Civilization V: Brave New World expansion announced

March 15, 2013 5:00AM PDT

Second expansion for Civilization V expands on culture and diplomacy, adding World Congress and international trade routes.

2K Games has announced Civilization V: Brave New World, the second expansion for the strategy game.

Brave New World is being developed by series steward Firaxis and will be out this summer for the PC and Mac.

The expansion is geared around tweaking the game's culture and diplomacy mechanics and also offers nine new Civilizations, eight new Wonders, and two new scenarios.

Brave New World introduces the World Congress and the concept of international trade routes. The World Congress will convene on issues like trade sanctions, hosting the World Games, and the use of nuclear weapons. 2K promises that players will be able to trade votes and engage in other shenanigans, and the World Congress will also tie in to winning a diplomatic victory.

International trade routes can be used to generate wealth, but will also spread religion, cultural influence, and science. Trade routes are increased by developing technologies, building wonders, and making use of each civilization's unique abilities. Longer trade routes carry more risk but will yield more lucrative supplies, and trade routes can also be used on players' own cities to distribute supplies internally.

Brave New World also adds the new culture victory. Civilizations work to spread their culture around the world, creating great works with great artists, writers, and musicians, and then hosting them in museums, opera houses, and the great library. Archaeologists can also be used to recover valuable artifacts. The first civilization to gain a majority influence across all other civilizations will achieve the culture victory.

The two new scenarios are titled War Between the States and Scramble for Africa, with the former letting players pick a side in the American Civil War and fight for control of Richmond and Washington. Scramble for Africa has players working against other civilizations to explore and establish control in a dynamically generated Africa.

New wonders include the Parthenon, Broadway, and the Uffizi. One of the new civilizations is Poland, led by Casimir III.

For more information on Civilization V, check out GameSpot's previous coverage.

By Martin Gaston, News Editor

Martin Gaston has absolutely never at all had the song from Beauty and the Beast sung to him at any point during his life, ever.

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69 comments

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CommodoreRaslin

Are they finally going to make Spain's unique ability not suck?

Cause getting a small amount of cash at most 5 times is useless once you hit the late mid-game to late game periods.

And I really don't like the idea of this new cultural victory because honestly it just doesn't make that much sense. You win by being the person who spreads your culture around the most? What does that even mean?

If I run around taking over the whole map shouldn't my culture automatically be the dominant culture? I'd much rather have a new victory that instead involves owning the majority of the buildable tiles (and hence being the dominant power and thus dominant culture).

Also the Brazilians don't really make much sense as a new civilization.

melo-franco

@CommodoreRaslin you have USA since the first game and you have Iroquois in this one. Brazil has been a leading power in SA for centuries. It is the 5th economy in the world, the second largest in the Western hemisphere: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/89ad55ba-45d7-11e0-acd8-00144feab49a.html We're talking about an almost 200 million people culture. Influential popular culture. Just accept it.

Lord_Python1049

When this comes out, I will finally play Civ5. Just enough time to say good bye to my loved ones!

sofalover

1 Like

The new Polish civ workers are twice as productive but move abroad after five turns.

csward

Nice, thanks Firaxis.

ksdlass

Nooo and I just bought the gold edition of Civ 5 :(

astryc

1 Like

@ksdlass the expansion will require the core Civ 5 game to play.. so your money isn't wasted =]

abassim

3 Like

Games come and leave my PC, only Civ 5 is retaining it's place since it's launch years ago. Because it is one of the few BEST.

Joesocwork

Sounds like a cool new victory condition. But why not keep the older cultural victory and simply call it something else? The more types of victories the better!

Senor_Kami

1 Like

@Joesocwork The old one was lame though. It was just whoever can level up 25 time first wins. The new cultural victory actually has something to do with spreading culture and having a dominating culture.

Joesocwork

@Senor_Kami @Joesocwork I agree; I do like the new idea a lot better! But I think in V, 2K streamlined (and dumb downed, imo) so much so that they passed up on opportunities to give the players more to play for. And more types of victories and better eye candy for the victories would be big on a Civ VI wish list.

PeterDuck

World Congress, that's basically the UN, right? Oh I meant, the US, the UK, China, France and Russia...

Frozensky

Poland? But they can't even into space.

2bitSmOkEy

@Frozensky Poland is awesome shush.

KainWeylin

@Frozensky Poland was actually a pretty important power in Eastern Europe until it was triple-teamed by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. At its largest extent, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth straddled Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. It also was pretty advanced for its day in terms of limiting the monarchy and having relatively democratic institutions.

So, yeah, Poland works at least as well as some of the other civs in this game.

PeterDuck

6 Like

@Frozensky

They're making the Witcher series. That is alone enough to admit them into the game.

Frozensky

@PeterDuck
...point conceded.

As for the "World Congress", the UN actually goes around asking people not to use the name in their creations, as I recall.

makryu

Will it make V on par with IV, finally?

QingJao86

@makryu You mean Stack of Doom the game? Sorry, IV is unplayable to me after playing V for any amount of time.

Senor_Kami

1 Like

@QingJao86 @makryu I prefer everything other than the combat and graphics of Civ 4 to Civ 5. Even the main designer came out and said that pretty much every change he made was a bad one. The fact that all of the expansions of Civ5 are adding core functionality that was in Civ4 says a lot.

Senor_Kami

2 Like

These are awesome additions. It's like they're listening to the fans and basically releasing a pack to turn Civ 5 into Civ 4 with better combat.

burnettaj

Awesome! I love the Civilization series. Will be following this one for sure.

