Great People to Shake Up Civ VII

[Boris Gudenuf]

Because let's face it (again), something this radical is not very likely to be enacted for Civ VI . . .

The discussion has come up in relation to Designing France and other countries for Civ VII, of using Great Ministers to 'modify' the features/Uniques of an Immortal Leader.
Let's take that idea and run with it, and introduce another potential Great Person to break up the smooth and boring progression of your Civ through the game: The Great Revolutionary.

First, the Great Minister in a nutshell:

The idea is simple: instead of changing the expensive resource Sinks that are the Immortal Leaders, you get a Great Minister who modifies some aspect of the Civilization independently of the Leader: a new UU, UA, UB, or other aspect.
- The Great Minister, like any other Great Person, comes along semi-randomly - you can’t completely avoid them, you can’t precisely predict their appearance.
- You can only have one Great Minister at a time, so when/if you get a second one, he replaces the first one. They Do Not have to be related to the Civ you are playing historically: Sumer can get Tallyrand in the Industrial Era or later.
- The Great Minister can also be Dismissed: that is, you can voluntarily get rid of him, but if you do it without Cause, you get major penalties. Cause is defined as losing your Capital, going into a Dark Age, or some similarly Highly Negative Event in Civ VII.
- Great Ministers, unlike Governors, affect the entire Civ. Right now, I am thinking they should give you a different UA or possibly a UU or UB, possibly require you to take certain Civics/Social Policies. To keep them separate from the effects of Great Revolutionaries (see below), I would not make them change your Government.

Here's is a very partial list of potential Great Ministers. I say partial because it is very Euro/North American -Centric: someone with a better knowledge of African, East Asian and Southeast Asian History needs to add some candidates from those areas.
Key:
* = a Great Minister/Revolutionary who could also be another type of Great Person, like a Great General, Great Scientist (Ben Franklin) or Great Writer (Voltaire)
** = a person who has been used as a Leader of a Civ in either one of the previous games or Mods for same.
Italics = a person that I personally think would be better as an entirely different type of Great Person. My suggestion is in parentheses immediately following

Imhotep (Ancient)*
Nefertiti (Neferneferuaten?) (Ancient)
Nefertari (Ancient)
Naqi’a (Classical)
Serua-eterat (Classical)
Chanakya (Classical)
Guan Zhong (Classical)
Zichan (Classical)
Li Kui (Classical)
Solon (Classical)
Wu Qi (Classical)
Mozi (Mo Di) (Classical)*
Olympias (Classical)
Shang Yang (Classical)
Cao Cao (Mengde) (Classical)*
Li Si (Classical)
Theodora (Classical)**
Alcuin (Medieval)
Hasdai ibn Shaprut (Medieval)
Nizam al-Mulk (Medieval)
William Marshal (the Marshal) (Medieval)
Eleanor of Aquitaine (Medieval) **
Tlacaelel (Medieval)
Gajah Mada (Medieval)**
Nogai Khan (Medieval)
Anne of France (Anne de Beaujeu) (Early Modern)
Margaret of Parma (Early Modern)
Margaret of Angouleme (Margaret de Navarre) (Early Modern)
Sir Thomas More (Early Modern)
Thomas Wolsey (Early Modern)*
Thomas Cromwell (Early Modern)
Sir Francis Walsingham (Early Modern)
Nur Jahan (Early Modern)
Catherine de’ Medici (Early Modern)**
Raja Todar Mal (Early Modern)
Axel Gustaffson Oxenstierna (Early Modern)
Cardinal Mazarin (Early Modern)
Cardinal Richelieu (Early Modern)**
Count-Duke of Olivares (Early Modern)
Catherine I (Yekaterina I Alekseyevna) (Industrial)**
John Law (Industrial)
William Pitt (Industrial)
Gregorii Aleksandrovich Potemkin (Industrial)
Jacques Necker (Industrial)
Tallyrand (Industrial)
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Gorchkaov (Industrial)
Klemens von Metternich (Industrial)
Benjamin Franklin (Industrial)*
Benjamin Disraeli (Industrial)
Prince Aleksandr Gorchkov (Industrial)
Chuang Bunnag (Industrial)*
Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich (Industrial)
Nikolai Alekseevich Milyutin (Industrial)
Nikolai Karpovich Girs (de Giers) (Industrial)
Otto von Bismarck (Industrial)**
Saigo Takamori (Industrial)*
Ito Hirobumi (Industrial)
Li Hongzhang (Industrial)*
Okubo Toshimichi (Industrial)
Count Gyula Andrassy (Industrial)
Jules Francois Camille Ferry (Industrial)
Isabel Gonzaga (Braganza) (Industrial)
Luitpold Ludwig (Industrial)
Cixi Taihou (Industrial) **
Mariya Fyodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark) (Industrial - Modern)
David Lloyd George (Modern)
Georges Clemenceau (Modern)**
Miklos (Nicholas) Horthy (Modern)
Plaek Phibunsongkhram (Modern-Atomic)*
George Marshall (Atomic)*
Kukrit Pramoj (Atomic)*

And, the second Part:
Great Revolutionaries.

