City States Update

God of Kings said:

Samarkand is also in the Mongols' city list.

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So does this mean Mongols are removed from the game?

Marrakesh was on the Arab list before it became a CS and then Moroccan, wasn't it?

Inhalaattori said:

So does this mean Mongols are removed from the game?

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Putting Samarkhand on the Mongols' city list makes as much sense as putting Bordeaux on the English city list to begin with, so I don't think removing it really matters in the long run.

Menzies said:

Panama City is a replacement for Rio de Janeiro, whilst Bratislava is a replacement for Warsaw, this by the same method that all the other replacements were found.

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Which assumes they followed past precedent. You can't just assert this in response to a caution that they might not have followed past precedent.

As I noted, it may simply have been ease of programming that prompted the earlier changes. We know that this time, however, there are new city-states of pre-existing types and there are new colour combinations. It might never have been a deliberate pattern that "colour-type combination replaces same colour-type combination", instead they may simply have needed X city-states replaced them and so changed X city-state names from the existing code. So Panama might not be a direct replacement for Rio (although it's been suggested also that CSes are deliberately replaced with other CSes from a related geographical region).

Of course all of this would likely still suggest that Venice is gone since it provides no reason for the designers to change its colour scheme unless they changed its type.

You also seem to forget the colour matching for the unknown civ to the colours on the Venetian Flag as it is on Wikipedia, which has lottery level odds of happening by chance.

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Not forgetting, it's just a stretch to begin with. It's a minor and little-known feature of the most-recognised Venetian flag. Venice has had several other flags in its history, none of which are violet and white/cream. The best-known closely resembles the colours we now know belong to Indonesia (which have no reason to belong to Indonesia) - had we seen that colour combination before Indonesia was revealed, it would have been reasonable to consider that a likely Venetian colour scheme. In combination with the city-state oddity, the alphabet, the "most serene" comment and the absence of plausible alternatives for the final European civ, it may add a little weight to the near-certainty of Venice's inclusion, but it could otherwise very well be chance.

Martinus said:

Dude, give it up already. If all these hints and indirect evidence pointing to Venice weren't enough, they were pretty much confirmed as solid with the not-so-subtle hint from the PCGamer reviewer.

To be honest, I wonder if the game devs read these forums and after the early on Venice/Riga analysis by menzies, decided to keep Venice hidden until the very end and kept dropping all those hints, like the flag, for and giggles.

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I don't doubt that Venice is in - I was highlighting it as probable while Menzies was pushing Italy based on the "clues" that supposedly pointed to that civ. I'm only questioning the specific line of reasoning.

For example, let's say we'd seen the Indonesian colour scheme before Indonesia was revealed as a civ. This scheme closely resembles one of the Venetian flags, and is a more obvious fit than violet-and-cream. We now know that that would not have been evidence that Venice is in the expansion. Once it's confirmed that Venice is in, spotting the Indonesian colour scheme would still not be evidence for Venice, it would simply be coincidence. Hence the importance of determining what represents actual evidence, and how strong, and what is instead an unrelated correlation.

According to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZpBFP1bdpc 0:29 Kathmandu has changed from cultural to religious CS.
How does that fit in with, well, anything?

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A few people have pushed for a Nepal civ in the past on the basis that Nepal is the putative birthplace of Buddhism. This has no relevance to Kathmandu, a later city (the oldest known evidence of occupation is 2,000 years old, around 500 years younger than Buddhism), however it's the only representation Nepal will get in the series.

PhilBowles said:

I don't doubt that Venice is in - I was highlighting it as probable while Menzies was pushing Italy based on the "clues" that supposedly pointed to that civ. I'm only questioning the specific line of reasoning.

For example, let's say we'd seen the Indonesian colour scheme before Indonesia was revealed as a civ. This scheme closely resembles one of the Venetian flags, and is a more obvious fit than violet-and-cream. We now know that that would not have been evidence that Venice is in the expansion. Once it's confirmed that Venice is in, spotting the Indonesian colour scheme would still not be evidence for Venice, it would simply be coincidence. Hence the importance of determining what represents actual evidence, and how strong, and what is instead an unrelated correlation.



A few people have pushed for a Nepal civ in the past on the basis that Nepal is the putative birthplace of Buddhism. This has no relevance to Kathmandu, a later city (the oldest known evidence of occupation is 2,000 years old, around 500 years younger than Buddhism), however it's the only representation Nepal will get in the series.

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Firstly, based on what we've seen from the Celts, they don't seem to care too much about Civs having ancient city lists if they can give them modern ones.

The initial evidence was that Venice had been replaced by Riga. This worked equally well for both Italy and Venice. Since we had clues pointing to Italy at the time, it made sense that Italy was the more likely of the two. The issue was that the clues, which were being championed by some (and even myself at a time) were ultimately shown to be red herrings. Such is the nature of using the achievements though, they can be ambiguous, hence why I still wouldn't take the alphabetical list from the achievements as the 100% yet.

