pre-release info Civ VII Civilisation & Leader Timeline

pre-release info

evonannoredars

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Civ 7 Timeline v3.png

Was curious how the civs line up with their respective eras (not well in the case of several Antiquity civs!) and the temporal distribution of leaders (predominantly 1700/1800s), so I made this.

Dates used for starts and ends of civs are the ones wikipedia lists on the respectively named entries, ambiguous dates are denoted with a darker shade. A few timespans are ambigious generally due to vagueness of what timespan the civ covers so I wasn't sure what named period to count (e.g. the French and Shawnee), although the soundtrack names helped in a couple cases (e.g. America and Hawaii). Very possible I made mistakes converting centuries to years or plotting BC dates, so corrections welcome!

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Pretty good efforts here! Some corrections:
  • The ending date of the Mongols is usually set at 1368 CE, i.e., the fall of Yuan. Ming directly succeeded them (although Mongols had just retreated to their steppe homeland and remained to this day).
  • The title of the "colonial" American soundtrack is actually very misleading. The American design features from the War of Independence (1776) to WWII (up to 1945).
  • Similarly, the French design features from the mid-1700s to the end of Belle Epoque (1914), rather than just the colonial empire.
  • The Meiji Japan design also features many elements from Imperial Japan up to 1945.
  • The design of Siam has Phibunsongkhram as a great person, whose prime ministership of Siam/Thailand lasted till 1957.
Edit: I am also not so sure about including the entire Mayan timeline, the in-game Maya design is very much a Classical Maya design, i.e., about 200-900 CE (which ended in the so-called "Mayan Collapse").
 
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Pretty good efforts here! Some corrections:
  • The ending date of the Mongols is usually set at 1368 CE, i.e., the fall of Yuan. Ming directly succeeded them (although Mongols had just retreated to their steppe homeland and remained to this day).
  • The title of the "colonial" American soundtrack is actually very misleading. The American design features from the War of Independence (1776) to WWII (up to 1945).
  • Similarly, the French design features from the mid-1700s to the end of Belle Epoque (1914), rather than just the colonial empire.
  • The Meiji Japan design also features many elements from Imperial Japan up to 1945.
  • The design of Siam has Phibunsongkhram as a great person, whose prime ministership of Siam/Thailand lasted till 1957.
Edit: I am also not so sure about including the entire Mayan timeline, the in-game Maya design is very much a Classical Maya design, i.e., about 200-900 CE (which ended in the so-called "Mayan Collapse").
Cheers! I'll make some adjustments later. Aye how I choose some timespans is variable, between specifically named empires/kingdoms (eg. in the case of Meiji Japan I wasn't sure whether to only include the named Meiji japan or the Japenese empire) and vague thousand-year civilisations/cultures (eg. with ancient Egypt, where I don't know enough to tell if they focused on specific periods or not).
In the case of the Maya, I did choose to include all of it instead of just the Classic period in slight protest of the fact the civ itself is just called the Maya/to point out how suitable they'd be for de-blobbing into an exploration counterpart. :P
Perhaps if enough people chime in with specialist knowledge I could improve the graph by having separate colours for 'time period the civ specifically refers to' and 'time period the devs appear to have drawn from most' for cases where it isn't so clear-cut. For now I'll maybe reconsider how I'm choosing timespans to be more consistent.
 
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Pretty cool thanks.
Some comments from what I see:
* A lack of very ancient civs and leaders.
* Early exploration age (so called "dark ages") is void of civs.
* Almost no leaders between 400 AD and 1200AD (only Charlemagne)
* Some civ outliers in antiquity (I was actually very surprised they put the Khmer as Antiquity when it was announced)
 
I think your graph would benefit from making the portion before 1500BC compress into 300 year per bloc instead of 100... And then make the part after 1300AD be blocks of 50 years instead of 100. Would squeeze a little the left part and spread out the right part, be more readable IMO.

Just a thought
 
Pretty cool thanks.
Some comments from what I see:
* A lack of very ancient civs and leaders.
* Early exploration age (so called "dark ages") is void of civs.
* Almost no leaders between 400 AD and 1200AD (only Charlemagne)
* Some civ outliers in antiquity (I was actually very surprised they put the Khmer as Antiquity when it was announced)
I noticed the lack of very ancient civs sometime ago but unfortunately there are very few options outside of Mesopotamia for civs as ancient as Egypt. Sure there were comparable civilizations in India and China but those regions also have far better documented civilizations and leaders from later periods of the ancient era.
 
