Fragamemnon
Member
Credit to Arioch at http://well-of-souls.com/civ/ for a great summary resource used in the construction of this OT.
Developer: Firaxis Games
Lead Designer: Ed Beach, of Board game fame and the lead designer of Civ 5: Gods and Kings.
Publisher: 2K Games
Genre: Single-Player, Turn Based Strategy "4X"
Platforms: PC/Mac, Steam required. Steamplay supported.
Release Date: 9 July 2013 (NA) | 12 July (EU and AU)
Required System Specifications-PC
Minimum:
OS: Windows® XP SP3/ Windows® Vista SP2/ Windows® 7
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 64 2.0 GHz
Memory: 2GB RAM
Graphics:256 MB ATI HD2600 XT or better, 256 MB nVidia 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics
Recommended:
Processor: 1.8 GHz Quad Core CPU
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 512 MB ATI 4800 series or better, 512 MB nVidia 9800 series or better
DirectX®: DirectX® version 11
Revamped cultural victory model.
The cultural victory of previous versions of the game, which boiled down to wonder spamming and turtling in a small empire hitting next turn with little interaction with your neighbors, has been completely reworked.
Instead of simply requiring a number of completed social policy trees to be completed, instead you must engage in a victory effort of cultural imperialism. This is tracked and quantitatively measured through a new mechanic known as tourism. As you build up your cultural output through building construction and acquisition of great works of art, music, and literature, you will generate tourism. To win a cultural victory, you must generate sufficient tourism (which isn't really tourism-think of it like blue jeans, rock and roll, Hollywood movies, etc.) to dominate the culture each of your rivals. You will be engaging in a world war, but one of ideals and values instead of rockets and bombs.
Finally, a new Archeology system has been added to the game to add a midgame "race" for each Civilization to weigh if they want to aggressively compete with. Once Archeology is researched, archeological sites are revealed on the map and any city with a University can produce a very dapper archeologist unit. This unit can go to the sites and dig up items that can be housed in your museums and cultural buildings (to generate tourism) or the site can be preserved for cultural benefit when worked. The addition of a key "race" in the midgame to rival Civ4's legendary liberalism races is a welcome addition and comes after the addition of the early game religious race added in Gods and Kings.
Trade Route System
Civilization V's gold economy model in previous releases has been mostly based on terrain: cities work resources and tiles that generate gold, and then that gold is added to your empire each turn. This is being partially changed in Civ 5: Brave New World and much of the non-resource gold is being removed from the tile outputs, and instead replaced by a new Trade Route system.
Starting from the Ancient Era basic technologies, you will be allowed to set up caravans and trade routes that represent trade between cities. When you trade with cities of other civilizations, both civilizations will receive gold as part of the trade route. Distance, variety of resources produced by the cities, city size, and other factors all determine yields. In addition, trade carries over religious pressure and can allow some science creation as traders interact with other religions and observe technology with more advanced civilizations (representing the natural diffusion that occurs when two peoples peacefully interact).
Trade routes must be protected and can also span overseas, which can be even more lucrative. You can also set up trade routes domestically to ship food and hammers to smaller cities to help them get off the ground. This is a welcome change that makes the midgame city founding much more competitive and is a huge boon to wider empire strategies.
The World Congress
Once any civilization has met every other civilization in the game and has also discovered Printing Press is researched, the establishment of the World Congress will occur, with the establishing Civ being the host, getting them extra votes over the other Civilizations and the ability to chose the first set of proposals. Every thirty turns (frequency increases as the game progresses through the eras), proposals will be made and the Congress will convene to vote on those proposals. Some examples:
Embargo City-States: No International Trade Routes can be established with City-States. Any such Trade Routes are ended and must be reassigned.
Embargo: No International Trade Routes can be established between the chosen Civilization and any other Civilization. Any such Trade Routes are ended and must be reassigned.
Standing Army Tax: Unit maintenance costs are increased by 25% Gold.
Scholars In Residence: Members research technologies 20% faster if another member has already researched it
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: All Civilizations are prevented from constructing new nuclear weapons (Atomic Bomb and Nuclear Missile). Weapons already constructed, however, are not disarmed. Available once any Civilizations discovers Advanced Ballistics.
And much more. The point is that the world congress, if you can get favorable proposals passed, can act as a huge boost to your strategy or a huge setback to other players. You will be able to trade for votes with opposing Civilizations through barter (give them gold/resources, etc) to ensure that proposals that they might be ambivalent on but that are critical to you will pass. Later on, City States will get votes and will vote along the line of their allied major Civilization.
