Define broad civilizations to make civ switching work?

The arguments boil down to civilization 7 not really reflecting the real world or real history anymore. It's just gameplay & you shouldn't try to compare it to the real world.
It never did, and now it's just a different kind of ahistoricity. IMO it's less ahistorical than it used to be, but it is still ultimately a video game, not a history book. TBH I'm less concerned about the historicity of the new model than I am about losing the what-ifs. I hope eventually we see some alt-history DLC of Exploration Age-versions of Antiquity civs, for example (but I also think those sort of things should be DLC or left to modders, just like the fantasy modes from NFP).
 
The ahistory I'm mostly concerned about is that by keeping a single leader for the entire game, Civ is perpetuating the "great person" view of history and that some of those great persons were vampires. It's actually worse, now, because undying Napoleon doesn't just use his hypnotic gaze to control all aspects of French society, he manipulates the ancient Greeks and also the Normans before sinking his fangs into the French Empire. It's worrisome and I fear for the impact it will have on the AI-generated papers schoolchildren submit to their history teachers.
 
The ahistory I'm mostly concerned about is that by keeping a single leader for the entire game, Civ is perpetuating the "great person" view of history and that some of those great persons were vampires. It's actually worse, now, because undying Napoleon doesn't just use his hypnotic gaze to control all aspects of French society, he manipulates the ancient Greeks and also the Normans before sinking his fangs into the French Empire. It's worrisome and I fear for the impact it will have on the AI-generated papers schoolchildren submit to their history teachers.
To be fair this theory of history is well supported by some excellent Civil War documentaries.
 
The ahistory I'm mostly concerned about is that by keeping a single leader for the entire game, Civ is perpetuating the "great person" view of history and that some of those great persons were vampires. It's actually worse, now, because undying Napoleon doesn't just use his hypnotic gaze to control all aspects of French society, he manipulates the ancient Greeks and also the Normans before sinking his fangs into the French Empire. It's worrisome and I fear for the impact it will have on the AI-generated papers schoolchildren submit to their history teachers.
Like it or not, Napoleon already has his fangs sunk into Modern France: he organized the current states/administrative divisions of France and its Legal Code, so Napoleonic influence is impossible to avoid in modern French life.

And the Civ franchise has always been thoroughly stuck on the "Great Man/Person" view of history, but I suggest that Civ VII's basic organization of the game into Ages that are driven by the greater trends of history (Crisis based on internal and external events outside of individual control, for instance) puts some distance between the game and the Great Men for the first time ever.
 
I don't agree that Civilization has focussed on great men to be honest.

The Civ leaders are as much AI opponents that are playing the game as they are elements inside the game itself. That so many people were furious about leaders talking to each other in the diplomacy screen (rather than facing the human player) shows this is not a rare view of things. Of course they're also a distilled caricature of the civilization they represent, so it's a bit of both. The old Role-Playing vs Power-Player dichotomy is the same thing in another lens. Great People have been in the game since Civ3 Conquest IIRC, but they're more in a supporting role than anything else. Old World is more "Great Man" IMO. If Civ as a series has any take on history, it's that development is linear, driven by technological progress, and the state that can produce more (be it population, science, production, gold, science, etc...) will inevitably dominate.
 
The ahistory I'm mostly concerned about is that by keeping a single leader for the entire game, Civ is perpetuating the "great person" view of history and that some of those great persons were vampires. It's actually worse, now, because undying Napoleon doesn't just use his hypnotic gaze to control all aspects of French society, he manipulates the ancient Greeks and also the Normans before sinking his fangs into the French Empire. It's worrisome and I fear for the impact it will have on the AI-generated papers schoolchildren submit to their history teachers.
Don't worry, when he face Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, he will finally be stopped.
 
It never did, and now it's just a different kind of ahistoricity. IMO it's less ahistorical than it used to be, but it is still ultimately a video game, not a history book. TBH I'm less concerned about the historicity of the new model than I am about losing the what-ifs. I hope eventually we see some alt-history DLC of Exploration Age-versions of Antiquity civs, for example (but I also think those sort of things should be DLC or left to modders, just like the fantasy modes from NFP).

The ahistory I'm mostly concerned about is that by keeping a single leader for the entire game, Civ is perpetuating the "great person" view of history and that some of those great persons were vampires. It's actually worse, now, because undying Napoleon doesn't just use his hypnotic gaze to control all aspects of French society, he manipulates the ancient Greeks and also the Normans before sinking his fangs into the French Empire. It's worrisome and I fear for the impact it will have on the AI-generated papers schoolchildren submit to their history teachers.

