New Civilization 5 Expansion - Brave New World

[NobleHelium]

I read that and I see:

Everything: good for everything.

[Adbekunkus]

So, anyone got a chance to test the expansion yet?

Played a quick game with Morocco, I liked the additions. The amount of changes in the culture and commerce fronts was enough to keep me invested in finding out more of them. True, I am a very unskilled civ player, but enjoyed exploring some of the new mechanics.

I liked some of the additions. i found pretty cool the split between artists, musicians and writers; to strive for a culture win felt way more active, actually, like a lot of work. I am a builder at heart, and my sp experience tends to gravitate towards culture and space wins, like simciting the game only to be interrupted by crazy neighbors to spice things up. I feel compelled to "wage peace", as it is (lurker comments notwithsanding in any of your threads). The new culture paths felt intresting, with many avenues to pursue. I can't quite grasp the best way to use the GP, I overbuilt Greatworks just to see the little display. I liked the little window showing the great works of art; sure it is mostly flavor but, I still liked it. Only tried once to tour with a musician, don't know if it was really worth it, though.

I couldn't balance quite well how to keep the tech rate, the production of great artists and a reasonably high gold output. I also couldn't make a great trade network. Sharing the whole continent with just 1 civ and having half of the routes I built landbased certainly didn't help, but, as I said, I suck. I would love to see one of our our resident civ wizards to showcase some new strategies and things to look for (shameless request for T-hawk to report yet another brilliant game). Still looking for ways to improve in this game, that currently lacks a zillion pbems and pitboss (pitbosses?) to learn from, unlike civ IV.

Anyways, wrapping it up, hope any of you enjoy the new state of the game and would love to hear from your experiences and output.

Have a nice day!

[Jowy]

The BNW sale was confirmed a mistake, and anyone who bought it before the sale received a free copy of Civ4. It's probably no use to most of us who got it, but at least we got an apology and a nice gesture. It's more than I expected.

[Jowy]

Some images from my first BNW game
Highlighting lots of BNW stuff.
I don't go super in-depth.

Close win in one of the global events that can be started with the World Congress.



A Great Writer creating a great work.



Here we can find the great work stored in an Amphitheater. Different buildings allow different great works to be displayed there. The ones with multiple slots allow bonuses for certain combinations. You can swap them around and also trade with other civs. Or you could just steal them ^^



Here is the tourism mechanic. I believe you need your overall tourism to be higher than their overall culture to win the game. If they are creating culture faster than you are creating tourism towards them, then the trend will be downwards.



The new ideologies tree. Once you unlock it, you can either keep using your unlocks towards social policies, or you can choose to unlock ideology stuff. There are three ideologies, and each has it's own tree to be unlocked. You can only have one active at a time. Ideologies also affect stuff like diplomacy and tourism.



One of my spies has become a diplomat in Egypt. I will learn what they want to do in the World Congress, and I can then avoid voting for stuff that would make them mad at me. Or I could just choose everything that hurts them the most, if I really hate them Diplomats also affect tourism.



Here is the World Congress. The host is voted upon, and gains 2 delegates while being a host. So far everyone has voted for themselves. There might be some reasons to not want to be the host though, because you have to enact something and sometimes every option would make someone mad. If you enact stuff that others want. you will get diplo boost. Same thing if you agree with them when it's time to vote, and they'll hate you if you disagree with them.



An overview of my two city empire.



I'd be near broke without trade routes! They are an essential part of gameplay, especially with early game gold now being lower from tiles.



My current trade routes. It shows what I earn and what the other guy earns from my caravan or cargo ship. Of course I'm aiming to get my income as high as possible while keeping their as low as possible. Trading also helps spreading religion and tourism. A very interesting part of trading is trading between your own cities. You can trade food or hammers to any city, and btw that doesn't reduce the equal amount from the city that is sending the caravan or cargo ship. It should be a good way to get new cities going, but comes at a price of lower gold income because it means less trade routes outside your empire for gold.

All in all so far I've had a lot of fun with the new mechanics and changes. It's a huge difference compared to things added in Civ4 expansions, stuff like espionage, vassals and corporations. Those were never much fun to me, even to this day. Whether the new stuff from BNW is balanced or not, that is hard for me to say.

