Saturday, April 06, 2024
An achievement, kind of
I don't generally care about achievements in games. But yesterday I couldn't help but notice that I got a Steam achievement for Millennia, that only 0.1% of players have reached: Age of Old Ones. Which is hard to reach, because you need to play incredibly badly to get there. In the Age of Renaissance you need to get to a negative culture income, which is easiest achieved by integrating a lot of vassal cities. Once you have played 20 turns with negative culture, your next age is locked to Age of Heresy. Of course, like always, you need to stay ahead of the AI opponents to reach the age first, which is why I played on medium difficulty.
In the Age of Heresy you must then deliberately destroy your improvements, so as to *not* fulfill your regions needs. That spawns cultists and cultist leaders. Once you reach 30 cultists in your region, the previously invisible Age of Old Ones locks as a new crisis age. Unusual, because normally you can't have a crisis age after another crisis age.
The Age of Old Ones is also a victory age: When you are the one to trigger it and reach it, all these cultists in your regions and in all the AI nations' regions come under your control. Suddenly you have a huge army, which doesn't need to be paid. So you just need to gather them into stacks, and attack everything. A bit tedious, but funny to do once. Although I am not convinced that this was game development time well spent, as very few people will ever see this. Until you read up on how to reach the Age of Old Ones, you are extremely unlikely to stumble into it by chance.