Sweden - These guys are getting sold short, I think. Caroleans are excellent Rifleman UUs. March is an excellent promotion and getting from the start is fantastic. The Hippopotamus is still a good UU, even though I really dislike the Lancer upgrade path; hitting quite hard with a Great General and also moving the otherwise slow GGs up the line faster or into rough terrain to drop a citadel.
My favourite aggressive Citadel play is to land an embarked Danish GG, race to the target spot, and drop the Citadel. But I can't do that in the list anymore.
I agree on those points and personally I would prefer to see a cultural ub instead of the musketeer (its been the there UU since civ3
) but you also have to remember that this game is primarily made by/for Americans so you cant expect every thing to be totally perfect.
The Musketeer being in since Civ III is fair reason to keep it - players of past games like seeing things represented just because they were in previous games, from the Zulus to game mechanics that they felt were "left out" of vanilla (they weren't any such thing: Civ V isn't Civ IV. But it exemplifies the mindset).
If the game does have such a deep American bias and made to cater to popular viewpoints, I have to question why civilizations like Songhai and Siam got in while only a few civilizations besides the United States(one of which even has the same territory as the US) from either American continent were included while there's a colossal amount of civs from Europe/Asia.
Ask the average American if they know more about France or Panama. And Japan is a particularly big interest over here, it seems.
As for the Songhai and Siamese, this is what you get after five incarnations of a 20-year-old game when the designers' main target is players of previous incarnations of the game. Many of whom are historically more literate than the original target audience (in not a few cases because an interest in history was inspired by earlier incarnations of the game, or because of mods that added more obscure civs). The additional civs selected have become increasingly obscure as time goes on, and not because of a lack of higher-profile civs to add.
And even there there is some pandering to popular expectations: Siam is a well-recognised name in popular culture, from cats and twins to The King and I (which is sufficiently widely-recognised to have featured in an episode of Family Guy, in heavily-modified form), and most people who recognise the name know it as "the old name for Thailand". It is not, however, a name that was ever in use for the Sukothai Kingdom represented in the game - rather it was derived from the Chinese name for Ayutthaya, a later Thai capital that was never part of the Sukothai Kingdom.
Something similar was done to Khmer city names in Civ IV, which were taken from the modern Western names for specific temples on the Khmer tourist trail (in some cases regardless of whether (a) these were ever genuinely cities rather than temples, or (b) whether two names - such as Yasodhapura and Angkor Thom - actually represented the same city), and has been done with the Maya city names in Civ V (which, unlike Civ IV which used the historic Maya site names, uses the modern names).
I've heard that in Gods and Kings, it is theoretically possible to have zero peacetime City State Influence decay with Greece...wow. They're already a civilization that I prioritize taking out precisely because of their UA. If that is the case, what the heck am I going to do with my gold if I play as Greece in Gods and Kings? First world problems, I guess!
This refers to natural influence decay, which is not very significant in G&K (also, I'm not sure if it applies to trespassing, which gives a bigger hit in G&K than it did in vanilla). Any civ can maintain permanent influence at 30 without natural decay (Patronage policy giving +20 resting influence, plus pledging to protect which gives +10), which makes Siam a powerhouse but only weakens Greece relatively speaking. Add in the plethora of new ways to gain large amounts of influence, and the general tendency for net influence to increase over time by completing quests even with normal rates of influence decay, and all Greece's UA really does is make it marginally more difficult to rig elections/launch coups effectively.
Aww come on people, don't knock Sweden out before Siam and Byzantium
What possible grounds are there for knocking out Siam, especially at this stage? While it's more fun to work the UA, G&K has even made it possible to use Siam on 'auto' (as above), keeping perma-friendship with everyone and milking the benefits, for those who like that style of play. Certainly neither Sweden nor Siam should fall before Greece, and that's not a weak civ despite the now near-uselessness of the UA.
