clapyourhands
Prince
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2017
- Messages
- 412
Mathematically speaking, there are ~20 colors that the game currently utilizes to distinguish civs from one another. One (black) is reserved for city-states when used as a background, and two others (navy blue and dark teal) are somewhat hard to distinguish from one another if they share the same icon color. This leaves 19 color options for the icon, and 18 for the background, for a grand total of 342 possible combinations. Well, 341 once you discount barbarians. At a rate of 1 alt leader for every 8 civs, that also meant about 30 new alt leaders, leaving 311 new civs (it ended up being 309 new civs with 32 new alt leaders). So of course I thought, "309 civs? I've seen far more ideas than that on this forum, we could easily fill out this set with room to spare!" And then sought to start filling it out, with icons. Full-blown abilities and the like would have even more insanity than this was. Civs that already have a popular mod for them just have the name of the mod creator in place of the icon so as to not re-invent the wheel, but I also didn't want to use the icons without permission either. Feel free to check out the mods if you want to see those specific icons.
Things I've learned from this:
1. I was wrong, 309 is far too many. I hit the point of "I would be content if these were all the civs to ever be included in the franchise" somewhere a little after #100, thought I started grasping for straws at around ~#175, and really started grasping for straws around ~#250. I started creating lists of potential "if I run out of ideas civs" as I did my research, then ended up exhausting all of those as well and then some.
2. With that said, there were far more than 350 polities that could make interesting civs. The bigger issue was where to draw the line between polities that morphed into or were conquered by another, especially when from a modern viewpoint they're viewed in continuity. Things get even more complicated when you consider states of semi-independence, like vassals that were left to their own devices or intra-polities that retained autonomy for centuries but were never independent. A lot of the polities I ended up splitting into their own civs versus keeping as a cohesive, era-spanning one ended up being nearly arbitrary.
3. As a corollary to the above, the civs that had priority for alternate leaders were 1) vanilla civs, and 2) civs that represented either long periods of time or multiple different polities that were not split into their own civs. So the Mongols didn't get two leaders since many other khanates get their own representation, but Siam does because Ayutthaya and modern-era Siam are not given their own civs. It's not perfect, but with the allocated 30ish alt leader spots I tried to give each civ only 2 leaders at most.
4. Technically speaking there are hundreds of people groups and indigenous tribes that were left out. However, there's only so much you can do to distinguish dozens of hunter-gatherer cultures from each other with 4 uniques per civ. I elected to give each region of North America at least one if not two NA groups, even splitting some regions into subregions (Alaska, Pacific NA, coastal CA, inland CA, Southwest, Baja, etc...), each region of Australia an Aborigine group, and other continents representation of either their largest or most well-known groups.
5. As for modern nations, most regions have a modern representative, but similar to the last point there is only so much you can do gamewise to distinguish them. I tried to choose options that were either popular in mods, had something that might be interesting about them mechanically, or would cover a bit of the map that for whatever reason had no civ representing it. As a side note, if you were to color in a map with territorial ranges of each civ, there would be virtually no empty spots save for Antarctica, and even then that would be filled if you considered modern claims.
6. Many color combinations are, to be frank, quite ugly. There's nothing that can be done about this fact, though, as by the constraints of the proposal there must be a civ for every color combination, regardless of clashing. Additionally, some color combos are very harsh on the eyes or illegible in their usual tone and required either lightening or darkening in order to alleviate this while still staying in the range of their name.
7. Also color related, it is frankly impossible for every civ to have an ideal color combination in the absence of a jersey system. Of course this is a problem Firaxis has noted as the very reason the system was necessary, but it became painfully clear throughout this process. Once the reds/blues/yellows/whites/ started filling up, I started settling for maroon or pink for red; tan or brown for yellow; purple or teal for blue. Then those started running out of room, and around icon ~200 the color choices became near-meaningless. They tried to stay somewhat faithful if possible, but honestly no culture in their right mind would want Purple/Orange-Brown as their national colors unless its capital was Halloweentown (sorry, Palmyra).
8. In keeping with the Civ VI design philosophy the icons are as simple as possible, with a leaning towards plant and animal motifs. To keep things distinct I tried to keep lions, dragons, and eagles to a minimum (ie: for Austria I went for the edelweiss instead). For a specific outlier, the dragon was far too iconic for Bhutan, but I was unable to simplify it for the icon; if it were to appear in Civ VI as a city-state or the like, I'd expect a still-full-bodied, but stylized version; I just don't have the skill to draw it that way.