[Azza]

I've played half a game as Venice and half a game as The Shoshone, and both seem to be quite powerful. Venice create ludicrous levels of gold with their extra trade routes (main source of gold in BNW) while the Shoshone are just stupid at the start of the game. Cities that instantly claim 8 extra tiles and instant CBs from upgrading their Pathfinders, it's a joke.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Watch Joe butcher Civ5! This is just for fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MpmUKCss...ixyulzOnUQ

He's better than most players too I would think judgeing by the comments. I think all reviews need to consider that 90%+ players cannot beat EMP . It's not really fair to trash the game and bitch about the carpet of doom if over 90% of players don't have to deal with it as they play below EMP.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Watch Joe butcher Civ5! This is just for fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MpmUKCss...ixyulzOnUQ

He's better than most players too I would think judgeing by the comments. I think all reviews need to consider that 90%+ players cannot beat EMP . It's not really fair to trash the game and bitch about the carpet of doom if over 90% of players don't have to deal with it as they play below EMP.

You can now watch angry joe fail more with his top 10 list. He failed to win by turn 400 on prince. And he does not understand that AIs never trade their last lux. And I'm sticking by my statement that he is better than most Civ5 reviewers/players. If this is the caliber of play no wonder Firaxis didn't care at all about MP. Also this is why Firaxis really does not care about game balance/gameplay. If most players are too weak to care about it Firaxis might as well focus on other things with their time. Graphics are the easiest choice.

In other news the level two glitch is still in the game. I tested by using the spy system.

[Sullla]

When I was working with Firaxis, they had a statistic where something like 80% of the people who purchase the Civilization games will never touch anything other than Chieftain difficulty. They will also play a couple of games and then move on to something else, without coming back to the game again. And let's face it, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that - most people will play a couple of light games for entertainment value. They're not looking to dive into every last mechanic or exploit flaws in gameplay design. As long as the presentation looks good, most people will be pretty happy with the product, and games like Civ5 are very strong on the presentation side.

Now, that said, are we still justified in criticizing a strategy game if it turns out to have bad design and poor mechanics? Of course we are! A game can be a commercial success and fulfill the lower demands of non-enthusiast gamers, while also being a disappointment in quality to the experts. This happens all the time with movies and other media, where the average person is pretty happy while critics are much more skeptical. We're the small minority of power gamers who are not typical of the general audience. Gaming developers don't have to cater to what we want, but by the same token, it's also fair for us to criticize them when they don't.

How do you measure quality in a product, and separate it from popularity? Here's the best explanation that I've come across: quality = popularity over time. In other words, anything can be popular in the heat of the moment. Things that have true quality are things that continued to be valued years, decades, centuries afterwards. So people still remember and enjoy Shakespeare and Citizen Kane today, while people have already completely forgotten most of the endless sea of mediocre FPS games on the market today. (How about a game like Haze, just five years ago. Does anyone remember or care about this one?)

Anyway, we'll have to see if Civ5 is able to maintain the same kind of longterm popularity that Civ4 has enjoyed, or if it will be dropped once something newer and shinier comes along. Civ5 is helped by the almost total lack of competition on the market; there are really no other empire building games from non-indie developers on the market right now. It's difficult to evaluate the game's true popularity when there's essentially nothing else to play that offers the same gameplay.

[Jowy]

Agree 100% with Sulla. I should know, I was one of the Chieftain crowd for a very long time. And I still would be, if I hadn't stumbled upon the Succession Games sub-forum on Civfanatics when looking up technical help. It's those kind of small pushes that make players start getting into competitive stuff. If you just play the game by yourself or with friends, it's rare if not extinct that you would look up bulb charts or make dot maps. The competitiveness is community driven. I'm really hoping that Civ6 will focus on supporting things like MP, Pitboss and PBEM. Maybe even official league play. If you have these things on launch, and spend some time on these features in your advertising, it would be a huge boost to the scene. It'd still be community driven, but instead of people getting into it by chance, they get into it because it's a big feature advertised in the game.

[Krill]

Sulla, I agree 100%, but I had a rather...unpleasant thought the other day, and it lead to an interesting question.

Out of the past three civ games, what was the best expansion pack? Play the World, Conquests, Warlords, Beyond the Sword, Gods and Kings, or Brave New World? Ignore the base game, judge it purely on what each Expansion brought to hte table in new content and game design.

I'm finding it difficult to say that Gods and Kings, and BNW, are actually bad compared to the shit that's been released before.