Culture (Unit + Quarter) Speculation Thread

[Krajzen]

Speaking of Precolombian Civs, however unlikely it is, they could go for the Nahuas as a broader demonym that could not only fit the Mexica, but also Toltecs or Tlaxcalan.

With this approach they could as well start naming civs as Germanic, Romanic, Slavs, Semites, Indo-Aryans etc : P

 

[BuchiTaton]

With this approach they could as well start naming civs as Germanic, Romanic, Slavs, Semites, Indo-Aryans etc : P

There are not problem with the idea of Nahuas, they are an ethnic group, certainly not unified but there are already on game "Celts" and "Mayans" or even "Greeks", all they are broad ethnic identities.

Even more, Mayans and Celts are broader than a possible Nahua culture. Anyway I see unlikely devs gonna leave the well know name of "Aztecs" for a less used even if proper Mexicas, or the "umbrella" cultural Nahuas.

Also, being honest there are very few chances to have other playable nahua states like Toltecs or Tlaxcaltecs, maybe as minor factions. Teotihuacan seems more likely but they probably were Otomi related.

 

[mitsho]

Just a thought, is there a reason two cultures in different eras can't have the same name? I just assumed so, but on second thought, having f.e. the Germans in both the medieval as well as the industrial era makes perfect sense. And there is enough room for an aesthete early modern era English with an emblematic ship and another quarter. It wouldn't be fair for them to be in the vanilla game, but as later additions, I can totally see a second England work. So is it confirmed that two cultures can't have the same name?

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Just a thought, is there a reason two cultures in different eras can't have the same name? I just assumed so, but on second thought, having f.e. the Germans in both the medieval as well as the industrial era makes perfect sense. And there is enough room for an aesthete early modern era English with an emblematic ship and another quarter. It wouldn't be fair for them to be in the vanilla game, but as later additions, I can totally see a second England work. So is it confirmed that two cultures can't have the same name?

It's possible, but I don't think it's very likely. For the Medieval Era people have speculated they might be called the Teutons or Holy Romans.

I believe the British will show up as an Industrial Era culture, and if you want to roleplay as the British Isles, you would stay as Medieval England for the Early Modern period as it stands.

 

[mitsho]

Yeah, that was not my question though. What you wrote is implied in my text already. My question was whether we have any indication that cultures of different eras may not share names. The only person that may answer that definitively here is Cat, so i was hoping that may happen.

 

[Siptah]

Yeah, that was not my question though. What you wrote is implied in my text already. My question was whether we have any indication that cultures of different eras may not share names. The only person that may answer that definitively here is Cat, so i was hoping that may happen.

But that can lead to the same name appearing multiple times if someone sticks witha culture for multiple eras.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

It could get confusing with discussions like needing to specify which England you are talking about every time you mention them. and then you might have the situation of being 'England' but then another player beating you to 'England' in the next era so you just decide to transcend and now there are two players known as England but are different.

Now games like this are full of strange situations but I think that would go too far into outright confusing territory.

Perhaps they have ruled out internally a Early Modern England? Not just for the base game but DLC's too which I'm sure they plan too. They might be planning to focus on adding new cultures and avoid having lots of European cultures appearing multiple times.

 

[Krajzen]

Personally I have always said: adding many different incarnations of a single country isn't that problematic. You simply name them like

MEDIEVAL AGE
Medieval France or
Kingdom of France or
France - Capet Dynasty
EARLY MODERN AGE
Early Modern France or
France - Ancien Regime or
Absolutist France or
France - Bourbon Dynasty
INDUSTRIAL AGE
Revolutionary France
Napoleonic France
French Empire
MODERN AGE
Modern France
French Republic
Gaullist France


And so on. It's not the most elegant solution but it would be fine for me.
As you can see, you may deal this way even with the very difficult case of 'France' which was simply 'France' for over 1000 years.
England is far less problematic because you can name it like
Medieval - Anglo Saxons
EM - England
Industrial - British Empire
Modern - Great Britain
here, problem solved

Similarly, you can do a lot of shenanigans like Piedmont -> Italy, Castille -> Spain, Prussia -> Germany, or an entire line of succession Kievan Rus -> Muscovy -> Russia -> Soviet Union and so on

Personally, as a Polish person, I would be too excited to get several incarnations of Poland to be irritated over their 'artificial' namind like

Piast Poland
Jagiellon Poland
Polish Commonwealth
Polish Republic

or let's try another difficult case, Turkey:
Seljuk Empire/Sułtanate of Rum (Med)
Ottoman Empire (EM)
Ottoman Empire - Tanzimat (Industrial)
Turkey (Modern)

This way you can spread every singular nation over many eras.

