Share Your First BNW Experiences Here

I didn't realize how important the trade routes were to my economy until the Huns attacked me and destroyed them all.
 
WOW. Anyone can confrim this? Seems like terrible, terrible and game breaking bug or just truly ******ed design choice...

I can confirm it was this way in G&K. Late game runaway Sweden sent a settler up north of my country to grab an open spot. There was no way I could start a war just to stop it. Luckily I saw a barb camp up there with two archers just sitting around. They let him walk right past and settle a town on my border.
 
I only played for .5 hours last night. Mt. Kilimanjaro's Altitude Training promotion is quite nice for my Shoshone Bowfinders. They fly over the hills.

Impi upgrade to Riflemen, not Lancers. Nice for all the Lancer-hating warmongers out there.

Money is scarce in the early game. I utilized my Bowfinders for barb hunting and bullying as much as exploration.
 
I was playing as Poland and Indonesia sent a settler very far away from their cities to my capital, so I bought a tile so that the settler couldn't continue moving north. That settler has been sitting in that same spot for the past 20 turns.
 
I'm pretty sure I was pulling in 18gpt before t100 as Venice without trying too hard or knowing the most about caravans.
 
Ok, my friend and I decided we wanted to play CiV at midnight instead of sleeping.

I type this as I try to stay awake at work :)

We played King, Small Continents, Standard map, 8 civs, 16 city states, most settings regular.

We both wanted to play Poland; My friend wanted Poland for the free social policies, I wanted Poland because Winged Hussers RULE THE UNIVERSE!

But instead of two Polandias I chose Venice.


Civs were:

Venice; Me
Poland; My friend

AIs
Zulu
Indonesia
Greece
Babylon
Siam
Mongolia

AI's were paired up on teams, humans not on same team, but intended to work together.

Poland started on his own small island with two city states.

Venice started on a continent with Mongolia, Siam, and 4 city states.

Poland leaned on culture and befriending city states as a strategy.

Venice took the tech path to optimize gaining merchants of venice and trade routes.
Spammed trade routes; first a few caravans but eventually all ships.
Venice puppeted with merchants of venice about as many city states as poland was able to build cities.

Got to the industrial era.

The Ai never declared war; perhaps they were happy to feed off Mighty Venice's 12 Trade routes!

We were ahead of the AI in score.

Comparing Venice and Poland in this particualr game,
Venice had twice the gold output, Poland had twice the Culture. Science and happiness were roughly equal.

It was great fun!


Best part was how barbarian pirates would sack my trade ship that went to Jakarta waaaay across the map in the fog of war.

Kinda realistic. The one trade route I could not easily guard was vulnerable.


Can't wait to play again!
 
Nope. It's still Ludwig von Beethoven. :rolleyes:

Argh! I was so sure they would fix that!

I guess it would be pretty easy to fix though, right?
 
As far as the 'AI Settler' thing, I did liberate a Settler or two, so it may just be wonky AI settings.

Tried a couple of Civs... I'm a n00b, but I feel like if I don't rush the Great Library, I fall behind in tech, and I really don't like the fact that only one real strategy seems to work. ><
 
Stayed up until 11:30 last night, I tried to stay up passed 12 AM to preview it, but I was too tired. Today, I was 10 mins late for work, because I wanted to check out the first few turns this morning. I started a game as Rome, on prince, (I like to play on king, but I made it easier for my first time with the new content.) In advanced setup, I choose to play with all of the new Civs. So far, I was able to find Venice south of my capital. I noticed the barbarians have a cool new avatar during turn waiting; it looks more... barbaric. I can't wait to get home and play, this is going to be longest day of work since the debut of Gods and Kings.

On a side note, did anyone notice that the map generation looks better, and more realistic, or is it just me?
 
Originally intended just to play to try it out - ended up with a full (short) game.

Settings: Indonesia, Emperor, Shuffle, random size (turned out to be Duel).

