Yes, but to me this is not the philosophy of the game. Starting with civ2, you could mod all that away and the game would still be the same. Mods like Seeds of Greatness for instance respected the civ philosophy but were located in the fertile crescent and didn't have a western bias. It's just that the 'default mod' is targetted at Americans and Europeans, and therefore it tries to give them stuff they are familiar with.
Even the fertile crescent reflects the Western bias - agriculture arose in China, in New Guinea, and in the Americas, but it's the Mesoptamian origin from which Western civilisation is derived, and consequently with which audiences are familiar.
Civilization indeed is about nation states, rather than civilizations. which is why France, England, Germany are included when they are only nations, whereas India is much more of a civilization than any of the aforementioned in my opinion.
On the other hand, you'd end up with a drastically reduced civ pool if you literally reflected "European civilisation" - with no discrete American civ either.
As for centralised governments, Call to Power had for instance a 'city-states' government type while still retaining the same philosophy. I'm not sure that civ is really about centralised governments, at least in the early versions, where far-away cities became quite useless.
It intrinsically forces a centralised government approach because, after all, there is only one player per faction, and that player's role is basically to do the job of government over the course of their civ's history.
The choices of these differences is very arbitrary. Many units are ridiculous. French musketeers?
Yes, plainly some are better choices than others, and certainly many are chosen for popular appeal (or at least recognition). But that doesn't obviate the point I made, and anything you do to try and add individual flavour to a civ with a history that in most cases dates back centuries, in which it will in reality have been known for many more things than one or two units, is going to force decisions based on some arbitrary standard - popularity is as good as any, probably better than most from a developer's point of view. England has a naval UA and a ship of the line unit (and in Civ IV a Man O'War unit), yet "England" was only a naval power for the less than two-century period between the naval reformations of Henry VIII and the Act of Union that formalised the creation of a unified Britain, and even then only intermittently (the state of the navy being so poor immediately prior to the Glorious Revolution that the Dutch were able to sail unopposed up the Thames, raze part of London and, if memory serves, capture the Royal Navy flagship).
Seriously, that's just because of Alexandre Dumas's novels, they were never meaningful or different from contemporary neighbours. I know this is for flavor, but I would rather have civilizations evolve character based on what they do/where they are instead of what they are.
As I've noted before, then you'd have an empire-building game, but it wouldn't be Civilization. I've trotted out this link several times before:
http://www.playthepast.org/?p=593
Fundamentally the only difference between Civ and its successors and imitators that makes it the classic empire builder is its historical flavour. Take exactly the same game, assign random names and abilities to the civs involved, and it becomes something else (and in my mind something less). This lack of the historical flavour (and indeed the various invented future developments that again, to my mind, detract from the whole point of Civ) is the reason I never became interested in Call to Power.
The philosophy is much more static, but if I want to go that way, I'd rather play a historical simulator like Europa Universalis (western bias in the name included
).
Well, this is the thing: that's what games like Europa Universalis are for. It's not what games like Civilization are for. It's always been more of a sandbox than a simulator - and sometimes it's worth throwing in Attila the Hun just so you can sometimes hear him say "We shouldn't let war define who we are", or Gandhi with his nuke fetish. But that only works if you can identify the protagonists in the game as the Huns, Indians etc. rather than "Generic Island Civ 1", "Horse-riding Steppe Civ 2" or whatever.
My gripe with UUs is that I consider all civs should be equal to begin with and evolve based on how the player performs and on their initial location rather than on predefined traits.
The two aren't in any way mutually exclusive. Civs invariably do evolve based on how the player performs and on their initial location (in the game I just finished, for example, my game evolved very different from a start with a hilly, production capital in plains, and with surrounding city-states that were predominantly cultural, than it does in more usual Siamese starts with gold-laden early jungles and - it seems as often as not - early game mercantiles in abundance, although the Siamese UU, UA and UB are identical whatever the start and player style). They just don't evolve traits or units that way (well, beyond the ones their choice of tech progression and access to strategic resources provides them with). And (unlike the Huns) if the Mongols get no horses, they don't get to use their horse-based UU - the same for any other civ that has a resource-dependent UU. But as well as adding flavour, differences between civs also provide variety between gaming sessions - Civ III was following a long-established herd when it first provided civ-specific trait combinations to its factions, and it's a system most games have adopted for good reason.
The only difference I see with Civ V is that its genuinely unique civ abilities (rather than just unique combinations of shared traits) have prompted the designers to more specifically tailor certain civs to particular strategies and playstyles. My example above was Siam, which happens to be one of the most versatile civs in the game and one which is particularly strongly defined by its environment (since its UA is wholly contingent on what city-states happen to be in the surrounding landscape).