 

[BuchiTaton]

The name of a culture could seem as a cosmetic or irrelevant element on the selection and design of on game cultures. But I think names said a lot about if there is really the best idea to have all those cultures.

Remember this...

As mitsho said, let's not get ahead of ourselves. That's a lot of different cultures, and it would pretty much push the number of combinations off the charts. (23 cultures per era, taking Transcendence into account, leads to 183,140,352 possible combinations...

Let's be fair: That well runs very deep (As Boris points out), and you could probably fill several university courses and still only scratch the surface.

The number of possible cultures even with the huge possibilities of Humankind is really limited for the most ambitious suggestion about broader and/or deeper historical representation. 10 cultures by era at release, so how many could be at the last expansion? 14, 16, 20 by era?

Now said 18 by era just to have a number, chose Medieval Era as example, so:
- Aztecs
- Byzantines
- English
- Franks
- Khmers
- Malinese
- Mongols
- Norse
- Teutons
- Umayyads

Then for expansions:
- Georgians
- Incas
- Lithuanians
- Magyars
- Majapahit
- Ruthenians
- Tamils
- Tibetans

But where are Mississipians, Tongan, Seljuks, Castile, Songhay, Swahili, Tang, Khazars, Mixtec, Scottish, etc...? There are not place for most of the cultures we can think about it. So please dont burn the slots on 3 or 4 versions of France, Italy, Germany or Britain. If you need to force adjectives to the name of the culture like Meiji Japan then that is saying you that this culture is kind of forced. English > British works but why Polish Commonwealth when could be just Polish and transcend.
If Humankind would have governments would you have "French Republic" with absolutist monarchy government?
Even PRC could save this just by be named China, as Qing could be Manchus. Simple names without government restrictions.

Finally remember how CIV series used to have just one or two representations (leaders and UU) of England, France, Japan, etc. by game? I dont see why there are need to be 4 of each one on Humankind.

 

[Krajzen]

The name of a culture could seem as a cosmetic or irrelevant element on the selection and design of on game cultures. But I think names said a lot about if there is really the best idea to have all those cultures.

Remember this...


The number of possible cultures even with the huge possibilities of Humankind is really limited for the most ambitious suggestion about broader and/or deeper historical representation. 10 cultures by era at release, so how many could be at the last expansion? 14, 16, 20 by era?

Now said 18 by era just to have a number, chose Medieval Era as example, so:
- Aztecs
- Byzantines
- English
- Franks
- Khmers
- Malinese
- Mongols
- Norse
- Teutons
- Umayyads

Then for expansions:
- Georgians
- Incas
- Lithuanians
- Magyars
- Majapahit
- Ruthenians
- Tamils
- Tibetans

But where are Mississipians, Tongan, Seljuks, Castile, Songhay, Swahili, Tang, Khazars, Mixtec, Scottish, etc...? There are not place for most of the cultures we can think about it. So please dont burn the slots on 3 or 4 versions of France, Italy, Germany or Britain. If you need to force adjectives to the name of the culture like Meiji Japan then that is saying you that this culture is kind of forced. English > British works but why Polish Commonwealth when could be just Polish and transcend.
If Humankind would have governments would you have "French Republic" with absolutist monarchy government?
Even PRC could save this just by be named China, as Qing could be Manchus. Simple names without government restrictions.

Finally remember how CIV series used to have just one or two representations (leaders and UU) of England, France, Japan, etc. by game? I dont see why there are need to be 4 of each one on Humankind.

The very reason why there could be several incarnations of a given culture in HK as opposed to civ is how HK is oriented towards much more cultures than civ.
Humankind is going to casually have 60 civs at release. IIRC civ6 had like 18 civs on release. That's 30% of HK initial roster.

