Winning a world-leader vote still ends up being a simple matter of buying off as many city-states as possible more often than not, but the addition of the World Congress creates an exciting new vector for peaceful interactions for any kind of playthrough. The diplomatic victory improvements are less of a resounding success. Firaxis also smartly left in a safety valve that keeps hostile neighbors or a trade embargo from being an economic death sentence, allowing you to assign your trade capacity to boosting production or growth in your own cities – though reaping the money from foreign routes is generally preferable. Fighting over control of critical shipping lanes is a welcome addition to combat, which previously took place almost exclusively around fortified cities. Having your trade lines cut by a hostile civilization is devastating. Crushing barbarians is more important when they roam neutral territory between your empire and a trading partner, since that extremely expensive and valuable route can be easily destroyed by any unopposed military. The addition of trade routes is another change that encourages you to look outside your borders through a lens other than conquest. The cultural endgame is much better delineated in the tech tree, so a culture-pursuing empire develops quite differently than any other as it must invest in expensive late-game buildings to multiply its tourism score. Segregating cultural Great Person generation from the others is a wonderful change that lets one to three cities focus on that, and removes the punishing need for cultural nations to focus exclusively on artist specialists. Saturating the world with explorers digging up ancient artifacts once Archaeology is discovered creates new diplomatic pressures and production priorities that are more fun to navigate than the old “build a bunch of Museums, beeline for Radio, and mash end turn” cultural victory. Splitting the new tourism rating off of the existing empire-wide culture score lets empires pursuing cultural hegemony engage in a slew of new interactions that otherwise-occupied nations can safely ignore while focusing on their own goals. The revamped cultural victory path is the best part of Brave New World. In reality, the United Nations doesn’t meet every 60 years to debate two proposals that could include a global embargo on a major power, but that implementation makes a vastly more fun and interesting game mechanic than a largely impotent body that great powers ignore with impunity. Civilization V: Brave New World pushes the latest incarnation of the legendary strategy franchise in that direction with great success.īrave New World follows in many Civilization entries’ footsteps by pulling out themes of human history and crafting around them, rather than embarking on a Quixotic quest to accurately model unbelievably complex interactions. Modeling the kind of soft power through which Venice built its trade hegemony and Denmark stamped an outsized influence on European politics has historically been much more difficult. Such expansive empires are exceptions to the rule of human history, though. Dozens of polished variations on the theme have entertained us for decades. World-conquering wargames are nearly as old as the video game medium.
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