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| Kill the white people! |
The newest expansion pack, "Brave New World" adds a plethora of new features that really do enhance the overall game significantly. If the bugs can be worked out, like the loss of some event sounds (including the little "ta-da-da" music that plays when your unit gets killed and the high-pitched flute notes that announce the discovery of a new "goodie hut.") then I think we got a winner, folks.
Of course, even with its flaws, I'm now more than ever hooked on this digital form of crack. Racked well beyond a hundred hours of this new iteration alone bringing total Steam play time to over 1350 hours.
One of the things I think has changed is the civ you pick, the early game land you chose to build on and the initial policies you make are much more influential to the later game than before when you could make-up missed opportunities later on. Now, if you did things right in the first few turns, good for you, it'll pay off in the long run. Make the wrong choices or get dealt with some bad luck and, well, you're gonna be sweatin' it from here on in. This aspect is much more in line with previous versions of Civ and, in my humble opinion, much more in line with real life. If you're born privileged and rich, you'll likely live life that way throughout. Grow up in the ghetto and well, you're fucked.
My preliminary eval of some of the new civs that I've played so far:
Assyria: Holy Shit! The Siege Towers, available very early on, are awesomely terrifying. Bronze Age Nukes on Wheels!! City, meet Siege Tower. City go Bye Bye.
Poland: Bankrupted so heavily and very early on to the point of, within a few turns, my civ becoming mentally retarded and having hordes of rebels burning all my shit. Fuck this. I'll try them again later, but I see they're designed to limit early expansionist players like me.
Venice: Relegated to only one city? Sounds like they'd suck, huh? Well think again. With the ability to buy up any city state you want, whether they like it or not, have a high happiness threshold overall, purchase power in puppeted conquered cities and a fucking ginormous pile of ever-flowing gold to spend to your freakin' heart's content, you'll easily be able to win in whatever way you choose. Take your time and enjoy the world as your oyster, or quickly raise a massive strike force of land and sea units and make the world your bitch in record time. The choice is yours.
Portugal: Only played for a little bit but so far seems evenly balanced.
Indonesia: I think you got to take fast advantage of the extra-continental settlement bonus otherwise these guys get bogged down in the dynamic trio of troubles that plague early efforts in this game: Ignorance, Poverty and Anger.
I have yet to try Brazil, Morocco, the Shoshone and, of course, the Zulu (yay, welcome back Shaka!), so I guess, without so much as a tidy closing, I'll go try out one of them right now. Bye.
*Here's how I tally-up the total cost of the game:
Vanilla game out-of-the-box: $60
Several DLCs released at various times over the past three years: $50
Gods and Kings expansion pack: $30
Brave New World expansion pack: $30
Tax: ~$15