I think the Mughals and Prussia (and Amina for a hypothetical Hausa civ) place a pretty comfortable exploration/modern divide around 1500-1600. I'm not sure why the devs put the line as late as 1750 when clearly "modern" is intended to include "early modern" era. The only real exceptions that ride the line are Shawnee and Spain, and we can understand why for both of them.

And similarly, although less important, I think they could have coulded push "antiquity" out to 800 for now to catch Khmer and Aksum. At the moment we haven't had any ambiguous civs straddling that line except early Abbasids and Charlemagne so for now that delineation makes more sense. Could even extend them as "dark" a tad earlier since Khmer does seem to lean very early, almost Funon-ish, and we know that the Mississippians are vicariously representing earlier settlements along the Mississippi like Poverty Point.
 
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I noticed the lack of very ancient civs sometime ago but unfortunately there are very few options outside of Mesopotamia for civs as ancient as Egypt. Sure there were comparable civilizations in India and China but those regions also have far better documented civilizations and leaders from later periods of the ancient era.
Depends on how you describe "ancient"; there are plenty of Iron Age civs...still in the Near East, of course, but the Ancient era is more than the Bronze Age.
 
Depends on how you describe "ancient"; there are plenty of Iron Age civs...still in the Near East, of course, but the Ancient era is more than the Bronze Age.
if you run the timeline back to 3200 BC and represent every century equally on the timeline, it's always going to make pre-700 BC look sparse. there certainly are civs in that time period, but A.) not that many with historical records, and B.) 2,500 years is a real long time

I'd love to see Yamnaya, for instance, but not sure where you'd get a list of city names... maybe one day they'll add nomadic gameplay (a man can dream)
 
Depends on how you describe "ancient"; there are plenty of Iron Age civs...still in the Near East, of course, but the Ancient era is more than the Bronze Age.
I'm describing ancient in the context of the game's era - which is mostly representative of the iron-age. And the ancient era is more than the Iron Age.

And I wouldn't be surprised if Assyria will be based on iron age Assyria too (which is valid as they were the first iron-age power). However I do think it would be nice to have a civ from the bronze age too - such as the Hittites or Phoenicians who could have a bonus tied to the copper resource.
 
Phoenicians who could have a bonus tied to the copper resource.
The Phoenicians were Iron Age, though there is more continuity than discontinuity between the Bronze Age Canaanites and the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were hungry for metals, which is what led them to establishing colonies on Cyprus, Sardinia, and Iberia (with their colonies in North Africa and Sicily chiefly as waypoints, though North Africa was also for access to African luxuries like ivory and ostrich eggs) so a bonus from empire resources would be very appropriate for them.
 
Updated with corrected timespans! Not going to add DLC content until release (or maybe once we know enough about the civs for me to confidently include all the CotW content), although Simon Bolivar is going to add yet another row to the leaders section :crazyeye: Ada Lovelace fortunately fits into the space above Benjamin Franklin and behind Amina fine, hopefully the RtR Leaders aren't from that 1700-1900 block Firaxis so loves or their second favourite 1400s gang.
 
I think your graph would benefit from making the portion before 1500BC compress into 300 year per bloc instead of 100... And then make the part after 1300AD be blocks of 50 years instead of 100. Would squeeze a little the left part and spread out the right part, be more readable IMO.

Just a thought
Tempted to make an alternate second version with the turn years on the x-axis so it's more exponential, but I'd rather keep a linear axis for this one for the sake of historical timespan comparison.
 
Also, looking at that, I feel like the Maya and the Mayapan should be distinguished in your chart, as the version we got is very clearly the former and not the latter.

Although if any Mesoamerican civ gets two eras, looking at this gives me a lot of hope for a Mayapan exploration civ (and Kukulkan leader, woof). Fingers crossed.
 
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Updated with corrected timespans! Not going to add DLC content until release (or maybe once we know enough about the civs for me to confidently include all the CotW content), although Simon Bolivar is going to add yet another row to the leaders section :crazyeye: Ada Lovelace fortunately fits into the space above Benjamin Franklin and behind Amina fine, hopefully the RtR Leaders aren't from that 1700-1900 block Firaxis so loves or their second favourite 1400s gang.
They've been datamined, so if you want to know who they are, click on the spoiler tags below:

Temüjin Genghis Khan
Rani Lakshmibai

I'm not sure if you're interested in knowing though, so i kept it in tags 🤷
 
It's incredible to see how saturated the last 400 years are. This goes to show that future DLCs and expansions should focus on the Medieval and Classical periods, rather than on the modern and "post-modern" times.
Hatshepsut is feeling rather lonely as the only genuinely Ancient leader in the game.
 
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