I think the game should get back to some realistic history

[Evie]

Cathrine de Medici would like to point out that "They used choice X when choice Y would be more worthy!!" arguments are not related to the presence or absence of a "political leader only" rule. So would Kristina. And any number of others. We had the very same all over the place even when we DID have that (soft) rule.

Furthermore, it's well l known that civ like to have a mix of returning material, new material, and reimagined material. Napoleon and Catherine (who, incidentally, *both* skipped Civ 6) are some of the returning material.

Further furthermore, America is a *terrible* example of a civ without a classic leader, because even by classical metrics, Ben Franklin was one of the most influential political leaders of the American revolution, and is one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable founding fathers, far more reconizable as an American leader than the vast majority of presidents. He's not the face (and name) of the American 100$ bill for his lack of political contribution to the nation (in fact, he's one of only two non-presidents currently appearing on US money, and the other is also a founding father, creator of the US federal bank system, and star of a recent mega-hit musical)! It's hardly a strike against his achievement as an American political leader that, by the time they got around to *having* a president, he was already 83 and would die the next year.

 

[GeneralZIft]

I don't know why realism should be an important aspect to Civilisation. The series concept is just to pick a famous people and lead them to glory. They should be any people from any time, and their bonuses should reflect what they were good at.
But by no means should the game force you to lead the people the same way they were lead in real life. I feel like that's antithetical to series concept.

Who the leaders are and who the Civs are really don't matter, as long as they're meaningful, iconic, fun and varied.
Although let's be realistic - they shouldn't have skimped out on the iconic and most well-known leaders of all time. Because we all know they'll back for DLC and that's just predatory in my opinion.

 

[ThichN]

I think Civ is well-suited to these non-head-of-state characters precisely because they live eternally through the ages. They become sort of symbolic, ideological representations that can react fluidly to societies and cultures. Having a mix is nice, but you'll notice even the head-of-state figures are people who are steeped in a dense mythology.

In fact, I wish they'd lean deeper into them, stopping at meta knowledge they are living forever (we don't need the Longevity Vaccine from SMAC). But having even more specific narrative events connected to personalities, perhaps even crafting some that exist specifically between two leaders, could be a fun way to bring more life to the game.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Then why repeat Catherine the Great for the millionth time? Or Napoleon?

Because they at least sat out Civ 6, is my guess. I would have left out Napoleon as well, considering there is Lafayette. Catherine is fine but if we had to get another Russian leader, I'd want it to be Rasputin.

They released a persona of Victoria revolving around science and industry in the last DLC of the game, so I'm sure they planned on not doing a similar thing again for that reason. But I do think that might have been a hint towards what they were planning on doing for Great Britain in Civ 7 and Ada Lovelace.

Cathrine de Medici would like to point out that "They used choice X when choice Y would be more worthy!!" arguments are not related to the presence or absence of a "political leader only" rule. So would Kristina. And any number of others. We had the very same all over the place even when we DID have that (soft) rule.

I think by most standards; regents also would get a pass as it's close enough to being the "political leader". At least I'd argue that Catherine de Medici had even more power in her time than Victoria did, and she was the queen herself. But everyone knows that the prime minister was the real power.

 

[Evie]

My point isn't that Catherine shouldn't have been in (I agree, she was fine), it's that even when the game DID stick to political leaders, formal and informal (like regents), we *still* had endless argument of "They should have picked this other figure instead".

As I recall, in the specific case of Catherine, there were lots of people who agreed she was a bad pick, but they couldn't even agree on who was actually the better pick, Louis XIV or Napoléon...and there were a few of us who didn't mind Cathrine so much but were adamant about no-Napoléon, no-Louis, or both.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

No two gamers play the same game.

That includes games with a 'historical' veneer and those that claim to be pure Fantasy, those that throw Real Life graphics at you and those that a complete simplifications or cartoons.

And Civ, at one time or many, has been all of the above.

Dog knows I've argued and posted about the Historical Basis for various Civ inclusions and mechanics forever, but please note: most of my posts have not tried to say This Is How It Should Be (and if they have seemed that way, my profound apologies to All) but rather This Is How It Was - and if we want the game to do X, this is how it actually happened as a possible model.

But short of a rigid recreation of history, the models are almost never complete as game designs - only guides to including something in the game, and only if the decision is to include it at all. - which is always the first and primary decision by the gamer designer.

As for Leaders and Civs and what should be included, I've come to the inclusion that it doesn't matter the proverbial Rough Terrain of Legumes. All the Leaders are simply graphics and their in-game bonuses and attributes can be slapped onto any graphic or title you want - same with the Civs: except for city/town graphic elements, all the other 'historical' elements are immaterial to the Civ: war-mongering Macedonia and war-mongering Prussia can be identical in game terms regardless of their 'real' historical differences.

In fact, I'll stick my neck out (but not really) and predict that some of the first modded Civs added to the game will 're-use' a bunch of graphical elements from existing Civs: how many gamers know enough about regional variations on Greek architecture to tell the difference between an Attic Greek temple and a Macedonian one? Or, for that matter, between a Back Home in Macedonian/Greek city and a Bactrian Greek city now under New Management as part of a Kushan Empire?

