If I'm not mistaken, you receive 2 delegates for each city-state ally in the Information age (or once 3 civs hit atomic), so 24 cs allies would be 48 delegates, more than enough to win. I did win by buying up all the city-states on a large map as Venice (trivial, was making 700-900 gpt late game).
And Gandhi wouldn't vote for me as world leader even if I offered him 9999 gold. We were long-time friends and shared an Ideology. Every single Civ would only vote for themself.
That's disappointing - they should remove the second vote in that case so that you need both civs and CSes (which was usually required in G&K).
Harun did offer to vote for me when I tested the waters with him, however that was when that wouldn't have given me enough votes to win - maybe the AI refuses to deal only if it knows you'll win. If so the best approach would be to bribe multiple civs independently. Generally this was needed in the earlier games too, so I'm okay with that.
It surprises me that 700-900 per turn is even close to enough to buy the CSes - each gold gift to one CS reduces the influence gain with all CSes, and in my last game Babylon had such a tight grasp on most CSes that even getting 150 influence wasn't sufficient to guarantee alliance (I even had a 0% chance of a coup with, admittedly, a level 1 spy in Kuala Lumpur when I had over 120 influence). You may have been in an atypical game - possibly none of the other civs was going for diplo victory? If they are, bribing city-states is all but impossible because the AI gets bigger bribes and uses them actively. At least in G&K, AIs that weren't after diplo victory would also do their best to bribe CSes away or invade them if you looked likely to get a diplo victory.
The BNW diplomatic victory (and yes I won my first game on it) feels really balanced. Yes, you probably need a good base of city-state allies backing you, and maybe 1 resurrected AI civ for good measure, but It's not so much economic victory, but a general victory.
I was wondering if liberated civs still had to vote for you. I did try bribing Shaka to give me Marrakesh in my last game, so I could liberate it, but didn't have anything he wanted enough or an army large enough to prompt him to give into demands (by that point he was Freedom-loving and allied with all my friends, so declaring war on him was a definite no-no quite apart from being logistically unfeasible).
At least in my game, very few World Congress resolutions really felt momentous. Once the few early ones were done, like group projects and arts vs. science funding, it felt like selecting from a list of things I knew would never pass (World Religion) or things that I didn't care about at all. Maybe my game was unusual that way since it was relatively peaceful, which in turn may have been because I was on random and got archipelago. But WC just left me feeling a little empty. Especially when, for all the talk of improved diplo wins, I won by buying every CS on the map and winning while everyone else voted for him/herself. I tried brining Babylon to vote for me but to no avail, despite having over. 40,000 gold and 630 income to bribe with.
Despite the above I can't comment too authoritatively - so far I've had one duel map, which is a poor showcase and one full game in which I had a minority of delegates, so never got to propose resolutions (and often not to affect them, hence the ban on cloves passing).
In my current game I'm leading the delegate numbers (though narrowly missed out on founding the World Congress because the one clue I had regarding where the final unknown civ was hiding - that France had encountered it - had me hunting near Paris, which turned out to be in the wrong direction), so I've got to propose resolutions. I'm seeing more of an effect, however since the Congress wasn't founded until the 19th Century because the Swedes were hiding, we've only had one session. The second looks to be a challenge - I'm trying to push through Buddhism as the World Religion, a move opposed by half the world. I'm going to have to spam Prophets and do some serious diplomatic legwork to work with that; I have the most delegates, but not a majority by any means.
By the way, there seems to an issue with Arts vs. Science funding - in my last game both were enacted, however only the first (Arts) was counted, when surely the effects on GP generation should be a function of the combined effect of both?
Tourism, once I got the hang of it, also didn't feel like it was adding much meat to the game–more like empty calories. I got Archaeology and Exploration early, and quickly found myself with more useless beads than I knew what to do with. Pretty soon I was settling useless landmarks everywhere just to avoid running out of slots for works of art.
Yes, it's not great that you have to make the decision at that specific point, so you must park archaeologists until you're ready to use them. I'd like artifacts to have some feature distinguishing them from art (such as different outputs related to era or civ), particularly since landmarks scale with era. Also making the landmark a UI associated with a random feature of the landscape that's uncovered late is awkward. It would undoubtedly work better in games with more warfare in the early game, however since most sites seem to be associated with barbarian camps, by definition they're going to be outside any civ's borders, and quite often former camps are on the best city sites so that the ones that aren't outside your borders are under your cities, and so destroyed.
