History questions not worth their own thread IV

[LightSpectra]

It's good enough for game purposes.

Yes, but at least Hinduism actually is polytheistic. Merging shamanism and voodoo with Christianity makes about as much sense as unveiling off-shore oil with the Music tech.

But you know, we're basically already at the bottom of the slippery slope anyway, so there's not much to argue against anymore.

 

[kiwitt]

Good idea in theory, the implementation I disagree with. Rather than totally remove the ability to create buildings or units, consider making them too expensive/time consuming to build without outside help or improvements in tech or production.

I did what you suggested in Road to War - Historical.

As I am currently doing a scenario based on an unaltered XML base, I need a simple way. However, I may give every nation access to the internet, i.e. "The Internet" project, which may help their development slightly and not be held too far behind. In this mod 15 nations must have a particular technology before it is shared.

 

[Flying Pig]

Civ religions are essentially shorthand for affinities which make relations more cordial between those who share them and less so between those who don't; if there's no chance of India meeting a Voodoo nation, there's a good argument for making them the same religion.

 

[kiwitt]

I have posted this question here, but though I would cross post here as well.

What would happen if I placed temples, cathedrals and monastries into cities via world-builder and did not make their religions present in the actual city. Would they eventually become present in the city over time.

I am thinking a better world representation would be to have the religious buildings in the cities, but base the actual 'presence' in them in accordance with the nation demographics. e.g. if a nation is 95% Christian all the cities in that nation would be 'Christian' only. If a nation has say 10-20% or more of another religion than I would include that religion as well.

 

[gangleri2001]

Am I in the world history forum?

 

[say1988]

Religious building have nothing* to do with religion spread. Religion simply must be present for them to be built.

*Monastaries making missionaries available is the one exception. I don't know for sure if the religion is a prerequisite for a missionary or just the building. I lean towards the latter, but may have a religion requirement since I believe a civic takes away the building requirement (I could be a wrong on that a long time since I played the game)..

 

[JohannaK]

Am I in the world history forum?

Theoretically, yes. But this particular thread seems to have become a Civ4 mods And whatnot.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Watching a history channel special on the presidents of the US. They just covered the civil war and are going into the post war period. They have repeatedly mentioned that post-war presidents were weak, inept and lacked direction.

Is it possible, given how much power Lincoln had usurped (not trying to argue the merits of that) unto the office of the President and all of the actions he took to expand that office, that weak a string of weak presidents is what we needed to restore some balance to the 3 branches of government?

Sure, Johnson was an unqualified disaster and none of the presidents were good for the country overall in the short term. However, I wonder if their weakness helped the nation avoid an overly powerful executive in the long term which may have really helped the US out? I mean, things did turn out really well for us in the next century, though I admit not all of that had to do with the actions of the government.

 

[History_Buff]

Watching a history channel special...

I think I see the problem...

 

[Cutlass]

Watching a history channel special on the presidents of the US. They just covered the civil war and are going into the post war period. They have repeatedly mentioned that post-war presidents were weak, inept and lacked direction.

Is it possible, given how much power Lincoln had usurped (not trying to argue the merits of that) unto the office of the President and all of the actions he took to expand that office, that weak a string of weak presidents is what we needed to restore some balance to the 3 branches of government?

Sure, Johnson was an unqualified disaster and none of the presidents were good for the country overall in the short term. However, I wonder if their weakness helped the nation avoid an overly powerful executive in the long term which may have really helped the US out? I mean, things did turn out really well for us in the next century, though I admit not all of that had to do with the actions of the government.

Lincoln really didn't take so much power. But with a war on, some expansion of what the president did was inevitable. We had a series of nonentities after that more or less just because of the way the party politics was working. And it isn't even fair to say all of them were weak, but rather that there wasn't a lot for them to do. The US federal government from the ACW to the 20th century was minimally involved in the activities of government by the choice of the people running the show at the time. Most government was simply left to the states. With a lack of wars, with most government being handled elsewhere, with the various economic crises being ignored, there really wasn't anything for a president to make his mark doing. Simply administering the government, which is really the president's primary obligation in peacetime, rarely leaves much of a legacy for pop-history.

 

[Antilogic]

Mangxema just sent me a message about that special on the presidents, I'll have to catch it at some point. How did they talk about the other Reconstruction and post-Recon presidents? How did poor old Chester Arthur do?

