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Sid Meier's Civilization V >  Workshop > Comrade✘'s Workshop > Play The World Extended (Brave New World Edition) > Discussions
Play The World Extended (Brave New World Edition)
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gergwerb 13 Feb, 2014 @ 5:19pm
Accuracy vs. play-ability
Look... short review... totally unbalanced.

Long review. Ok so, the map is really nicely done, and has a lot of detail. And seriously, I realize its not a modders fault that the whole game is Euro-centric. But then trying to build a "realistic" Earth where the civ's are "realistically" placed simply makes the scenario horribly unplayable.

This map may have worked under the vanilla or G&K builds, where you didn't have to rely on trade routes for practically everything. But having a bunch of European civs all jam packed into a slightly bigger than real Europe, and the rest of the world sparsely populated simply doesn't work.

For example: I'm trying to play Indonesia (Epic timescale) and its simply impossible. You start on a tiny little island with practically no resources, so you're forced to focus all of your tech development on the ocean going side of the tree. And when you finally manage to get embarked, you find that every island is jammed with barbarians, so that settlement takes a small invasion force that you can barely support.

On top of that, there's not another civ anywhere to be seen, and only one city-state in decent proximty. Now, under vanilla and G&K, where you got gold largely from tiles, this may have worked. But under BNW, where all your gold (and many other things) come through trade routes, its nearly impossible to afford the army that you need to fight off all the barbarians, wchich are constantly spawning because there's absolutely no other civs to keep them in check.

So, after 200 rounds, I still only had two cities, and I'm LOSING to barbarians (not to mention the other civs that have beaten me to every Wonder, and are clearly like 50 turns ahead of me in tech development. I haven't MET any yet, but I get nice little messages about how badly they're beating me). I'm pretty sure that the continent of Australia literally has %50 of its tiles occupied by barbarian units.

Whew. So, look, realism's nice, but as a scenario, it's not playable. The map's too big for the number of civ's, they aren't distributed well, and there's too few city-states for the diplomacy mechanic. Unless you're playing as a European, you're going to lose.

/endrant
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Showing 1-7 of 7 comments
Krajzen 15 Feb, 2014 @ 5:47am 
Well, I agree with you - personally I edited this map in the world builder because I found it really unbalanced, I launched game also as Indonesia and it's pretty cool (I advice using mod "embark units on Sailing" + adding one tech for each civ: bronze working for jungle civs, sailing for sea civs and so on) but still this map is simply TOO BIG. Europe is always cramped and poor (the only hope for this continent is if one civ here conquers half of the landmass), Zulu have nothing to conquer and stagnate, central asia and siberia are horribly devoid of life (even much more than in the real history), and there is simply TOO MUCH LAND TO SETTLE! (especially with BNW science for city penalties). I am in the modern era - 2/3 of North America is free and there are insane amounts of barbarians here, and this is despite Shoshone have lots of cities. Mongolia has over 15 cities and yet this is way not enough to settle central asia, also they are still outnumbered by barbarians. North India, south China, Kazakhstan, Australia, Scandinavia, most of Balkans and very big parts of Africa - nothing. Not to mention Pacific (void). And this is with increased AI expansionism and decreased settling penalties! (by mods). No wars till medieval because of giant distances, no colonisation because this is just too much land in the old world to settle, no trade till medieval/renaissance. Zulu and Indonesia are screwed, whole regions have no strategic resources (no iron for Indonesia in the entire south east asia, seriously?) or lack production (yeah, almost no hills for Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, France...). Inca impossible to conquer because of mountains. Indian subcontinent too big to settle by Gandhi. Yeah, I will try smaller and more balanced map.
#1
Comrade✘  [developer] 17 Feb, 2014 @ 11:51am 
All your points are legitimate! World maps have their pros and cons, even more so as Civ V only allows a limited number of Civs, or doesn't give you enough possibilities to setup games on a custom map. Let alone that the game has not been developed with the real world in mind (which is a shame, given that a large percentage of Civ players have always loved to play such scenarios). ;)

You both should try the Enhanced Map Pack and its setup menu (if you haven't already). Not only can barbs be removed, you can play with more (up to 43) or less than 22 Civs, depopulate Europe etc.. It overall should make your experience with this map way more fun (there will still be some unpopulated areas however, such as Siberia, Northern Canada, parts of Central Asia):

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=164928513
Last edited by Comrade✘; 26 May, 2014 @ 4:51pm
#2
gergwerb 18 Feb, 2014 @ 12:34pm 
Thanks, I'll have to check that out, though this map already stretches my comp's capacities, I think it would run extraordinarily slow with even more civ's.