Also, there appears to be another bug - I can build archaeologists, but I can't buy them (no option to purchase at all, not just greyed out, and I can't see an option to do so even when I can buy any other civilian unit), and I can't see a reason this would be intentional (after all, you can buy Artists etc.)
The works trading system is really lackluster, and once I filled the Louvre and my Hermitage for their theming bonuses, I felt like new culture wins were a lot like the old ones. Just waiting for circles to fill up. Except the old way, as non-interactive as it was, at least gave me rewards. I'm talking from a strictly behaviorist perspective here. Getting a new policy and hearing the pen-scratch sound is a good reinforcement. The new way, AFAIK, doesn't really give me an incremental reward in the same way as I get closer to victory. It's just a binary "I've won or I haven't yet" system. Also the fact that another civ pursuing culture makes it so tedious hurts it a lot, although having interactivity in culture wins (past nuking then) is really good.
Fully agreed with this, but I think the game significance of the 'rewards' is deeper than behavioural psychology. Policies give you different rewards depending on which ones, and which trees, you select, and that can add variety to the way the game plays in a way a useless tourism resource can't.
The one thing I really did like, though, was the ideological blocs. While just basing ideologies off culture, effectively making them slightly more customizable trees, is a big disappointment, I loved how they influenced politics. I was first, getting Freedom, and then when my two closest allies Ethiopia and Carthage took Order and Autocracy respectively, we started drifting apart, becoming rivals. Ethiopia even sent a fleet after me I think, but rush-buying a fleet of WWI bombers and upgrading my Frigates to Battleships made him think better of it.
I love the political effects, but in my first game where I got to see it in action the effects were too binary - all the non-Freedom civs rapidly became rivals, and one an enemy. It seems to take very little account of other diplo modifiers built up during the game.
Another weakness is that it was basically outside my control in that game - I happened to choose the ideology that became dominant (actually when I chose it, Order was more common than Freedom), but the effects on other civs were driven by Persia's cultural influence rather than mine. There's nothing wrong with this conceptually, indeed it's somewhat reflective of reality (the Cold War success of capitalist democracy was driven by the fact that America had adopted it, not that Belgium had), but in a game context it means you're forced to play tourism heavily or have no control over the defining feature of late-game diplomacy, and this is not good.
Then later when my old rival Babylon took Freedom, we started patching up old rifts and ended the game with a DoF. That dynamic diplo experience was really rewarding.
Yes, it was great to see Shaka come in from the cold after his unpopular Order government was overthrown and he was forced to adopt Freedom.
Trade routes, while a great addition, also didn't feel like they were adding anything to the late game slide. Just another button to click again every 30 turns.
If you're the one pushing an ideology or trying to become influential, they're an important way to spread your influence. If you're not, they're not. I feel this is a big flaw with BNW - it seems to be forcing a playstyle that focuses too much on its sometimes restrictive new mechanics. If the tourism system was better-realised, with more varied ways to significantly increase your output, this would not be an issue - like religion it would be a mechanic that you should use, but that you can use to pursue a strategy in a number of different ways. Unfortunately this focus on tourism means that the failure to implement it well has negative knock-on effects on the rest of the game.
Anyways, I'vs seen nothing but praise for the endgame in BNW, so I wanted to put this out there for people to way in on. Is my experience unusual? Was there possibly something I missed, or maybe the map script tamped down on the game's ability to provide at the very end? What's your own experience been? Overall it was a great experience and I love the expansion, but I just didn't see where the late game love was coming from.
I don't think there can be any argument that BNW doesn't change the late game, or that there isn't more to do in the late game than there is in G&K, and the latter was the thrust of the expansion. I fully agree with you that the BNW mechanics are not brilliantly implemented - as a whole, to me the game feels less complete now than with G&K, with unfinished systems that make a third expansion more necessary than the second one was (if a third expansion can do for tourism what BNW did for religion or G&K to city-states, it would be well worth it) - but it does do quite a lot to make the end-game at least more varied, even if it does just mean pushing a couple of buttons every 30 turns they are at least different buttons.
