From the shrunken head on the guys necklace I tend to agree with the Romans lol!
It does sound a bit odd though, how many times have the natives been the ones who attacked first? Hardly ever! Those new invadors were the trouble makers! I hope you can get a good response from Barbarians at times! That would make it a tad more realistic!
Barbarian was deffenitly a racist word in Ancient Greece, however, I don't see many people calling other racial groups "Barbarians" these days, so I don't think it carries the same weight as it did back then.
Does anyone take offence to the word "Barbarian"?
Well, if anyone is taking offence to the word "barbarian", or to this image for that matter, it's much more a taught insult rather than a real one. People think they ought to feel insulted when someone's calling a black person smelly, regardless of context.
The whole game of Civilization is culturally biased, but that's not a bad thing. Everyone has a cultural bagage and one cannot think without picking out certain aspects out of this bagage. And indeed, when Europeans were fighting natives (which is a very culturally biased word on itself) they had little to no regard for these 'barbarians', so this picture is more or less historically correct. His looks are very stereotypical, though...
Nowadays we don't consider any nation in the world as 'barbarian' or 'savage', but that doesn't mean barbarians should not be included in the game. The whole choice of civilizations included in the game, plus their so-called unique units and unique buildings, is a product of common 'knowledge', whether historically accurate or not. Mostly they are, but that's not my point here. In fact, the whole thinking in terms of nations as entities with absolute power and sharp borders is a left-over from the age of nationalism. Think about religious groups, companies, corporations, terrorist organisations... But now I'm wandering off.
In short: don't try to be ethnically correct too much, but rather enjoy the recognision of an etnocentristic expression. Once you know how to identify them all, you would grow mad about all the 'insults'.
I think these barbarians lived in south America which is somewhat close to the amazon if not in it and the game designers had to make him look more barbarian like somehow.
The Norte Chico were not barbarians. They were a civilization in the Andes. The reason this is wrong is not that they're using the term "barbarian", though the Norte Chico certainly weren't that, it's that they portray them as some "black" Amazonian tribe that has shrunken heads and hates cities and attacks with blowpipes when in fact nothing could be further than the truth. The Norte Chico were somewhat like the predecessors to the other Andean cultures- Chavin, Moche, Huari, Inca, etc.- they built cities in the Andes based around terraced pyramids and verticality. The Norte Chico farmed potatoes and raised llamas and were sedentary.
If Firaxis had really wanted to put this ridiculous stereotype in, they should have said something like "Cunhambebe", a leader of the Tupi, an actual Amazonian tribe.
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