This started as Great Felons - Great People you probably didn’t want to see, because they were up to No Good: Rob Roy, Jesse James, Charles Ponzi, Stenka Razin, etc: people to annoy you and your citizens. Then it occured to me that the people you Really didn’t want to see were the one that would force some major change in your Civilization whether you wanted it or not. In other words, the Great Revolutionary, who makes you change your Government, or major aspects of your Government, Civics, and/or Social Policies regardless of your wishes.

- Great Revolutionaries are Great People that appear, produce an Effect, and disappear. They cannot be used as Great Leaders (although some of them have been in the past). They are in the game to force a change in direction and give the gamer something to work around or overcome, especially late in the game when too often Civ VI has become a Snooze Fest amble to pre-determined Victory.
- I do not (intentionally, anyway) include Religious Revolutionaries here, because such characters are, in Game Terms, usually Great Prophets that start a new Religion. The fact that they frequently also send Civilizations careening off on entirely new paths is something that will have to be worked out in the mechanics of Civ VII.

Here, again, is a very partial list of potential Great Revolutionaries. It needs some more names from Non-European history, but I have purposely tried to avoid most late twentieth century Revolutionaries, no matter how familiar, because having a major brick thrown into your Civilization in the last Era seems to me to be a recipe for Rage Quits and not a desirable feature.
Similarly, the majority of the list below are Industrial/Modern Era characters because those were the Eras of Revolution and in game tend to be when a gamer has (in the past) started to pull ahead and settle into a dull plod to victory: the Great Revolutionary is designed precisely to change that trend.

Key: Same as above except:
+ = Great Assassins, could also be Great Spies

Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) (Ancient)**
Absalom (Ancient)
Cleisthenes (Classical)**
Yao Li (Classical)+
Zhuna Zhu (Classical) +
Harmodius and Aristogeiton (Classical) +
Alcibiades (Classical)**
Aristophanes (Classical) *
Pausanius (Classical) +
Gaius Gracchus (Classical)
Publius Claudius/Clodius Pulcher (Classical)
Marcus Junius Brutus (Classical) +
JingKe (Classical) +
Zhang Jue (Classical)
Dae Joyeong (Medieval)**
Abd al-Rahman (Medieval)
An Lushan (Lu-Shan) (Medieval)*
Reginald Fitzurz (Medieval) +
Francis of Assisi (Medieval) *
Simon de Montfort (Medieval)
Owain Glendwyr (Medieval)**
William Wallace (Medieval)**
Girolamo Savonarola (Early Modern)*
Tomas de Torquemada (Early Modern)*
Theresa of Avlla (Early Modern) *
Atahualpa (Early Modern)**
Lautaro (Lev-Traru) (Early Modern)**
Bohdan Khmelnytsky (Early Modern)
Guy Fawkes (Early Modern)+
William the Silent (Early Modern)
Zumbi dos Palmares (Early Modern)
Henry Every (Avery) (Early Modern)*
Theobald Wolfe Tone (Industrial)
Voltaire (Industrial)*
Maximilian Robespierre (Industrial)**
Benjamin Franklin (Industrial)**
Thomas Paine (Industrial)
Tecumseh (Industrial)**
William Wilberforce (Industrial)
Toussaint L;Ouverture (Industrial)**
Sakamoto Ryoma (Industrial)
Sam Houston (Industrial) **
Tiradentes (Joaquim Xavier) (Industrial)
Ignaz Semmelweis (Industrial)*
Karl Marx (Industrial)
John W. Booth (Industrial) +
Mikhail Bakunin (Industrial)
Hong Xiuquan (Industrial)
Harriet Tubman (Industrial) *
Sandor Petofi (Industrial)
Guiseppe Garibaldi (Industrial)*
Frederick Douglas (Industrial)*
Lajos Kossuth (Industrial)
Jose Rizal (Industrial)
Leon Czolgosz (Industrial)+
Sri Aurobindo (Modern)
Gavrilo Princip (Modern) +
Vladimir Lenin* (Modern)**
Leon Trotsky (Modern)
Emiliano Zapata (Modern)
Pancho Villa (Modern)
Rosa Luxemburg (Modern)
Sun Yat-Sen (Modern)**
Mary “Mother” Jones (Modern)
Thomas Sankara (Modern)
Charles “Lucky” Luciano (Modern)*
Thomas Clarke (Modern)
Huey Long (Modern)
Pridi Banomyong (Modern)*
Nathuram Godse (Atomic) +
Aime Cesaire (Atomic)*
Witold Pilecki (Atomic)
Leopold Senghor (Atomic)
Joseph McCarthy (Atomic)
Ho Chi Minh (**)

 

[Zaarin]

I really like both ideas.

