Like before, one of your goals will be to generate as much culture as possible through a combination of worked tiles, wonders, buildings and social policies.Īnother goal comes in the form of a new mechanic: tourism. While still challenging, the biggest strategy was making sure you were the first to secure certain world wonders and were quick to adopt the correct social policies.Īchieving a culture win in Brave New World requires you to become more effective at spreading your culture through the world than your competition. The problem: to go for second culture win, you’d be playing the game in the exact same way. The game basically forced you to a rigid path, and as long as you were left alone most of the match by other civs, you were likely to secure a win if you didn’t mess up some detail. Pre- BNW, cultural victories were arguably pretty boring. The biggest change of them all is one that I consider to be long overdue: an overhauling of the cultural victory. Be prepared to cough up $30, or I’d recommend you to stop reading!īrave New World adds 9 rulers (and one carried over from G&K), 8 units, 4 buildings, 13 wonders, and 2 scenarios, along with a couple of new mechanics: global trade routes, World Congress, revamped social policies and new ideologies, an adjusted diplomatic victory and a completely revamped cultural victory. The same thing can be said about the game’s second expansion, Brave New World. A couple of matches with G&K is all it took to make sure you never disabled it.
For the most part, it brought back most of what fans believed should have shipped with the original game, such as religion and espionage, and while it remained accessible for new players, it added more complexity for old-schoolers, resulting in a richer experience overall. Simply put, G&K was an absolute “must have” expansion pack. It wasn’t until Gods & Kings‘ (our review) release in 2012 that I began to better understand the root of those complaints. A common complaint was that it was “dumbed-down”, catering more to new players than the series’ biggest fans.
As someone who used the game as a gateway into the series, I found it to be truly amazing, and couldn’t quite appreciate the arguments from long-time fans about where the game went wrong. When Firaxis pushed Sid Meier’s Civilization V out the door in 2010 (our review), fan reactions were quite varied.