Discussion about Game Options

I'm happy never to see any of these options again.

 

One option I'd like to see is the ability to choose the number of colonial powers. For myself including countries (primarily Denmark and Sweden) to the mix is a mistake. If we are going to include non-historical nations, I'd rather see the Chinese or Japanese included as an option (at least the Chinese have been suggested to have visited the West Coast of North America. All the Dane and Swedes do is clutter up the map when playing the historical maps.

 

You can edit the nr of natives and colonials in CIV4WorldInfo.xml
If you make a custom game you can also set which AIs you want. If a map size has 6 colonial powers and you manually select the 6 you want then those 2 left won't spawn.

Historically though Denmark actually did have colonies and islands in the Americas, unlike those you mentioned. Sweden also had some. These are not ahistorical, just small. Seriously, it's a 2 second google search to find info on these... the internet isn't a novelty anymore...

 

More specifically The Virgin Islands. I took a quick look through the article and it left out some relevant info, which is interesting for context, particularly related to slavery. A family traveled to mainland Denmark and took a slave with them. He didn't want to be a slave and it resulted in a court case. In 1801 the case reached supreme court, which ruled "The word slave isn't and has never been mentioned in the law. It is now the duty of the court to determine the legal relationship between the people in question". They came up with Domestic Worker, which was the most common type of employment for Danes at the time. This meant the "slave" had a standard contract like everybody else with the duties and rights mentioned in the law for standard contracts. Once the judge was done speaking, the "slave" announced while everybody were listening "I quit my job". Also worth adding it was illegal to hit your domestic workers.

Around the same time the king decided that school should be mandatory for all children. 3 days a week for 7 years. Teachers would teach 6 days a week and as such families relying on the workforce of their children would only have to send half of them each day. The only way to get out of this was private tutoring. This meant nobody was low enough to not go to school, not even "slaves" or people in the poor house.

Also regarding the interest in selling the islands, it's not mentioned that on top of a workforce issue, the purpose was gone. The main goal was to produce sugar, but by the time there were no more interest in the islands, it had turned out that Denmark has the best soil in Europe for sugar beets. Yeah even today without the colonies Denmark is a net exporter of sugar. The railroad connected domestic sugar factories delivered sugar to the cities too cheaply for the cross Atlantic transports to be able to compete. Linking the poor colonial economy purely to a question of workforce/slavery is inaccurate at best.

 

This has always been a friendly forum and I think this is a bit uncalled for. Would it not be better to educate with a smile, rather than belittle?

 

I was going to let it pass, but since it's mentioned, I will say that I agree. Searching for something online can be a bit random as it's hit or miss if you write precisely the right thing to search for. Also google aims at giving local results meaning two people on the forum searching for precisely the same thing might not get the same result. All this combined means "you should have googled it" can easily be used in cases where people actually did it.

Having said that, I will add that arguing for removal of existing features like already completely countries should also be a bit more careful. Not only are people using them, it is also completely ignoring that it takes many hours to create a new country, complete with king and leaders. I haven't seen any arguments, which remotely will make me even consider changing anything regarding which countries are available.

 

So I may occasionally be overly aggressive, and sometimes to an unnecessary extent, yes, but usually you'll find that I am right despite it.
I often see a small but loud part of mod users spouting the most ridiculous nonsense. They either have no idea what can be modded or cannot (which is fair, but tiring), or they don't consider how much time something takes, or, the most common, they don't ever read anything in the description and then come with some ******** question or even request they'd know better than to do had they read the damn thing. I know I'm not alone in this view, for this has been discussed a fair amount in other communities.

In this example SimianMusings makes an utterly ridiculous and ******** request. For starters the argument he makes is so ridiculous Monthy Python couldn't have come up with it themselves. He states Denmark's and Sweden's presences in the Americas are ahistorical, and would rather have China or Japan be present, as it is speculated they have visited the Americas. Well for starters the Vikings have actually factually briefly settled North America, and a search for something as basic as "Danish colonies" should immediately give you a yes/no answer on the topic regardless of search engine and physical location. In the meanwhile SimianMusings suggest replacing these with a country like China, which has never settled the Americas nor has, as far as I could quickly find, ever had any colonies at all (let's leave modern geopolitics out of it).

Not only is this whole suggestion laughable, the work involved in making it happen and the work already done that would be thrown out, is certainly of no laughable proportion. This whole thing is so ridiculous it's not even funny, and modders in general are routinely thrown nonsense such as this.

Now do notice, I've said that this very specific opinion of SimianMusing is utterly ridiculous, but I haven't attacked SimianMusing himself beyond criticizing his willingness to use a search engine in this one instance. Big difference. And I myself have been the target of this very common critic, rightfully so in some cases.

And, finally, I did provide a solution to the personal request he made, which I'm willing to bet he wouldn't have gotten otherwise:

 

Can an optional setting to require killing all AI units for it to be wiped out from the game (a-la Civ4) be added?