That said, we now have two extremely solid, unambiguous pieces of evidence for Venice, as well as a direct clue from a reviewer. The key point though, which you seem to question, was the colour. So let's deal with this directly:



The above is ridiculous and shows a complete lack of understanding for why the colours are evidence for Venice. It's not that the colours resemble colours off the Venetian Flag as on Wikipedia, it's that they are the colours off the Venetian Flag as on Wikipedia. I can not stress that enough. That is the only reason the discussion turned to Venice. Before that I was discussing, along with most other people, that it was likely a Native American group, potentially a recolour of the Iroquois, or a doffing of the cap to Civ II by giving the Sioux that colour. The moment it changed was when we compared the colours we got from the screenshot to Venice's colours off a flag that someone posted as a "what if" comment. If we got Indonesia before, we wouldn't have had that exact match and as such there would have been nothing to discuss at that level. Maybe some would have suggested that it was Venice, but we wouldn't have had it as a direct, extremely solid clue towards Venice. As it stands, getting the exact colour combination that is on that flag is literally lottery level odds of about 1 in 419,166,106 and even being extremely conservative and giving them the widest amount of error imaginable (the original error calculation before took into account the observed error from compression) the odds of picking that exact colour combination by chance are still 1 in 4520.

I think Samarkand is written as "Samarqand" in the Mongol city list, but I might be mistaken. If it is indeed Samarkand, they will probably remove that city from the list only.

EDIT: Just checked it. It is written SAMARQAND instead of Samarkand indeed.

What was the direct clue from a reviewer?

phaethon16 said:

What was the direct clue from a reviewer?

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In the comments section, the reviewer said something like (and I'm paraphrasing here somewhat) "we'll give you the most serene details about the next civ later". The reviewer explicitly used the words most serene in the context of a new civ. There's really only one civ that can get that most serene.

Well, besides San Marino.

That we'd have "all the most serene details" soon.

I think the choice for kyzyl as a city-state is rather odd. It was founded in a recent time (1914) and didn't have much impact as far as I know. And it doesn't represent any civs who are not included. To give a better alternative from the same area there is Ufa or Urumqi. The later was a major hub in the silk road and would definitely be identified as mercentile. It could be a bit controversial because of China and Xinjiang Uyghur's movements to become independent but Lhasa would be too and is in.

cybrxkhan said:

In the comments section, the reviewer said something like (and I'm paraphrasing here somewhat) "we'll give you the most serene details about the next civ later". The reviewer explicitly used the words most serene in the context of a new civ. There's really only one civ that can get that most serene.

Well, besides San Marino.

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That does sort of indicate Venice, doesn't it. That's too bad, because I was just hoping that we would get Italy later on, and not part of it now if you know what I mean.

One question Riga is considered the replacement for Venice as it is a Maritime - Cyan, some have suggested that this is not convincing as they may have just changed the nature of the Venice City State, with that in mind, was there already a mercantile city state with the cyan color palate?

Eagle Pursuit said:

According to Menzies' list, Kyzyl is Middle Cyan Cultured where Florence is Cyan Cultured, so it's not a replacement. However, Menzies may change his mind and decide that It is regular Cyan after all. He's been known to mistake similar looking colors.

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I'm now quite used to the differences between the cyan's, and there was a helpful other middle city state to compare to anyhow. It's not a replacement for Florence.

bite said:

One question Riga is considered the replacement for Venice as it is a Maritime - Cyan, some have suggested that this is not convincing as they may have just changed the nature of the Venice City State, with that in mind, was there already a mercantile city state with the cyan color palate?

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No there wasn't, but that would break the colour-type law. We've seen city states change type before (they did it a bit in Gods & Kings to populate the mercantile and religious city states), but they never gave another city state the old colour-type combinations. There evidence is still entirely for Venice being replaced.

Actually come to think of it... the Chinese version of Civ 5 apparently doesn't have Lhasa as a city state. Anyone know what is in place of Lhasa, perhaps the Chinese video has an additional clue then too if one of the colors were replaced by either Samarkand/Tannu Tuva's cap?

How do you know that they have excluded Lhasa in the Chinese version?

Any chance they can add the following function to City states?
-50% bully gold income.
Build a military unit before worker. and have them guard the worker with the military unit.
Now a completly free worker completely changes balance in favor of killing all city states.
so none gets the votes, but the conquerer gets the cities very cheaply if taken early on,

Gucumatz said:

Actually come to think of it... the Chinese version of Civ 5 apparently doesn't have Lhasa as a city state. Anyone know what is in place of Lhasa, perhaps the Chinese video has an additional clue then too if one of the colors were replaced by either Samarkand/Tannu Tuva's cap?

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Neither have it's colour-type combination so far, and I'd expect it to be a direct replacement.

Bakspatel said:

How do you know that they have excluded Lhasa in the Chinese version?

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Worth noting that it was the Taiwanese preview, and I'm pretty sure they don't get that issue.

Menzies said:

No there wasn't, but that would break the colour-type law. We've seen city states change type before (they did it a bit in Gods & Kings to populate the mercantile and religious city states), but they never gave another city state the old colour-type combinations. There evidence is still entirely for Venice being replaced.

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Just to add again that we've seen in the Taiwanese video that Kathmandu has changed type in BNW to religious, so odd things can happen...

Martin23230 said:

Just to add again that we've seen in the Taiwanese video that Kathmandu has changed type in BNW to religious, so odd things can happen...

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No odd at all, it's a well known change mechanism seen multiple times in the last expansion pack. The question was whether they'd do it again and it appears that they have. Doesn't change the law of city state colour-type replacement whatsoever.