and Korea... right now Korea is just a weird fusion of Silla and Chosen.
eh, i don’t think Korea has to be deblobbed, and i think, especially with dynastic civs like Korea, it’s better that some abilities are picked up from various points in the history of the civ, so I don’t really have complaints about Korea’s design.
I’d like to see a Religious/Industrial Japan led by Meiji in a future game though, the current all-rounder Japan with a warlord leader is fun but we’ve had it for a while now (since before we had Oda and Tokugawa, and now Hojo as well), would mix things up and make them a bit more interesting. Also, I don’t think any leader of Japan has ever focused especially on Shinto and Meiji would be opportune in that respect.
Lol imagine Ho Chi Minh with a unique Infantry unit of his own who is super duper cheap to maintain and can dig trenches and tunnels and invisible in marshes and woods and rainforests, just to bring those 'Nam flashbacks.
Or something like this, a unit with an active ability that allows them to remain permanently invisible and cannot be detected as long as they stay in neutral territories and not adjacent to another civ's border. Deal extra damage when attacking out of invisibility. They cannot and cannot go back into invisibility for 10 turns after receiving damage from a non-Barbarian unit.
Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh could have the water puppet theatre as UI, the vietnamese version of the Turtle Ship as UU, and Vietcong as a weaker but much cheaper Infantry replacement unit which can make farms and have better vision in jungle
Arabia is a civ I'd love to be deblobbed at some point though I think it's unlikely it'll happen, certainly not before India. I just think it opens up more interesting game possibilities if you separated them rather than kept them together and creates more potential Muslim civs. Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Mamluk, etc could allow more nuanced representation of the region than is currently possible.
Of course whether or not these would be accepted by the community as worthy civs or not is another question
Arabia is a civ that I can see having a good argument for de blobbing but doesn’t necessarily need it. At the very least, a central Arabia civ + peripheral civs like Al-Andalus and Oman would be fun.
India is, in my mind, the number one candidate for deblobbing. Split it up into Maurya, Chola, Mughals and if you really want, modern India, and you’re set.
Number 2 for deblobbing, imo, is Persia, into Achaemenid and Qajar/Safavid at the very least. Maybe a Persia/Iran dichotomy.
Third would be maybe Russia, with USSR, Russian Empire and Kievan Rus or Muscovy civ’s
Civs like China, Korea, Japan, Germany and Arabia, Russia and Persia (if they’re not deblobbed), with very different cultural periods over time under different empires that function differently would be best served with 2-3 leaders.
India can’t be represented as well in that sense since it was never a really unified thing until the British came, and it’s empires were culturally, linguistically and ocassionally religiously disparate.
It wouldn't hurt to give Arabia extra leaders, but honestly I don't think they're a high priority for de-blobbing. The Arabic-speaking Islamic world was highly unified culturally during the Middle Ages. I'd much rather see an Islamic Persian civ added than see Arabia split. Likewise I don't think civ really needs Silla and Joseon as separate civs--certainly not in a game where the HRE, the German Empire, and the German Republic are all the same civ, where royal France, Imperial France, revolutionary France, all the French republics, and maybe even Francia are the same civ, where China from Qin to PRC are the same civ, etc.
i agree with all of this
