City State Colour

I thought this really should be put as one contiguous piece rather than lots of little points here and there. To start the analysis of the city state colour-type combinations again from the beginning, I thought it might be good to look at how they changed throughout the game so far. Below is the initial list by colours as they appear:

MINOR_WHITE
Warsaw - Cultured

MINOR_GREY
Edinburgh - Militaristic

MINOR_BLUE
Dublin - Militaristic
Oslo - Maritime

MINOR_MIDDLE_BLUE
Geneve - Cultured
Copenhagen - Maritime
Stockholm - Maritime

MINOR_CYAN
Venice - Maritime
Florence - Cultured

MINOR_MIDDLE_CYAN
Genoa - Maritime
Ragusa - Maritime

MINOR_GREEN
Helsinki - Maritime
Belgrade - Militaristic
Tyre - Militaristic

MINOR_LIGHT_GREEN
Bucharest - Cultured
Vienna - Cultured

MINOR_PEACH
Budapest - Militaristic

MINOR_LIGHT_BLUE
Brussels - Cultured

MINOR_PURPLE
Monaca - Cultured

MINOR_MIDDLE PURPLE
Seoul - Cultured
Sidon - Militaristic

MINOR_LIGHT_PURPLE
Hanoi - Militaristic
Lhasa - Cultured

MINOR_LIGHT_ORANGE
Almaty - Militaristic
Cape Town - Maritime

MINOR_YELLOW
Kuala Lumpur - Cultured

MINOR_LIGHT_YELLOW
Singapore - Maritime
Rio de Janeiro - Maritime

What is immediately obvious is that in the original game the colour-type combinations, unlike in the Gods & Kings list, did double up. Notably Genoa and Ragusa, Bucharest and Vienna, Belgrade and Tyre as well as Copenhagen and Stockholm. The numbers of city states were also different:

Militaristic: 8
Cultured: 10
Maritime: 10

That is, they were slightly more militaristic city states (as there were only 6 in Gods & Kings). Following the release of Vanilla there was a few DLC that replaced city states:

Denmark DLC - Copenhagen and Oslo replaced
Korea DLC - Seoul replaced

Their replacements were:

Sydney replaced Copenhagen - MINOR_MIDDLE_BLUE and Maritime
Quebec City replaced Oslo - MINOR_BLUE and Maritime
Kathmandu replaced Seoul - MINOR_MIDDLE_PURPLE and Cultured

The file replacing them was quite direct in that it said: "Replacement names for old city-state names used in DLC civs", in the file, so it is clear enough what they did here.

With Gods & Kings they added a two new types of city states, and rebalanced it so it was:

Cultured: 10
Maritime: 10
Mercantile: 10
Religious: 6
Militaristic: 6

This obviously changed things around, a lot in fact. The question then becomes what they did as they did this. One notable change is that they seemed to use existing city states, at least initially, to replace the ones replaced in the expansion. These were:

Dublin, Ediburgh - Celts
Vienna - Austria
Stockholm, Helsinki - Sweden

What's also an interesting aside is that some files here are actually written referencing to them as City States, rather than "Minor Civs" as they are in most of the files. In any case, the direct replacements for these are, for colour and type at least:

No city state replaced Dublin - MINOR_BLUE, Militaristic
Budapest replaced Edinburgh - MINOR_GREY, Militaristic
Lhasa replaced Vienna* - MINOR_LIGHT_GREEN, Cultured
Mombasa replaced Helsinki - MINOR_GREEN, Maritime
No city state replaced Stockholm** - MINOR_MIDDLE_BLUE, Maritime

*Bucharest also shared this combination, but Lhasa was changed from Cultured to Relgious seemingly after this change was made
**Sydney is of this type combination, but replaced Copenhagen earlier

So here it certainly seemed as though as part of adding in such a large number of new city states they did things a bit differently. Here is the fully list of city states afterwards by colour and type:

MINOR_WHITE
Warsaw - Cultured
Cahokia - Mercantile
Jerusalem - Religious

MINOR_GRAY
Budapest - Militaristic
Jakarta - Maritime
Zurich - Mercantile

MINOR_MIDDLE_BLUE
Geneva - Religious
Sydney - Maritime

MINOR_CYAN
Venice - Maritime
Florence - Cultured
La Venta - Religious

MINOR_MIDDLE_CYAN
Genoa - Mercantile
Ragusa - Maritime

MINOR_BLUE
Quebec City - Maritime
Hong Kong - Mercantile
Prague - Culture

MINOR_LIGHT_GREEN
Bucharest - Cultured
Lhasa - Religious
Manila - Maritime

MINOR_GREEN
Belgrade - Militaristic
Tyre - Mercantile
Mombasa - Maritime

MINOR_LIGHT_BLUE
Brussels - Cultured
Zanzibar - Mercantile

MINOR_PURPLE
Monaco - Cultured
Antwerp - Mercantile
Lisbon - Maritime

MINOR_PEACH
Marrakech - Mercantile
Yerevan - Cultured

MINOR_LIGHT_ORANGE
Milan - Cultured
Almaty - Militaristic
Cape Town - Maritime

MINOR_MIDDLE_PURPLE
Kathmandu - Cultured
Sidon - Militaristic

MINOR_LIGHT_PURPLE
Hanoi - Militaristic
Colombo - Mercantile
Wittenberg - Religious

MINOR_LIGHT_YELLOW
Rio de Janeiro - Maritime
Vatican City - Religious
Singapore - Mercantile

MINOR_YELLOW
Kuala Lumpur - Cultured
Valletta - Militaristic

What is interesting is that here there are no more identical colour-type combinations. The changed were:

Budapest - MINOR_PEACH, Militaristic => MINOR_GREY, Militaristic - Replaced Edinburgh
Geneva - MINOR_MIDDLE_BLUE, Culture => MINOR_MIDDLE_BLUE, Religious
Genoa - MINOR_MIDDLE_CYAN, Maritime => MINOR_MIDDLE_CYAN, Mercantile
Tyre - MINOR_GREEN, Militaristic => MINOR_GREEN, Mercantile
Lhasa - MINOR_LIGHT_PURPLE, Cultured => MINOR_LIGHT_GREEN, Religious
Singapore - MINOR_LIGHT_YELLOW, Maritime => MINOR_LIGHT_YELLOW, Mercantile

Of those only two changed their colour, Budapest and Lhasa, and these seemingly replaced a pair of removed City States. One of the interesting points about Gods & Kings is that they made it so each colour-type combination was now unique. I'm not actually certain that this was intentional, but it certainly has been done.

In any case, from everything so far it's clear that they replace city states by giving the colour and type to a new one, this has been repeated a few times. It's a bit trickier in Gods & Kings to analyse this as they change a few more things than just a couple of city state names, but it can still be followed. Despite lots of new city states though, they didn't give any used colour-type combinations, and other changes meant that they became unique. Looking at vanilla however I'm not sure if this is entirely significant or not, however, it does seem that they have no given an identical colour-type combination to a new added city state, and there were a lot added in Gods & Kings.

So, what can be concluded from this:

1. They generally do direct replacements when removing city states to make civilizations
2. They have changed the number of each type of city state before (from 8 militaristic city states in vanilla to 6 in Gods & Kings)
3. As part of the change and rebalance of Gods & Kings they did not replace Dublin and Stockholm directly
4. In Vanilla colour-type combinations were not unique
5. They are however unique in Gods & Kings
6. They have not given a used colour-type combination to a newly added city state before

Where from here though. We have seen plenty of city states in screenshots for Brave New World. The first thing to note is that, as would be expected, without any major changes to the types (that is, they haven't added new types this time), the city states that we had in Gods & Kings appear to have the same colour type combinations. We have also seen that the ones that would have had to have been replaced (Warsaw, Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon) have been for type and colour, as the above would have suggested:

Bratislava - MINOR_WHITE, Cultured - replaces Warsaw
Ur - MINOR_PURPLE, Maritime - replaces Lisbon
Panama City - MINOR_LIGHT_YELLOW - replaces Rio de Janeiro

We have also seen a new city state colour combination:

Sofia - MINOR_LIGHT_GREEN, Militaristic

This appears to indicate that it is a new addition all together, and may suggest them adding more Militaristic city states back to to rebalance the numbers a bit, much like how they lowered the number of militaristic city states from 8 to 6 between vanilla and Gods & Kings.

Finally, we have one new piece of information from all of that. We have a new city state:

Riga - MINOR_MIDDLE_CYAN, Maritime

This has Ragusa's colour and type combination, and as noted above, whilst they while changing things for Gods & Kings (new types and rebalance) did change two colours and did not replace two city states that were removed during that whole process they did not make any new city states with previously used combinations and the two colour changes were to combinations of city states that were removed. As such, the only conclusion that fits what has been seen before is that Ragusa has been replaced in this case by Riga, take from that what you will.

