New Q&A session

[Martinus]

I guess the reference to Rome is a combination of several factors, some of them already mentioned:
- a slight boost to wide empires (and Rome has the most wide-empire-friendly UA of all civs),
- a good possibility of winning a cultural victory while being wide and aggressive (in fact they referred to Rome before as a historical example of winning a cultural victory the BNW-way, by capturing great works from other civs and then dominating them with your culture), and
- caravans could be used to boost production in the capital, and the more buildings are built in Rome, the more powerful the Roman UA becomes.

 

[Yubnub]

I've mentioned before that I believe the Mughal Fort will be replace due to it depicting the Red Fort in its icon. It's possible such a discrepancy will be overlooked, but the opportunity is there to replace the rather weak UB with, let's say, a faith oriented UB.

 

[JtW]

Regarding Polynesia buffs: they will have a greater choice of trading partners pre-Renaissance, as they are able to send their settler across the ocean. If they build a city on another continent separated by ocean from their starting spot, they will effectively double their trading opportunities.

The question, though, is if they will be able to leverage this, as you will have a limited number of trade routes early game.

 

[Ulthwithian]

Yubnub: What would really 'fix' India is if they replace the Mughal Fort with a UB that adds Happiness to an early-build building that you want to build regardless. Something like, oh, a Granary or Monument.

A UB Granary that had as its bonus +1 or +2 Happiness would completely reverse the perception of India, I think.

 

[Montov]

Maybe the benefit of Rome would be a 25% production bonus for internal trade routes?

And Indonesia needs 4 landmasses. It would be seriously OP otherwise. The maximum bonus is 12 happiness + 3 resources to trade for another 12 happiness or 10g/t or something. You will need to do something for those bonuses.

And can anyone tell me what happened to the National Treasury? Is it gone?

 

[VainoValkea]

National Treasury is gone, replaced by the East India Company.

 

[stealth_nsk]

And can anyone tell me what happened to the National Treasury? Is it gone?

There's no National Treasury on the tech tree we've seen so far. With gold income shifting to trade routes, this looks logical.

 

[PhilBowles]

Are we looking at the same Morocco? They concern completely different mechanics -- Morocco's ability pertains to trade routes, Arabia to trade networks.

The Arabian UA explicitly reads "+1 gold from each trade route". You may conceptualise the way this works as a trade network, but there's no Civ V mechanic called a 'trade network'. In practice, a trade route is just a road in Civ V to date, but if the Arabian UA retained the same wording in BNW, its UA would work with the new trade route mechanic - and so work exactly like Morocco's (just with 2 less gold for both parties and 1 less culture for Morocco), only for both domestic and international routes.

Then we have the bazaar, which has a lot of functional overlap with the Indonesian UA - except that the Indonesian UA gives you an all-new resource plus the bazaar duplicate, and while the bazaar becomes useless in the late game when the other civs willing to trade with you already have your resource, Indonesia can rely on a game-long monopoly. Of course the trade-off is greater flexibility: you can have more Bazaars and they aren't limited by when you can found cities on other continents. But the practical effect is similar.

 

[Altonym]

The Arabian UA explicitly reads "+1 gold from each trade route". You may conceptualise the way this works as a trade network, but there's no Civ V mechanic called a 'trade network'. In practice, a trade route is just a road in Civ V to date, but if the Arabian UA retained the same wording in BNW, its UA would work with the new trade route mechanic - and so work exactly like Morocco's (just with 2 less gold for both parties and 1 less culture for Morocco), only for both domestic and international routes.

In that case, could a hypothetical altered Arabian UA work by applying a Morocco-like bonus (perhaps with a different tweak, like more efficient/increased transfer of food and production) to domestic routes instead of international ones? Or perhaps providing a small gold yield from internal trade as well as the large yield from external trade?

It might differentiate the two powers by shifting Arabia a little closer to a wide bias and Morocco a little closer to a tall bias, maybe?

 

[JtW]

The Arabian UA explicitly reads "+1 gold from each trade route". You may conceptualise the way this works as a trade network, but there's no Civ V mechanic called a 'trade network'. In practice, a trade route is just a road in Civ V to date, but if the Arabian UA retained the same wording in BNW, its UA would work with the new trade route mechanic - and so work exactly like Morocco's (just with 2 less gold for both parties and 1 less culture for Morocco), only for both domestic and international routes.

The old trade routes, i.e., gold from roads, got renamed to City Connections for BNW and will still be there. So they could change the wording of the Arabian UA and keep it intact if they wanted. But it wouldn't represent the concept their UA tries to represent, I think.

