Many of Brave New World ’s changes–political ideologies to complicate late-game relations “tourism” to inspire simulated jealousy of other cultures a “World Congress” where players can trade votes for this cause or that one–seem focused on relieving this cramp, on creating new ways for players to express themselves diplomatically. A strategy game capable of generating interests so varied and complex naturally has trouble devising an interface for those interests to be bargained, traded, insisted upon, relinquished all Civ diplomatic systems feel cramped even (especially) when inhabited by real human players. In focusing on international relations, Brave New World is nobly trying to improve not just Civ 5 but the entire Civ series, for which robust diplomacy is a kind of final frontier. They hide, like worms, in its “interests.”īrave New World, the second expansion to Civ 4 ’s streamlined and sometimes dumber successor Civilization V, wants to make your interests more interesting than ever: to deeply complicate the dangerous tangle of deals, obligations, and suspicions. More than the old chestnut about land wars in Asia–I had learned that an empire’s suicidal mistakes don’t just come from stupidity in its leaders or dementia in its body politic.
Many turns later, as “war weariness” immersed my major cities in paralytic riots and an endless procession of the world’s best-armed troops disembarked from Indian Ocean transports to die uselessly in a jungle stalemate, I realized I had learned something. Sid Meier’s Civilization games are sometimes accused of being educational, but it’s not the three lines about how Stonehenge was built or the capsule description of the Malinese empire that educates you. “I don’t know if you should do that,” he said.īut I did. The next turn I announced to the friend I was playing with that I was sending troops to Indochina. I was much more technologically advanced than the Chinese much richer my home cities were an ocean away, untouchable. Trade suffered the security of Arabia and even Europe was in doubt. Chinese troops were pushing south into Indian territory, and the Indians were not going to be able to stop them. Here’s a thing that happened to me once in Civilization IV : as the more-or-less benevolent emperor of Earth’s western hemisphere, I watched a hungry and growing China declare war on its vulnerable neighbor India.
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