Comments on: Thoughts: Brave New World.

By: 2013 End Of Year Retrospective. » The Scientific Gamer The Scientific Gamer

2013 End Of Year Retrospective. » The Scientific Gamer The Scientific Gamer — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 11:03:16 +0000

[…] Expansion Pack : Brave New World […]

By: Ross

Ross — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 07:59:31 +0000

@Darren

Yeah precisely, you can’t really afford to 3-4 city turtle to culture like you used to. Even if you overcome 6 of the 7 civs the culture of the last one is often insurmountable without a late game invasion, which makes the whole thing a lot more active as you monitor and try to hamstring other civs.

@Hentzau
I’d be happy to play through a game or two with you, username is Raeynn.

By: Darren

Darren — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 17:33:37 +0000

@Ross:

Yeah, conquest is now pretty important for a cultural victory. Reducing the number of cities reduces the amount of culture they generate, which reduces the time it takes to dominate them culturally.

On the flip-side, a conquering civ can be difficult to beat culturally, as they can generate a TON of culture. They may not get as many policies, but they may be nigh invincible to cultural assimilation.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 10:10:08 +0000

See, this is why I was a bit hesitant to outright diss BNW — I had a suspicion it was more to do with me than the game since there’s so many ways of playing Civ, and I think everyone in the comments has made valid points on how it’s supposed to work. There’s a bit of a game glut on at the moment, but once it’s over I’ll go back to Civ and try to get out of my rut with a different strategy.

By: Ross

Ross — Sat, 27 Jul 2013 05:30:01 +0000

I agree – tourism doesn’t kick off until late game so you don’t really have to commit earlier. Voting on GPP can swing you one way or the other quite drastically.

Regarding wars, I play on 6-7 difficulty generally and there will almost always be an early war. In fact the safest way to play now regardless of the victory you are pursuing, is to mass produce military and take your neighbour’s capital before settling into your strategy.

By: Darren

Darren — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 16:23:43 +0000

Interesting. I think there’s now less emphasis on picking your strategy (though you still should really do it) than before because there are more routes into the different areas of the game.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 22:32:48 +0000

Oh, and on your first point, all I’d say is that any build strategy carries its own risks and returns. Going tall leaves you really vulnerable militarily, and faith production is directly keyed to empire size. Failing to get the wonders that you need invalidates the tall approach altogether. And I find that no matter what kind of empire you go for, you never have enough science.

That said, the change does seem to push wide empires more towards domination victories. I can’t see wide empires getting culture victories any more.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 22:12:40 +0000

Bah images. Anyway, example http://i.imgur.com/Mj8kZux.jpg

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 22:11:39 +0000

“Second, the game still scores you based on how wide you are, with no acknowledgement given to a tall civ beyond the wonder bonus points.”

Actually that’s not true – score takes in a wide variety of things, including (but not limited to) tech advances, religion, land covered etc. If you mouse over your score on the score list you can see what it’s made up of.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 21:04:24 +0000

I partly agree with this, from a “Oh my god they still haven’t fixed the UI” perspective. There is an awful lot of unnecessary faff in the game, not from a design point of view, but a usability one. I especially like periodically and repeatedly having to confirm my trade route destinations, which was great fun when I was playing Venice and had 18 of them. And of course because there’s such a big inhibition on going wide now it’s more difficult to do things in parallel; instead of three cities building three Archaeologists you have one city building an Archaeologist three times. It adds to the sense of there being a lot of make-work in this game, and it could definitely do with being a bit more streamlined.