Guys... guys... guys! Aren't we going just a little over the top in the history lessons we're trying to give one another.
I admit I was applying some historical knowledge myself to illustrate the point I was trying to make. Which is simply that I don't agree with the position that Furor Teutonicus = Poor choice... the original topic of this thread.
In a game like Civilization, history has a profound influence upon gameplay. If it didn't, Firaxis would have simply made up fictitious civilizations.
To that end, it is worth discussing history as it applies to the gameplay. Obviously a post that only talks about history is off point, but so long as a thread intertwines history and how it applies to gameplay, there is never too much history.
It might not be great for some gamers, but when I read so many post with people agreeing that the UA and UU's that Germany has in this game are just about worthless and not even appropriate to the German history, I felt someone needed to defend some of the considerations the game designers seem to have based their decisions on.
The choices that the developers made are appropriate and I don't think anyone said they weren't. However, they could certainly be improved upon, more so than most civilizations in the game.
So I applied some of my own logic and pretty soon came up with a couple of very good reasons why all this Bismarck bashing is doing an injustice to the creators of this game.
Most of the arguments I presented try to explain the viewpoint the designers must have had when deciding on what kind of edge the German Civilization should have over the other Civilizations. So far very little effort has been done to disprove any of them.
Furthermore I am amazed about this increasingly hateful discussion about some of the playable Civilizations' political history and that it somehow matters when they officially became a nation.
I thought I was doing fairly well in eloquently and concisely explaining my opinions. It is a simple matter to see what the developers were thinking or what they were trying to convey, but, after reviewing their design choices, I still find Germany lacking (not absolutely, but to a degree greater than the other civilizations in the game).
Do I really need to point out that the name of the game is "Civilization". If those things had mattered to the designers they would have probably called the game: "Nation"
A "nation" falls under the category of "civilization," along with "kingdom," "empire," "tribe," or whatever other term you can think of.
You have the nation of Germany, which was previously the Empire of Germany, which was previously small, seperate nations and kingdoms, which was previously the Holy Roman Empire, which was previously small kingdoms, which was previously small tribes (I might have mussed up the sequence, but my illustration is made and you get the idea).
It becomes rather difficult to pick three things (UA/UU/UB) that will sufficiently represent any civilization, no matter the class of that civilization, when you attempt to represent so many iterations of that particular civilization. Germany, more so than most, has gone through way too many incarnations to comfortably be represented by such a wide spanning collection of uniques (Furor Teutonicus, Landschnekt, and Panzer). The developers would ultimately do more credit to history and more credit, most importantly, to the gameplay by making Germany a more focused, well-honed civilization, and perhaps by adding in a new civilization to represent the older German kingdoms/empires/tribes.
Oh, and Germans didn't come together and call their country "Germany." That is just what it is in English. In Germany, they call themselves "Deutschland."
In English, we just went with a name that Latin writers ascribed to a certain tribe. Similarly, in Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, etc.), it is a derivation of "Aleman," which is merely
another tribal name described by Latin authors.