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For his role in history, putting him with Stalin sounds good. Putting him with Hitler and Pol Pot is just wrong.

All were brutal dictators, but Pol Pot and Hitler left their countries in complete and utter ruin.
Under Mao, China was unified, ending the civil war, and reigning in the various warlords that were only nominally under the rule of Kia-Shek. Got the PRC the China seat in the UN, established it as a nuclear power.

I would unquestionably say that, like the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Chinese state was far better off when Mao died than when he came to power, or for a long time before that.
Maybe the average person was worse off, and yes there were many problems, but 1976 China was sure better than 1949 China.

In contrast, upon Hitler's death, Germany was destroyed, occupied, and divided for 40 years. Far worse off than it had ever been since the end of WWI, even int eh darkest days of hyper inflation and the Great Depression.

The condition of the people and human rights are one thing to consider, but you must also consider the condition of the state as a whole.

Learn some modern Chinese history before you talk. Better off, learn it from somewhere other than New York Times or CNN.

TBH, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Ahriman said:

Umm...

How many "great people" have:
a) Caused devastating famines causing millions of deaths (by pulling farmers off the land, destroynig farm tools and collectivization), "Great Leap Forward"
b) Destroyed most of the cultural heritage and antiquities of their country, and allowed purges and executions of anyone with an education, "Cultural Revolution"
c) Enslaved their population, shipping vast numbers of people off to labor camps where they were worked to death

Putting Mao together with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot is... about right.

Heck, even Mao himself didn't mind the comparison:
"This man Hitler was even more ferocious. The more ferocious the better, don't you think? The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are."

If you want a great modern Chinese leader, take Deng, not Mao.

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This would be a fair statement of the deserved role of Mao and Stalin in history.

Before Stalin, the Sovient Union was an agricultural country, with a weak industry. The Sovient Union was just a 'second tier' country. Under his rule, the Sovient Union became an industrialized country, and it was capable of competing with US. Even today, although Russia is much weaker than the former Sovient Union, nobody still dare to underestimate the country. All of this is the impact of Stalin rule.

Before Mao, there was numerous invasions of western countries of China. All major powers had their 'country in a country' in China, and China wasn't even capable of making nails or matches.

After Mao, nobody even thought of putting a soldier in China any more. China became a nuclear power and an industrialized country, and eventually the world's factory like today. Chinese average life expectancy increased from 35 to 70. China had a permenant seat in the Security Council in UN. Mao set up the foundation of today's proporous China.

Of course, he made a lot of mistakes. But he didn't try to starve his people for fun, or try to exploit his people so that he can live the life of a king, like Kim Jing-Il. He doesn't know how to manage a country's economics, and he didn't realize it. He wanted to eliminate a class that live on profit rather than labor, but didn't realize selfishness is the pushing power for a society to progress. Everybody in China recognize that.

For all those human right fighters, what you really fail to realize is one common knowledge all the Chinese have: the people that got hurt the most in China during Mao's era is not the poorest, but rather, it's the richest. Mao despises all land owners, factory owners, bankers, and all rich people, and considers them living on other people's flesh and blood (in a sense he's right). He basically emilinated these classes and split land to peasants. He's more about equality than any of the human right fighters. What he failed to realize that complete equality eliminates the motivation for people to work. He intended to creat a society in which everyone is equally rich, but ended up with a socienty in which everyone is equally poor. The funny thing about the controversy on Mao is, he's pictured as a butcher bullying his people and exploiting the poorest of China, but as a matter of fact, the people that love him the most are the poor, and the people who hate his the most are the rich.

say1988 said:

For his role in history, putting him with Stalin sounds good. Putting him with Hitler and Pol Pot is just wrong.

All were brutal dictators, but Pol Pot and Hitler left their countries in complete and utter ruin.
Under Mao, China was unified, ending the civil war, and reigning in the various warlords that were only nominally under the rule of Kia-Shek. Got the PRC the China seat in the UN, established it as a nuclear power.