You could squeeze in maybe ~25 more civs/leaders if you separate navy blue from regular blue and utilize the combos with black that the CS's don't already use, and maybe a few more by separating the hues of gray (though the light grays are hard to read with the light colors, and the same for the dark grays and dark colors). But honestly there isn't much to represent other than, as I said before, various indigenous groupings and ancient cultures.
Conclusion: In terms of visual clarity the game can support over 300 distinct civs. For the sake of quality, it really shouldn't get anywhere near that.
Spoiler Icon Table :
Things I've learned from this:
1. I was wrong, 309 is far too many. I hit the point of "I would be content if these were all the civs to ever be included in the franchise" somewhere a little after #100, thought I started grasping for straws at around ~#175, and really started grasping for straws around ~#250. I started creating lists of potential "if I run out of ideas civs" as I did my research, then ended up exhausting all of those as well and then some.
2. With that said, there were far more than 350 polities that could make interesting civs. The bigger issue was where to draw the line between polities that morphed into or were conquered by another, especially when from a modern viewpoint they're viewed in continuity. Things get even more complicated when you consider states of semi-independence, like vassals that were left to their own devices or intra-polities that retained autonomy for centuries but were never independent. A lot of the polities I ended up splitting into their own civs versus keeping as a cohesive, era-spanning one ended up being nearly arbitrary.
3. As a corollary to the above, the civs that had priority for alternate leaders were 1) vanilla civs, and 2) civs that represented either long periods of time or multiple different polities that were not split into their own civs. So the Mongols didn't get two leaders since many other khanates get their own representation, but Siam does because Ayutthaya and modern-era Siam are not given their own civs. It's not perfect, but with the allocated 30ish alt leader spots I tried to give each civ only 2 leaders at most.
4. Technically speaking there are hundreds of people groups and indigenous tribes that were left out. However, there's only so much you can do to distinguish dozens of hunter-gatherer cultures from each other with 4 uniques per civ. I elected to give each region of North America at least one if not two NA groups, even splitting some regions into subregions (Alaska, Pacific NA, coastal CA, inland CA, Southwest, Baja, etc...), each region of Australia an Aborigine group, and other continents representation of either their largest or most well-known groups.
5. As for modern nations, most regions have a modern representative, but similar to the last point there is only so much you can do gamewise to distinguish them. I tried to choose options that were either popular in mods, had something that might be interesting about them mechanically, or would cover a bit of the map that for whatever reason had no civ representing it. As a side note, if you were to color in a map with territorial ranges of each civ, there would be virtually no empty spots save for Antarctica, and even then that would be filled if you considered modern claims.
6. Many color combinations are, to be frank, quite ugly. There's nothing that can be done about this fact, though, as by the constraints of the proposal there must be a civ for every color combination, regardless of clashing. Additionally, some color combos are very harsh on the eyes or illegible in their usual tone and required either lightening or darkening in order to alleviate this while still staying in the range of their name.
7. Also color related, it is frankly impossible for every civ to have an ideal color combination in the absence of a jersey system. Of course this is a problem Firaxis has noted as the very reason the system was necessary, but it became painfully clear throughout this process. Once the reds/blues/yellows/whites/ started filling up, I started settling for maroon or pink for red; tan or brown for yellow; purple or teal for blue. Then those started running out of room, and around icon ~200 the color choices became near-meaningless. They tried to stay somewhat faithful if possible, but honestly no culture in their right mind would want Purple/Orange-Brown as their national colors unless its capital was Halloweentown (sorry, Palmyra).
8. In keeping with the Civ VI design philosophy the icons are as simple as possible, with a leaning towards plant and animal motifs. To keep things distinct I tried to keep lions, dragons, and eagles to a minimum (ie: for Austria I went for the edelweiss instead). For a specific outlier, the dragon was far too iconic for Bhutan, but I was unable to simplify it for the icon; if it were to appear in Civ VI as a city-state or the like, I'd expect a still-full-bodied, but stylized version; I just don't have the skill to draw it that way.
You could squeeze in maybe ~25 more civs/leaders if you separate navy blue from regular blue and utilize the combos with black that the CS's don't already use, and maybe a few more by separating the hues of gray (though the light grays are hard to read with the light colors, and the same for the dark grays and dark colors). But honestly there isn't much to represent other than, as I said before, various indigenous groupings and ancient cultures.
Spoiler Icon Origins :
Conclusion: In terms of visual clarity the game can support over 300 distinct civs. For the sake of quality, it really shouldn't get anywhere near that.
