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And yeah I've slogged through games dealing with pressure the entire time just scraping by with help from Autocracy, but the entire time I'm thinking "this would be a helluva lot easier if I just ensured I was dominant culture faction before hitting Ideologies", which is basically my point. The easiest, best route for extended warmongering (i.e., not clearing a pangaea with Hunnic horse archers) is to go for all the non-war items in the game. A bit backwards if you think about it.
Remember: many a domination victory has accidentally turned into a culture victory first.
Besides, I'm not talking about solutions, I'm talking about game design. This is a game where you customize your empire to stand the test of time by choosing where you want your priorities. Now nobody said Civilization was a balanced game, but in general this idea holds up. If you want to be a religious Civ, picking religion-related mechanics is a good idea.
If you want to be a warmongering expansionist Civ, the last thing you want to do is pick war-related mechanics. In G&K you could get by, because while Krepost was still crap, you weren't punished for building it. In BNW, Krepost is still crap, and shame on you for not building an amphitheatre instead, your main source of culture for going into mid game and also building up Ideology resistance. Or spending that gold on city-state alliances instead of units and maintenance, so you could vote down luxury bans, embargos, and world ideologies.
More importantly, other options and ways of play are not punished. You wanted to go Freedom as your tree-hugging pacifist small and tall empire, but the leading tourism faction chose Order? No problem, you have more happiness than you need anyway, you can still go Freedom. You want to warmonger with Autocracy but the leading tourism faction chose Freedom? Welp, get ready for a massive unhappiness hit which greatly limits how quickly and far you can expand until you figure out a solution. Or, just also go Freedom and give up the choice you wanted.
It isn't that I hate BNW, it is just that I go into every game feeling pressured to play a specific way, which is essentially all or nothing when it comes to war. Either you go all out and clear the map before anyone else can leave medieval, or you completely ignore war until after you've essentially won the game through other means (huge tech lead, huge culture/tourism lead, controlling majority of CS's, etc). Anything in between often ends up being a punishment with little to no benefit.
It isn't by coincidence that most of the trash-tier Civs in the game are the ones with war-related bonuses, and BNW pushed this idea even further. At least in vanilla and G&K you could eventually snowball. A Civ like Assyria would have ben god tier in G&K, not so much in BNW.
If something needs to be balanced, it's science in general and some of the policy trees ( 9/10 games end with tradition + rationalism, sprinkled by a few liberty or honor domination games ).
And who would that be, apart from Assyria?
But I digress. I feel like ideology is a bit of a hassel when playing with AIs in general.
Also, the fact that you can punish warmongers with ideology is an excellent mechanic in this expansion, if you want to go to war you should have the production to get the early ideology from factory rushes. After this you then have your own pressure ideologically and making other warlike civs adopt this increases your chances at warring.
You have to also recognise which civs are going to try and defeat you with the ideological battle and circumvent them in the early game.
I believe that a slightly different phrase would describe more accurately the game's mechanics: 'ON LARGER MAPS, if you don't want your QUICKLY expanding empire to crumble apart, you build museums TOO, not ONLY barracks'. How many? See the above mentioned circumstances. The museums and the barracks support and reinforce each other, don't replace each other.
Example. In my current game I chose Portugal, and my continental neighbors were Russia, America and the Aztecs. There are also Greece, Babylon, Netherlands and Germany on other continents. I rushed Industrial Age to get the three factories, but surpise! No coal. Conquered the Aztecs, got gold from puppet cities. I used my 3 Nau to get some more gold and befriend a city-state. Also sent a worker to improve its coal resource. Then I built/bought the factories and chose Freedom. I bought a Great Writer with faith too. So now I had 6 Foreign Legion, which accompanied by artillery and frigates conquered the rest of the continent (Russia and America). With other Freedom tenets, I was able to keep at bay Greece (spies double chance to rig the elections and +4/turn influence with city-states from trade routes). Levelled the spies and got one more with the National Intelligence Agency. Later, got one more with the Great Firewall (the one I kept in my capital, now available to send to a city-state). Now I feel powerful and happy enough to invade and conquer the other large continent. The rest of it. I have Boston there, a beachhead from my previous war. All my battleships have +range from the beginning (focused on military buildings in Lisbon, my capital). That should help. I also have Great War bombers with extra range. Building now two carriers (5 bombers each).
My point - I do focus on military. But social policies and ideologies create opportunities or help taking advantage of some opportunities, or help compensate for some weaknesses etc. There is no policy or ideology best suited for a certain victory condition, and most certainly it would be very difficult to wage an all out war without focusing on military. I prefer to play on large continental maps, and I play domination exclusively, so I know that expansion comes at a cost. But so does playing tall. And you do get severely punished for being peaceful. Should I decide to try any other kind of victory (not going to happen, just saying), what could any of the other civilizations do to stop me? Three cities against 30? Ridiculous. What kind of culture/tourism, or science could they generate to beat me? Diplomacy? I have every single city-state in my pocket.
Conquering the world is not easy, especially on larger maps, but it goes hand in hand with all the other victory conditions, and really, none of them seems particularly easy. I don't need to build museums instead of warships, but building museums helps building a stronger military, which in turn helps building more museums. What kind of victory I want - that's entirely up to me. I really don't think that the ideologies cheapen the war side of the game in any way, but they offer more customization options to the game I want to play. Frankly, I believe that the way the levels of difficulty work is the only factor that narrows down the options and so cheapens the play somewhat.
