Greece's obligatory Civ VII Thread

[Boris Gudenuf]

Keep Peltast Thracian, CIV7 could do good use of Minor Civs ally or conquer a Thracian city would allow you to train auxiliar Peltast (like Persians and Roman did).

It was famously said (by the Greeks) that if the Thracians would only stop fighting each other they could conquer the world. Nobody has recorded any Thracian saying the same thing about the Greeks, although it would have been equally appropriate.

In Civ VI terms, the Thracians would make a good Military City State that could give you Peltasts as units. Since in fact they were not known as city builders at all, I would hope that Civ VII will have a better way to represent such large, culturally coherent but politically incoherent groups.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I think a unique commercial hub could also work granting both culture and gold bonuses.

The Agora as a Commercial Hub District would work, if one of the 'specialties' of the Unique District would be that it would get Adjacency bonuses from being next to Cultural, Holy Site and City Center Districts - the Athenian Agora was right at the base of the Acropolis and included several assembly or meeting halls for political groups and numerous Temples as well as the Stoa that acted as commercial markets.

 

[BuchiTaton]

In Civ VI terms, the Thracians would make a good Military City State that could give you Peltasts as units. Since in fact they were not known as city builders at all, I would hope that Civ VII will have a better way to represent such large, culturally coherent but politically incoherent groups.

It could be with villages/camps like barbarian clans. Anyway have no proper cities is not a problem for even playable civs like Shoshone or Cree.

 

[Lord Lakely]

Ok, tackling Greece next.

Like did with Persia and France, I'm just posting an adaptation based on my own theorycrafting. The designs for my Civ 7 vision are different, but I've adapted them for Civ 6's rules, just to shape a general idea of what I think the Civ should be about. So, here is my punt:

Alcibiades leads Greece in Sid Meier's Civilization VII

He was one of the most controversial figures in Athenian politics, as well as a brilliant admiral. Begrudgingly respected by his enemies and admired by his followers, this Athenian orator because known for his populistic ideas that granted him an immense amount of influence in the Athenian assembly. When his rivals tried to exile him, Alcibiades defected to Persia, earning himself a spot as the Emperor's advisor.

Greece's unique unit is the Hoplite. This Spearman replacement is as strong as a Swordsman, but more expensive to build. Hoplites receive a +4 Combat bonus when standing adjacent allied units, or +8 when standing adjacent to another Hoplite.

The Greek ability is called Ekklesia. Districts built on Hills construct buildings 50% faster, and provide a free Envoy when completed.

The Greeks also have access to Gymnasium unique District. This replacement to the Entertainment Complex does not count towards the District limit. Districts placed next to a Gymnasium are built 50% faster, and provide one additional Great Person point per turn.

Alcibiades's shrewd Diplomacy is reflected by his ability Logos, Ethos, Pathos. He receives additional Diplomatic Visibility with every leader he has met, an additional +2 Combat Strength for every level of that Diplomatic Visibility. When his spies are caught, they are able to frame other players for their crimes, increasing Grievances and possibly inciting Alcibiades' enemies to fight each other.

Alcibiades's ability also allows him to construct the Pentekonter unique unit. This melee warship is faster than a regular Galley, and receives flanking bonuses from other ships. Whenever a Pentekonter sinks another ship, it earns Great Admiral Points for Greece.

The key to win as Greece is to use play as a crafty politician, building up your spy network and using it to break your rivals. You'll want to expand towards Hills, as these will allow you to set up your powerful cities faster. Make use of your extra envoys to gain City State allies, and use Gymnasiums to earn yourself more Great People while providing your citizens with Amenities. Greece is a highly flexible Civilization that can go in any direction they wish, so long as they're backed by a strong leader.

Will you become the greatest politician the world has ever known? How will you lead Greece in Sid Meier's Civilization VII?

Sigil & Cities
Sigil

I went for the Triskeion for Greece because it makes the sigil look like an authentic Greek shield, while also avoiding symbols typically associated with the city states (such as the Athenian Owl, the Corinthian Helmet and the Spartan Lambda).Since Alcibiades was from Athens, I went for the very Athenian colour of Olive green, with a navy blue symbol.

The Alternative colours are the more neutral Black on Orange, again because it looks like an authentic Greek shield <3

City List

the names of the cities are based on the ancient Greek pronunciation, then transliterated to the Latin Alphabet.
Capital: Athinae
Other Cities: Sparte, Corinthos, Argos, Thebae, Mycenae, Ephesos, Megara, Pharsalos, Eretria, Knossos, Rhodos, Miletos, Pergamon, Halicarnassos, Pella, Mytilene, Phocaea, Olympia, Naxos, Samos, Syracusae, Gortyn, Sicyon, Tiryns, Eleusis, Iraklion, Elis, Illion, Chalkis, Delphi, Messene, Chios, Delos, Paros, Lamia, Orchomenos, Pherae, Epidamnos, Ambracia, Abydos, Tegea, Epidauros, Corcyra, Taras, Pylos, Pyraeos, Salamis & Marathon.


