Here’s a fact: late-game Civilization is usually awful. Most of the important decisions take place at the beginning of a game, and the last third is about managing momentum. That’s what makes Civilization V: Brave New World the best Civilization expansion so far. Instead of just losing the endgame, now you can win it.

There are two major prongs to Brave New World’s attack on modernity. The first is to introduce ideologies as a subset of the culture-driven policy tree. It’s similar to the religion systems of Gods & Kings, where the founders of a religion get to choose its beliefs. Once a civilization industrializes, it can choose from the ideologies of Freedom, Autocracy, and Order, and then select tenets that provide special bonuses and abilities. This adds a lot more flexibility throughout the game.

The other major change involves the culture victory, and its implications that affect even civilizations that eschew cultural achievements. In both Civilization IV and Civilization V, cultural victories are a passive process, especially because Civ V imposes huge cultural penalties on large empires. Too often, culture demands weakness; you just build lots of cultural buildings and Wonders, and then spend the 20th and 21st centuries taking a knee. Loading

Brave New World fixes this with the concept of tourism. In a nutshell, culture still unlocks policies as before, but most cultural buildings have sockets in them where Great Artists, Musicians, and Writers can place Great Works, generating tourism that slowly earns you influence over the other civs. Once you cross a certain ratio of tourism-to-culture, the other civilization falls under your influence. And when all of the civs have fallen under the spell of your music, paintings, and literature, you get the culture victory.

You’ll be glad I explained it that way, because Civilopedia is so inscrutable on this point that I think the Sphinx must have written it. But the bottom line is simple: culture-weak civs are easy prey for tourist influence, but culturally strong ones can be an insurmountable roadblock to the culture victory … unless something bad were to happen to them. Something like extermination. Let's see how the French feel about their own cultural achievements when my nation of artists and writers start carpet-bombing Paris.

These two factors change the endgame tremendously. Instead of a bunch of civs slowly gliding toward the culmination of their chosen strategies - with only the Conquest civs choosing to fight wars - the finale of a Brave New World game is much less predictable, and 10 times more exciting, because there are so many more points of conflict.

In fact, everything in Brave New World pushes towards the direction of having more interaction between civs, of broadening the context for strategic decision-making. For instance, caravans and cargo ships now ply the trade lanes between empires, generating gold and extra research for both civilizations. But that’s not the only thing they carry: trade routes also spread religion between cities, and make each side of the trade relationship more susceptible to tourism influence. It lends an interesting dynamic to these exchanges: the gold generated might be more than offset by the way trade opens the door to religious and cultural influence and gives less technologically advanced civilizations a bonus to their research, helping them catch up to you.

Things really heat up when the World Congress begins to meet and vote on global proposals. These proposals can confer bonuses or penalties on different civilizations: a standing-army tax can force militaristic civs to pay considerably more in upkeep, strangling their economy, while an arts-funding measure can increase the rate at which every civ generates Great Artists. Given the disparate ways these measures can help you or your rivals, the World Congress becomes the setting for increasingly high-stakes diplomacy.

In my game as Morocco, I used my civ’s trade-route bonuses to outspend the Greeks on city-state allies and undercut its natural affinity for city-states. But while I could hold it to a slight advantage in the Congress, I couldn’t break its chokehold on world affairs. This was partially because the AI is terrible at forming voting coalitions. I was forced to conspire with my closest ally (and religious kindred, the Turks) to gank him. I launched a decapitation strike at his capital while the Turks wiped out his colonies, and the Aztecs joined in a pile-on. I captured his capital and seized the host-rights for the World Congress, averting his diplomatic victory and opening the door to my own cultural triumph (after I wiped out Siam, of course). Loading

As a side-note here, Brave New World really takes the dangling threads of Gods & Kings and brings them to their full potential. Espionage may never be my favorite mechanic, but with the World Congress, spies now have an immensely important role. They can subvert city-states to your cause and away from another player, or they can journey to foreign capitals as diplomats who can let you make bargains over World Congress votes. Religion, too, is more closely tied to every other aspect of the game. It will affect war, diplomacy, economics, and culture from the beginning to the very end of the game, far more so than in Gods & Kings.

There are so many new ways to get bonuses and abilities from Ideologies and from Congress votes that, at last, the endgame no longer feels like a slog toward inevitability. Late-game strategic switches are hard, but far from impossible. I’m much more likely to stick with a struggling game because now there’s a good chance to make up lost ground in the 20th century.

If anything, Civ V: Brave New World no longer really feels like Civ V so much as it does Civ VI. Before its expansions, Civ V hinged on committing early to a victory condition, then using your civ bonuses, units, and buildings to get there. The trade-off for this was a great deal more constraint in gameplay. Brave New World lifts a lot of those constraints, which makes for a more dynamic late-game but also slightly diminishes the special character of each individual civ, despite the addition of nine new ones. Between Religion, Ideology, and Congressional acts, there are almost always a few options available for eliminating your weaknesses and playing-up your strengths.

That’s a trade-off that I’m willing to make, though. Brave New World is in some ways a less elegant, slower-paced experience (a complete game on standard settings easily runs over 12 hours, though some of this is due to Civ V’s chronically poor performance in the modern era). But it has completely solved Civ V’s third-act problems and makes me feel far less imprisoned by early-game choices. It’s a more competitive, more kinetic game.