. . . Personally, I've always found it jarring that America can exist in basically its modern form in Civ in 4000 BC. I'm sure some would find it jarring to have a some civilization transition from an Egyptian to Japanese culture, but I find it no less bizarre.
How do you explain a modern America existing in the Bronze Age anyway? Does it imply Sioux, Cherokee, Apache and the like can somehow culturally mutate into British pioneers and then modern Americans, and simultaneously that those original Native Americans could've somehow envisioned modern America to maintain such an unchanging monolith through the ages? And how is England as a civilization entirely irrelevant to its existence? It just plain doesn't make sense, and I strongly doubt that many people are really that fixed on such a ridiculous idea.
America is probably one of the easier cases to poke at, but ultimately what Civ does is take a very reduced historical snapshot of a civilization and stretches it 6000 years. Often to the breaking point. America can exist without England and England without the Romans nor the Celts nor the Vikings, whereas civilizations which did exist in ancient times can somehow remain culturally intact for millennia. And I'm not even getting into the immortal god-rulers.
But in the end, I don't think either of us can single-handedly determine what the community wants in this regard. From my point of view, it's a worthy concept to explore, just as much as the traditional path, and doesn't require any further suspension of disbelief.
Personally I don't think civilizations (cultures) morphing and changing across eras is much stranger than the same exact culture (country, empire) existing for 6000 years. And Humankind isn't going to have immortal god rulers!
In Humankind system it looks like this:
Celts -> Rome -> England -> Great Britain > America -> America
In Civ: HELLO BRONZE NEIGHBOR IT IS YEAR 4000BC AND I AM TEDDY ROOSEVELT WITH MY GLASSES AND SUIT, WELCOME IN THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA
(I can also already imagine obligatory mod "limits civ switches to those making historical sense")
Let's step back a bit from 'game mechanics/concepts' and address what the games are trying to model: Human History. (Yeah, yeah, I can hear the click of numerous Threaders moving on from another of Boris' Historical Rants - bear with me for a bit)
1. No Civilization or Group that existed in 4000 BCE still exists in anything remotely resembling the same cultural or sociological form. There are no 'continuous' civilizations. That includes China, which did not even become recognizable as a Civilization (In Civ terms, anyway, as in Building Cities) until almost 2000 years later.
So: Kudos to Humankind for addressing this.
2. The development of any group or Civ was a product of Geography, both natural, manmade and sociological ("Population Geography" to use the term from my College Days, back during the Atomic Era) and External Influences ranging from immigration to technology spread to invasion and subjugation or invading and subjugating: numerous mechanisms that introduced New Things, sometimes radical New Things, to the existing cultural or political group.
So far, Kudos to neither Civ nor Humankind, because the influences that drive the 'morphing' of Humankind's factions into Other Civs hasn't really been spelled out.
3. No Civ, once established, ever became an entirely different Civ unless they were utterly destroyed first. Greeks conquered by Romans and later by Turks did not become either Romans nor Turks nor did a Roman or Turkish Civ get established in Greece - old ruined temples and mosques don't count except as Tourist Curiosities. Carthage did become Roman, because Carthage was completely destroyed by Rome so that when a city was rebuilt in the same area, there were no Carthaginians in it, only Roman colonists.
And the permutations could be mind-bogglingly complex, especially when tracked over 6000 years. Take, for example, France (I won't take the USA, because there is a complete break there, between the Native North American culture groups and the European, later Modified European, Culture/Polity that replaced them over most of North America)
France starts in 4000 BCE as hunter-gatherers, by modern DNA evidence largely descended from Pre-Start-of-Game immigrants from Africa.
By 3000 BCE (dates are still being Hotly Debated by the scientific community) these were being replaced by farmers, immigrants from Anatolia who moved up the Danube valley and then across the Rhine.
By about 2000 - 1500 BCE these in turn were largely replaced by immigrants from central Asia/Russia: pastoral wagon/chariot riders with herds who apparently also brought herd origin epidemic diseases that massacred the farming population (among others, Plague traces have been found dating to this movement). This movement also brought an entirely new 'wave' of language and religious practices with them, usually termed the 'Indo-European'.
