Moreover, all your trade routes are instantly destroyed and must be manually rebuilt whenever your trade partner declares war on you. Every single trade route must be manually re-established after its 30 turns have expired, followed every time by a monumentally obnoxious Are you suuure? dialog. Caravans do move automatically – but only for 30 turns. The trouble starts with the new trade route systems. Unfortunately, Brave New World considers these features bugs and sets about to “fix” them. The game flowed smoothly and often with little user input outside of major wars. Convoluted spreadsheet dialogs existed but were only needed for micro-optimizing empires on higher difficulty levels – playing on Prince or King, I generally ignored them. Gods & Kings even recreated espionage and religion without the micromanagement that had burdened them in Civ4. While that vision was never fully realized, it was indeed possible to play Civ5 mostly from the main map, with the aid of various pop-up displays. Jon Shafer’s original design vision for Civ5 was to emulate the obviousness and simplicity of a board game. The rest of this post gives my first impressions after a couple of games, and explains why I’m rather less enthusiastic than the reviews linked above. I couldn’t write any actual addenda since Firaxis didn’t ship a proper manual – please consult the in-game Civilopedia for information on the new expansion. I’ve updated my Civilization V Manual Addenda with information on the new expansion, including details on the new ways of AI cheating. On the upside, the AI is less inevitably hostile than before and may actually maintain lasting friendships. This is the first Civilization expansion I can recall that actually increases cheating, fitting right in with the generally half-baked feeling of Brave New World. Compared to Gods & Kings, the AI now receives additional bonuses on all levels between King and Deity. Is the AI any better? Not if the new version of CIV5HandicapInfos.xml is any indication. The somewhat confusing term Local Happiness has been replaced with a clearer formulation: “cannot provide more Happiness than there are Citizens in a city.”.Obviously the Firaxians are big fans of Rise of Nations… Completing the Terracotta Army now creates a new military unit of each type you already own.Iron is now revealed with bronze working, allowing better city positioning during the early expansion phase.Each new city now incurs a cumulative 2.5–5% penalty on research costs, depending on the map size, similar to the existing 5–10% penalty on policy costs.Each unhappy face now generates cumulative combat and production penalties, rather than just one big penalty at 10 unhappiness.Not really an improvement, I’d prefer to have them sorted by function. A city’s available buildings are now sorted by order of discovery, rather than alphabetically.Not a crucial feature but a nice one, and long overdue. Airports are back and once again allow airlifting units between cities, aside from producing tourism.These are in addition to the changes introduced by the recent patch. The big new features in Brave New World are detailed in the manual and the various reviews, but there are also a number of smaller changes that I wanted to mention. Adam also wrote an excellent tutorial, Civ V: Brave New World Culture Guide. A parade of glowing reviews: Russ Pitts at Polygon, Rob Zacny at IGN, Adam Biessener at Game Informer, Fraser Brown at PCGamesN.So you only need the first expansion in addition to the second if you want its new civilizations or scenarios. Brave New World includes all new or changed game systems from Gods & Kings (combat, espionage, religion).CivFanatics also links to non-English language versions of this brochure. Firaxis did not produce a full new manual as for Gods & Kings, but you can download a 34-page overview (PDF) from the expansion’s Steam Store page.But first, here’s a rundown of information and other opinions on the new expansion. Unfortunately I’m somewhat disappointed, as I’ll explain below. I was quite fond of the original game and its first expansion, Gods & Kings, so I was very much looking forward to this one. Brave New World, the second expansion to Sid Meier’s Civilization V, is finally upon us.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |