Part of the world was already playing it since last Tuesday but it was only today that Sid Meier’s Civilization 5: Brave New World, Civ5’s second expansion, was made available to the general public by 2K and Firaxis Games.
Announced features include a new culture victory condition, new policies and ideologies, a world congress feature, international trade routes, new civilizations (9), new units and buildings, new wonders (8) and two new scenarios: The American Civil War and the Scramble for Africa. Apparently, you don’t need the first expansion (Gods & Kings) in order to play Brave New World, however you’ll not be able to play Gods & Kings eight civiliations and some scenarios. You do need the Civ5 base game though.
Examples where the expansion is available for digital purchase are: GamersGate, Amazon, Steam and GreenManGaming. You’ll get Steam keys from all of them. So, you’ll need Steam in order to play in any case. I’ll be all over this one from now on. So, if you want to play it safer maybe you could wait just a bit more for our review :)
\Edit: There’s a demo available by the way.
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It’s amazing. Civ V is now much, much better than Civ IV. The new end game is a crap-ton of fun!
Long live Civilization!
Um no. Civ5 AI isnt smart enough to deal with hex based. One unit per tile combat making it ultimately a lesser gaming experience
I absolutely hated stacks of doom.
1UPT is a big improvement in gameplay.
Lol, and now we have carpets of doom. Give me stacks any day, they’re easier to move.
Been playing it since this afternoon. Really completes Civ V and the culture aspect it added is interesting. I had fun in an abandoned game trying to play as a peaceful shoshone but I lagged behind tech and I never went in to war ever but I managed to get tons of gold through trade routes and tons of culture per turn.
Another satisfying moment for me recently is playing as Venice and using merchants to purchase city state then being able to destroy Sweden because of my alliance with a militaristic city state, which gave me a couple of siege units. Too bad I got crushed by Rome since I lagged behind military tech.
I think this could possibly be the most complete and best Civ game ever now.The new world congress and archaeology systems are truly unique.
“I think this could possibly be the most complete and best vanilla Civ game ever now”
– fixed it for you.
No vanilla game can compare to the sheer epicness of Civ IV with the Rise or Mankind mod.
They even have a demo for those fence sitters.
Totally forgot about the demo. Will update the article.
Hey Adam,
When can we expect one of your excellent and very detailed reviews for this expansion? I have Civ5 G&K. So I’m wondering if I should get Brave New World before I really get into the game.
thanks.
You’ll have it, but most probably not in July. Hopefully on the first or second week of August.
Sounds good! Keep up the good work :)
I’m hoping this expansion pops up on the Summer Steam Sale sometime soon. :)
It was already in a flash sale for 33% off (ended 1-2 hours ago). But I wasn’t sure if I wanted to grab it…
I believe that was actually the core game. They did have another sale that included the core game and all the DLCs, plus another package that just upgraded your Steam core game to have all the DLCs (which I ended up getting for ~$5). I didn’t see Brave New World as part of any of those packages – I would have snagged it immediately.
It was BRAVE NEW WORLD ( -33% )
i bought it.
Just paid 5 bucks for all the dlc..I can swallow that.
This is an astoundingly good game. It really is in a league all its own.
I can play for hours and hours and it only makes me want to play more.
BEST GAME EVER.
The problem I had with Civ 5 was 1 unit per tile. The AI didn’t really know what to do with hex based tactical combat. Plus, the maps weren’t designed for hex based tactical combat. So it could be very tedious maneuvering a large army through crowded areas on the map. Other than that it was okay with the Gods and Kings expansion and I’ll probably pick this one up eventually.
That’s kinda the point. It should be really hard to move troops through bottlenecks in the geography. What you’re claiming to be a downfall to the game is one of it’s strengths. There wasn’t anything tactical about building a stack of doom and going where you please with it.
Trying to move one of Civ V’s “carpets of doom” that cover half a continent is a painful exercise in frustration and frankly a bit of a joke. If the stacks were bad, then Civ V’s new carpets are just horrendously bad.
I wouldn’t consider this a strength by any means, particularly since the AI has absolutely no idea how to move them effectively. I agree with Alien JD …. big downfall.
There really isn’t anything tactical about spending 6 turns getting through a bottle neck with a carpet of doom either. Once you get through the narrow space the battles are easy. It just takes longer to get to them. The problem is that a tile represents a much larger area than a single unit. A single unit of archers is not the same size as a farm that feeds a small city.
If they wanted hex based tactical combat they should have just used a separate map for combat. When two armies meet up they could move to a map similar to what Dai Senryaku or Military Madness used. You play out the battle and return to the strategy map. Allow auto-resolve for players who don’t want to bother with the combat.
Sounds like Total War.
Or maybe they could have made different terrain hexes have different capacities and different types of units had their own space requirements. This way you could send a couple battalions of tanks through a single open plains type of hex but would have difficulty sending even one through forest or jungle. Infantry would take up less space and could be stacked more so than tanks, but not unlimited like the stacks of doom.
The hex grid is just perfect and I got used to it immediately. I guess it’s a matter of preference. Also, some people are more flexible than others. How can you expect to fight off innovative opponent if you are so rigid in perception?
Another thing is the space occupancy. It’s not like one tile is being occupied every inch by the unit, but rather the unit is in control of the area represented by the tile. Ideally it would be best to have zoom-in and out capability so we could have one tile occupied by multiple units, then see them separated when zoom-in. Hmmm, it could be quite great, but could get really tired by all the zoom in and zoom out.. Current representation is quite good as it is.
It’s really annoying that they are using regional pricing for this. It’s 50 USD down under. So I’ll be waiting until it’s repriced and on sale down here.