In France, this distilled by 1000 BCE or so into the
Hallstadt Culture, later identified with the historical Celts/Gauls of the Classical Era.
In the last two centuries of BCE, this group was starting to build real cities (Bibracte has been estimated to have population of 20,000, making it Very Large by Classical standards) but got conquered by the Romans before they could continue their development.
Between about 100 BCE and 400 CE the Romans extensively 'Romanized' the language, culture, and politics of Gaul, so much so that only faint traces of the original Celtic language remain - overlayered by Latin just as the Gallic roads were overlaid by Roman roads all over the province, and the original 'Druidic' religion was so completely wiped out that later 'Druids' are largely a modern (19th century CE) invention with no connection at all to the original.
After about 400 CE, German tribes, including Franks, invaded and settled in the area. They did not replace the original population, though: hence Latin and not a Germanic language remains the basis for modern French. The exact amount of the culture, population, sociological 'shift' remains debatable: at least one author/academic argues (persuasively, in my view) that Roman institutions of government and local cultural institutions remained in place, being slowly modified by adaptation to changing conditions over the next 400 years.
By about 900 CE, a recognizably 'modern' France emerges, with a segment of the population that considers themselves 'French' (but, to this day, Huge regional variations, even extending to language) and a government that at least has aspirations to rule all of the 'French'.
BUT No Game could possibly represent or include the combination of benign and Less Benign 'foreign influences' that produced France in 1000 CE and later starting from the 'nomads' (hunter-gatherers) of 4000 BCE. For one thing, a similar pattern of immigration and invasion and 'waves' of different cultures could be described for England, Rome, Greece, Anatolia/Turkey, Russia, Spain, etc. each producing a different Final Cultural 'Civ' product.
However, and this is the crux of the matter for me, neither Civ nor Humankind is even attempting to show any such thing.
Civ simply starts you out in 4000 BCE with a 'Civilization' with traits or influences derived from some later (sometimes much, much later) point in its history. There is only the slightest effort to model any influences from geography and none whatsoever to include influences from other Civs or cultures, like the Etruscans on the Romans or the Romans or Franks on the 'French' - basically, they conquer you and you disappear entirely into them or you conquer them and they disappear entirely unto you except for occasional City Names.
Humankind starts you out with a nomadic Group/Civ with traits derived from a selection of 'recognizable' early historical groups. How much this selection is influenced by geography has not, I believe, been indicated yet. Then. based on factors also not yet entirely clear, this Group can take on traits of other historical groups in succeeding artificially (that is, not Game Generated) Eras with, apparently, no actual portrayal in game of those Groups prior to that Era: they spring full blown and different in each Era, so how they generated or generated their influences is entirely Artificial.
So, one Design (Civ) gives you a monolithic Civ for 6000 years, with the myriad historical and prehistorical outside influences almost entirely Absent.
The other design (Humankind) gives you succeeding Civ/Culture Groups with, apparently (presumably, being almost a year out, a lot of the details are still In Development) No real (in game) connection between your group and the successors necessary.
In other words, in Civ you start with France and end with France and Indo-Europeans, Celts, Romans, Germanic Franks, et al have no influence on the Civ. In Humankind, you can't start as France, but you could start as Egyptian or Chinese and wind up as France later on. What conceivable process could result in that is apparently, not modeled exactly - it's a product, as much as anything, of the gamer's desire to wind up playing France.
Both may be commercially successful (I'm enough of a Gamer to hope so) but neither is a Historical 4x game, they are Fantasy games with a (very thin) historical glaze dripped over them.
A purely historical game on this scale (6000 + years) would be, I think, both almost impossible to develop and entirely frustrating to play, and therefore won't happen outside of some academic 'simulation' setting.
But I keep hoping that some Design Team will at least make an attempt to include the historical development process in a game: outside influences, real geographical constraints, Unforeseen Events (read Geoffrey Parker's
Global Crisis on the influence of climate change on the entire World in the 17th century CE, for instance) and instead of giving a gamer just a series of decisions to make to optimize his game, give him a series of problems to solve related to the actual problems actual rulers and peoples had to deal with.
