How come there are so few civs in the game????

[Dervish]

Hi! I am a newcomer to this forum and its my first time. I like all the games of this Great Sid Meier's Civ Family, especially the latest one I've been waiting for so long. Civilization 3 is all in all very superb game with regard to strategy building especially now that they (the inventors of the game) have incorporated new stuff like cultural influence, and science, new system of trade, totally different from that of previous Civ games. Which I sometimes find very awkward to get used to. Sending truckloads of goods seems to me better than trading through diplomacy screens, but diplomacy itself in this new game is very commendable and more complicated. So, overall picture would be a perfect game, except, may be, one thing - there are so few civilizations, even the predecessors like Civ 2 and Call To Power have more. May be the inventors of the game should include more civ's?? The other problem is that you start with American tribe 4000 thousand years ago with Lincoln clad like cavemen. And some Babylonians, which is now extinct, become modern civilization. How can we change the game so that these minor misrealities turn to be more realistic?? To my mind they should include Turks, Mongols, Koreans, Spanish may be few others.

 

[Feinder]

Essentially, they initially created 15 civs, because that way each combination of the "civ attributes" is represented (where each civ will have 2 attribs), and frankly, I don't really know why they were compelled to round it out to 16 civs (by adding an extra Mil, Rel).

For example (15 civs)

Mil, Sci
Mil, Exp
Mil, Rel
Mil, Com
Mil, Ind
Sci, Exp
Sci, Rel
Sci, Com
Sci, Ind
Exp, Rel
Exp, Com
Exp, Ind
Rel, Com
Rel, Ind
Com, Ind

They then looked thru history to find civs that (relatively) represented those 15 combinations of attributes, and assigned them accordingly (probably with some awareness towards political correctness).

-F-


Frankly, I think they should have 30 civs, 2 civs with each representative attribute, and have one have a unique unit that you get earlier, and on the other have a "better" unique unit that you get later.

 

[Dervish]

I like this idea of having several unique units for each civ depending on different Age they are in. Age or Epoch. The other thing is that the game itself should be divided into several Epochs or Ages starting from Prehistoric Age dating back to 100,000 years ago, then slowly evolving into another like Stone Age, and then to Tool Age. I don't know, scientists know these Ages and their dates better than I do. Scientists like historians, ethnologists, archeologists should be consulted more on matters like that.
It would be very funny to start game without any specific civ, ethnicity, start as "cavemen", or "ancestors" or may be "prehistoric buggers" or simply "hairy people" (or there is another nice theory about Nostratics - a common ancestor of Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, Semite, Dravid and etc. people), you choose number of players, just like that number 1, 2, 3, and so on, no nationalities, no political correctness. Then at the Advent of each Epoch or Age a pop-up screen would show you a schematic of the first further divisions that befall on your prehistoric tribe, asking you to choose among Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Ural-Altaic or any other ethnical Families (again, as I mentioned before these ethnologists know better what and when). If you chose Indo-European and went through the next Epoch or Age, which is what? Say, Stone Age, right? And at the turn or transfer to the next Age you would be prompted again to choose, if you are an Indo-Euro tribe, further among Celtic, Germanic, Romanic, Slavonic, Iranian, Indian, Hittite tribes and so on. At this point it would be very nice to allow these tribes to have specific attributes, difference in culture, science, national character, unique unit and etc. or may be, earlier, at previous Age, I don't know. Germanic further divides into German proper, English, Dutch, and etc. Romanic - into Roman proper, French, Spanish, Italian etc. Same would happen if you chose Ural-Altaic, it would be further divided into Turkic, Mongol, Finno-Ugric, Korean, Japanese etc. The only problem with that might be that most of the Earth civilizations are covered with the off-spring of Indo-Euro tribes.

 

[Dervish]

The only problem might be in this case with naming the cities, you don't know what kind of cities were 100000 years ago, the only known is Jericho, and the rest are very young cities, and giving attributes to cavepeople, and naming the scientific advances and knowledge. Probably these would include very old primitive knowledge as "Using Stone", "Picking One's Nose With A Stick" and etc.
And no unique units until they get to Iron Age, may be???
What do you think?

 

[Dervish]

To my mind I expect to see the latest Civ game (whether it is Civ 3 or Civ 4, 5, 6) turn into some kind History teaching book, which in the future could replace History classes. The mere fact of which itself represents a Wonder for our current Civilization. May be in the next Civ games, The Civ Game would be a Wonder to be built in one of your cities to increase both science output and happiness by two per continent.