Everything except the new expansion is on a 50% sale at the moment.
for those who dont want to buy it for the full price, 30% at gmg using this code
GMG30-LY2G6-UKDYY expires n the 19 July?
Seems to be working now.
Worked for me. Thanks
I finally took the time to try CIV5 again, with the expansions and patches.
While it is a huge improvement compared to the original, I am still not impressed. Even an 1400 turn game feels rushed, I blow through eras before I could really enjoy them. The AI is.. passive? Like it takes the AI ages to expand.. in 3-4 games, the AI had 3 cities each by the time we got into the early renaissance. I reckon that is a result of how happiness and economy works in the game, but it still makes for a boring game, not to mention strange game, when big parts of the map are not colonized, despite multiple civilizations living on those parts.
Also because of the extreme importance of luxury resources, colonization is pretty much about grabbing whatever you can before the rest, leading to a very spotty map, where borders are rarely cut clearly.
Territory does not flip by culture, so if someone expands to a resource that’s between your city and his, your only real option of changing that is by war, even if your city is way more dominant in culture.
All in one, while I would not say that it was a bad experience, playing CIV5 G&K is just not on the same level as playing CIV4 RoM
Regarding your reports of “passive AI” and the AI not grabbing every bit of land, could that be a difficulty level issue? What level did you play? I played Civ5:G&K to death on Emperor and Immortal (only those two difficulty levels) and there the AI is hard to very hard, especially on Immortal. They expand to every corner they can find and are always looking to pick a fight because they amass larger armies than they did before that big 2012 fall patch. Certainly not passive at all.
No flip by culture, no. But, I’m not sure I miss that feature much from Civ4. At least the way it was implemented it could be quite frustrating to take cities. The new expansion, Brave New World, implemented a new culture flipping system. Let’s see how that goes.
I agree that, overall, Civ4:BTS (not Civ4 vanilla, but Civ4 with the 2nd expansion Beyond the Sword) is still a better experience than Civ5:G&K.
By the way, my Civ5:Brave New World review should come out next week ;)
I mixed up the two expansions. I played with the brave new world expansion of course.
As for culture flipping, I think you are referring to cities flipping due to culture. I never liked that and usually have it turned off in my games. Its just unrealistic to assume that a city I conquer and have half a dozen riflemen in it would suddenly shift back to the original civ taking all my units with it. Would it only happen to unprotected cities, i would accept as it would be reasonable.
Actually city flipping has happened in one of my games. Japanese adopted the Autocracy ideology, while I was in Order.. my culture and ideology was very dominant which has caused lots of unhappiness for the japs. One of their cities flipped over to my side and then they decided its better for them to just go with order as well.
What I was missing is tile flipping, so basically borders shifting due to culture. Imagine two cities 5 tiles from each other, with a source of iron halfway between. In civ4, you could dominate the enemy city culturally in order to access that iron. In Civ5, once a city owns a tile, it is theirs for eternity. You can only take it by conquest, or by building a great citadel (great general tile improvement) in an adjacent tile.
As for AI expansion. I play on Prince / King. Higher difficulty levels give unreasonable AI bonuses, especially considering how AI bonuses work. (AI is always considered playing on chieftain level, so they get all bonuses that comes with that, in addition to the bonuses they get from the difficulty level you choose for yourself)
So an AI on Prince/King should definitely be able to have more than 3-4 cities in renaissance, with all the happiness bonuses it gets, when me, with my penalties can still manage 5-6 quite well.
My last game was maybe the best so far, where at least one of the civs, the japanese showed some aggression. They took out 3 civs early in the game and had an empire that actually was bigger than mine for some time.
The AI is also horrible when it comes to combat. I usually won my wars in a few dozen turns.
Maybe its better on higher difficulties, maybe the game would have been different with more aggressive civs as my opponents, similar to the japs, but out of 3 games, only 1 civ of 1 game posed any kind of challenge.
As far as tech and wonder progression goes, the AI usually manages to keep up quite well. They use spying to their advantage, but diplomacy is ridiculous.
The AI is completely unreasonable when it comes to demands. I line up my forces on the border, when i’m two eras ahead of the weakest AI and demand they turn over a small city that’s embedded in my empire and they refuse.
I can’t offer defense deals with civs that I have not announced to be friends with, as if negotiating with a nations would require them to announce their intentions to the whole world.
Generally theres very limited ways of winning the game.
For a diplomatic victory, you pretty much need world dominance, because getting other AIs to vote for you is next to impossible and bribing enough city states to vote for you / protecting them from the AI that try to thwart your plans demands a significantly large force.
BUT, then you could already have won a military victory, as you clearly are bigger / more superior than your opponents combined.
You can go for the science victory, but for that – again – you need a suitably large empire to ensure that you produce those SS components in time.
you can try for a cultural victory, but again.. getting enough wonders / tourism requires a huge dominance over your opponents in terms of empire size.
All in one, the game boils down to who has the biggest, most productive empire in the end game, and to get there, you will have to clear out some early rivals. Which will inadvertently brand you as a warmonger in the eyes of the AI, resulting in every AI denouncing you on a permanent basis from late renaissance onwards.
Oh and lets not forget the bugs.. the most annoying of which revolves around conquered cities. Happiness from courthouses is calculated incorrectly, so if you build a courthouse in a conquered city, it gives about twice the happiness back it should. This error only persists until you reload, potentially leaving you with an empire that is massively unhappy.
I had to abandon my first game because of this problem, when after conquering 3 civs one day, my loading of that game the next day left me with -30 happiness. Suffice to say, that such unhappiness will cripple your otherwise well structured empire.