deliberately building a personality, say a Terrifying ruler, is therefore a strategy rather than flavour text: it changes which events you will be offered.
Behind the Throne leans hardest into this. The expansion adds more than 350 events built around court politics, intrigue and personal ambition, and introduces named advisors, viziers, aristocrats and courtiers with their own drives, plus the Stress and Revelry systems, the Grand Vizier office, New Political Eras and Rising Stars. Update #136 later dialled Rising Stars back so they appear less often and ask to become Grand Vizier less frequently.
Ambitions, Legacies and the National Ambition
One of Old World’s victory routes runs through Ambitions: complete ten and you win. They are semi-random objectives “driven by vassal family selection,” and the manual notes you will not be offered one you have already completed to 75% or more — which is why a “build six barracks” ambition will not appear if five already stand. Early ambitions are small (build six mines, research six techs, connect three cities) and they scale steeply, pushing a serious ambition player down playstyles they had not considered.
More important for a dynasty is the Legitimacy they generate, because an ambition left unfinished at the ruler’s death becomes a Legacy, which the official wiki notes is “worth less Legitimacy” toward an Ambition victory. Update #133 reworked the end of that ladder: the final ambition is now a National Ambition, and it can be offered early — soon after a player has completed five ambitions and reaches roughly 70% progress toward one of the national options. National Ambitions also do not count toward tier scaling, so chasing one does not make the regular ambition offers harder. For a dynasty planner that shortens the endgame considerably: you can commit to a national identity rather than wait for the deck to hand you the objective you wanted.
Succession: holding a dynasty together across 200 years
A standard game runs 200 turns, one year each, and Advanced Setup offers three mortality settings — Standard, Lengthy and Realistic — with Realistic drastically shortening an average ruler’s life. Because leaders age and die, succession is not an event but a repeating system. The manual’s warning is blunt: if you have not produced an heir by the time the ruler dies, the game hands you a randomly selected relative whose talents may not match your plans. Producing and grooming an heir is therefore the first priority, not a late-game concern.
Three structural pieces govern how that plays out. The first is the vassal families: each of the seven nations has four noble families and you pick three, each with its own bonuses and its own opinion of you. Angry families can spawn rebels around their cities and their units fight worse; happy families fight better. The second is religion, which multiplies family relations — if all three families follow one faith, improving your standing with that faith’s head improves every family at once. The third is the regency: Update #136 changed the rules so that Regents become Royal if they usurp the throne or continue ruling after the rightful heir’s death.
Heir education is the long lever. The manual’s table maps each field of study onto the archetypes it can produce: Philosophy leads to Tactician, Zealot, Builder, Judge or Scholar; Politics guarantees a governor-capable archetype among Hero, Diplomat, Judge, Orator and Scholar; Tactics always offers a general and is the best route to a Spymaster; Commerce always offers an Ambassador. Planning two generations ahead is the difference between a dynasty that keeps its Order income rising and one that resets every time a ruler dies — which is exactly the problem Crusader Kings III players solve with dynasty legacies and renown, and the same “who do I marry next” question CK3 start dates frame from the other direction.
Version and DLC assumed
This guide describes the base game plus the later expansions, and the mechanics as they stand after Update #143 (18 February 2026), which moved the game to Unity 6 and converted its renderer. That matters for anyone reading the official manual, which is version 1.63 and predates several balance passes:
- Governors no longer require a Garrison (Update #135), contradicting the older manual text that lists a Garrison as a prerequisite; the same update cut Garrison and Stronghold stone costs from 80/100 to 60/80.
- Unique-unit tech bonus cards are now unlocked through culture, not tech (Update #143); first-tier cards cost 200, give two units and need a Strong city, second-tier cards need a Legendary city.
- A Zealot leader-general now performs a Heal action after each kill instead of being able to Apply Enlist (Update #143).
- Guilds now allows building Elder specialists directly, skipping prerequisite specialists (Update #136), and Clerics get free Divine Rule on founding rather than free Monasticism.
For DLC, the manual documents Heroes of the Aegean, The Sacred and Profane, Pharaohs of the Nile, Wonders and Dynasties and Behind the Throne; Wrath of Gods arrived after v1.63 and appears in the update notes (Update #134 added its Rejuvenation map script). Where an Update and the manual disagree, the Update wins — the manual is a snapshot, the patch notes are the current state.