That's because
a) HK's very core design is about switching between many culture in game, unlike "choose one per game" mechanic of civ
b) The pain of adding each new culture is much smaller thanks to the lack of
- the huge resource sink of fully animated leader with native voiceover and Pixar level animations
- by civ6, like 15 minutes of soundtrack per civ, one theme variant for each era (I think HK will have 2-3 times less)
- the conceptual pain of needing civs with very well documented (even if mythical) leaders

There are so many more potential slots (three times more by release!) that it would be a waste NOT to spend some on multiple incarnations of certain very powerful, very multi faceted, long living cultures. It would be a waste to NOT use the opportunity never offered by civ format: to see more than one side or period of diverse great empires. Especially in a game with core "transform culture" mechanic so there is an abvious appeal of evolution through different Chinese dynasties, or from Greeks to Byzantium.

And the best part is, Humankind's format completely disables "true start location Earth maps" (at least without some pretty extensive modding of core rules), so that pretext supporting obsessive geographical symmetry is already dead

As for 4 incarnations per culture, I guess thats too much for European nations, but I'd honestly support 6 incarnations of China and India across all ages lol, or 3-4 incarnations for Persia, Ethiopia, Turks, Korea.

Huh, thinking now about it, 4 different incarnations of Germany or Italy wouldnt be that silly seeing how many fragmented states they had and how little justice they get in games like this... (with Italy somehow being absent and Germany being often hugely militarist Prussian stereotype)

 

[BuchiTaton]

Even without count trascendence:
10 cultures by era = 1000000
12 cultures by era = 2985984
14 cultures by era = 7529536
16 cultures by era = 16777216
18 cultures by era = 34012224
20 cultures by era = 64000000
The number turn so masive each additional culture that turn overhelming for a player to try even a small amount of possible combinations. With this model a huge number of cultures at release not mean necessarily that there is going to be many more.

Names like "Celts" said ous there is not going to be Gauls for France or Gaels/Britons/Picts for Britain. Classical era have less possible cultures that medieval, so if the long term plan was about many incarnations of those nations the really different on culture and name celtic representatives should have been an easier task for devs.
"Persians" maybe open place for "Iranians" on later eras, but not more.

India is a complety different history, the subcontinent was less centralized and more diverse that core China.
Harappans (west pre-Aryans) > Mauryans (east buddhist aryan ) > Tamils (south hinduist dravidian ) > Mughals (west islamic turkic-persian) > ***** > India (Republic)

The Han chinese dynasties are powers since ancient time, relevant all along every era. But even China could leave place on Early Modern for Manchus/Qing and like India dont have an industrial incarnation to represent that time period when those regions were overshadow by european colonial powers.

Italy could be like this:
1- Etruscans (Ancient have much more free space)
2- Romans
3- ***** Can pick Franks,Teutons (HRE) or Byzantines huge parts of Italy was controled by them anyway.
4- Venice (could be medieval but that era is full of options all around the world, still Venice had their best time at Renaissance and we know what that mean for Italy)
5- Italy (unification and colonial ambitions)
6- ***** Is still Italy
Why not Papal states?, again because there are too many good options for Medieval and Early Modern to spend the slots on more than one Italian representative at the same era. Still you have 4 representatives for Italy.

Germany is easy:
***** > "Goths" > Teutons (HRE) > Austrians > Prussians > Germans

Actually Goths, Celts and Romans are perfect options for classical Europe knowing how many european countries have singnificative legacy from those three. Considering the migrant Goths, Germany like Italy get 4 regional representatives while India and China get 5 incarnations of each one.

 

[conorbebe]

As someone who is English, I don't think my country needs to appear more than twice. Having the English for Medieval and the British for Late Modern/Industrial is adequate in my opinion. With the ability to "Transcend", I don't think it is necessary that any nation is represented every consecutive era from their inception. We can use our imaginations to fill in the gaps. There are so many other interesting civilisations and states that I'd like to see included over repeat cultures.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

Yes considering India and China appear to be limited to three cultures across the game I think everyone else can content themselves with 1-2.

 

[bite]

So with last week being the English, one would assume this week's reveal with be the French?

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

So with last week being the English, one would assume this week's reveal with be the French?