The diplomatic victory is now accomplished through the World Leader vote through the World Congress. This vote will automatically occur at regular intervals and will always occur during World Congress meets after the UN is built. The two Civilizations with the highest votes will get additional permanent delegates for the next vote. The net effect is to radically alter the way the diplo victory works-it is now a gradual effort based on long-term relationships with weaker Civilizations, containment of militaristic Civs that would swallow those weaker Civilzations, and patronage and defense of City States. This is a welcome change instead of the current "buy all the city states before the vote, then lock out rivals ability to respond" with mass warfare.
- Small changes to the tech tree, mostly to incorporate the new features above with few balance changes in the tree itself, but more in the units and buildings that already exist.
- Eight new Wonders. Reassignment of some Wonders to be unlocked not by tech but by opening up of social policy trees.
- Adding in some additional new "base" units, such as the XCOM Squad as a very late tech upgrade to Paratroopers and a Bazooka unit for Machine Guns to upgrade into instead of waiting until Mechanized Infantry.
- Addition of a Diplomat unit, which is converted from a Spy unit. You can use it to manipulate the world congress voting with other civilizations or promote your tourism to other major Civilizations.
Complete Social Policy Tree Rework
The existing Social Policy Trees have been reworked. Freedom, Order, and Autocracy have been moved out of the base tree entirely. Two new policies have been added-Aesthetics (focuses on culture, replaces existing Piety tree in function, which itself has been reworked to a religion tree) and Exploration, a naval-focused tree. replaces the old Commerce Naval focus which has been retooled to a "gold" production tree).
Once you either build three factories or reach the Modern Era, you will be prompted to pick an ideology for your civilization, which represents the old Freedom/Order/Autocracy split that currently exists. Each tree works by picking choices tuned to your victory condition, and each choice will be good at three victory conditions and not good at the other. Each ideology has tenets associated with it, and you buy tenets with accumulated culture in the same way you buy social policies currently.
If another culture with different ideology is generating a lot of tourism pressure on you, then your people will get upset. If they get too upset cities could defect or revolt. This adds a sort of "cold war" element to the game where you might not be in a position to wage war directly but can destabilize your enemies via the power of things like soap operas and rap music.
Note that each of the new Social Policy trees will unlock a wonder you can then build). This is a huge boon because it means less contention for wonders, especially early game wonders. The trees and associated wonders:
Tradition: Hanging Gardens
Liberty: Pyramids
Honor: Statue of Zeus
Piety: Great Mosque of Djenne
Patronage: Forbidden Palace (likely getting reworked if it is in this tree, we don't know to what though)
Aesthetics: Uffizi
Commerce: Big Ben
Exploration: Louvre
Rationalism: Porcelain Tower
Every new Civ expansion has always added new Civs to the mix, and Brave New World is no exception. Here's a list of the new Civs, their unique abilities, units, and buildings, and some brief commentary provided by me (a longtime Deity player).
Assyria:
Ability - Treasures of Nineveh. Steal an enemy technology when taking a city. Can be used only once per city.
Unique Unit - Siege Tower - Catapult replacement. Gives 50% to nearby units vs. Cities.
Unique Building: Royal Library: Replaces Library. Grants extra XP to combat units built in the city when its Great Work slot is filled.
Commentary : These are some extremely synergistic and powerful features. The catapult replacement allows it to have an impact immediately at the start of siege before the requisite waiting for a turn and allows for much greater survability vs. walled cities. Stealing technologies is a huge benefit when engaging in ancient and classical era warfare due to the loss of hammers and production on science buildings.
The Royal Library is easily a top-tier unique building. With Royal Libraries, Assyria really never has to mess with costly Amphitheaters, and if you just manage a couple of cultural city states you can ignore the entire set of culture buildings entirely until much later in the game (if you decide to dig up artifacts). The extra XP really helps getting to that gamebreaking last-tier promotion easier with late game units, such as air repair bombers or logistics artillery.
4.25/5 Star Civ. Top flight early warmonger and the siege tower doesn't suffer too bad even on higher difficulties.
Brazil :
Unqiue Ability: Carnival - Tourism output doubled and spawn rate of Great Artists (all types) increased during Golden Ages.
Unique Improvement: Brazilwood Camp. Can be placed on Jungle. Yield: +2 Gold, +2 Culture with Acoustics. Requires Machinery.
Unique Unit: Pracinhas (replaces Infantry) - Success in combat adds to your Golden Age meter.
Unique Suckage : Jungle Start Bias.