I would unquestionably say that, like the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Chinese state was far better off when Mao died than when he came to power, or for a long time before that.
Maybe the average person was worse off, and yes there were many problems, but 1976 China was sure better than 1949 China.

In contrast, upon Hitler's death, Germany was destroyed, occupied, and divided for 40 years. Far worse off than it had ever been since the end of WWI, even int eh darkest days of hyper inflation and the Great Depression.

The condition of the people and human rights are one thing to consider, but you must also consider the condition of the state as a whole.

Click to expand...

Learn some modern Chinese history before you talk. Better off, learn it from somewhere other than New York Times or CNN.

TBH, you have no idea what you are talking about.

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Sounds like you learned modern Chinese history from the New York Times and CNN.

Of course, he made a lot of mistakes. But he didn't try to starve his people for fun, or try to exploit his people so that he can live the life of a king, like Kim Jing-Il. He doesn't know how to manage a country's economics, and he didn't realize it. He wanted to eliminate a class that live on profit rather than labor, but didn't realize selfishness is the pushing power for a society to progress. Everybody in China recognize that.

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Those "little" mistakes caused millions of people to die.

I wish they would have more then one leader for the Civs. City states sound cool.

oh lord....take the arguments about Mao/Hitler/Stalin to a different thread....

I'm with you Atwork, this is supposed to be a discussion of the admittedly limited game info in GamePro magazine, not another tiresome "Mao/Stalin/Hitler should/should not be in the game" thread .

Aussie.

Jewman said:

maybe there are going to be less units overall? a focus on training the armies you have and placing them strategically rather than massing and being head on.
Maybe production cost will be much higher for armies and whatnot?
i mean who nows, exactly how the game will work, we know very little about the economy and whatnot not to mention all sorts of other things

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exactly

The point is not to MASS ur units unlike all the other strategy games. This makes for a LOT better game. It also singles out the real strategy players from the people that just play to get it over with.

Mathalamus said:

peace isn't everything. i don't even think peace is a good qualifier for leaders, since it sounds so boring. you could end up having Chamberlain as the English leader.

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I think the point is that, instead of getting all the other civs going for all out war (like Civilization Revolution), it'd be interesting to get a more diverse mix of Civs, some of which will be more warlike, but others that might focus on developments that in turn, maybe pose a different type of challenge; the problem with previous Civ games is that things inevitably turn to war, but it'd be nice to see a more real race for tech, or a race to develop the largest cities and cultures.

Javier.707 said:

In depth. A single unit with support, and located at a choke point can only fight, at best, two units per turn. As long as you have a free hex to shuffle your units around, and put a fresh one in its place, while you heal the veteran one, you could stop a very large group of enemy units almost indefinitely. Look at the screenshots: see that city exactly on the isthmus? With a six-unit army, you could stop as many as 20 enemy units. And if that is the only access to your civilization´s territory, you have basically prevented invasion.
The thing is, while playing previous CIVs you never had to worry about rotations: you could attack/defend any unit or stack, and it made no difference from where -any side meant the same result-. In Civ V, you´ll have to remind that your army/stack, is no longer the same front to front, nor side to side. Now you have to take into account which side your deployed army is facing. A single exposed unit might mean the undoing of your entire defense. Hexes have actually made combat rather deep, not only tactically, but strategically: now the shape and terrain of your civilization as a whole has an impact on defense (not to mention attack). So, there are actually many, many ways to defend a city with only one unit on it. It´s just that you have to think "outside" the city, and not the city itself...
(That is, if the AI is good. If not, it´ll probably beeline the attack, and all you gotta do is cut them off and fight the reinforcements one at a time).

Try playing Panzer General 2 if you can get a copy. It´s gonna be great practice.