First thought (other than how great Jakarta's city spot was - all hills with a river except for the sea, which included two whales and a fish, and except for one marble tile) was that the addition of extra early game options really change your decision-making, and can be heavily context-dependent, particularly since you need to weigh investing in early trade against the fact that at that game stage, trade units have quite a long production time. Low gold yields also force careful decision-making when it comes to determining if a building is really worth it.

Venice can be awkward to play against on a map like that, when you're reliant on trade for much of your income (as the game goes on, you can get a positive income with harbours and "city connections" - really, couldn't they have come up with a better name since you see it regularly in notifications), and you'll be short of independent CSes to trade with when war comes. I was fortunate that Ragusa remained independent game-long - the other three all became Venetian.

About the general systems:

Trade: This is very obviously the dominant feature of the expansion (though tourism becomes important sooner than you might think). Gold is otherwise in short supply, and gold-producing effects from elsewhere are valuable (I suspect Great Merchants will be valued more in the early game) - I rode through much of the game on the back of the Mausoleum of Helicarnassus. In peacetime, however, gold ceases to become a limiting factor probably sooner than is really welcome. I'm somewhat glad I didn't start with Morocco after all, as I think they might have too easy a time.

There appear to be no explicit diplomatic modifiers for trade; at first I thought this was a lapse, but as it is trade is so easy to conduct and gain benefits from (and needs no open borders or agreement with the other civ), I think it works better if the AI doesn't have too much incentive to let you keep trading. It may still be that there's a 'hidden' diplo modifier, that AIs will be less likely to go to war if they're able to calculate that trade is in their interest.

Tourism: I'm not yet sold on this, but a duel map is a bad way to develop firm impressions of any Civ mechanic. It feels very passive - you have very little control over your Great Artist etc. production, since you can have only one of each guild and the two specialist slots a guild provides are the only way of creating those GPs (other than occasional Wonder points). So you basically just stick a guild in a food city and wait, then pop out Great Works. The alternative abilities don't seem to do a great deal, except for Golden Ages. Until Hotels and Archaeology, and the late-game tourism Wonders like Eiffel Tower, tourism output is wholly a product of Great Works and belief-linked religious buildings, and your standard cultural output without putting any effort in will far exceed the effects of that. You have no way of accelerating Great Work production without being Brazil (except for one World Congress option), and while you can trade Great Works like-for-like, you can't gain any extra ones through trade (by, say, exchanging them for gold). So far at least it feels much less interactive than promised.

World Congress: A duel map - with one surviving CS, at that - is the worst possible way to showcase the Congress. In this context, it was a button-pushing exercise that let me pass anything I wanted, and the AI seemed bewildered at how to interact with it - Dandolo was annoyed with me for proposing my religion become the World Religion, but come the Congress he actually voted for the measure. On another occasion he moved to create the World Fair, but Jakarta was a production powerhouse and Venice ... was not. Of two civs bidding on the Fair, poor old Enrico succeeded in coming third. I was pleased to find that the effects are cumulative (so I got all the bonuses of 1st through 3rd place).

Looking forward to starting on a larger map, but so far my experience is that BNW adds more to the early game - with extra options, meaningful gold limitation, and let's not forget iron at Bronze Working - than to the promised late game, although the World Congress should be more interactive with more civs in the game.

Other changes:

I went Piety for first social policy branch. This really paid off - Tithe helped keep my economy going when trade volumes were low, and I had the faith to buy Catholic mosques and monasteries whenever Enrico spread his religion to my cities, before restoring the rightful Hindu faith. Jakarta benefitted from both God of the Sea and Desert Folklore (all its hills were in desert), a very strong combination. Jesuit Education provides universities for the same cost as a missionary, which is very cost-effective. Two of my cities were on rivers, and I gave them both candis to speed GP production as well as the faith boost.

I struggled with happiness for much of the game, more than I'm used to in G&K, and probably in large part due to some great food cities and a game-long alliance with maritime Ragusa; without the happiness I eventually got from settling my three cities on other continents, I'd have struggled much more. My Kris Swordsmen got nice promotions and Iron Working seems a good tech choice now - also they keep the promotion as they upgrade even if you haven't fought with them to discover which promotion they have. When fighting other Riflemen, this gave a very definite edge. I don't think any trick strategies are going to emerge that will make Indonesia a power civ (beyond selling the spare luxuries for large sums of gold), but none of its uniques are weak.
 
