Continuing my series of strategy guides for the civilizations of Brave New World, I have now moved onto legacy civs whose strategies have changed somewhat due to the expansions' features. One civilization that received an indirect upgrade by the changes introduced in Brave New World is Dido's Carthaginian empire. Even though her actual ability didn't change, the new trade route mechanics changed the function of the harbor, which subtly changes how Carthage should be approached by Brave New World players.

In the ancient world, the Phoenicians exercised near absolute dominance over maritime trade in the south Mediterranean. Phoenician control was centered in Tyre, whose colonies paid tribute but were not directly controlled by Tyre itself. When Alexander the Great destroyed Tyre in 332 BC, the Phoenician colony of Carthage began claiming control over Tyre's former colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, Morocco, and Iberia, and established itself as the commercial center of the Western Mediterranean. This economic success and naval supremacy lead to three Sicilian Wars with Greece and three Punic Wars with the Roman Republic. The third Punic War resulted in the sacking and conquest of Carthage by the Romans.

Historical records of Dido are very limited, and historians debate her historicity. The sources available indicate that she was the daughter of an unnamed King of Tyre, who named both her and her child brother, Pygmalion, as heirs. But when the king died, the people refused to acknowledge Dido as heir, and only Pygmalion was recognized. Pygmalion had Dido's husband, Acerbas murdered in order to claim Acerbas' vast wealth, and Dido stole away Acerbas' gold and fled Tyre along with some attendants and senators. She landed in North Africa, where a local Berber king granted her an amount of land that she could encompass with a single oxhide. So Dido cut the oxhide into small strips and encircled an entire nearby hill upon which the city of Byrsa was founded. She would later also found the city of Carthage before sacrificing herself in a pyre in order to remain faithful to her deceased husband and escape a marriage proposal from the Berber King. She would later be deified by the Carthaginian people, making it difficult to determine if the stories are genuine or just legend.

There's one civilization that I have not yet covered in my Brave New World strategies series that did receive an explicit rewrite of its unique national ability. I haven't covered them yet because that rewrite isn't so much a change to their ability, as it is really just a clarification that the ability applies to the new rules. The Iroquois civilization led by Chief Hiawatha has an ability that explicitly utilizes the expansion's trade route mechanics. The Iroquois are another civilization (like India) that receives a lot of hate from the Civ V gaming community due to some supposedly lackluster, highly-situational uniques. This strategy will focus on utilizing those uniques when they are beneficial, and on compensating for their downfalls and limitations.

Very little is known about the early history of Iroquoian people prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. The Native American tribes had no written language, and their histories were passed down through oral tradition. According to that tradition, a great Peacemaker united the eastern Great Lakes tribes of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onandaga, Cayauga, and Seneca sometime between the 12th and 15th centuries. Other tribes would later join the confederacy, including some that were displaced from their native lands by European settlers. Iroquois culture was matrilineal, meaning that children were born into the mother's family, and women had a great deal of influence in the politics of the tribes. The Iroquois Confederacy utilized a representative system in which each tribe appointed a number of chiefs (based on relative population of the respective tribes) to serve on a council. There was both a council of male chiefs, and also a council of clan mothers that both had roughly equal authority.

Hiawatha is a near-mythical figure in Iroquois history. He was a follower of the Great Peacemaker, who traveled between the various tribes of the region preaching a prophecy of a strong alliance uniting all the tribes of the Great Lakes region in peace. Hiawatha, along with the Peacemaker, effectively founded the Iroquois Confederacy using his skills as an orator (and, in some traditions, magic) to convince the various tribes to join. According to oral tradition, the Seneca resisted the alliance, leading to a confrontation that was stopped when the sun miraculously went dark, turning day into night. This supposed solar eclipse lead the Seneca to put down their arms and commit themselves to the alliance.

Following up on my previous post about the Top 10 good ideas in Civilization V, here is a list of the opposite: the flaws and annoyances in the game's design that really grind my gears and make me nostalgic for the older games and wishing for dramatic changes in future sequels.

And since I'm always eager to provide constructive criticism where I can, I will propose ideas for addressing some of the problems with these features where relevant. The hope is that future games in the series will be able to learn from Civ V failures and successes and be better games.

Of course, any list of "good ideas" or "bad ideas" is going to be subjective. You may not agree with my opinions, and that's OK. If there's any features, mechanics, or design decisions that you really hate in Civilization V, its DLC, or its two expansions, please feel free to leave a comment!

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With Starships released, an expansion for Beyond Earth announced, and support for Civ V apparently done, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back at the game. I'm going to spend a few posts to discuss what Civ V did right, and what it did wrong, so that future games can learn lessons from this iteration's successes and failures.

Here I will present a Top 10 list of my favorite new features, mechanics, and design philosophies in Sid Meier's Civilization V (and its two expansion). These are the elements of the game that stood out the most to me as contributing to the fun and addictiveness of the game, and which push the series in positive directions. Most of these features are things that I would probably like to see return in future sequels.

But even though my intent here is to shine glowing praise on Civ V, I'm not going to ignore the faults of even my favorite features. Some of these mechanics are great ideas, but still suffered from problems in execution. So I won't shy away from constructive criticism where applicable, and I'll make recommendations to improve these great features in the future.

In a future post, I will also look at the things that Civ V got wrong.

Of course, any list of "good ideas" or "bad ideas" is going to be subjective. You may not agree with my opinions, and that's OK. If there's any features, mechanics, or design decisions that you really love in Civilization V, its DLC, or its two expansions, please feel free to leave a comment!

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Over the weekend of March 7, I was once again invited to participate in the Civilization podcast "PolyCast". It's always enjoyable to participate in this show. DanQ and the others always do an excellent job (even though Dan wasn't in this episode).

I particularly enjoyed this one because I felt that I had more to contribute than on some of the other episodes that I've been invited to. Part of that was because I actually reviewed the topics in advance and prepared for the episode. But it was also advantageous that one of the topics discussed was my own blog post about Civ VI ability ideas. I don't think that discussion made it into the edited episode, but it will perhaps make it into a clip show later in the year. Even so, I felt like I had valuable commentary on the other topics, and there were some good discussions.

The episode can be streamed in its entirety at thePolyCast.net.

The first and most significant topic of conversation was about a video posted by Errant Signal that takes a critical look at the meta-themes of Civilization and what they say about our perception of what it is to be "civilized".

His primary criticism is that the game unnecessarily puts civilizations in competition with one another, rather than fostering a spirit of cooperation; and that the various victory conditions in the game are very "American", "Western-centric" ideals. So our PolyCast panel discussed these criticisms and different game mechanics that contribute to them, as well as ideas for ways to alleviate them (particularly on the topic of victory conditions).

Another significant topic of conversation was whether or not we really want the different civilizations to have unique units and powers in the game. The question was posed on the Civfanatics forums by user Naokaukodem, who seems to be arguing in favor of removing the unique units and making them accessible to any civilization that techs to them. I think it is safe to say that the panelists on PolyCast were not in favor of such a change, and some good arguments (both mechanically and thematically) are made in favor of keeping the uniques as they are.

There were also some other discussions of various Beyond Earth topics and some other discussion. I'm not sure if all of it made it into the final edited episode, as we went well over the allotted time. So some of the discussion might have to be rolled into one of PolyCast's future clip shows. After listening to the full episode, all the topics discussed in the live podcast did make it into the edited version available on the site.

Thanks, as always, to the PolyCast hosts for the invitation. I hope to participate again soon!