I don't disagree on both how difficulties are handled or the balance issues, but that is still more or less what I am saying through different wording. If the war-related mechanics don't favor warmongers, then it is partly a balance issue.
And no, it isn't just one thing, but several. I could point out issues with policies, tech tree structure, base unit stats, yields buildings provide, etc.
Japan, Ottomans, Iroquois, Denmark. Russia isn't played for Krepost or Cossack, but for production and extra trades. Germany would make the list if it weren't for Hanse, even if considering games which last long enough for Panzer. Rome isn't played for their UU's. Sweden is okay, but like Greece the benefits more come from CS's.
Really, it would be easier to ask this question in reverse. Which Civs are clearly designed to profit from war AND actually do so? China, Shaka Zulu, Huns, and England. Maybe Persia.
Then you could make an additional list of Civs which clearly are NOT designed for war, yet completely blow away others when playing war games.
Anyway, while related, a bit off topic since I wanted the focus more on BNW and not base design flaws.
The reverse isn't really true though. Other than the obvious "have some standing military so you don't die", there is zero punishment for ignoring anything war related and nearly zero punishment for ignoring additional game mechanics like Ideology pressure and WC.
Of course a big part of this is flaws with the 1UPT system and/or flaws with AI, but let us ignore those for now.
I'll throw out this hypothetical idea just to show what I mean. Say there was an additional bucket called "military experience" or whatever. You fill this bucket in much the same way you fill culture and faith buckets. At certain points, you are rewarded with global military bonuses. Either directly through enhanced combat strength, heal speed, movement, etc., or indirectly such as extra happiness in occupied cities, less road maintenance, whatever. You fill this bucket by getting improvements such as barracks, building certain wonders which give points, maybe even have a one-time use on great generals to boost it.
Now, there is actual competition and choice. You are rewarded for focusing on war-related improvements. You are rewarded for combat (more GG's to use the ability, perhaps benefits from capturing cities).
Sure, you may get punished for not focusing as hard on culture, religion, diplomacy and such, but it is no longer one way, it goes both ways now. The tree hugging small and tall Tradition empire who doesn't focus on similar improvements may still be able to garrison crossbows in Oligarchy cities, but they are punished by going up against more powerful, effective enemy military and that same enemy is also a threat you need to manage if it is only getting stronger by feeding off conquest, in much the same way a WC leader and tourism leader is a threat for warmongers and needs to be checked.
We got something similar in G&K purely through snowballing, but with additional mechanics to slow snowballing, some flaws in the game tend to be a bit more apparent. Which is why everyone, inluding most AI's, play as tree huggers for 90% of the game because you just don't profit otherwise.
You can quickly ally with all culture city states towards the beginning and just race your culture that way, instead of building culture buildings. I've been able to buy a ton of culture this way and still keep up with culture civs, while waging war on everyone i come in contact with. The other benefit to this is it pisses off civs that eventually declare war on me, which is convenient right?
The next thing you could try is just change your alignment. If freedom is more popular than what you're doing, then just switch. I know you'll lose the perk of the tree your on, but it'll be worth it to get your happiness back quickly. It'll be like pure communism... You are FREE my people, not really - its all a muse - but whatever.
The last thing you can do is just build the lourve and swap great works to get the theming bonus. I know its not beneficial for a domination victory, but the lourve with theming can get you a +16 tourism... i think... If you play french (muskeeters?) the bonus is like +24. It'll keep you a float, while you kill everything, with little vested effort.
You could say similar things about culture buildings - optimal science/domination games usually do not involve building anything above a monument and you can even win culture games without building them either through conquest, Sacred Sites, or dirt culture. Tourism is also a mechanic that is unnecessary in non-culture games - you don't need more than 2 SP trees, ideological tenets keeps your happiness afloat and by the time ideological pressure rolls around, you're already in winning position. Who needs more than -10 happiness when you're warmongering anyway?
And it isn't like these mechanics had value before BNW, it is just that you were able to overcome the low value just by snowballing. It is true you could warmonger and profit without even building libraries, because eventually your science output would increase from number of cities alone. Since you could ignore more buildings and still profit, you could waste hammers, time, and gold on mechanics which aren't really benefiting, but hey it adds cool flavor, like barracks and Heroic Epic.
Really, what it comes down to is what warmongering results in, which is typically land. BNW added a bunch of mechanics to both slow down the rate of expansion and the benefit of expansion in an effort to prolong the game... because games rarely lasted long into modern era anyway, and BNW was a late-game expansion. Which is fine, but in doing so they killed off all incentive to expand in mid game, and any wars fought are defensive in nature.
A shame, really, since they could have both boosted the value of various warmongering mechanics and prolonged the game. You could have let players snowball, but the means to do so included heavy focus on various warmongering mechanics, which in turn would have naturally been slower anyway because those same resources could not have been spent on the traditional methods of boosting growth, science, etc. In other words, balanced.
There certainly could have been a third expansion which focused on various things like diplomacy, war and how land is fought over and/or acquired, etc. Would have been way more successful than Civ in space