This version deviates heavily from my own - Instead of Greece I just have Athens and Sparta as separate entities. (somewhere on the East Coast, Zaarin breathes a sigh of relief at avoiding more hellenes). Also, my Athens is heavily reliant on Espionage and Specialists, and Civ 6's rendition of those is... the less said the better if I'm honest.

Still, I would like Greece to have mostly versatile bonuses, with the Leader pushing them in a certain direction. Be it Diplomacy, Science, Culture, War,...

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

Alright, coming back to dig up this old thread with a new idea I've had.

Famously, the problem with representing classical Greece is that it was never unified under a single political entity, right? Well, I don't truly have a solution to that problem (because it's a restraint of the Civ model), but I might have a way of representing the disparate political bodies.

Civ Ability: Politiká
Has a unique government they cannot switch out of that has a mix of policy card slots from the governments of their cities.*

Unique Infrastructure: Agora**
City center replacement that enables the city to adopt its own government***, granting the benefits of that government to your entire civilization.

*Ex. If one of my cities has Oligarchy and the other has Classical Republic, my Greek government will have 2 Military slots, 2 Economic slots, 1 Diplomatic slot, and 1 Wildcard slot. It takes the best of each government's policy card slots.

**Formerly named "Polis"- thanks, @Boris Gudenuf!

***For the sake of simplicity, this city-level government doesn't have its own policy cards.

Thoughts?

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Unique Infrastructure: Polis**
City center replacement that enables the city to adopt its own government***, granting the benefits of that government to your entire civilization.

*Ex. If one of my cities has Oligarchy and the other has Classical Republic, my Greek government will have 2 Military slots, 2 Economic slots, 1 Diplomatic slot, and 1 Wildcard slot. It takes the best of each government's policy card slots.

**From my understanding, this is the appropriate term, but is there anyway we can represent apoikiai?

***For the sake of simplicity, this city-level government doesn't have its own policy cards.

Thoughts?

Polis simply meant a City State. The Unique Infrastructure, found in the middle of every Greek city, was the Agora, where citizens met to debate and decide policy or the Oligarchy/Tyranny or other non-debatable government-type would have its seat. The Agora was also the site of the city market, but its status as rhe center of political activity is what would be appropriate here.

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

Polis simply meant a City State. The Unique Infrastructure, found in the middle of every Greek city, was the Agora, where citizens met to debate and decide policy or the Oligarchy/Tyranny or other non-debatable government-type would have its seat. The Agora was also the site of the city market, but its status as rhe center of political activity is what would be appropriate here.

My mistake! I originally chose "Polis" in an attempt to represent the entire city, but upon further consideration, the Agora- being the literal center of the city- makes far more sense for a city center replacement.

Considering their role as the engine of a Polis' government, would it also be fair to let them generate Culture, assuming generating Culture is still the method for unlocking new governments in Civ VII?

Edit: Is the Greek mass settlement of the Mediterranean in the centuries following the Greek Dark Age important enough to receive representation in their Civ design?

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Considering their role as the engine of a Polis' government, would it also be fair to let them generate Culture, assuming generating Culture is still the method for unlocking new governments in Civ VII?

The agoras were not only the political centers but the social, commercial, and spiritual centers of the city as well. Honesty they could generate faith, gold and production on top of culture.

 

[Zaarin]

Edit: Is the Greek mass settlement of the Mediterranean in the centuries following the Greek Dark Age important enough to receive representation in their Civ design?

Well, yes, but actually no--because that's Phoenician design space.

 

[Phrozen]

I think the acropolis works fine for a UD for Greece.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I think the acropolis works fine for a UD for Greece.

IF the entire Greek Civ was Athens, that would be correct. There were 'acropoleis' in other cities like Corinth, Argos, or Thebes, but in those cities the acropolis was simply a hill with a fort on it that was the original citadel - and so no different from any other fortified centre in any other Civ's cities.

And, of course, the Acropolis of Athens and its crowning Parthenon is probably the most recognized single artifact of classical Greece.

On the other hand, the Acropolis of Athens was strictly a religious/cultural locale, and all of the buildings on it were religious/cultural. In no way does it represent the Greek achievements in natural philosophy, trade, or politics (the last was mainly in giving us words to describe all the different types of governments and th eir proponents).

