That being said the new Civilization 5 1.0.3.276 patch mainly focuses on the games multiplayer mode
Just because the penalty has been halved doesn’t mean you have to wipe out every City State.
Despite the release of Civilization: Beyond Earth only last week, Firaxis Games has just released the new Civilization 5 1.0.3.276 patch which along with tweaking the warmonger penalty, has also slightly nerfed Tradition and brings a few bug fixes to the multiplayer mode.
The biggest change this patch has brought to the game is the new scaling of the Warmonger penalty. While previously the penalty was based around capturing cities, declaring war and capturing City States since this patch the penalty will now scale based on the era you’re in. This means that the penalty will only be 50% of its normal strength in the Ancient era, and up to 90% in the Industrial era and 100% in every era afterwards. Also as an added bonus this patch means that the amount of warmonger penalty you got for attacking a City-State has been halved, which is great news for Genghis Khan players.
Besides the new scaling to the Warmonger penalty, the biggest change is a slight nerfing to the Tradition opener and a slight boost to the Piety tree. This means that there is now one addition policy needed to get Legalism and more importantly one more required for the Landed Elite policy. In the Piety tree you’ll now need one less policy in order to get a Reformation belief, which adds an additional powerful bonus to your religion such as the ability to buy educational buildings with faith.
Staying with the single-player for a second the new patch also means that you’ll still be able to unlock the Conquest of the New World achievements when playing the Deluxe version of the scenario, and the Cocoa and Bison resources from that Deluxe version have also been added to the main game.
Besides the above most of the other changes brought with the 1.0.3.2776 patch are bug fixes for the multiplayer mode. For example you can now unready yourself if the leader of the group changes the rules of a game, you can now set your own nickname in LAN matches and the patch also fixed that bug where you were stuck in the joining multiplayer screen if you were using an incomplete IP address while attempting to join through using your IP address.
The new Civilization 5 1.0.3.276 patch has been available to all Civilization 5 players since last night and if you want to check out the patch notes for yourself, you can do so here.
The original source for the patch notes was the 2K forums.