 

[Trias]

The Arabian UA explicitly reads "+1 gold from each trade route". You may conceptualise the way this works as a trade network, but there's no Civ V mechanic called a 'trade network'. In practice, a trade route is just a road in Civ V to date, but if the Arabian UA retained the same wording in BNW, its UA would work with the new trade route mechanic - and so work exactly like Morocco's (just with 2 less gold for both parties and 1 less culture for Morocco), only for both domestic and international routes.

The game doesn't interpret the UA by parsing the English wording from the civilopedia. (In fact, it typically works the other way around. The civilopedia entries are made by parsing the code.) In BNW the civ5 mechanic called "trade route" is renamed to "city connection". So, without any alternations to the coding of the UA it would now read "+1 gold from each city connection".

 

[stealth_nsk]

I think the concept of Arabia as wide trade civilization will remain the same as there are no pretenders for this role. In vanilla their UA benefited wide civs, UB benefited both wide and trade and UU was freat for defending large empire.

So, I think in BNW they'll get some ability based on international trade routes and related to empire size. Probably some bonuses for trade routes coming from different cities. Something like this. There are a lot of possibilities, actually.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I've mentioned before that I believe the Mughal Fort will be replace due to it depicting the Red Fort in its icon. It's possible such a discrepancy will be overlooked, but the opportunity is there to replace the rather weak UB with, let's say, a faith oriented UB.

If they replaced UBs due to similar wonders, they wouldn't have gone with the Maya Pyramid given that Chichen Itza is in the game.

 

[AlpsStranger]

The game doesn't interpret the UA by parsing the English wording from the civilopedia. (In fact, it typically works the other way around. The civilopedia entries are made by parsing the code.) In BNW the civ5 mechanic called "trade route" is renamed to "city connection". So, without any alternations to the coding of the UA it would now read "+1 gold from each city connection".

Yeah, I was kinda like over here reading that too. The game isn't going to go like "Well, it does say trade route. Better recode myself accordingly."

Sounds like one of those guys you'd always get when you played M:TG who would come up with some bizarre, unique interpretation of the rules to serve himself.

 

[j51]

I think the concept of Arabia as wide trade civilization will remain the same as there are no pretenders for this role. In vanilla their UA benefited wide civs, UB benefited both wide and trade and UU was freat for defending large empire.

So, I think in BNW they'll get some ability based on international trade routes and related to empire size. Probably some bonuses for trade routes coming from different cities. Something like this. There are a lot of possibilities, actually.

It could be something related to faith and trade routes.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Since when? At least the "What we know" thread and Well of Souls state the opposite: a long trade route yields more money per turn. And that makes sense, given a longer route will require more defensive investments to maintain safely.

We've seem the tooltips for trade route gold yield. Distance is not there

Gold of the two cities
Buildings that boost it
Resource difference
(There is presence of a river, and whether it is sea)

 

[kingchris20]

I don't know...to me this is still as ambiguous as it was before. Or did everyone around here already figure it out? (Just got home, kinda tired to scroll through the threads). Hesitant to start throwing around strategies until I know for sure

Also, glad pepper was the choice. Very lucrative history long before the Dutch came even. The whole originated from India is a non-issue. Like many of the Unique Units in the game, it's tied enough to the history where it's basically Indonesian

EDIT: Slightly leaning towards four separate continents. But, again, if people figured this out somewhere else let me know

EDIT 2: More I read it the more I lean towards four separate continents. If they only meant capital, wouldn't they just say "(that is anywhere other than capital continent)" ?

Four separate continents, I mean it says The first three times Indonesia founds a city on a brand new continent(where it hasn’t yet founded a city)

That screams, four separate continents to me

 

[VainoValkea]

Well, technically the first city is founded on a city where it hasn't founded a city yet, isn't it?

 

[MadDjinn]

I guess the reference to Rome is a combination of several factors, some of them already mentioned:
- a slight boost to wide empires (and Rome has the most wide-empire-friendly UA of all civs),
- a good possibility of winning a cultural victory while being wide and aggressive (in fact they referred to Rome before as a historical example of winning a cultural victory the BNW-way, by capturing great works from other civs and then dominating them with your culture), and
- caravans could be used to boost production in the capital, and the more buildings are built in Rome, the more powerful the Roman UA becomes.

You could think of it this way.

You could also flip it around and have caravans leaving Rome to new cities, giving them a hammer boost via the trade route that may or may not be boosted by the Roman UA. It'll mean that those newly founded 'later' game cities get the % boost and a bunch of free hammers to quick build all of the basic buildings. Assuming you're just buying all buildings in Rome by that point ofc.

 

[Buccaneer]

You could think of it this way.

You could also flip it around and have caravans leaving Rome to new cities, giving them a hammer boost via the trade route that may or may not be boosted by the Roman UA. It'll mean that those newly founded 'later' game cities get the % boost and a bunch of free hammers to quick build all of the basic buildings. Assuming you're just buying all buildings in Rome by that point ofc.

I love it when you talk strategy.