I think my main response would still be that, knowing the limitations of the scenario, and knowing that there is already a similarly built 'Play Europe' map, this scenario should not have had half the civs be European/Mediterranean. Since it's a 'Play the World' scenario, Europe should have been alotted an appropriate number of the 22 civ's, which is to say probably FEWER than any other continent, given that it has the smallest landmass. While this would still leave the civ's too spaced out, at least everybody would be equally spaced out.

As a last note, I replayed the scenario as the Shoshone, and discovered that the 'roominess' of the map actually gave them a ridiculous advantage. Their scout unit can choose what benefit to gain from Ancient Ruins. And while you can't just choose 'tech-tech-tech-tech', you can choose 'tech-culture-faith, tech-culture-faith', and with the ruins pretty evenly dispersed, I was able to use 3 scouts to roll across both North and South America claiming nearly ALL of the ancient ruins, and getting a ridiculous lead. So it's things like this that can make map builds really difficult to porperly balance, when they step outside of the intended base-game mechanics.

Anyway, I appreciate your response, and I'll have to see if the Enhanced pack works better.
#3
Skytrout 27 Feb, 2014 @ 12:41pm 
I Modded Americas out of my version since AI can't really interact that well intercontinentally. I managed to squeeze more civs into the remaining landmass in the process. Success! Really interesting. The way Columbus expected it to be :D
#4
Misko 22 Mar, 2014 @ 11:32am 
Well, to be fair, the base game itself has quite a small amount of civs that could populate Africa/Asia/South America, simply because most Civs originate from Europe, or are clustered in the Turkey/Saudi Arabia region as their historical empires (Ottomans, Assyria, Babylon, Byzantium, etc etc etc). If you REALLY think about it, Mongolia, China, Japan, India, Korea, and Indonesia are really the only civs in Asia that I can think of, along with Russia if you want to count them. That's actually not bad, this map has all of those except for Korea. Africa could have a little more but again more would equal the threat of clustering civs.

It is a pretty Europe/Asia centric map, but all Earth maps will be, there's almost no way to populate every corner of the globe with civs given what the base game has.

I think it would be cool if Hormigas cooperated with a modder like TPAngolin, who makes some spectacular "colonist" mods like Australia, Canada, Mexico, and Phillippines. Perhaps adding them to the map could help distrubite civs a bit more. But I think no matter what, with an Earth map as large as this, being outside of Europe will equal bad early game, but a very interesting late game.

Keep in mind Japan is actually incredibly strong on this map, they start beside Mt.Fuji and their island is swamped by luxuries and grassland-river wheat, whole island can be efficiently worked by 3 cities.

My 2 cents.
#5
gergwerb 23 Mar, 2014 @ 2:58pm 
Originally posted by Venmar:
Well, to be fair, the base game itself has quite a small amount of civs that could populate Africa/Asia/South America, simply because most Civs originate from Europe, or are clustered in the Turkey/Saudi Arabia region as their historical empires (Ottomans, Assyria, Babylon, Byzantium, etc etc etc). If you REALLY think about it, Mongolia, China, Japan, India, Korea, and Indonesia are really the only civs in Asia that I can think of, along with Russia if you want to count them..

Well, I think this is precisely not my point, or perhaps you illustrate it by saying it. When you say "that I can think of" it simply illustrates that we in the West have a very narrow conception of what constitues 'civilization', and also a very limited knowledge of the worlds actual civilizations.

There are, in fact, a s***ton more civilzations in Europe, Africa, North and South America than this game deigns to recognize. That you cannot think of them doesn't mean they don't exist, only that in the West we rarely discuss them, or bother with them, and hence even lack easy access to literature and references to them.

But more importantly, this is a game that, in its base form, starts you at 4000 BC, with a village and a people that are not yet Civ's at all. The point is that you build TOWARDS being a Civ, in a world where our own singular history does not exist. As such, there is no reason, for example, that you couldn't play Australian Aboriginals, and have them BECOME a civilization, regardless of the historical reality that we don't recognize their culture in that way in our world (which, again, I consider a bias.)

The only reason, game wise, that Australia's native people can't be included is the insistence on having each civ represented by a historical/archetypal 'god-king', that can be the cute little face you interact with. Since they didn't have one in our particular world, the game concludes that they couldn't have had one in ANY world, no matter the conditions.

So the insistence on the game's adherence to a 'great' person/leader mentality forces it to be built in a certain way, and thereby replicates our real world's Eurocentric view of history. Which is a crying shame.
#6
Commander Strax 25 May, 2014 @ 1:00pm 
when I play a giant map I turn off barbarians. problem solved.
#7
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