This is in fact why it's my favourite civ, and so in that regard we're probably coming from much the same perspective (although naturally I like the city-states). It probably is the closest Civ V offers to what you're looking for - whether Siam develops as a religious powerhouse, a centre for culture, or a growth economy with a range of options can be determined very much by its early environment. And ironically it's a part of the environment you dislike for flavour reasons that actually provides that mechanical emphasis (and can too for other civs, but to a lesser extent).
Actually, there were scenarios for this in Civ IV but you're mostly right. However, barbarians were an option that could be turned off without changing totally the way the game evolved. In Civ V, city-states can be disabled but you suddenly lose a lot of game options. Some civics suddenly no longer make sense. Some civs special abilities just go poof.
In Civ V disabling barbarians makes Germany's ability just go poof, drastically limits Songhai's, and makes the Honor tree opener useless. It's not as drastic as removing city-states, certainly, but it's there.
No. The point is that some cultures are integrated in the game but you can't play them and can't win with them. You could win an OCC game with Kuala-Lumpur in Civ 1. In Civ V, you'll have to mod a city state out and mod a nation in in order to try it.
You can just rename your capital Kuala Lumpur in Civ V (and your civ name to Malaysia, I suspect) - the CS isn't in all games (though it seems to turn up in most of mine), and if it's not there the system will let you change the name. It's true that you'd have to preselect one of the existing civs whose abilities you judge best reflect KL, however.
It's not at all about the anarchy mechanics. It's about the presence of brutal changes. Even with 1 turn of anarchy, going from democracy to theocracy was possible in Civ 2. It is not in Civ V. You have to stay along the road that you paved. Civ V pretends that if you chose options that make your civ a democracy, it can never turn into a totalitary state. None of the previous civ incarnations was that optimistic.
There is an anarchy mechanic for changing from, say, Piety to Rationalism or from Freedom to Autocracy, but the social policy system doesn't encourage its use (why go for a full policy branch and then get rid of all of its benefits, instead of taking a compatible branch?) So as I say, it's still there - but again, not well implemented. Since policy trees are generally defined by game stage (mainly in when you can select them, but to a large degree when you'll get most use out of them), it would no doubt be possible to have a system whereby you unlock policy branches and can unlock any other, with anarchy resulting, but you can only have one active at a time. Unlike the current system you would keep the knowledge of all past policies you've accumulated, so if you want to switch back to Patronage and gain its benefits after exploring Freedom, you could do so (with attendant anarchy).
I am not talking about gameplay. I am talking philosophy of the simulated history. Yes, UUs are fun. City-states I feel are far too gamy and badly implemented, because you do diplomacy with them in a way different from other players. Other games with 'minor civs' (f.e. Galactic civilizations) managed to have minor civs interact in-game as major civs did, and I feel that is way better in terms of gameplay.
Civ ultimately is a game - it surely should have "gamey" elements. And looking at it as a game, city-states add an element largely lacking in previous civ games - a way for civs to interact with and interfere with one another's strategies other than warfare.
How could putting culturally specific units into a civilization's game mechanic be racist. If anything its historically accurate and respectful to the civilization.
For those of us that love history it is offensive for you to suggest that historical accuracy in unit types is prejudiced.
The 'racist' appellation is certainly bizarre, but he does have a valid point that many of these units aren't especially notable for their historical accuracy (or at least relevance - certainly it's accurate to show the French using musketeers, but it's equally accurate to show the Spanish of the same period using them. And inaccuracy is certainly introduced by the exclusive nature of UUs - it's true that the the Americans used B-17s, but it's not true that they didn't use any other bombers).
But to say the Indians where more of a civilization than the French (which I'll use as an example because it was brought up by a poster before me) is both a kind of meaningless statement (there's no real applicable scale or measurement of civilization-hood) and a biased one. Because modern day India is different from Mughal India and different from the Indus Civilization in a similar way modern France is not the same as the civilization of the Gauls or say, Charlemagne.
This certainly comes from a particular use of language, but I understand his point. "India" is a large assortment of different 'national' groups and former kingdoms that is culturally largely unified, but has historically been politically divided for most of its history. What the British inherited as "India", and from which the modern nation state largely derives its boundaries, was less than a century old when the British took control, and British India was essentially a continuation of the Marathas Confederacy's effort to unify India as a single political entity.
Transplanted to Europe, places like England, France and Germany - all areas originally populated by culturally similar Germanic peoples, with continual historical migration and cultural interchange between them, and until recent times similar styles of monarchic government, shared religion, shared technology and, indeed, shared interactions with the external world from crusades to imperial expansion and scientific exploration - are more akin to the individual kingdoms of pre-unification India than distinct cultural groups. They're the principalities of the "Western Europe" civ.