No early game boosts and a jungle start bias in a Civ is always somewhat of a downer, and picking Brazil somewhat railroads you into a cultural victory or a "derp into Diplo" win. You will want to approach them similarly to the way that Persia is played in the current version-chaining extended duration Golden Ages together and using your larger cultural output to target social policies that yield free golden ages and augment tourism. Pracinhas allows you to generate golden age points while defending you or your allies-note that infantry are not all that exceptional for offensive activity vs. other options of that era, so don't get the idea you can mass them to generate Golden Ages. It will likely not work out as well as you want.
2.5/5 Star Civ.
Indonesia :
Unique Ability - Spice Islanders - The first 3 cities founded on continents other than where Indonesia started each provide 2 unique Luxury Resources.
Unique Unit: Kris Swordsman - replaces Swordsman. Receives a random promotion after its first round of combat.
Unique Building : Candi - +2 Faith, +25% Great People generation in this City, and +2 Faith for each World Religion that has at least 1 follower in the city. City must be built next to a River or Lake.
These guys are OK if the map is right. The unique ability, combined with the new domestic trade route changes, really lets you power out a new rash of good new cities after your first set of initial ones on another land mass (where they are generally quite safe). You can trade away the surplus luxury resource from each city to help "pay" for the lost trade route income from not having an international trade route, helping them to grow and get up the staples pretty quickly.
The Candi is also strong in the worst of situations (a garden that produces +4 faith is amazing in a wide empire), and scales well to congested mixed religious areas such as what you will find when you have your own religious but someone has strong pressure against your own cities. High faith output into the late game is very strong since you can buy great people with faith at the industrial era.
The swordsman is kind of meh but you build swords anyway since pikemen are so terrible to upgrade. So you'd build a sword, get into a fight once, then use the free promotion after they upgrade. Seems fine but not spectacular. The real hangup with them is the constrictive map conditions they need and the forced-wide linear play that they encourage can be extremely rough on your science output.
2/5 Stars
Morocco :
- Unique Ability: Gateway to Africa : Receives +3 Gold and +1 Culture for each International Trade Route with a different civ or City-State. The Trade Route owners receive +2 Gold for each Trade Route sent to Morocco.
- Unique Unit - Berber Cavalry - Replaces Cavalry- Gets bonuses in desert and home territory.
- Unique Improvement: Kasbah - Requires Chivalry. Can only be built on a Desert tile. It provides one additional Food, Production, and Gold. It also provides the same +50% defense bonus as a Fort
So the ability is just excellent at generating more income. In a usual game you will be able to get a lot more income early on quickly. How well Morocco will do in your game is how well you can take that money and snowball off of it. The unique improvement is simply not very good (since you can't build it on top of farms or mines) and the Unique Unit is mounted and not ranged, and wants to defend against rifles? It's just bad.
This is a shit-tier CIv if you can't secure Desert Folklore AND Petra. Desert starting bias is awful without those things, you wind up with a capital w/ like 11 workable tiles max.
1.5/5 stars. Maybe lower.
Poland :
Unique Ability - Solidarity: Receive a free Social Policy at the start of each new Era.
Unique Building - Ducal Stable , replaces Stable - +15% Production and +15 XP for Mounted Units. Each Pasture worked by this City produces +1 Production and +1 Gold.
Unique Unit - Winged Hussar , replaces Lancer - The Winged Hussar has the ability to force an enemy unit to retreat or take additional damage.
Great unique ability lets you be super greedy with the social policies that you chose. You can get "fluff" like Consulates in Patronage and quickly blitz through the right half of Rationalism. You can go wide and do liberty+piety starts , get Consulates, and still get the important bits of rationalism online in a decent timeframe. Poland doesn't have the strength of a linear strategy but has the strength of being completely adaptable to whatever plans you need to make.That's power.
The building is not terrible and the UU is a surprisingly decent beater.
4/5
Portugal -
Ability - Mare Clausum - Resource diversity grants twice as much Gold for Portugal in International Trade Routes.
Unique Unit - Nau - Portuguese Unique Unit; replaces Caravel - This unit will sell its cargo, earning Gold and XP. More will be earned for selling farther from your capital. This may only be done once with this unit.
Unique Improvement - Feitoria - Built it in the territory of a city-state, and it provides you with a copy of whatever Luxury resources the city-state is producing. If the city-state becomes an ally, Portugal will receive double resources. Coastal only.
Extremely strong water map Civ, Nau's trade mission help pay for other work while you get them out to explore the map. They make for even better than free upgrades from Triremes at that point in the game. The trade route gold is really not a huge boost, however-maybe adds up to 70-80 gpt at the end of the game or so after modifiers.
Better than Carthage? I think so. You don't have the lack of synergy that Carthage has in its array of features. You will have to tote around workers to build Feitoria, which is a pain micromanagement wise but worth it.