Sakuban

I hate that when companies announce these things so early! G'ddmit how am i going to wait now? When will it come out?

JLCrogue

1 Like

@Sakuban They said it comes out this summer. That's not too long of a wait, now is it? In the mean time you can still play the base game and/or the Gods and Kings expansion all you want.

Sakuban

@JLCrogue @Sakuban No it's still a long wait. :)

naryanrobinson

1 Like

Sorry *how* much? Ehhhh no.

Triton

Should read: Civilization V "Got more Milk" expansion.

I'll still end up buying it. lol

IgorSteinberg

This sounds exactly like what I've been waiting for.

Ten_Tigers

2 Like

I remember when all these "expansions" used to be part of the game right out of the box. : /

ipggi

IMO false revisionist history. 1996's Civilization II had 2 add-ons, Conflicts and Fantastic Worlds.

Worse though was the original Civilization as DOS game. A later Windows multiplayer but otherwise identical edition, CivNet was released 4 years later at full retail price. Yep the old days were great.

Senor_Kami

1 Like

@Ten_Tigers Yeah, like Beyond the Sword, Colonization, and Warlord for Civ 4... oh wait. This expansion is coming out like 2 years after the original game. You're really gonna argue that it should have been in the box?

QingJao86

@Senor_Kami @Ten_Tigers How about Brood War and even Core Contingency (a Total Annihilation expansion for the unaware) if you want to get really old school? Expansion packs have been a part of strategy games all the way from at least Total Annihilation and Command and Conquer 1, why would we expect that to change? At least now they make the way of playing totally different.

edinko

3 Like

The 29.99 price tag is HORRIBLE exploitative in this special case. If the expansion will be contentwise something like the first one it `s about 300% overpriced

Pyrosa

I'll gladly download this on day 1... I'm still getting great value out of CivV with G&K for the occasional game, but it's good to know that new mechanics and civs are en route.

RetryAgain

3 Like

A culture victory? So now there's two ways to win through culture, or does it only sound similar and is completely different from the Utopia project?

Also, I'm still kind of disappointed in the religion system from G&K. It's underpowered and you can always just take up someone else's religion, and making your own religion the best/fastest spreading is a drain on time and resources that doesn't feel worth it most of the time.

Senor_Kami

@RetryAgain This is a real cultural victory that actually has something to do with spreading culture (ie Civ 4). The old Civ 5 one was just whoever levels up 25 times wins.

shingui5

@RetryAgain it might just be a reworking of how the cultural victory is achieved.

SauhlGood

1 Like

@shingui5 @RetryAgain and they need an expansion for that, this should be in a patch

shingui5

@SauhlGood @shingui5 @RetryAgain because thats the only thing being introduced in the expansion? -.-

ZetA_LatA

Culture victories should have been in the original game however Civ 5 by itself was still tons of fun. God and Kings was great and this new expansion is the perfect excuse to go back.

QingJao86

Civ makes the best expansion packs in games IMO. Occasionally they might take a misstep in an expansion pack, but generally they are really good, and change the game in a way that you can't imagine what it was like to play before. Religion was a huge boost, the new spy feature slightly less so, and now we are getting new ways of winning, new trade, and new congress, and new ways of spreading influence. That sounds huge to me.

2bitSmOkEy

Nice, I love me some civ 5.

Zarkhaine

Hold on! I haven't got the first expansion pack yet!

QingJao86

3 Like

@Zarkhaine Why not? The first expansion pack was awesome if I do say so myself.

CommodoreRaslin

@QingJao86 @Zarkhaine I wasn't that thrilled with it. Other than adding in some Civs with really overpowered unique abilities it didn't really offer much. The religion thing was pretty useless and easily ignorable because you couldn't really do anything with it other than pick up a few bonuses, some of which had been ripped out of the cultural abilities.

Maybe if you could use religion to incite revolts and actively recruit spies it would have been more interesting, but at its heart the entire thing was so damned passive and made little to no difference to the actual game.

Zarkhaine

@QingJao86 @Zarkhaine Waiting til I get an itch to play it again, kinda played it to death not long ago, need to reset my brain.

QingJao86

@Zarkhaine @QingJao86 Makes sense, but note, G&K does really change the way you have to play the game, especially with the religion. Also some of the civilizations are much different.

Kayweg

11 Like

In an ocean of DLC, Expansion island offers hope.

If this is anywhere near as good as "Gods and Kings" was, it's gonna be a must have for any Civ fan.

That said, Civ 4 had many of the Civ 5 expansion features from the get go

PeterDuck

@Kayweg

I also like that there is a difference between the terms "expansion" and "DLC"

Vojtass

1 Like

Poland at last! For the first time in the series! Winged hussars (aka Husaria) = the best cavalry unit ever = hell yeah!

http://michalpol.blox.pl/resource/husaria.jpg

Komissar33188

@Vojtass That would mean putting in a new Austrian Unit--right now they're rocking the Hussars.

Vojtass

@Komissar33188 @Vojtass Not necessarily. Both units have the same medieval hungarian-serbian origin: in Poland Hussars became semiheavy cavalry, however Hungarian units were still light. Hussars were very popular in whole Europe. Hell, even Great Britain has own hussars. But Winged Hussars of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were active (and victorious) mostly during 16th and 17th century.

cis77

@Vojtass @Komissar33188Polish Hussars where heavy units. The Armoured Companions where semiheavy...

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