Instead of waiting for more culture to be produced and then picking a new social policy which provide defined buffs to your civilization, you now have to actively pursue both the accumulation of culture and promoting tourism to your civ. Like I said above the cultural victory was one of the most passive victories you could compete for in the older versions of Civ 5 and now it is one of the most active. The first game that I completed in Brave New World was a cultural victory with one of the new civilizations, The Shoshone Native American tribe. It is now harder to tell when you have reached a dominant position and often the game can be in doubt well into the later stages. Brave New World revamps the victory conditions for the diplomatic and cultural victories and it gives you more things to do with in the late game. I always found the domination victory, in which you capture all of the other civilization’s capital cities, too tedious since moving units around the map is not very fun for me, and the diplomatic and cultural victories too passive since you basically just waited for more money or culture to accumulate in order to buy off another city state or open a new social policy respectively. My preferred victory path has always been the science victory, in which you outproduce research into new technologies until you get to the point where you can build a spaceship which will colonize a new planet. Once I established myself with my core cities it was easy to tell when I had gotten to a dominant position via technology, or production, and knew it was just a matter of time until I achieved victory. This pack like the previous one adds civilizations but also revamps the victory conditions for culture and diplomacy while also adding new world wonders to build, creating trade routes, and rebalances other game mechanics only in smaller ways.Īs I put more and more hours into the core game of Civilization 5 back in 2010-2011 I came to realize that the true challenge of the game is getting off to a good start. With the release of the Brave New World pack I have really gotten back into playing Civ 5 after having been away from it for quite some time. I found these things fun to play with but they didn’t hold my interest for as long as the core game, I think it may have been that I had already put several hundred hours into the base game. The Gods and Kings expansion pack released last summer added more civilizations to choose from and added new game mechanics, or I should say newer versions of old game mechanics found in Civilization 4, religion and espionage. The base game, as it was released in 2010, was a pretty good and it is in this version that I have spent the most time. Do you build a worker to immediately start improving the tiles around your first city, do you build a monument to improve your culture, how about a shrine to get your religion started, and when do you build a settler so you can found a second city? Ultimately, your goal is to either outplay the computer or other human players in multiplayer and either outproduce them in culture, diplomacy, military, or in technology. In the early game you have a lot to choose from and half the battle is setting priorities on what to build. Each city can work up to 3 hexagonal tiles away and has the capability to produce worker units, which can improve these tiles thereby increasing their productive capacity, and constructing buildings which improve various things. It is turn based and your goal, in the early stages, is to get a solid set of cities from which to push towards victory. With the release of this new expansion pack you can pick from over 40 different civilizations from all of history and build up an empire from 4,000 BC to the far future. If you are not familiar with this game I will do my best to explain it, however a game like this is almost impossible to explain in just a few sentences.
The game is that addicting, it is not for nothing that the tagline to this game is “Just one more turn”.
It was released a week ago today and since then I have already poured quite a few hours into it, trying to adjust my strategies and trying to try out all of the new gameplay mechanics. Every time I boot up the game I am reminded of the amount of time I have poured into this game, and as of this writing I given a total of 661 hours (27 days if you must know) to this game since it was released 3 years ago. I haven’t done much blogging recently because I have been playing the game about I am about to provide a review of, the expansion pack to Civilization 5, Brave New World.