Historical Accuracy Upgrade

[Thorvald of Lym]

Thanks to various user patches, many of Civ2's original engine limits have been overcome: a game map can cover over 30,000 tiles, thousands of units and hundreds of cities. Suffice to say, the original 20–30 city namelist average starts to feel inadequate.

Several weeks ago I started musing expanded/updated city name lists for the vanilla game, and today I got inspired to take it a couple steps further. While Civ2 is commendable for being the first in the series to provide gender parity in leader options, some of the choices are decidedly less realistic than others (Sacagawea was Shoshone, Scheherazade is a folk character, Amaterasu is a literal god, &c.), and even the male leaders can be inaccurate ("Frederick" is actually Otto II). As part of this rework, I want to shuffle the deck; while some civs may need to lean into legend, it's far easier to track down plausible female candidates today than back in the age of dial-up.

Lastly, accompanying revamped portraits is an expansion of custom titles, which I always thought was grossly underused. Think 'Khan(um)' for Mongolian Despots, 'Hem(et)-Netjer' for Egyptian Theocrats, 'General Secretary' for Russian Communists, &c.

With this in mind, any suggestions and/or requests? As much as I'm a fan of the thematically-tailored vanilla portraits, for consistency's sake the whole roster will probably be overhauled.

 

[Buck2005]

With this in mind, any suggestions and/or requests? As much as I'm a fan of the thematically-tailored vanilla portraits, for consistency's sake the whole roster will probably be overhauled.

Well, I somehow did a similar partial work for my vanilla version. I removed some strange nations (like the Aztecs, Zulus and Mongols), replacing them with more significant for the historical process (in my opinion, of course). In addition, for some nations, I corrected the list of cities. It always seemed strange to me that some nations start in the game from a modern capital (like Athens, Washington, Delhi, Madrid, and so on). Therefore, I changed the list of cities by placing at the beginning of the list the most ancient cities of these civilizations. If you are interested, you can take a look at my version of the list of cities in the application. In general, this edition is made purely for myself, and does not claim to be absolute historical accuracy.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Aye, I don't know if I'll be that pedantic, but I can definitely make use of these. Thanks!