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I am sure that the system works great for a game like Panzer General 2. A game where the focus is on a specific time period or war. But I don't see how it will work on the scale of Civ. The map view is too far pulled out for this type of combat. As I suggested earlier (or in another thread... I don't remember where) imagine playing on a full earth map and playing as France. You go to war against Spain. You gather your forces and move them down to attack Madrid, your units filling all of France. At the same time, Spain is completely filled with their defending troops.

This is completely rediculous and clutters up valuable map tiles. Until I see larger maps (which I highly doubt), I really don't see how this will work. Even given that, though, I was willing to accept it if they allowed garrisons (where player can store a number of troops based on buildings, size, etc int there cities and Forts... which are apparently out as well). Of course, that is out now! If Firaxis wants to keep me on board, they really need to show me the money! (Meaning, show it in action and very soon!)

Frantic men said:

exactly

The point is not to MASS ur units unlike all the other strategy games. This makes for a LOT better game. It also singles out the real strategy players from the people that just play to get it over with.

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Part of the point of Civ is MASSING units! If what you say is the case, then that will open up too much for sneak attacks from other Civs. I just don't get it!

Lucky The Fox said:

I'm just going to say that I will be really disappointed if multiple leaders per civ are out. It was one of my favourite improvements in IV and the leader selections, for the most part, were perfect.

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Considering that each leader is going to have unique advantages and disadvantages, I would suspect they've reduced the total number of leaders in order to increase the diversity.

I don't get it, we've been more than happy to accept the necessary abstractions in Civ in regards to movement (& even combat if you really think about it), but there is suddenly a problem with *scale* the moment you talk about doing away with the beloved SoD exploit. Note, SoD's are not a strategy or a tactic-merely an exploit of a poor game design-one which it finally sounds like they're gonna *fix*. Now I'm not 100% sure that I like the idea of a hard 1-unit-per-tile cap, but if it gets rid of SoD's, I think I might just be able to accept it!

Aussie.

Frantic men said:

exactly

The point is not to MASS ur units unlike all the other strategy games. This makes for a LOT better game. It also singles out the real strategy players from the people that just play to get it over with.

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Actually it becomes a game of tactics. Strategy has very little to do with it.It has even less to do with "real-time games" which it looks like your using for comparison.

Aussie_Lurker said:

I don't get it, we've been more than happy to accept the necessary abstractions in Civ in regards to movement (& even combat if you really think about it), but there is suddenly a problem with *scale* the moment you talk about doing away with the beloved SoD exploit. Note, SoD's are not a strategy or a tactic-merely an exploit of a poor game design-one which it finally sounds like they're gonna *fix*. Now I'm not 100% sure that I like the idea of a hard 1-unit-per-tile cap, but if it gets rid of SoD's, I think I might just be able to accept it!

Aussie.

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Spot on. This happens every time a new Civ game is released. Like when Civ 4 tried to do away with ICS. The wailing and gnashing of teeth has come to be expected now.

People are either too lazy or too stupid to learn a new way to play it appears.

I personally look forward to a new challenge.

Alter Ego said:

As I wrote later in that thread, I'm pretty sure it's Bismarck, not Stalin, who appears in the article.

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Thanks Alter, that would be incredible.

Japan in Civ 4 always made me sad because of how terrible Tokugawa was depicted as a leader; his shogunate did become isolationist but it was after his death, and they make him a stubborn ass when he was the most patient and crafty men of his time. Famous saying that said of him, "If the ****oo does not cry, let us wait", describes him well. And now, as a direct opposite, described, "If the ****oo does not cry, kill it", Oda Nobunaga! The guy was too far ahead of his time; he had modern concepts for infrastructure, independently introduced the standing army and three-stage volley, and showed some serious religious tolerance, building the first Jesuit seminary in Japan and encouraging Christian development. He also was a huge proponent of culture, encouraging all these kinds of arts like kabuki and cha-dou (tea ceremonies) and such, and even building this magnificent castle called Azuchi-Jyou, an amazing mix of Western and Eastern styles. But at the same time, he had quite the temper, occasionally massacring his enemies and once burning a famous monastery complex, with thousands of members, down to the ground. But he was a man with a clear vision of a modern Japan, on par with the European powers trickling in at the time, one that would have been achieved had he not been killed shortly before he could unify Japan. To me, he represents the other path Japan could have taken; while Tokugawa's government isolated Japan, and subsequently cultivated a distinctly Japanese culture over the course of 200 years, Nobunaga's government may have created a country that incorporated, without being overwhelmed by, European technologies and concepts, and created a Japanese-Spanish/European culture that would have been amazingly progressive and innovative for its time, at the cost of a distinct Japanese culture.

