Reflection after 2 BNW Games

[staplovich]

I just wanted to post some quick reflections on my experience with BNW so far. I'm going to assume you're familiar with the expansion overall.

First off, I've played 2 games and won them both. I played on King level. I had fun, but I do admit that I wish it were a bit harder. My first game I played as Morocco, and I really utilized their trade bonus; I ended up with so much gold I was able to handily ally sufficient city-states to win the Diplomatic victory.

My second game I played as Brazil and from the beginning wanted to figure out how to win the newly revised Culture victory. The 2 things I learned were:

1. Tourism takes off in the late game. Gaining open borders, maintaining trade routes, etc. are great ways to keep your tourism pressure up, but later buildings like the hotel and airport are crucial. So is the Internet tech, which doubles your tourism across the board
2. Although by and large you should use your Great Artists, Writers, and Musicians to make Great Works, using the Musicians' Tour ability on the one or 2 civs that are giving you trouble culturally is a really effective tactic as you're trying to wrap up a culture victory. A single Musician can yield well over 2,000 tourism.

I definitely think this new culture victory approach is preferrable to the old, which was stale and relatively unchallenging. That said, I wish the AI was a bit more cut-throat about opposing you once you begin to make serious progress towards a victory. If someone has a huge tourism score, DON'T sign Open Borders with them! It gives a 25% bonus to their tourism influence on your culture. I also would like the AI to be smarter about trying to split City-State allies from you if you are approaching having sufficient delegates to win. Maybe these things can be tweaked by Firaxis in the coming weeks and months.

Overall, I'm really happy with the expansion. It added a lot of new elements without losing that streamlined, user-friendly GUI that is crucial to Civ success (those of you who tried Call to Power will know a great example of a game stripped of this virtue).

I'm interested in hearing from others about their experiences--I've see a lot of complaints about a lack of early aggression. I've had wars in both games, though admittedly not in the very early game. But honestly, super early wars don't make a lot of strategic sense IMHO unless you are one of the civs with major bonuses (the Hun, obviously, as well as the Aztecs and some others) so I don't know that I see this as a bug or problem necessarily.

I'm also still trying to figure out all the details of the theming system. It's definitely interesting and I like that it demands some attention, but again, without seeming like it drags the game down in tedious micromanagement.

 

[ptoss1]

I've lost all my games on Prince difficulty, Huge map.
There's a runaway civ in every game. First it was the Russians. Then it was the Mongols. Both with the best terrain with cities situated beside mountains or isolated from possible aggression.

Tourism is great but you'll run into a wall when you realize you can't defeat that one civ with more culture than you can handle.

World Congress is the best addition to this game.

Trade Routes are a pain in the ass.

Civs with special gold bonuses have been given a major buff.

Military aggression has been nerfed for a variety of reasons. People hate you, can't trade, no money, World Congress penalties, etc.

 

[Philosophia]

I just finished my first game as Morocco and I won diplomatically as well! I found the world congress to be a powerful tool to punish run away civ. In my game Carthage conquered everything, and I was isolated behind mountains so it would have been hard to attack. I put an embargo Carthage and formed some allies during the ideology period. Me, India, Songhai, and Babylon ended up passing things that benefited us and allowed to us to spring ahead of Carthage. I really love the changes and can't wait to play more

 

[kingchris20]

I played my first game as the Shoshone on Prince, standard speed, huge continent map. I spawned on a continent with Assyria to my south and France to the south of Assyria, Morocco to my east and Greece to the East of Morocco.
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I built Pathfinder first and started exploring and popping ruins with 2 Pathfinders and ended up taking about 10 of them.....then the barbarians came, so I started pumping out pathfinders (since they move faster and are as strong as Warriors), so my military strength naturally went up. My military weakened as AI started teching, so I switched from the top half of the tree to the bottom half to catch up, throughout this phase I got the Great Library and the Parthenon, in addition to defending against the barbs.
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I built a total of 4 cities and focused on tourism, keeping a strong-enough military presence (no one even attempted to lower from "friendly" status with me though?) France and Greece teamed up on Assyria and reduced them to 2 cities, and Morocco joined in later. As they were fighting I was pumping up my religion and tourism. France became the first host of the WC, and Enrico was the Vice-host(?) each of them first proposed a ban on luxury resources. I had one of them and happiness was a problem at that point, so I of course focused all my delegates on nay to Salt ban...........Neither passed. As the WC opened and I met everyone, I found out that Indonesia had already removed Brazil from the game and was at war with Poland, while Portugal was at war with Venice.
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Venice and Assyria became the "bad guys" of the map as everyone started DoW'ing them over and over. The Zulu started on a lone continent at the bottom of the map, and Arabia had the same scenario (this continent map spawned 2 big continents and 3 smaller ones with other large islands throughout).
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As the second Voting round came up, to my surprise France proposed that my religion be the World Religion (I had spread throughout my continent and everyone had the "has happily adopted your religion throughout the majority of their cities" modifier, thanks to trade route influence spread). And to my larger surprise it passed! So I then had the 50% increase to tourism in the holy city for the rest of the game!
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I ended up popping a few more happiness and cultural/tourism wonders as time progressed and slowly started gaining influential status on everyone, starting with Assyria. My only war came when Assyria's closest city to me was in danger of being lost to France, and I kinda wanted it (it was on the coast and I only had one coastal city) so I waited for France to bilge it down in health and DoW'd Assyria and took the remains in one turn (that still did not offend anyone, even France for that matter).
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Aside from those "major" events, I used archaeologists to pop several dig sites (I took one from Morocco's territory, they came and told me to stop, but nothing else came of it) to get more tourism bonuses. The Louvre was the most beneficial and I was able to properly theme it for maximum tourism, along with a couple other +6 buildings (cant remember which they were).
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I ended up winning in the Atomic era via cultural victory.
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---I was surprised at the lack of DoWs or even denouncements against me, while there was plenty of that going on between the AI.

---I was surprised by how much the gold game has changed, and requires you to be in strategic spots to gain the best trade route possibilities.

---I was surprised that I never had a pillaged trade route

---I was surprised that I never had much of a say in the WC/UN (though Greece was in the game so not too surprising)