3/5
Shoshone -
Ability - Great Expanse - Founded cities start with additional territory. Units receive a combat bonus when fighting in their own territory.
Unique Unit - Pathfinder - Unique Unit for Shoshone; replaces Scout. Has the strength of a Warrior. May choose benefit when discovering Ancient Ruins. Shoshone starts the game with a Pathfinder instead of a Warrior.
Unique Unit - Comanche Riders - Replaces Cavalry. Cheaper and faster than the base unit.
The unique ability and unique unit are very good. You will be able to get a lot of free culture, pop, and free composite bows with two pathfinders. This is especially true on lower difficulties where the AI doesn't get a huge pile of free units to explore with. The bigger borders is a boon allowing you to place cities more optimally and still get immediate access to their luxury goods or natural wonders. I have found in practice that the wider borders really helps develop cities faster IF you have enough worker turns and food to make the city quickly worthwhile. So to get the most of of the border bonus, use a round of food imports via cargo and have enough workers to develop the land, especially any food tiles and resource tiles. If you do so you can continue to expand outwards and snowball hard from
The other UU is a mounted unit without ranged attack, hence it is bad.
The wider borders and ability to "get out of hand early" and stay that way due to your powerful defensive bonuses make this Civ perfect for peaceful land grab starts that you can use to transition into any kind of victory condition you want. Top tier new Civ.
3.75/5
Venice -
Unique Ability- Serenissima - Cannot gain settlers nor annex cities. Double the normal number of Trade Routes available. A Merchant of Venice appears after researching Optics. May purchase in puppeted cities.
Merchant of Venice - Replaces Great Merchant - Merchant of Venice can purchase City-States outright, bringing them under Venetian control as a Puppet. The Merchant of Venice is expended when used in this way, and there is no other monetary cost. Venice receives a Merchant of Venice instead of a Settler in situations in which they would normally be awarded a Settler (such as with the Collective Rule policy in the Liberty tree).
Unique Unit - Great Galleass - DAT Galleas, bigger and badder than a normal galleass. Also more expensive.
Venice doesn't play like the other Civs, obviously. Your goal will be to create a large puppet empire that makes gold, then use that gold to improve your puppet cities (which are also only really good at making gold, btw).
You will want to focus on using Merchant of Venices to get hostile or militaristic city states with their larger standing armies, then using your money to upgrade them and then defending your own territory or conquering others. The other unique unit is not very good, because galleasses are only built for upgrading en masse to Frigates, which are amazing.
Any victory condition is open, but given the huge amount of free units you can get with Merchant conquest (see Austria's similar hijinks), I believe you are going to want to incorporate offense into the equation at some point.
4/5 - Lack of a powerful linear strategy and weak UU are a bummer, but there are big benefits to one-city strategies on higher difficulties that Venice can execute much better than other Civs. On lower difficulties you can just snowball their early cash/science and acquired army from their puppeted armies and faceroll your opponents.
Zulus -
Unique Ability - Iklwa : Melee units cost 50% less maintenance; all units receive 25% more experience from combat.
Unique Building - replaces barracks. Provides new upgrades, such as bonus to flanking & vs. gunpowder units.
Unique Unit - Impi Abilities: Strike twice when attacking: first at range, then at melee, replaces Pikeman.
The unique ability , especially the added experience, is great. Combine that with honor and just get ranged logistic crossbows without too much effort and dominate your continent. The upgraded pikes play in perfectly to human aggressive strategies (pikes+composite bows, pikes+crossbows).Never stop warring with these guys, you want to constantly be rolling in that extra XP.
3.5/5
Civ 5 :Brave New World contains two new standalone scenarios.
American Civil War: Fight the “War Between the States” from either the Union or Confederate side as you focus on the critical Eastern theatre of operations between the capital cities of Richmond and Washington.
From what I've seen this is really a very generalized take on this theater of the American Civil War (ACW). It's worth playing if you have a passing interest and/or are curious, but really the best ACW games are either from Matrix Games for a billion dollars or the older AGEOD ACW game. This has a very simplistic unit command and command model, and no supply mechanics (from what I can tell). Given that these are the key to any reasonable ACW experience, I would either play another game or (probably even better) just read a good book or play a good boardgame instead.
Scramble for Africa: The great colonial powers of the world are scrambling to explore the Dark Continent and extend their reach into its interior. Search for the great natural wonders of the heart of Africa as you explore a dynamically-generated continent each time you play.
This sounds a lot more interesting due to the randomized Africa, but there is almost no details out on this at the time of the OT so I can't elaborate further.