 

[ace99]

I don't know that you would call Grant weak....

 

[Antilogic]

I don't know that you would call Grant weak....

Modern scholars have been rating him more highly. It's pretty rare (and a testament to the South) that being under martial law was A Good Thing for black civil rights.

 

[ace99]

Modern scholars have been rating him more highly. It's pretty rare (and a testament to the South) that being under martial law was A Good Thing for black civil rights.

Should've kept them under martial law longer.

 

[Cutlass]

I don't know that you would call Grant weak....

For whatever other strengths he had, he was remembered for being an alcoholic and had an administration with a lot of corruption.

For a (extremely) brief overview of the American presidents, The Complete Idiot's Guide to the American Presidency could give you some basics to start from.

 

[ace99]

Perhaps he should be better remembered for his support of civil rights for African-Americans and his continued military occupation of the South, and his destruction of the Ku Klux Klan.

 

[Flying Pig]

Yes, but he also had the most corrupt administration in US history

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Mangxema just sent me a message about that special on the presidents, I'll have to catch it at some point. How did they talk about the other Reconstruction and post-Recon presidents? How did poor old Chester Arthur do?

They dumped on all of them, Arthur included IIRC.
___________

I get that without a war and without tools like say, stimulus packages, there wasn't a ton for presidents to do. However, is it fair to say that many of them took a 'do nothing for anything' approach to many of the problems of the day that got worst as time went on without corrective action? They didn't even try and think of solutions it seems.

As for Lincoln's power grabbing, yes I know it was due to the war. Maybe I was being mislead by History Channel when they pointed out that his power grabbing was actually significant, though entirely justified. I just wonder if a roll-back of whatever powers we can agree he did take on would have been successfully rolled back if we hadn't had such do-nothing, inassertive presidents immediately following him.

 

[Antilogic]

Perhaps he should be better remembered for his support of civil rights for African-Americans and his continued military occupation of the South, and his destruction of the Ku Klux Klan.

Yes, but he also had the most corrupt administration in US history

As far as I know, the tension between these two points is a huge issue for historians talking about the Grant presidency. Historically, the focus has been on the corruption of the administration (and especially at the lower levels, in post offices and customs houses, etc.) and not on civil rights. In the modern era, there has been a shifting balance in what people are researching and looking for, so Grant is being up-rated a little bit from the bottom quartile where he used to reside.

You can see this if you look at the chart on wikipedia listing the scholarly survey results. The early ones place Grant solidly in the bottom/fourth quartile, and more recent (esp. post-2000) surveys have moved him up to the third quartile.

They dumped on all of them, Arthur included IIRC.
___________

I get that without a war and without tools like say, stimulus packages, there wasn't a ton for presidents to do. However, is it fair to say that many of them took a 'do nothing for anything' approach to many of the problems of the day that got worst as time went on without corrective action? They didn't even try and think of solutions it seems.

As for Lincoln's power grabbing, yes I know it was due to the war. Maybe I was being mislead by History Channel when they pointed out that his power grabbing was actually significant, though entirely justified. I just wonder if a roll-back of whatever powers we can agree he did take on would have been successfully rolled back if we hadn't had such do-nothing, inassertive presidents immediately following him.

After reading Mornings on Horseback (actually about Teddy Roosevelt, I know, but he gets his start during the Arthur administration) and some other works, my opinion of Arthur has ticked upwards. Although he was originally part of the corrupt wing of Republican politics, he turned around a bit in his presidency, to the point where he couldn't get his fellow Republicans to re-nominate him. He lost his own primary as an incumbent. While that was more common earlier in the century, especially in the 1840s and 1850s, that trend was starting to change and two-term presidents were making a comeback (Lincoln, Grant; before them, Jackson).

And he helped pave the way for civil service reform, a modern navy (which had been languishing since the Civil War), and some other small things. He's more like the average president amongst a series of bad ones.

 

[ace99]

Yes, but he also had the most corrupt administration in US history

He himself rarely ever profited from the corruption. In fact after the Presidency he was often on the verge of penury and was only saved when his pension was restored and he received a contract for articles and books.

He was loyal to a fault and appointed many friends and military men he had served with. He carried over that military loyalty and was loathe to denounce any even when they were accused of corruption unless it was most egregious. It was a blindness of his, but not malevolence.