By the gods, that's quite a wall of text. Wonder how long that took to type all up.

I've skimmed that, and while I'm not 100% convinced - still neutral as of now - I can't say your reasoning doesn't have merit. I'll look it over more carefully tomorrow.

I'm anti-Italy and just tolerant of Venice, so this isn't the best news. That being said, this is some pretty cool analysis.

So they're adding Croatia?

Brom said:

So they're adding Croatia?

Click to expand...

Italy or Venice would seem far more likely. The Croatian Ragusa fits on a list for Venice, but it's also worth noting that the game initially said that the Ragusa in the game was the Italian Ragusa. They may also just want to have the Italian Ragusa on the Italian list and don't want two Ragusas. Who knows...

In my mind, Croatia would be a more interesting choice than Italy. Certainly a civ most people wouldnt expect, much like Sweden last time around.

Thank you for this excellent analysis. It cleared up the matter of where the idea that Ragusa was removed came from. It certainly bodes well for someone like me.

Venice (or some sort of Northern Italy civ) would make a lot of sense.

- it is a civ that epitomizes both the trade theme and the "accumulate looted great works of art" theme,
- it is a medieval/renaissance naval trade civ (Arabs are that for land, Dutch and Portuguese are that for later eras),
- it fits nicely with the unique luxury hypothesis, and
- it represents Italian contributions to world culture without the awkwardness of having Italy next to Rome as playable civs (Italy is currently the culture with most wonders, great people and great works of art in game without having a playable civ representation).

An interesting alternative would be to base the new civ around the Lombard League of Northern Italian city states, that existed for over a century during the middle ages (which is longer than unified Greece in the pre-modern era). It could elegantly capture the cultural splendor of Northern Italy, without getting into problems like incorporating Rome as one of its cities.

And to be honest, when people talk about the Italian renaissance, it usually means the Northern city states, as Naples and Sicily were quite different culturally and politically.

Martinus said:

An interesting alternative would be to base the new civ around the Lombard League of Northern Italian city states, that existed for over a century during the middle ages (which is longer than unified Greece in the pre-modern era). It could elegantly capture the cultural splendor of Northern Italy, without getting into problems like incorporating Rome as one of its cities.

And to be honest, when people talk about the Italian renaissance, it usually means the Northern city states, as Naples and Sicily were quite different culturally and politically.

Click to expand...

Then we'd have the problem of Ragusa wouldn't we? It's in Sicily after all. I'm not saying it's a bad idea though.

Err no Ragusa is in Dalmatia not Sicily

Martinus said:

Err no Ragusa is in Dalmatia not Sicily

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This is the annoying point. Let's call them Ragusa for Sicily and Ragusa [D] for Dalmatia.

When the game was released, the Ragusa in the game was Ragusa according to the Civilopedia. After some thinking this seemed odd and thinking that it probably should have been Ragusa [D] it actually turned out that there was an error (or they just felt like changing it because a handful complained) and it was fixed in a patch.

For this instance Ragusa [D] actually would work as a city for Venice, as the Venetian Republic had control of Ragusa [D] for a significant period of time. However, as we know so far from the game, having a city in the game twice isn't an issue (for example, Constantinople and Istanbul), only the name of the cities and from what I can tell, having two identically named cities could be a problem. This offers a few possibilities:

1. The city that is being added to a city list is Ragusa
a) Ragusa [D] is being removed to avoid issues with the names and potentially confusion
b) The city state Ragusa may actually still be considered Ragusa to the developers now despite the current Civilopedia
2. The city that is being added to a city list is Ragusa [D]
a) Venice is the Civilization
b) Croatia is being added

Note that Yugoslavia is not an option as Belgrade is already confirmed as a city state.

In any case, Ragusa appears to be out, the question is what that means.

Oh how I would squee if they added the Most Serene Republic. =)

Great analysis. Glad it's all in one place. It's something we can refer to in future screenshots. Maritime Cyan is something to look for (although Florence is also something to look for if we want to know about Italy).