The point here is that there are different motivations of players of civ. There are RPG players, history players, strategy players etc.

The civ designers try to keep the RPG players by giving them now a leader as continuous element. That might work. But actually I'm not sure.

The history players might be caught by the nice graphics and deeper uniques/civics. But they will be thrown off by the civ switching.

The strategy players might just be fine.
 
The point here is that there are different motivations of players of civ. There are RPG players, history players, strategy players etc.

The civ designers try to keep the RPG players by giving them now a leader as continuous element. That might work. But actually I'm not sure.

The history players might be caught by the nice graphics and deeper uniques/civics. But they will be thrown off by the civ switching.

The strategy players might just be fine.
That's fair, but it also depends on perspective. I'm a chiefly RP and history player, and I overall like the direction they're taking Civ7 except the cheaper leader models. :dunno:
 
The history players might be caught by the nice graphics and deeper uniques/civics. But they will be thrown off by the civ switching.
I think that is one of the points of contention. I agree some players will be thrown off by the civ switching, and some of them will be because for them that cross a line historically. But the way you wrote, sounds like you think that a historical player will invariably get throw off by it, while me and others argued that that doesn't need to be the case at all: The previous game already had many ahistorical things to it that this game will keep, and the new system has some ahistorical parts to it (like some of the civ "historical" paths, etc while being a bit more historical that previous civs in some places(having civs being more fit for the era you can use them than previous ones, not having a civ continue without some down moments for 6000 years, etc).

There is no reason why playing civ historical means previous one were ok but this one is an objective no go. Only that for some people subjective pov, this will be a bridge too far or just cross the accumulated line of ahistoricity with all other ahistorical characteristics of the series. Likewise, it may be better for some historical players and make them like it even more because of the points in which it become more historical than previous entities.
 
It's not just the historical players who might be thrown off by it. It's partly a game concern, too. I've used this analogy in other threads. In games, your avatar generally stays stable through the whole game. It's part of how you, and all the other players, know who won. You don't start Monopoly as the racing car, shift over to the scottie a third of the way through, and then finish as the thimble. In Civ VII, the leader has to carry all of the load of that through-the-game identification. You are really playing as Ben Franklin--and three potentially pretty-much random civilizations he happens to control in the span of 6000 years (no one of which, incidentally, has to be connected with the RL Ben Franklin). This is a psychological question as much as it is anything else: how players identify with their game avatars. Maybe there are studies on it. Game Studies is a whole academic field these days.

I've always identified strongly with my civ and weakly with my leader. In fact, I sometimes do a historical write-up of my games, and give names to the kings who were reigning at a particular moment, completely independently of the leader of the civ. The leader is just "the spirit of the civ"
 
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If there is a simple divide between those who like civ-switching and those who don't, I think it might be whether one can envision a "civilization" as a set of ideas that morphs with time, spreads, and can be adopted by different groups; or whether one only sees it as the static identity of one group of people, passed unchanged down the generations unless an external events kills off that group (or least replaces its leadership). This is as much a matter of definition as it is of history.
 
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To be fair this theory of history is well supported by some excellent Civil War documentaries.

The Civil War documentaries provide support for undying vampire leaders. :eek:

And the Civ franchise has always been thoroughly stuck on the "Great Man/Person" view of history, but I suggest that Civ VII's basic organization of the game into Ages that are driven by the greater trends of history (Crisis based on internal and external events outside of individual control, for instance) puts some distance between the game and the Great Men for the first time ever.

Nope, they're totally doubling down on the some Great Persons are vampires theory. No, tripling down. The undying now show up in 3 times as many civilizations as before.
 
Nope, they're totally doubling down on the some Great Persons are vampires theory. No, tripling down. The undying now show up in 3 times as many civilizations as before.
But they only seem to be providing half as many Leaders, so that's 1.5 times at best and having removed the Undying Civilizations from the equation I think they are slightly ahead.

Besides, any nod to the actuality of history that No polity has survived for 6000, or even 3000 years intact and unchanged is, I think, a dramatic step forward. To quote Firesign Theatre:

"Forward into the Past !"
 