Here, again, is a very partial list of potential Great Revolutionaries. It needs some more names from Non-European history

A few ideas for non-Western Great Revolutionaries:

Absalom (Ancient)
Zhang Jue (Classical)
Dae Joyeong (Medieval)
Atahualpa (Renaissance)
Lautaro (Renaissance)
Tecumseh (Industrial)

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

After some Google searches, I have some recommendations of my own.

Voltaire (Renaissance)
William Wilberforce (Renaissance)
Toussaint L'Ouverture (Industrial)
Jose Rizal (Industrial)
Rosa Luxemburg (Modern)

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Thanx: have added both your sets of suggestions to the original list.

My philosophy is the more the better to start with, we can always whittle 'em down later.

The next trick, and it's actually the larger and more complex one, is to come up with specific effects for each Great. I would really like to not have 'generic' Great Ministers or Great Revolutionaries, both because it keeps the game more dynamic if you have to deal with something different in every game and because some of them lend themselves to very 'singular' effects.

For example, Solon was known as "The Lawgiver", but specifically he resolved the debt slavery issue that was about to plunge Athens into a nasty Civil War, so as a Great Minister his Effects could be:

Reduces all Loyalty Negative effects by 50%
Cannot have Social Policies of God King, Colonization, or Corvee in effect while he is Minister
(He increased the independence and political 'clout' of the small land-owners and tenants, making Corvee and God King nearly impossible and Colonization much less popular an alternative to the population)

Mikhail Bakunin as Great Revolutionary, on the other hand:

Cannot get any effects from any form of Government OR Great Leader for 20 turns.
(Bakunin was notoriously against ALL governments: the original Anarchist!)

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

William Wilberforce could be a later Solon except prohibiting stuff like Serfdom and such.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

William Wilberforce could be a later Solon except prohibiting stuff like Serfdom and such.

Remember what happened if you were still using Slavery in Civ 4 when Emancipation came around? Wilberforce could be the means to bring up Emancipation when you don't expect it, makes Triangle Trade impossible, but on the other hand gives you a Bonus for setting up Anti-Slavery Patrols with your navy and maybe gives you extra Diplomatic Bonuses with Civs that have also 'Emancipated'.

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

Remember what happened if you were still using Slavery in Civ 4 when Emancipation came around? Wilberforce could be the means to bring up Emancipation when you don't expect it, makes Triangle Trade impossible, but on the other hand gives you a Bonus for setting up Anti-Slavery Patrols with your navy and maybe gives you extra Diplomatic Bonuses with Civs that have also 'Emancipated'.

I don't remember anything about Civ 4 since I haven't played it, but I like your idea about Wilberforce.

 

[Zaarin]

Remember what happened if you were still using Slavery in Civ 4 when Emancipation came around? Wilberforce could be the means to bring up Emancipation when you don't expect it, makes Triangle Trade impossible, but on the other hand gives you a Bonus for setting up Anti-Slavery Patrols with your navy and maybe gives you extra Diplomatic Bonuses with Civs that have also 'Emancipated'.

Thinking of abolition put me in mind of another possibility for a Great Revolutionary: George Fox. He'll boost your Faith and Gold output but forbid you from going to war or using any kind of forced labor policy. (I'm not sure of George Fox's specific relationship to abolition, but I do know that abolition became as staunch a conviction of the Quakers as pacifism before the end of the 17th century.)

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

With Ben Franklin, though... He's just so complex a character that literally almost any bonus could stick to him and be historically accurate. Maybe something relating to his Postmaster position, or maybe a bonus to Science and Culture.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

With Ben Franklin, though... He's just so complex a character that literally almost any bonus could stick to him and be historically accurate. Maybe something relating to his Postmaster position, or maybe a bonus to Science and Culture.

Generates a random eureka whenever a natural disaster passes over him or on a tile where a Theological Combat is happening.

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

I have some recommendations for Great Ministers.

Chanakya (Classical)
Gajah Mada (Medieval)
Nogai Khan (Medieval)

 

[Xandinho]

Great Revolutionaries: Tiradentes and Zumbi dos Palmares, both Renaissance.
Bandit leader counts too? if so, include Lampião as well, the probably greatest bandit leader of the 20th century.