I'd assume it would be called the Franks. At this point I could see the French waiting to be revealed in the Industrial era based off of the Revolutionary/Napoleonic period.

Edit: It can also easily be Early Modern as well, but with the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and whatever Italian city-state they want to throw in as possible European cultures, which were in their prime during the Early Modern period, the French can wait.

 

[Siptah]

I'd assume it would be called the Franks. At this point I could see the French waiting to be revealed in the Industrial era based off of the Revolutionary/Napoleonic period.

Yes, Franks would be the fitting name. And for me, it is hopefully modeled on the earlier Franks - sadly, we already know the EU to be a knight though, so I don‘t expect them to get a Pfalz EQ or something similar reminiscent of the Carolingian Renaissance to accompany that.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

yeah I'd expect them to be later Franks just as we have English not Anglo Saxons with seax shieldwall and great hall EQ or something like that.

 

[one179]

So i did a small research and can confirm (on 90% ) some coming medieval civs:

Franks (capetian)
unique unit - capetian knight

Holy roman empire
unique unit - teutonic knight - probably like in Aoe2 foot soldier - as we have so many cav unique units in medieval age

Ottomans
unique unit - 'some cavalry'

Mongols
unique unit - --- (probably cavalry unit)

Vikings
unique unit - longship

middle east civ ??
unique unit - camel cavalry ?


already comfirmed - Byzantines, English

and my guess for the latest two civs are - aztecs and japanese

 

[Siptah]

We‘ve seen the Mongolian EU.

The Ottomans are hopefully not in medieval.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

So i did a small research and can confirm (on 90% ) some coming medieval civs:

Franks (capetian)
unique unit - capetian knight

Holy roman empire
unique unit - teutonic knight - probably like in Aoe2 foot soldier - as we have so many cav unique units in medieval age

Ottomans
unique unit - 'some cavalry'

Mongols
unique unit - --- (probably cavalry unit)

Vikings
unique unit - longship

middle east civ ??
unique unit - camel cavalry ?


already comfirmed - Byzantines, English

and my guess for the latest two civs are - aztecs and japanese

I would substitute the Ottomans and the Japanese for the Khmer and either Mali or the Inca.
The Khmer are going to be in the game, and they would go in the Medieval. I think it might be determined that the Japanese will be put in Early Modern as well, due to the way the Samurai look. The Ottomans definitely don't belong in the Medieval era, but Early Modern.

 

[one179]

So i did a small research and can confirm (on 90% ) some coming medieval civs:

Franks (capetian)
unique unit - capetian knight

Holy roman empire
unique unit - teutonic knight - probably like in Aoe2 foot soldier - as we have so many cav unique units in medieval age

Ottomans
unique unit - 'some cavalry'

Mongols
unique unit - --- (probably cavalry unit)

Vikings
unique unit - longship

middle east civ ??
unique unit - camel cavalry ?


already comfirmed - Byzantines, English

and my guess for the latest two civs are - aztecs and japanese

So i was searching further and at 90% are these 10 medieval civs in game:

Aztecs

Byzantines (Varangian guards)

English (Longbowman)

Franks (Capetian Knight)

Ghana (Wagadou) (Camel Cavalry)

Khmers

Mongols

Holy roman empire/Teutons (Teutonic Knight)

Umayyad (cavalry unit)

Vikings (Longboat)

 

[j51]

So i was searching further and at 90% are these 10 medieval civs in game:

Aztecs

Byzantines (Varangian guards)

English (Longbowman)

Franks (Capetian Knight)

Ghana (Wagadou) (Camel Cavalry)

Khmers

Mongols

Holy roman empire/Teutons (Teutonic Knight)

Umayyad (cavalry unit)

Vikings (Longboat)

Yup, that's what everyone in this forum has seemed to figured out over the past month.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Ghana (Wagadou) (Camel Cavalry)

Is it confirmed that African culture has a camel unit? Could it be the for the Ummayads?

 

[j51]

Is it confirmed that African culture has a camel unit? Could it be the for the Ummayads?

I remember a camel unit being in the shots of the tech tree next to an Akan symbol (modern Ghana), indicating the probable inclusion of medieval Ghana. Someone at Amplitude must've gotten mixed up and accidentally chose it as the symbol. Hopefully that has/will be corrected.