Argh! I was so sure they would fix that!

I guess it would be pretty easy to fix though, right?

Just have to edit one line in the text xml file. It takes 2 seconds to do, if that.
 
Just have to edit one line in the text xml file. It takes 2 seconds to do, if that.

That's what I thought. Guess I'll have to do that.

It's mind-boggling that they managed to get it wrong, though...
 
Started as Assyria. My first neighbor? Persia. Oh boy, rumble in the Mesopotamian jungle.

Second neighbor, Ethiopia! So much for founding a religion. War-mode, activate!

And Brazil! Captain, the tourism is too much, our culture cannae take much more!

Then I found a city state giving Impi. Whew, at least that's a relief. Maybe there's some hope after all.
 
Small Continents, King, Standard, Poland
Other Civs: All the new ones except Zulu (he had the misfortune of being on the bottom of the list)

On the same continent as Brazil, Morocco and Indonesia.

In G&K you basically always had a second or third copy of one resource close by your capital, so you would have luxuries to trade. In this game I didn't have any second copies until I founded my third city, but instead had 1 each of Gems, Citrus, Truffles, Ivory, Marble, Incense. Anyone else seen anything like this or was this completely random?

Right next to Morocco, my trade routes with them are freaking AMAZING, no other way to describe it. +11, +12, +13 gold between my capital and their 3 cities I have routes with. Tying science and religion into the trade routes makes for some interesting decisions in regards to how you set them up. Do I really want to give +3 extra science to Brazil (because of my tech lead) just for an extra +1 GPT? (As an example).

The changes to gold (not being able to sell to AI) and the tech tree (all the new building additions, wonders, etc) make the early game a lot more interesting because of the decisions to be made.

With all 4 of us crammed onto this small island things are very peaceful, I am friends with Brazil, Morocco and Indonesia are friends, and there hasn't been one denouncement or hint of war so far (on turn 180). Which is good because I completely ignored military units for a long time and was pretty defenseless. Just found Portugal and looking for Assyria so I can found the World Congress.

The trade route UI is pretty intuitive. The left and right arrows work, but wish they would just be color coded with the civs colors. So that the arrows pertaining to my civ were Red (Poland) and the arrows pertaining to the other civ were Green (Morocco), but I see how that could get problematic. You could also just replace the arrows with the Civ's icon.

The cultural UI, uh, makes my head hurt trying to decipher it. I am sure it will come with time, but it's completely different and there is A LOT of information on those screens, and I haven't even gotten to the part of the game where tourism, archaeology and great works really start to matter.

I used a Great Artist to create a work called "Naked Lady Looking in a Mirror" (or something like that) and put it in my palace. If you click on the great work in your city screen it replays the little video from when the work was created. Nice touch there.

All in all this is how I feel about BNW: :king::king::goodjob::goodjob::king::king:
 
I used a Great Artist to create a work called "Naked Lady Looking in a Mirror" (or something like that)

A warning to others who may be as stupid as me: that great work is a poem. Do NOT use the text to search for images with Google.

Unless you are into that kind of thing.
 
That's what I thought. Guess I'll have to do that.

It's mind-boggling that they managed to get it wrong, though...

It is correct in my G&K version, in file D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\assets\Gameplay\XML\NewText\EN_US\CIV5GameTextInfos2.xml in lines 331 and 332.
 
First Real Game:
Shoshone Continents Standard Prince Standard
Liked my starting location and popped a few goody huts with the pathfinders. Used them on a free tech and culture.
Hong Kong was isolated by mountains in the north, but in the south I found Shaka with 4 cities (4 CITIES). Luckily Theodora was closer.
Above Zulu was Mnt. Fuji near some silver and whales. Easy 2nd city location next to the mountain.
I found another goody hut and upgraded my pathfinder to a CB. Turns out they do that now.
 
Top Bottom