tl;dr: Nobunaga has significant characteristics of all the types seen in Civ 4: the culture freak of Asoka, the warmongering craziness of Moctezuma, and development/wonder focus of Cyrus, with a dash of tech-whoring à la Mansa Musa. I've always thought he was the ideal leader of a Civ game, since he would act most like the human. I'm excited to see how this plays out with AI and these "unique" personalities. Meier, you're making a step in the right direction, but please don't disappoint.

Nobunaga is every inch as good a choice as Tokugawa (to the poster earlier who complained about that change)

Hirohito would be a horrible choice, not because of the war criminal debate, but because in review...he just doesn't have much success to his name*. His government fought and lost a war that led to devastation and ruin for Japan...and then he managed to not get removed from power.

If you wanted a relatively modern Emperor of Japan (but you won't get one, because of the legal aspect of putting an Emperor in Civilization - we found that out with IV), Meiji is the only defensible choice.

China-wise, Mao is too recent to make a good decision, but...I tend to think history will eventually come to view him favorably, because in general, what people remember is deeds, not statistics. "Rounding up the jews of Europe and trying to kill them all" is a deed. "Leading the Soviet Union to victory over a German invasion" is a deed. "Finally unifying China and ending Western interference in it" is a deed. "Killed X amount of political opponents" and "Leading X millions to die in a famine" are statistics.

(Note that I'm not saying they SHOULD be remembered positively. I'm just saying that I think they will be, because it's how history tend to work out)

Louis XXIV said:

Considering that each leader is going to have unique advantages and disadvantages, I would suspect they've reduced the total number of leaders in order to increase the diversity.

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Has that been confirmed? All I remember reading is that each AI is unique in behaviour.

It sounded like they said that each had a unique feature/trait.

I'd like to see more faction diversity. The limited faction diversity has always been one of the lamest things about vanilla civ IMO.

cybrxkhan said:

If you measure in terms of people dead, ironically, Hitler is the "best".

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It's highly probable this is true only because Hitler weren't in power very long.

That doesn't I'm saying Stalin and Mao are acceptable. They're just farther removed from "western civ", that's all. (At least in the uneducated minds of some boss at Firaxis/Take)

Case in point: the korean bar owner who opened "hitler bar". He was devastated when somebody told him that was equivalent to me opening a "emperor hirohito bar" here in Western Europe.

dc82 said:

- Basic military units move two tiles in combat instead of one.

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This is the significant change.

This definitely shows they're going for more of a Panzer General type of gameplay.

Which is cool; I've been clamoring for a new PG game for ages.

However, it does kind of rule out maps encompassing Earth. Tactical movement (like in PG) simply does not take place on a global scale like this.

At least not in ancient times - probably not even today. "Sir, the enemy holds India. Should we detour north of the himalayas and attack them in the flank?!".

You would have needed at least two scales: one global strategy scale where you can, indeed, stack, units.

And another local tactical scale, where you implement the one tile one unit, ranged artillery, and more-than-one-step basic movement rules.

Not saying Civ needs this - quite the contrary, two scales means clutter and complexity.

Civ 5 will probably be a fine game, but it will be a very different game from previous Civs.