I have some recommendations for Great Ministers.

Chanakya (Classical)
Gajah Mada (Medieval)
Nogai Khan (Medieval)

Gajah Mada would function just as well as the unique governor of Gitarja.

 

[Zaarin]

Tiradentes

Fascinating how much that looks like it could be a Hellenization of an Iranian name like Tiridates, Astyages, Cambyses, etc.

 

[Saxo Grammaticus]

Been away for a while, but stumbled on this thread and thought I'd chime in with kudos and some names off the top of my head.

Ministers:
Cardinal Mazarin (early modern)
Gyula Andrassy (industrial)
Jules Ferry (industrial)
Klemens von Metternich (industrial)
Jacques Necker (industrial)
Grigory Potemkin (industrial)

Potemkin seemed like an odd pick, but I considered how a favorite could be a drain, and Potemkin as a minister could even bring some yield distortion into play. I also like the idea of Ferry-led laicism, e.g. no holy site faith production, no training of religious units, double science output, loyalty penalty.

Revolutionaries:
Abd al-Rahman I (medieval)
An Lushan (medieval)
William the Silent (early modern)
Hong Xiuquan (industrial)
Kossuth Lajos (industrial)
Pancho Villa (modern)

Even with the current game, Abd al-Rahman I, An Lushan, and Hong Xiuquan all strike me as fun "bosses" to break up gains in a golden medieval or solid industrial era. With revolutionaries, I suppose there is also some nuance in those who gained power.

All in all, perhaps some redundancies with Mazarin and Pancho Villa, and I admit it's overly euro-centric for my taste, but hopefully these can help fill in some blanks!

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

Recommending this guy because I watched a Historia Civilis video about him, and man would he be interesting

Publius Claudius Pulcher (Classical)

 

[Zaarin]

Hong Xiuquan

I recall reading about him. His is an absolutely surreal story; if it were fiction it would be derided as utterly implausible.

 

[Evie]

I almost wish you stuck with your great felons so we'd have somewhere to put the patron saint and poster boy of living forever in infamny, and arch-enemy of all metal purchasers in Ancient Mesopotamia.

The man, the legend, the one and only seller of bad cooper. Ea-Nasir.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I almost wish you stuck with your great felons so we'd have somewhere to put the patron saint and poster boy of living forever in infamny, and arch-enemy of all metal purchasers in Ancient Mesopotamia.

The man, the legend, the one and only seller of bad cooper. Ea-Nasir.

Actually, I still have my list of Great Felons, because where else am I going to sneak Ned Kelly and Charles Ponzi into the game?
And Ea-Nasir is a good catch! Getting a Great Felon that early in the game should shake up a player's "Perfect Plan" enormously (and I Loathe 'Perfect Plans' in any type of game, by anybody . . .)

Ben Franklin is one of several Great People that I have in my Master Timeline as a potential Dual Great Person: Great Minister OR Great Scientist.
(Along with George Marshal as Great Minister OR Great General, and Walt Disney as Great Artist OR Great Merchant)

Also, George Fox is already listed (in my list, anyway) as a Great Prophet because of his role in founding the Society of Friends. - But I do think there should be more Religious Tenets of various kinds that address Social Issues (In-Game Civics OR Social Policies), because that is by no means a new thing in Religion.

Will add all the rest of your suggestions to the OP list tomorrow morning - it's after 10:00 PM my time here, and I've never been able to kick my old Army habit of getting up before 6:00 AM . . .

 

[civac]

Great Ministers may be a good idea. I like them much more than the governors currently in the game (less micromanagement, more appropriate to empire building).

Great Revolutionaries could be a way to change government or cultural mores. They should not appear randomly. If you want to make the game challenging teach the AI to play the game semi-competently (doesn't have to be that good) and then ramp up its bonuses until only elite players have a shot against it on deity. Unlike frontloading their early game as is currently done the production/science/culture/faith bonuses should increase with every era.

I also dislike the randomness and tortured distribution mechanism of the current Great Person implementation both of which are a consequence of their variety. I'd prefer them having a predictable component or perhaps being able to chose from a small selection (3-5) to alleviate the randomness.

 

[Phrozen]

Great Ministers:

William Marshal(Medieval)
Ookubo Toshimichi (Industrial/early modern)
Imhotep(Ancient)

Great Revolutionaries:
Simon de Montfort (Medieval)
Owain Glyndŵr (Medieval)
Henry Every (Renaissance)
Lucky Luciano (Modern)
Sam Houston(Early Modern)
Fredrick Douglass (late industrial)