If there is a simple divide between those who like civ-switching and those who don't, I think it might be whether one can envision a "civilization" as a set of ideas that morphs with time, spreads, and can be adopted by different groups; or whether one only sees it as the static identity of a group of people, passed unchanged down the generations unless an external events kills off that group (or least replaces its leadership). This is as much a matter of definition as it is of history.
But it's not just a matter of agreeing with this in principle as a description of general historical processes. The phases of your empire will have names that have RL associations, and the sequence will be discordant against those associations. One can agree with the proposition that that "civilizations are a set of ideas that morph with time . . ." and know that Rome doesn't evolve to Mongolia. To experience it your way, a player will have to ignore the specifics of the second civ and just think of it as Generic Second Civ built on the ruins of my First Civ. But civs' specifics are a big part of how they are defined and a big part of what gives them appeal.

This is what a good early post on the matter argued (I wish I'd taken better note of it): When you're Egypt and you shift to Mongolia b/c you have three horse, don't think of yourself as Mongolia, think of yourself as Horse Civ, or Egypt in its Horse Civ stage. But unless renaming is allowed, the screen is going to read Mongolia.
 
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Seeing the way discussion is going around 'Great Leaders' has me thinking some mod potential... how about a Great Idiots leader game mode? Where the game is populated by the great idiots of history, and rather than leader bonuses you have to work against negative traits.
 
Or, in a slight modification, just leaders who had less-than-impressive epithets and then funny leader traits:


(includes Childeric the Idiot, so there's some overlap in our ideas)
 
But it's not just a matter of agreeing with this in principle as a description of general historical processes. The phases of your empire will have names that have RL associations, and the sequence will be discordant against those associations. One can agree with the proposition that that "civilizations are a set of ideas that morph with time . . ." and know that Rome doesn't evolve to Mongolia. To experience it your way, a player will have to ignore the specifics of the second civ and just think of it as Generic Second Civ built on the ruins of my First Civ. But civs' specifics are a big part of how they are defined and a big part of what gives them appeal.

This is what a good early post on the matter argued (I wish I'd taken better note of it): When you're Egypt and you shift to Mongolia b/c you have three horse, don't think of yourself as Mongolia, think of yourself as Horse Civ, or Egypt in its Horse Civ stage. But unless renaming is allowed, the screen is going to read Mongolia.

That seems to be pretty much what I said in the post you quoted? At least what I implied by it. And that post you're thinking could well be one of mine too lol.

If you think of the Egyptian civilization as the specific group of people who lived along the Nile and built the pyramids, and of the Mongolian civilization as that specific group of people in the eastern part of the Eurasian steppe in the middle ages; then it's absurd for the former to become the later. But if you think of Egyptian civilization as a way of living that relies heavily on rivers and building monuments to the gods [plus lots of other nuanced aspects of culture represented by UUs, UBs, UAs, etc... that I won't exhausted list here], and of Mongolian civilization as a horse centric society with a focus on aggressive warfare; then it's entirely plausible that the descendants of people who had the former culture and lifestyle would adopt the latter. Especially in response to a generations long crisis and if they lived in a region with an abundance of horses.

I'd argue that the former interpretation is actually quite difficult to hold in Civ as, unless you're playing TSL, there is not even a Nile or Eurasian Steppe to begin with, so whatever group of people you imagine living in your Ancient Egyptian empire aren't real-world ancient Egyptians. They're a fictitious population living in a fictitious setting undergoing a fictitious history (and not just because they live inside a computer). The very premise of the game points towards civilizations as ideas rather than peoples. I don't think that requires ignoring specifics: it just requires thinking of those specifics as ideas. For example, a yurt as a portable dwelling suited to pastoral nomads with a specific look that anyone who lived as pastoral nomads might have developed, rather than as the building that is inhabited by particular group of people from real history.

So while some of the historical civ transitions are inspired by sudden invasions of concrete groups of people in real life history; the mechanic (especially for the unlockable civs), and the alternate-history setting of Civ in general, demands abstracting civilizations away from those peoples to a set of ideas about lifestyle, society, and culture.
 
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Seeing the way discussion is going around 'Great Leaders' has me thinking some mod potential... how about a Great Idiots leader game mode? Where the game is populated by the great idiots of history, and rather than leader bonuses you have to work against negative traits.

Huh. Could be an era transition thing. "Spend 3 Legacy points to pick from the Great Leader pool. Otherwise you will be randomly assigned a Great Fool to lead your civilization for the next era."

Would allow Firaxis to introduce the general public to a whole new group of historical figures.
 
Or, in a slight modification, just leaders who had less-than-impressive epithets and then funny leader traits:
unready Æthelred noises (thought strictly speaking his epithet in Old English means he was ill-advised, not ill-prepared)
 
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