Sid Meier's Civilization V: Brave New World is the second expansion pack for Civilization V - the critically acclaimed 2010 PC Game of the Year. This new expansion provides enhanced depth and replayability through the introduction of international trade and a focus on culture and diplomacy. Your influence around the world will be impacted by creating Great Works, choosing an ideology for your people and proposing global resolutions in the World Congress. As you move through the ages of history you will make critical decisions that will impact your relationship with other civilizations.
Sid Meier's Civilization V: Brave New World also introduces nine new civilizations, eight new wonders, two new scenarios, four new gameplay systems and dozens of new units, buildings and improvements offering an expanded variety of ways to build the most powerful empire in the world.
Civilization V: Brave New World is due this summer. Accompanying this news is an interview with Firaxis lead programmer Ed Beach and senior producer Dennis Shirk, who talked with gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun about what to expect from this new expansion:
Ed Beach wrote:Overall what we wanted the focus for this expansion to be was to look at that back half of the game from when you get into the twentieth century, and then you push on to one of the four different types of victories that are supported in Civilisation V, and we wanted to ramp up the tension and excitement level in that part of the game. So there are two things that we did: one was that we looked at the conflicts of the twentieth century. We already had a concept we just started to introduce in Civ V a little bit about different ideologies, where we had a freedom policy tree, an order policy tree, and an autocracy policy tree, and we wanted to bring that to the fore and really make civilisations make a commitment to one of those three different types of ideologies.
So when you reach the modern era you have to look around the world, see who’s going with which of the ideologies, who’s your friend, what type of victory you want to pursue, which ideologies might help you get there. You’ve got to make a key decision at that part of the game, are you going to be a freedom Civ, are you maybe going to take the workers of your country and try to unite them and get behind order and push towards victory that way? So there’s a big decision point there, big political and diplomatic blocks form around that, and that’s sort of where the tension towards the end of the game revolves.
Dennis Stark wrote:...what we’ve basically done is before you just generated culture, you built lots of buildings, you filled up your tech trees. Now the culture yield itself is actually a defence for your civilisation, the amount of culture you’re pushing out. When you get to around a third of the way through the game, you’re going to start generating great people: great artists, great writers, great musicians, and they’re going to be able to create a great work of art or a great work of music in the game, and we actually have, in your cultural buildings now, we have slots for these, so one of your great artists might create ‘Starry Night’ and you put that in one of your museums.
That piece of work now is creating tourism, and it’s an actual yield, and you’re staring to build up tourism. Later on when archaeology comes online, you’re going to be running around on a second phase of exploration and discovery in the world when archaeology comes up because there’s now all these digs around the world that are actually reflections of stuff that happened earlier in the game where a battle might have taken place, where a barbarian camp was. You can extract artefacts from these sites and also put them in your museums.
Some of your wonders now have different great work spots, they create tourism. So you’re now creating tourism in parallel with creating culture, and that’s going to directly go head to head with other people’s culture, and you can get bonuses,. In other words if you have open borders with another civilisation, that creates a boost for your tourism. If you’ve got trade routes to that other civilisation, more boosts to your tourism. So it’s an ongoing battle that really becomes dynamic late in the game, because late in the game when you have a lot of tourism being pumped out, other civilisations might have to take notice and start creating more culture to defend against it, because their culture’s now being overwhelmed by your pushing tourism, it’s a dynamic way to play that game.
There are certainly some interesting ideas being touted here. The early game trade routes, which rely on units that can be attacked by barbarians and other civilizations, sounds like it could be fun. Before, this trade was automatic in the form of gold provided to cities built on coastlines; now, you must set up these trade routes yourself.
I'm particularly keen on the new "archeology" system that tracks the location of discovered ruins and ancient battles. Later in the game, an archeologist can "discover" these ancient sites, dig up an artifact, and display it in your museum, thus boosting your tourism. It's a nice connection to the early portion of the game, which is always my favorite part.
Finally, the new World Congress has the potential to be intriguing. I love the concept of the "game of diplomacy," and this new feature promises that you'll be able to horse-trade for votes of measures like sanctioning rogue nations and limiting worldwide resource usage. Color me skeptical, though; I've never seen this kind of feature implemented well in a game before.
My big disappointment is that nothing is mentioned about improving the poor performance of the multiplayer portion of the game. There is so much potential there, yet so little attention has been devoted to that area. I was really hoping that a new expansion would tackle the myriad of necessary improvements. Maybe it will - we haven't yet seen the list of enhancements and bug fixes - but it's disheartening that it's not mentioned right up front.
I don't know that I'm blow away but what I'm reading here. It sounds like a collection of nice additions, but nothing terribly groundbreaking. I'm sure the game will come out at a pretty hefty price point. Unless I hear something about multiplayer improvements, I might want to wait for a deep discount before taking the plunge. What about you?
. How do others who've played Civ V MP deal with a bathroom break? 
