Yes, I hadn't thought of that. Now that you mention it, AoE II does cover a pretty large timeframe, something like 500 to 1500. Which can be a bit awkward as it allows for the Dark Age Goths and the Age of Discovery Spanish existing coterminously in the same game.
Yeah I definitely felt that the Spanish and Portuguese didn't really fit for the time period they were going for. Felt kind of unbalanced to have only one or two massive, global naval powers in a time period that mostly begs for everyone to be land-locked.
Since you mentioned it, I've been reading up on the appropriateness of the term. As far as I can tell, the term was used mainly by Europeans, though the etymology is contested (it may have come from a Semitic root). Still, I guess just "Arabs" would have been better.
It seems kind of like a misnomer in a similar sense to Scythia, in that some people were more definitively "Scythian" but the term became broadly applied to nomadic steppe peoples generally. However, I'm willing to give Scythia a pass since that time period and region was poorly attested and concessions were quite obviously made just to get a kurgan civ into the game at all. We don't need to resort to calling the Arabian peoples outdated names that feel vaguely racist in retrospect, when the cultural/language barrier has been breached and we now have a fairly precise understanding of their historical identity.
I don’t know what you mean that the Guarani isn’t culturally distinct. They also occupy an empty space the map.
Meaning that if the Mapuche are intended to fill a playstyle niche of a large native population occupying in large part northern Argentina which resisted against colonial invasion, the Guarani don't have much to differentiate themselves from the Mapuche. I really don't see the devs wanting to put too many civs in the game which are primarily defined as resisting imperial rule; that kind of weighs down the tone of the game.
I do agree that we need a caribbean civ, specifically my first choice would be the Taino or Arawak, my second would be Cuba and my third the Haiti
While I wanted Taino and the Arawak for a time, Taino is poorly attested and the city-state was a fine compromise. In general I have been really digging city-states as a way to get cultures like the Taino and Muisca in the game without having to delve into really obscure design space that doesn't have wide appeal. In a way it's like a kind of soft vetting process for future civ games, see which city-states grab players' attention more.
If we are going to make concessions for islands to join a roster full of empires, I would pick Haiti over Cuba any day. Haiti was at least nominally an empire and represented a sort of cultural self-assertion that was relevant to the entire region. Cuba...is really hard viewing as a success story when the cost of freeing itself from U.S. influence has been effectively tyrrany. Though now that I look at both of them I think I would just prefer we go with something safe like pirates, who undoubtedly held a larger spread of territory between Port Royal, Havana, and Nassau and can represent the "spirit" of anti-capitalist sentiment without being too immediate.
why not? They’re an empty space and they’re an interesting culture. It’s not liek civ is a 0 sum game either, and we can have the guarani as well as a caribbean and NA civ.
Uh, yes Civ is absolutely a zero sum game. There will only ever be X number of civs in VI, and only X number made per year. The developers only have so much time/money/energy, only so much mechanical space to differentiate civs, and only so much cultural space that will actually appeal to the broader market. The question is
where the sum lies, not whether it exists, and I think this sort of boundless hope attitude toward including every imaginable civ in the game is simply untenable in the face of reality.
indeed, but in the case of the Música and Guarani, we do know enough to make a civ.
Knowledge is only half the battle. The other half is making it marketable. I simply do not see the devs squandering their efforts to fit a fifth civ into a very well-represented continent when there are more resonant cultures to be plundered with stronger mechanical/aesthetic design space that are more likely to appeal to players. Nobody in the community has been asking for the Muisca as much as they were asking for Gran Colombia, and virtually nobody has been asking for the Guarani. Nobody was really asking for the Mapuche, either, but at least some reddit historian went and appealed to Firaxis directly to get them into the game; we don't have any evidence of that for the Guarani.
