American - Aztecs, Inca, Shoshone, Maya, Iroquois, etc. (I was originally going to split them, but feel that they would mostly share the same overall focus)
Yeah, to be honest I sceptical about splitting native americans on three groups. At most they should be divided into city dwellers and 'tribes', but when I think about their focus it seems to be similar, and I am going to write down my few ideas about them.
Colonial, Steppe, Subsaharan and Islamic are the easiest/most obvious groups
Graeco-Roman - Rome, Greece, Byzantium, etc.
I cannot invent much more civs which would fit here :d Carthago isn't exactly Graeco - Roman but for gameplay purposes it seems much more similar to them than to Near East. I would call this one 'Mediterranean' and put here Rome, Greece, Byzantium, Carthago, Phoenicia/Minoan/whatever is included.
Mesopotamic - Persia, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt etc.
Sumer, Hittites. By the way, what about Israel and Armenia?
Polynesian - Polynesia (in anticipation of the More Civs split, too)
:0 entire group for these guys :0 on the other hand, I forgot about planned Polynesia split - then this group would make sense
Yeah, that seems to make sense - especially if we would call this group simply PACIFIC and add here Aborigins + Maori (there are mods with them, also it seems TPangolin prepares some Aborigin tribes)
Germanic - Celts, Goths, Franks, Denmark, Norway, etc.
Slavic - Poland, Russia, Hungary, Kievan Rus', etc.
And here is where problems appear
- 'Ethnic' reasons: we have Germans, Slavs, Romanic nations, Celts and... Hungary + Finland
- 'Cultural' reasons: we have Latin Christianity (well, before reformation) and Orthodox Nations (...here also Byzantium collides
)
- 'Civilisation historical focus reasons': we have colonial western powers, Scandinavia, little republics of Netherlands/Italia and land empires like Germany 1870, Polish - Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia, Hungary
Yeah, Europe in this context gives me a headache
Oriental - China, Indonesia, Siam, etc.
Japanese - Japan
Indian - India (in anticipation of the More Civs split)
Ok, so let me be a little geek as I know basic outline of East Asia history
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/Indian_cultural_zone.svg/940px-Indian_cultural_zone.svg.png
This map shows countries and zones under historical Indian cultural influence. From what I know, it seems that Indian architecture, culture, philosophy and religions (especially buddhism and hinduism) had great impact on South - East Asia; Indonesia, Siam, Burma, Khmer have much more in common with India than with China, when we use scientific term of 'civilisation' (still unclear...). On the other hand, they are distinctive enough to consider creating separate SEA group, although I am not sure about that; definitely they should be rather in Indian group than in Chinese one.
On the other hand, China had powerful cultural impact on Korea, Japan and Vietnam, so they should belong to Chinese group (maybe with exception of Japan - to be honest I don't know whether Japan should have separate group or not, but I thought you want to create not many 'general' groups
)
Basically, we have options:
Chinese Group - Indian Group
Chinese Group - Indian Group - South East Asian Group
whatever groups - separate Japanese group
ALTERNATE:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Clash_of_Civilizations_map.png/800px-Clash_of_Civilizations_map.png
This one, as we can see, divides Europe on Latin and Orthodox Christianity, and creates interesting mess in Asia: India is India, China + Korea + Vietnam are in Chinese group, Japan is alone, Indonesia belongs to Islam group (but for big part of its history Indonesia was hindu...) and Tibet + Burma + Khmer + Siam create buddhist group. Generally, this is based on world religions.