When we speculated about new city types, Religious was always the hardest to think of. It's possible they only thought of six and decided to balance that out with six militaristic ones (so it would seem more deliberate). There's a good argument that they've just simply added more militaristic now, which is curious (although I can't say it means anything). It does say that our previous analysis (which I have used to argue that Vietnam was in the game) was, at best, unsophisticated. It seems they are in fact just adding new City-States, but it's still possible to tell if there's a swap based on color.

There is also at least one more city state that I didn't see on your list - Mbanza-Kongo

What happens to your analysis if Ragusa shows up later in a different type or color?

bite said:

There is also at least one more city state that I didn't see on your list - Mbanza-Kongo

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We have no information on Mbanza-Kongo except that it is in the game.

We don't know which colour, or type it is,b ecause it was spotted in teh Espionage Screen, and covered by a pop up (I believe anza-Kongo was all we saw).

bite said:

There is also at least one more city state than what is on your list - Mbanza-Kongo

Click to expand...

The issue is I can't do anything with it at the moment. We need a colour and a type. I'd guess religious or cultural, but it could also be a mercantile one.

As things stand, if we were to get:

6. Morocco
7. Italy
8. Indonesia
9. Native American

Than we'd at minimum need to replace:

Marrakech - Mercantile
Milan - Cultural
Florence - Cultural
Genoa - Mercantile
Venice - Maritime
Jakarta - Maritime

On top of what has already been replaced (including Ragusa). The fact that we can't analyse Mbanza-Kongo yet means little at this point.

An interesting question from here though is about statistics. There are what... 42 city states in Gods & Kings. We know there's a net gain of at least 1 (Sofia) and I'd guess 4 (two new religious city states, two new militaristic, including Sofia). Why 4? 8 for both Militaristic and Religious, which brings it back into a similar line to Vanilla where it was 10 for Maritime and Cultural and 8 for Militaristic. If this is the case, then we'd have 46 city states, but for this analysis that could be 42 or 50 and shouldn't really matter.

So far we have seen what I think is two different games of Brave New World. Let's start with the first one:

Civs:
Poland
France
Assyria

As it had 4 civs it would by default have 8 city states. Of these we saw:

Riga
Sofia
Ur
La Venta
Zanzibar

We don't need to identify every one in the game, I'm just making sure that if one appeared in both gameplay demonstrations that is taken into account for completeness sake.

The second game had 6 civs and as such would have had 12 city states by default. The civs were:

France
Zulu
Poland
Assyria
Brazil
Portugal

The city states were:

Panana City
Sofia
Geneva
Monaco
Wittenberg
Jerusalem
Prague
Cape Town
Bratislava
Mbanza-Kongo
Belgrade

From the two games we get firstly that we got 3 new out of 5 for the first and 4 of 11 being new from the second, of what we saw of course. Here it is important to take into account that Sofia is still "new" in the second game, despite us seeing it in the first. The reason being is that we're not interesting in the particular city states, but rather the probability of seeing ones that are new to Brave New World. As it stands we've seen 7 "new" from 16 total city states seen. So that's about 43.8%±12.5% of the civs being new. So that's reasonably anywhere from ~14-26 city states being new for this version. As things stand we've seen 6 unique new city states, if Italy, Indonesia and Morocco are 3 of the remaining 4 we'd see another ~6 city states replaced and adding to this say... another 3 new ones for balance (1 militaristic, 2 religious) that would give us a total of around 15-16 new city states, so within error roughly what we're seeing in terms of new city states. The next few demonstrations they give us could tell us a lot.

Martinus said:

Err no Ragusa is in Dalmatia not Sicily

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What I meant was Ragusa [D] has been removed (presumably), our basis for Italy from this theory would be this is because they're adding Ragusa , however, if Sicily and Naples are excluded from the hypothetical Italy city list, there'd be no reason to remove Ragusa [D] as a CS.

Venice is a different matter because there the city would be Ragusa [D] as part of it's overseas cities.

Eagle Pursuit said:

What happens to your analysis if Ragusa shows up later in a different type or color?

Click to expand...

It would break it and go against what we've seen so far. We have seen city states change colour before, but they were replacing another one that was removed (despite already being in the game). In those cases however, no new city state took their colour-type combination. So having Riga take Ragusa's colour-type combination and Ragusa showing up uninvited in new threads would break the analysis and force somewhat of a rethink, and based on previous analysis, would break one of the most solid rules from what has been seen so far with city states, which is that unless they are replacing another, they don't take a used colour-type combination.