Big expansions come with equally large expectations, and
Brave New World is Civ 5’s second major piece of DLC. Now expansions and strategy
games are old bed fellows, you can find one for just about any strategy game
you care to name and the majority of them followed a familiar trend. Lots of
new toys to play with no attention paid to balance issues.
You spend hours investigation all the new options, but once
you’d finished that exploration, the cracks would be laid bare and you interest
would be gone again. And this is what makes Brave New World so interesting. It
bucks the trend completely, instead being a carefully crafted expansion to fix
the problems Civ 5 already has.
And Civ 5’s biggest problem by far was a lack of mid to late
game action. It was all too easy to build empires that would be entirely introverted;
completely focused on their path to victory which involved no one else. You’d
just be clicking next turn to see if you could complete your science victory before
someone else filled the culture bar. Only a warring nation could throw a
spanner in the works, provided they had the technology to do it.
So what does Brave New World do to get players round a table
and interact? Well it introduces a very important table in the form of the
World Congress and makes you pull up a seat. Once an early game technology is
completed and the simple matter of meeting everyone is achieved, the World
Congress begins. Every thirty turns, new proposals are put forward for approval
by all nations. These range from putting trade embargos on your enemies to
trying to decide the world religion and ultimately, voting for the world leader
as a diplomatic victory.
It elevates the importance of diplomatic relations and makes
them relevant again. You can use spies you gain to instead act as diplomats,
allowing you to haggle over back room deals with the other leaders. A large sum
of gold and a few resources may well secure you those crucial votes to enact the
policies you need. Each vote can be quite a tense moment as you never know
exactly who will be in favour and who might see your proposals as being one
step closer to war.
Other changes see a revamped cultural policy tree as well as
the introduction of ideologies. Each of the three ideologies is an extra tech
tree of cultural policies with some powerful late game bonuses. These also have
a great impact on international relations by affecting your empire’s happiness.
If your populations think it looks more fun over the border, your happiness can
take a serious hit. Riots can spring up, and you may be forced into towing the
line and switching to the more popular ideology.
Cultural victory has had a complete re-work which it definitely
needed. Before it was simply a case of building culture producing buildings and
filling up a progress bar to win, hardly engaging. Now a cultural victory sees you doing battle
with tourism as your offence and your own cultural progress as a defence. You
utilise great writers, artists and musicians to produce works that you can put
on display giving you tourism points. This will slowly build up through the
game and if you focus on it, your tourism begins to eclipse the culture of your
opponents. If your tourism score is greater than every other’s nation’s
culture, the game is yours as the world marvels at your artistic output.
The UI does a good job of tracking and displaying you
tourism progress, with clear indicators to show if you’re making progress or if
you’re falling behind. You can also swap great works with other nations to
achieve theming bonuses that can give you a little extra boost. It also adds
another late game element with archaeological digs. These appear as a bonus
tile improvement with the right technology and with a little effort, will let
you find artefacts to display in museums (where they belong), further boosting
your tourism output.
All these new elements are also nicely accommodated by the
previous expansion, Gods and Kings. There’s clearly been a lot of effort put in
to make these expansions feel like a cohesive whole, as all the new elements
can interact with the religious choices you make. If you get other leaders to
agree that your religion is the world religion, you gain further votes in the
world congress. Other choices can give your tourism a boost, so there’s a nice
link to the new mechanics.
Crucially the AI is capable of playing a competent game with
all the new additions. It’s able to sensibly assess the proposals made at the
World Congress and knows where its votes will benefit it the most, as well as
how much it should demand if you want to buy its votes. War is also a lot more
predictable, if leaders start denouncing each other, you know war is only a few
turns away unless you make efforts to smooth things over. Not that a war
focused AI will care much for your offerings, but I felt that war didn’t
suddenly arrive on my doorstep as a surprise like it used too.
So the real question is, do the additions give you enough to
consider in the late game, or are you still doomed to click next turn? Playing
a standard pace game against the AI, there were moments where that did happen,
yet it was never long before something required my attention. A quick paced
game or one with friends will likely give you plenty to do for most of your
turns. So on this point Brave New World is a real success. It may need a few
balance tweaks, but considering the complexity of Civ 5 with all its DLC, it’s
likely that any imbalance is perceived rather than it being a real underlying
problem.
It does however fall down at my second question. Is it worth
the money? Not really. If you buy it full price, it’s nearly as expensive as
the original game and it’s only an expansion. This probably won’t be a problem
for long though as Civ 5 and its DLC is regularly on sale. So as soon as that
happens, Brave New World jumps triumphantly into the must buy category for
anyone who already owns Civ 5.