Consequently, I suggest that the Agora as a Unique District makes more sense. The Agora of Athens (arguably the best preserved and certainly the most-excavated by archeologists) included meeting houses for both the Assembly (the Bouleuterion) and the generals (the Strategeion), 5 temples to various Gods, at least three Stoa, or places for market vendors, and two different theatres/amphitheatres nearby. In other words, a District that could be allowed Religious, Government, Cultural or Commercial buildings, or at least bonuses related to Religion, Gold, Culture or Civics. It's a much better representative of the multifacetd nature of the Greek city states and Civ in general than a simple Religious/Cultural District..

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

^ So 'Agora' can have ANY of aforemented buildings of different districts in one, that building one is mutually exclusive ? or what? but Agora can't be barracks nor stables.

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

Well, yes, but actually no--because that's Phoenician design space.

Figures. If someone had to complicate things, of course it would be the Phoenicians

 

[Zaarin]

Figures. If someone had to complicate things, of course it would be the Phoenicians

As usual, anything the Greeks did someone else in the Near East did first and better.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

As usual, anything the Greeks did someone else in the Near East did first and better.

Except . . .
The later knowledge of the Babylonian/Middle Eastern mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics all came through Greek synthesizers like Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Aristotle, etc.
Why?
Because of one invention that was completely Greek and trumped all the others: Vowels.
By re-purposing several symbols from the Phoenician alphabet that Greek did not need, the Greek alphabet allowed an exact recreation of all the sounds of the words and speech, and so an exact recounting of information, and all with less than 40 symbols total, so that by the 7th century BCE in the Greek world it could be assumed that any adult Greek male of the middle or upper classes was literate - to the point that a poem could be scratched on a piece of pottery at a drunken banquet and passed around on the safe assumption that everyone there could read it and appreciate it.

So, the first language in the world that could be written down with complete accuracy and the information made available to a large percentage of the general public was Greek - which allowed them to wind up taking credit for a great many early and non-Greek developments tht could not be so easily generalized in their original languages.

 

[Zaarin]

Except . . .
The later knowledge of the Babylonian/Middle Eastern mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics all came through Greek synthesizers like Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Aristotle, etc.
Why?
Because of one invention that was completely Greek and trumped all the others: Vowels.

Cuneiform transcribed vowels (there's some debate about whether Akkadian had an O-colored vowel because Sumerian only had /a e i u/ and therefore cuneiform only had <Ca Ce Ci Cu A E I U>); Egyptian, Ugaritic, and the Phoenician-derived alphabets did not (until centuries later when, at roughly the same time, Jews, Syriac Christians, and Arab Muslims all began to worry about what might happen if knowledge of how to vocalize their scripts were lost...). Since the major astronomical works were in Akkadian, the problem was not vocalization but rather the small number of professionals who could read cuneiform. (Which makes it that much more of a shame that the works of Berossus were lost and only preserved in quoted fragments.) On which note, part of the inaccessibility of the Akkadian and Sumerian originals has to be blamed on the spread of Aramaic (and later Arabic), causing the loss of the much-needed professional cuneiform scribes (also put out of a job by the successive spread of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and Islam, being tied to the native Babylonian temples).

By re-purposing several symbols from the Phoenician alphabet that Greek did not need

To clarify, the Greeks did not take symbols they did not need and repurpose them. Rather they heard Phoenician /ʔalpʰ/ as /alpʰ/ and /ħeːtʰ/ as /eːtʰ/. There is some confusion about how they got Ο out of /ʕeːn/, but otherwise it's a straightforward matter of the Greeks' simply being unable to hear the initial consonants of א ח ע (using Hebrew letters because this board doesn't support the Phoenician characters...). (The relationship between the semivowels /j w/--also written /i̯ u̯/--and the vowels /i u/ is so straightforward that the development of yōd > iota and wāw > upsilon doesn't really need comment. See also Latin, which used I U for both values.)

But yes, the Greek system was at any rate easier to disseminate to non-native speakers and to adapt to a language that had neither a CV(C) syllable structure nor a grammar based on consonantal roots.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

^ So 'Agora' can have ANY of aforemented buildings of different districts in one, that building one is mutually exclusive ? or what? but Agora can't be barracks nor stables.

Barracks or stables would have made more sense for an military inspired acropolis.
Honestly it would have been interesting if the acropolis had different bonuses depending on which leader you chose, highlighting the difference at least between Athens and Sparta. Gorgo could have gotten more militaristic bonuses from hers.

As usual, anything the Greeks did someone else in the Near East did first and better.

Which Near East civilization had a form of democratic representative government?

 

[Zaarin]

Which Near East civilization had a form of democratic representative government?

