Each great work provides a culture boost, as well as a tourism boost. You earn both those by spawning great artists, writers, and musicians, who each can create great works that will display in the museums, opera houses, amphitheaters, and great wonders you build in your cities. Cultural victory, for instance, is no longer tied to the nebulous 'utopia project,' but rather through cultural influence that can only be earned through copious amounts of earned culture and tourism. Still, while not all the new civs are especially great, nearly all the mechanical changes made are to the game's benefit. Cultural victories are much easier to achieve now, thanks to the new diversity of great artists, writers, and musicians. Unlike other puppet states in the game, you can purchase buildings and units for them, which gives you a bit more control than you'd otherwise have, while still preventing you from traditional expansion. With Venice, you cannot create settlers nor annex cities, but you can use a Merchant of Venice unit to 'buy out' city states and make them puppets. Morocco probably makes the best use of the new trade elements, while Venice has the distinction of being the only playable city state.

The Zulus and Assyrians, for instance, are both traditionally warlike cultures to add to the already lengthy list of those, while the Polish do little of note except collect extra social policies at the beginning of each new era. Unfortunately, few of the new Civs feel particularly creative or unique within the greater scope of the dozens of other civs already present in the game. These trade routes are extremely important for every civ in the game, but several of the nine new civs added for this expansion, which include Morocco, Portugal, and Venice, focus largely on wealth acquiring and trade bonuses. Going to war all but assures your trade routes will get swallowed up, and early on, when barbarians are still a frequent risk, you'll have to make sure your routes are regularly clear. The risk is that trade routes are easily plundered.

Outside of your own empire, you'll receive nice gold bonuses (especially after you've built a caravansary in your originating city), apply religious pressure, and even gain some small science boosts from certain empires. You won't get gold if you travel to your own cities, but you can create food or production bonuses. With these trade routes, you'll build either a land caravan or cargo ship to travel to other civs, city states, or even your own cities. Trade routes make for an exceptional boon to players that tend to find themselves financially strapped, without just making it overtly easy to gain gold at all times. Maybe it's just because I'm terrible at resource management, but I often found myself running into financial trouble in previous iterations of this game, especially once I started expanding further and further, building more roads, and so on. The most significant change to the core game is the addition of trade routes. New civs, new mechanics, and new scenarios make up the content of Civilization V's latest expansion. Then again, Sensible New World doesn't have quite the same ring to it, I suppose.

In this regard, Brave New World is perhaps less a brave step forward for this aging title, and more a sensible one. These are all changes that make perfect sense, and mostly manage to achieve Firaxis' goal of a better, less predictable late-game push, without making any major fundamental changes to the way Civ V is generally played. It aims to revamp the sometimes tepid and mundane late-game elements with reworked culture mechanics, additional monetary resources, and a whole new method of diplomacy between civilizations.

Brave New World is a bigger expansion than the last, and a more targeted one. We're now three years removed from Civ V's initial release, and a year from the last big expansion to overhaul this world-dominating strategy game. Calling Civilization V's latest (and last) expansion Brave New World was an interesting, if not wholly accurate choice.

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