Brave New World allows you to destroy your enemies with art

Nothing beats rounding up your armies of cavalry and totally crushing your enemies in Civilization V. Take that Ghandi! But suppose you could create enough foofy statues and paintings to grind the other rulers under your heel? The Brave New World expansion doesn’t just add badass rulers like Shaka Zulu and Casimir, it also allows players to choke out their rivals with art!

Eurogamer sat down with Firaxis to look at how you can make Ghengis Khan cry over your culturally important works of art.

The way the new culture victory’s implemented may truly make it sing. Great works are stored in your cities in specific buildings – places like museums and amphitheatres – and many of these structures come with more than one slot. This leads to a compulsive little mini-game – the poker bit – where you get an additional boost to both culture and tourism when matching works that go together thematically

It’s not just about the avant-garde. Brave New World will also add a new wrinkle to the later game in the form of archaeology.

“What happens is that as the game starts up and you have initial battles with the barbarians in the early and classical era, we keep track of that, and it effectively gets written onto the map,” says Beach. “Then, when the first civilisation unlocks archaeology, we generate a new resource on the map – just like iron or uranium. But this new resource is antiquity sites, and it’s generated from the location data that’s been built up during the course of the game so far.”

I’ll finally be able to crush native barbarians and use the excuse that I’m just preserving their cultural history for future generations to learn about.

Also, if none of this does it for you, remember that Brave New World will let you create the XCOM squad (pictured) to destroy Paris.