One of my biggest criticisms with the Gods & Kings expansion pack for Civilization V was that none of the features added really felt all that fresh. They were just redesigns of old features that were present in previous games. Granted, they were also the most highly-requested features by the player community, but as concepts, nothing really felt new or original.

The new expansion, Brave New World changes all of that by adding never-before-seen concepts to the game, and they add a great deal of flavor and dramatically change the way that the game unfolds.

Table of Contents

• Returning concepts
  • Trade routes are an obfuscated combination of physical units and abstract "lines on a map"
  • World Congress fleshes out diplomacy, but not enough
• The "pacification" of Civ V
• Completely original concepts adds fun and flavor to the game
  • Flourishing of the arts
  • It belongs in a museum!
  • Tourist attack
• Fun new civilizations make old civs feel mundane
  • Zulu and Shoshone make Germany and America look boring
  • Venice: the first playable City State!
  • Other civs provide plenty of variety
• Miscellaneous balance changes, improvements, and scenarios
  • Missed opportunities for reworking boring legacy civs
  • Interface updates
  • Scenarios are dull
• Brave New World changes the way the game is played, and adds whole new challenges and levels of player-engagement

A few more of the missing concepts from Civilization IV are re-introduced with a new coat of paint in Civilization V: Brave New World: trade routes and a world resolution system. Both systems are implemented differently than in the previous game, and both are kind of hit-or-miss this time around

I have long been asking for the introduction of some kind of international trade route mechanic to be added to Civ V. Without such a feature, the vanilla game (and Gods & Kings) were missing one of the key incentives to maintain peaceful relations with your neighbors. Well now we have such a feature. In some ways, it's a step forward from Civ IV's completely non-interactive trade routes, but it's also a bit clumsy.

Coastal cities might seem weaker due to the lack of gold on sea resources, but sea trade routes are more profitable and have longer range than ground routes, so coastal cities are still valuable.

This review was originally published 10/17/2010 on Game Observer (now defunct as of 05/13/2014). In anticipation of the soon-to-be-released Brave New World expansion pack, the review has been republished here for archival purposes.

For better or worse, I probably won’t be able to go back to Civilization IV after playing this.

I want to put my review into perspective before I begin. I’m not a day-one Civilization player. I didn’t start playing the franchise until Civilization III (after it had already been out for several years and both expansions had been released). Civilization IV, however, is probably my favorite video game ever -- or at least, my favorite PC game. The only games that I’ve probably logged more hours with than Civ IV are the Sims 2 (plus all the expansions) and the cumulative sum of all the Madden games I’ve played since 2000.

My hopes for Civilization V were sky-high from the moment the first details of gameplay were revealed about a year ago. This was despite my misgivings about the vendor and edition-exclusive gameplay content -- gameplay content should NEVER be exclusive to a vendor or edition of a game; anybody who buys a game should have the right to play any content that is released for the game (even if they have to pay extra for it) regardless of where they got it or when they bought! But now is not the place to discuss industry politics -- I’ll save that rant for another day.

Back on-topic: Civilization V promised a lot: competitive, tactical combat with a totally new rule-set; intelligent, interactive AI leaders; a simpler, streamlined interface; and simpler, more streamlined gameplay without sacrificing any of the series’ trademark depth. I’ve been spending almost every free moment playing this game for the two weeks since release. Does it measure up?

I noted in my original review of Civilization V that I expected an espionage system of some sort to be added in an expansion. I also stated, in a February edition of the Civilization Polycast webcast that I expected an expansion to be announced soon. I was right on both accounts!

I’ve spent a lot of time with Gods & Kings in the few months since its release, but I’m disappointed to say that it hasn’t quite lived up to my expectations.

The expansion isn’t a complete let-down though. It does include some significant enhancements to the core experience.

Table of Contents

• The changes I can't live without
  • Rebalanced combat and better tactical AI makes wars more fun
  • More dynamic, but still not life-like City States
• In Sid we trust!
• In her majesty’s mostly-useless service
  • Surveying rival cities and stealing techs
  • Rigging elections
  • Counter-espionage and overall boredom
• Lack of overall player engagement cripples the appeal of the late-game
• Other changes are hit-or-miss
  • Diplomacy still not improved much at all
• Gods & Kings adds some nice wrinkles to the gameplay, but nothing really game-changing