that’s not really true. Mapuche didn’t take over too much land, the various mapuche tribes and nations occupied that land. Most wars were squabbles within those tribes or fighting against imperialist advances, first from the inca, then from spain.
La Pampa, Rio Negro, Chubut, and Nequen are quite large and make up about 25% of Argentina. But point is, the Mapuche at least have a history of taking (and taking back) territory, just barely qualifying them as an expansionist culture.
Poland wasn’t particularly expansionist, and while athens created large alliances, they never really sought out to expand their own polity. Gandhi-India certainly wasn’t expansionist, nor were the Maori, who again, settled the land and then mostly had inter-tribe squabbles.
Expansionist
or imperialistic.
* Poland-Lithuania was basically an empire, at least to the extent that Austria-Hungary was, or Hungary alone, or Georgia.
* Greece was largely included in the past because Macedonia; it's admittedly a little odd now that Alexander was split off from Greece. It might be a strong case for civ to abandon the idea of empires altogether in VII.
* Gandhi's Indian nationalism was borderline imperialist, and at least on that front I think he unequivocally fits in the game, even if in most other respect he is disappointing compared to better options.
* Maori had at least an oral history of wayfaring, and certainly settled the entirety of New Zealand. They were another stretch, but they at least mostly jive with the core 4X mechanics.
Gran Colombia wasn’t expansionist, it was just 3 provinces of new spain that declared independence at the same time and chose to unite to maximize their power and leverage against falling back into colonialism. Nor was Brazil, which’s large size is lent to the imperialism of the portuguese, not any desire or intent for expansion in Brazil itself.
GC was like a reverse-empire, but it had many of the similar signatures and cultural vestiges of an empire, helped a lot by the fact that New Granada had existed for a long time prior. And Brazil occupies that happy space shared with Canada and Australia in that, by the time it achieved independence, it didn't
need to expand; it was already huge and a dominant regional power, making it inherently imperial-ish from its inception.
Kongo wasn’t expansionist. Nor were the Cree or Maya, really, either (the maya, like the other city state civs, largely fought amongst themselves in any wars). Georgia wasn’t expansionist either.
* The Cree, as far as I remember, were a dominant power in intertribal warfare and sprawled all across the Canadian frontier. They are about as much an expansionist/imperialist NA tribe as the Shoshone, perhaps a bit more.
* The Maya are generally agreed to be an empire and had many imperial tendencies.
* Georgia is colloquially referred to as an empire here and there, and definitely displayed imperialist traits during its golden age.
* Kongo...I think the developers take what they can get in Bantu Africa. Like the Zulu it's the closest thing we have to an empire, native or otherwise, outside of South Africa.
The key point here is Civ != empire. I think civ means a culture or nation which left a profound impact in regional or international history (or continues to do so)
There's clearly some sort of standard in place. Where we don't have straight-up empires, we have kingdoms which were very close to empires (Kongo, Georgia, Hungary, Scotland), and absent that we have very large tribes known for spreading and conquering/reconquering (Cree, Mapuche, Maori, Scythia). We don't have any civ in the game yet that generally didn't ever try to reach beyond its territory and influence its neighbors, and I think that is an implied requirement for civs in VI where it a) has a natural, uncontroversial synergy with 4X design values and b) keeps the number of civs the devs need to consider with a reasonable scope. This latter bit is again quite important because if the Guarani could get in, then everyone would clamor for the dozens of other smaller kingdoms which didn't having any warping effect on their neighbors.