Their kings were representatives of the gods and therefore spoke with a purer voice than the voice of the people. On a serious note, most Neolithic peoples, including in the Near East, probably had true democracies governed by consensus, which is a lot more democratic than what was taking place in Athens. And since there were people in the Near East before there were people in Europe... (On a more serious note, one could make and people have made the argument that the tribal government of pre-monarchy Israel as described in the Deuteronomic histories was a representative republic, with the assembly made up of representatives from each family, clan, tribe, etc. Many American political thinkers in the Revolution and post-Revolution periods used it as a model, as did the Puritan founders of New England.)

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Their kings were representatives of the gods and therefore spoke with a purer voice than the voice of the people. On a serious note, most Neolithic peoples, including in the Near East, probably had true democracies governed by consensus, which is a lot more democratic than what was taking place in Athens. And since there were people in the Near East before there were people in Europe... (On a more serious note, one could make and people have made the argument that the tribal government of pre-monarchy Israel as described in the Deuteronomic histories was a representative republic, with the assembly made up of representatives from each family, clan, tribe, etc. Many American political thinkers in the Revolution and post-Revolution periods used it as a model, as did the Puritan founders of New England.)

The Neolithic/Chalcolithic tribes that were studied the most closely were those of the Native Americans in North America in the 16th and later centuries, and every one of them had a 'consensus' government. The authority of any individual was based entirely on that individual's merits and history of Doing Things Well - and then he would be put in charge of only those things that he was good at, like leading raids or hunts or negotiating with other tribes. There is no record of any individual ever having the kind of over-all control and authority that a 'king' supposedly had in Europe or the Middle East.

Given that in Europe groups as different as the German tribes (as described by Roman writers) and Greek poleis also had traditions of consensus - that is, the requirement that the general mass of at least the able-bodied adult men had to agree before action could be taken - which other government types (in the Greek states) like oligarchy or tyranny (in the original Greek sense, simply single-man rule with no legal basis) were outliers, and even those kept the institution of the General Assembly, even if they tried to 'pack it' with only their own people or ignore it completely.

The older Myceneans seem to have had hereditary kings, but how 'authoritative' they were is debatable: in the later Macedonian example, which the contemporary Greeks considered a throw back to ancient practice, even the first-born son, direct descendant of the king had to be acclaimed or 'approved' by the army - the able-bodied adult men of the group - before he became king: there was nothing automatic about it, and the evidence from the Greek tales indicates that even 'kings' among the Myceneans may have been more 'First Among Equals' than Lord of All He Surveys - Agamemnon in Homer doesn't show any indication of being able to give orders and expect unquestioning obedience.

As a much later general said in a different context: "Nobody . . . takes an order as other than a basis for argument and discussion . . ." - and that seems to sum up the Authority in most human groups until the complexity of urban society started requiring something more organized and centralized.

 

[Zaarin]

The Neolithic/Chalcolithic tribes that were studied the most closely were those of the Native Americans in North America in the 16th and later centuries, and every one of them had a 'consensus' government. The authority of any individual was based entirely on that individual's merits and history of Doing Things Well - and then he would be put in charge of only those things that he was good at, like leading raids or hunts or negotiating with other tribes. There is no record of any individual ever having the kind of over-all control and authority that a 'king' supposedly had in Europe or the Middle East.

Given that in Europe groups as different as the German tribes (as described by Roman writers) and Greek poleis also had traditions of consensus - that is, the requirement that the general mass of at least the able-bodied adult men had to agree before action could be taken - which other government types (in the Greek states) like oligarchy or tyranny (in the original Greek sense, simply single-man rule with no legal basis) were outliers, and even those kept the institution of the General Assembly, even if they tried to 'pack it' with only their own people or ignore it completely.

The older Myceneans seem to have had hereditary kings, but how 'authoritative' they were is debatable: in the later Macedonian example, which the contemporary Greeks considered a throw back to ancient practice, even the first-born son, direct descendant of the king had to be acclaimed or 'approved' by the army - the able-bodied adult men of the group - before he became king: there was nothing automatic about it, and the evidence from the Greek tales indicates that even 'kings' among the Myceneans may have been more 'First Among Equals' than Lord of All He Surveys - Agamemnon in Homer doesn't show any indication of being able to give orders and expect unquestioning obedience.

As a much later general said in a different context: "Nobody . . . takes an order as other than a basis for argument and discussion . . ." - and that seems to sum up the Authority in most human groups until the complexity of urban society started requiring something more organized and centralized.

There's a lot of evidence that "king" was a dirty word for most Indo-Europeans. The Greeks considered monarchy the very mark of the barbarian (including those filthy Macedonians), the Latins hated the rex, and there's good reason to believe that Celtic rix and Germanic kuningaz/rekaz are better translated as "chief" than "king." Even the Hittites and Persians (and, later, Alexander) picked up the notion of the god-king from contact with their Near Eastern neighbors (and Augustus probably from Egypt).