The culture-related Great People have been expanded upon to do just that, and gaining their signature creative works will go a long way towards getting other civilizations to “recognize your cultural amazingness.” Great Artists will still pop up from time to time, and they’ll be joined by Great Writers and Great Musicians, too.

Where special buildings used to give you three or four culture per turn, now they’ll only give one–but you’ll have the opportunity to get more culture by adding great works to your cultural buildings.

We really felt like, as a military player, you have to go out and spread all over the entire world to win a victory, and we thought there’s no reason that your culture couldn’t be doing the same thing.” In Brave New World, the player takes more of an active role not just in gaining culture, but spreading it throughout the world. “That was pretty cool, but it was a little too passive. Before, “it was all about building a small, compact set of cities building as much culture as possible… you just waited for all that culture to build up over time, so you could get enough social policies to win the culture victory,” Beach said of the game’s current path. The cultural victory appears to have gone through just as many changes as the diplomatic one in Civilization V: Brave New World. “As it gets further and further along and you start going towards the diplomatic victory, you can send spies to other people’s capitol cities and use them as leverage to find out what the other states are going to vote for in the World Congress, you can actually trade votes in the World Congress as well.” This results in more of a lead-up to the actual end-game voting, giving you more ways to work towards a diplomatic victory as you move through the ages. Initially, the job of the World Congress is to vote on things like “the cost of how much it’s going to be to keep a standing army around” and “whether or not some of the resources are allowed to be created” (whaling being an example of something that might be outlawed by the Congress). The World Congress itself is another of Brave New World‘s additions, and its voting members can actually affect the rules of the game as it goes along. “So what we do now is, when we get towards sort of the Industrial part of the game, at that point the World Congress forms.” “We thought that the diplomatic body that votes on things could be a lot more interesting if it had a longer footprint on the game, and was active sooner,” Beach explained. As it exists now, the diplomatic victory requires the player to form the United Nations late in the game, which could backfire if its members vote for another civilization to be the world leader. It’s already possible to achieve diplomatic and cultural victories in Civ V, but Brave New World changes how they’re won. “We wanted to give more ways for a builder-type of player, a non-militaristic player, to still create an amazing civilization and feel like they can overtake the rest of the world in terms of culture or their diplomatic prowess.” “There were a lot of things that you encountered after that, later in the game… that sort of culminated towards the cultural victory or diplomatic victory, that we thought we could improve on,” he said.

With so many elements working together, and so many hours already invested in the game, how can Firaxis improve upon the Civilization V experience with its next expansion, Brave New World? As Lead Designer Ed Beach explained to The Escapist at PAX East, the developers looked at how all of the systems were working together and found opportunities for improvement, hopefully creating an even more in-depth experience with more fleshed-out paths to victory.Īs Beach explained, the additions to Civilization V introduced in Gods & Kings focused on the first half of the game, about to the Renaissance era. For some of us, that means we’ve spent hundreds of hours marching units across continents and oceans, unlocking policies, frantically racing other civilizations to the finish line of the space race, and saying “just one more turn.” In 2012, developer Firaxis added even more moving parts to the already deep game, incorporating religion and espionage into the Gods & Kings expansion pack. Civilization V has been out since the fall of 2010.

Civilization v brave new world