Spring is rolling in (soon), and with it comes more free time. More free time = me playing an increased amount of Civ V. I have heard that there are Civ fans on the forum, and was wondering if anyone has purchased Brave New World. I bought the GNK expansion last summer, and was mightily pleased by it. Is BNW worth it? I've only know of two people who bought the expansion, one loving it, saying it brought more dynamic gameplay to the post-Colonial Era game, and the other hating it, saying it overcomplicated aspects of the game, and that tourism was a massive fustercluck.
What say you?

Don't...just don't get me playing Civ again. I've kicked that habit for good, and I can't sink another 1000+ hours into it.

BNW is definitely worth it, 100%.

but then since I'm the sort of person who buys Civ expansions day of release, I would say that.

BNW completely revamps the game. It fixes all the problems hardcore Civ players complained about, makes multiplayer more interactive, et cetera

I never played 4 or 5. Last one I played was 3. How do you think they compare?

Has anyone ever played any non-Civ Sid Meier's game? I've only known Sid Meier's Gettysburg! (actually, years before I touched to Civ series to be honest). From the Civ series I only know Civ IV + expansions and Civ Rev for X-Box 360.

There was a Humble Sid Meier Bundle this month, 15 bucks for everything Civ III, IV, V including Gods and Kings, BNW, Scrambled packs + Pirates, Railroads and Ace Patrol. I used to love Pirates, my brother loves Railroads and the Civs sounded like a good deal.

BNW was totally worth it.

Alpha Centauri was a fantastic game. In my opinion, it surpassed the Civilization series. And you can get it to run in a Windows XP virtual machine just fine.

Oh, Gettysburg was one of the best games from my childhood. Had completely forgotten about the hours I put into that.

Yebellz, I never put as much time into IV as I did into II and III but it definitely holds up. I've just recently gotten back into it and it's a blast. It does a good job of automating the crap you had to do in earlier versions while still allowing you some new depth.
It works out well for people like me who really enjoy the game but aren't willing to put the detail orientated time in that you need to play the top few levels of the game.

Haven't played V yet (because my computer isn't good enough) but I've heard great things.

Also, for the kids out there that never had the pleasure of playing Pirates, you definitely should. The new one didn't do it for me the way the old one did but it's still awesome.

I've played Pirates but I prefer the Civ series more. I've heard many many good things about ALpha Centauri.. just haven't gotten a chance to play it. I'm considering putting Civ 4 on my laptop (just isn't up to par for Civ 5) and I of course have Civ 5 on my desktop.

Weird, tonight I was just playing Civ I.... we've come a long way

I play Civ 5 G&K pretty regularly. I haven't bought BNW yet, will probably wait for whenever the next expansion or Civ 6 comes out then get BNW on some $2.50 sale on Steam. I was not thrilled with Civ 5 vs. Civ 4 when I first tried it, but with the G&K add-on I think I overall like Civ 5 better now.

I also have logged 1,000 on Civ V... could have learned a language.

Eli, it's best not to think about what we could have accomplished instead of playing Civ.

Excellent point Yonni!

That's a lot of days.

through the ages board game

Hooked on Civ since civilization I. Also love Pirates, Alpha Centauri and Gettysburg. Now I spend most of my time playing the CIv Board Game.

Alpha Centauri suffered the same flaw as most civ games. Once you get a certain unit you suddenly become invincible. If memory serves a lightly armoured helicopter with a big gun was as cheap as chips and could cut through waves of the enemy like butter.

After that, aside from a few frustrating hours trying to design a useful naval unit that wasn't an espionage ship, there were no real challenges.

I've spent 700 hours on Civ. fml

Sid Meh. The guy basically ripped off the idea of Advanced Civilization the board game. Just like his latest project with is a rip-off of the game Sopwith.

@Octavious - I generally used mind-worms on Alpha Centauri.

The Galactic Civilizations series is also worth checking out.

I haven't played the original, but I've probably logged well over 5,000 hours on Civ over the years. I think the only one that I didn't enjoy all that much was Call to Power, but even that wasn't too bad.

BNW is extremely good for multiplayer and I would recommend it if you actually intend to play against human players, as the cultural victory is no longer a race and is instead a proper competition, and space victory is no longer the easiest road to victory (late game techs are considerably harder to reach). The late game ideologies (freedom, order, autocracy) are very well done and make the game much more enjoyable from industrial onward.

The play style has changed slightly in that massive expansion isn't as well rewarded (and OP) as happiness is harder to acquire until industrialisation when you can get a few happiness from certain buildings policies. Additionally, tech costs increase with additional towns (and puppets) making spam towns slightly less effective at gaining insane science growth. Finally, other than the capital, unless you have a lot of stolen great works (new concept, artists have been split into categories that can each generic certain types of great works which help you win cultural victory), your towns won't have as much culture output making policies a lot harder to gain with lots of founded towns.

The problems I do have with the expansion is the AI is even more clueless in how to conduct warfare, as they don't even build walls most of the time, even on king and higher difficulties. Additionally, the AI seems to be affected more by the whole warmonger thing in BNW as it is a bit more fleshed out, which is good for the cultural/peaceful players as they used to assist the people that were going to kill them next, however the military superpowers pretty much condemn themselves to defeat by being hypocritical and hating other warmongers and as a result having nobody to trade luxuries with, the people get angry with the leader, and the empire's advance is halted. It's unfortunate the brutal militaristic powerhouses of high difficulty GNK just don't exist and BNW AI opponents are generally quite poor players. They tend to favour cultural victory now, and they generally just suck at it, and I have no idea why.

I avoided mind worms purely because of the look of them. I found them the third most annoying thing in the game (second only to other nations spamming the board with naval bases and the computer blatantly cheating with its missile ranges).

They do solve the problem of one unit being over-powered, especially if you can get hold of the psi-combat wonders.

BNW is a really good expansion. To be honest, GNK isn't as good as it should be. If Civ could improve its early game, it would be extremely good, but the early game is a weakness. The diplomacy in BNW improved a lot with the world congress and better U.N. The cultural victory makes a lot more sense now.