After all, all the graphics and mechanics in the game are only symbols or symbolic, and symbols have a way of getting very twisty the longer you look at them. Take one of the oldest symbols in the Human World, the swastika: an outlawed symbol of German reactionary militarism, but also the national symbol of Finland and the unit symbol of the US Army's 45th Infantry Division - all at the same time in 1940 - 41. We will not see swastikas used in the game because it comes loaded with far too much history of the ugly sort, but whether I am looking at Ben Franklin, Judge Dee or Judge Roy Bean as Leaders doesn't matter at all as long as I know What the 'symbols' represent in the form of in-game attributes (although if they decide to go with semi-historical characters as Leaders, Judge Dee would be about as 'semi' as they get . . .)

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

My point isn't that Catherine shouldn't have been in (I agree, she was fine), it's that even when the game DID stick to political leaders, formal and informal (like regents), we *still* had endless argument of "They should have picked this other figure instead".

As I recall, in the specific case of Catherine, there were lots of people who agreed she was a bad pick, but they couldn't even agree on who was actually the better pick, Louis XIV or Napoléon...and there were a few of us who didn't mind Cathrine so much but were adamant about no-Napoléon, no-Louis, or both.

I admit that I was one of the adamant ones when it came to why Catherine, and not Louis XIV, at the beginning of the game. But then her new persona came along, and that ability is what I would have wanted Louis XIV to get anyways, so to me it all worked out in the end.

After all, all the graphics and mechanics in the game are only symbols or symbolic, and symbols have a way of getting very twisty the longer you look at them. Take one of the oldest symbols in the Human World, the swastika: an outlawed symbol of German reactionary militarism, but also the national symbol of Finland and the unit symbol of the US Army's 45th Infantry Division - all at the same time in 1940 - 41. We will not see swastikas used in the game because it comes loaded with far too much history of the ugly sort, but whether I am looking at Ben Franklin, Judge Dee or Judge Roy Bean as Leaders doesn't matter at all as long as I know What the 'symbols' represent in the form of in-game attributes (although if they decide to go with semi-historical characters as Leaders, Judge Dee would be about as 'semi' as they get . . .)

It's also used in the main symbol in Jainism. I do wonder if that's the reason why they have never decided to use Jainism in the game, despite it being the only major world religion that has never appeared in a civ game.
Though one would think you could also just use the hand?

 

[Bast]

I mean the other way to see this or flip this is, if they had not included say the likes of Ada Lovelace and Himiko or Machiavelli, would anyone have said, damn this game where is Ada Lovelace. They're not even bald or inspiring choices. Something like Marx would be. So why then risk alienating the core fan base for this? I have a theory and it goes along with Great Britain being dropped in the base game and it is that they basically think that they have the core fan base locked up for sales as well as for good reviews regardless of what they do. It's like when political parties see safe electorates as locks for their party and find out otherwise at the ballot box.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I mean the other way to see this or flip this is, if they had not included say the likes of Ada Lovelace and Himiko or Machiavelli, would anyone have said, damn this game where is Ada Lovelace. They're not even bald or inspiring choices. Something like Marx would be. So why then risk alienating the core fan base for this? I have a theory and it goes along with Great Britain being dropped in the base game and it is that they basically think that they have the core fan base locked up for sales as well as for good reviews regardless of what they do. It's like when political parties see safe electorates as locks for their party and find out otherwise at the ballot box.

Let's flip it again. Having no statistics to back this up, of course, but I would bet that for everyone who considers Lovelace or Himiko or Machiavelli 'not even bald or inspiring' there is at least one someone else who finds them different and intriguing.

More importantly, I think, there are people who find what they bring to the game in attributes, bonuses, et al intriguing enough to want to play them regardless of what name or title or graphic is hung on them.

From what I know of historical personages (mainly European and Classical) they could have given Machiavelli's attributes to Richelieu, Metternich or Louis XI (The "Spider King") without changing a thing and they would have been equally 'realistic' - or at least, arguable, which is probably more accurate in the game context. Shuckee-Gee, Armand Jean du Plessis could have probably added several chapters to Machiavelli's The Prince complete with footnotes and a fat appendix of examples . . .

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I admit that I was one of the adamant ones when it came to why Catherine, and not Louis XIV, at the beginning of the game. But then her new persona came along, and that ability is what I would have wanted Louis XIV to get anyways, so to me it all worked out in the end.

It's also used in the main symbol in Jainism. I do wonder if that's the reason why they have never decided to use Jainism in the game, despite it being the only major world religion that has never appeared in a civ game.
Though one would think you could also just use the hand?

The fact is, in Civ we don't play the Leaders except in our fevered imaginations: we play their coded attributes, bonuses and agendas and play against them when they are our AI opponents. The graphic Leader figures are, as they say, just the 'shingle before the shop' to entice us to try the goods/attributes within.

And I believe the excellent "Historical Religions" Mod for Civ VI used the Hand as the symbol of Jainism.

The problem with symbols is that they all have context for the individual that is based on that individual's experience of the symbol. I once had an older woman, a customer in the bookstore where I worked who got extremely upset at the 'peace symbol' that was on a book. It turned out that she was a Holocaust Survivor, and the modern symbol is also a Rune that the Nazis used to mark Jewish residences and shops for destruction. She could not, emotionally, see that symbol as anything else. I would not have expected her, in tlihat context, to buy the book that displayed it, just as no game company could expect much in the way of sales of a game with the swastika prominently displayed in it, no matter how many Finns, Navajo, or veterans of the 45th Infantry Division see it differently.

 

[Evie]

Just a few notes on that story - the peace symbol does have some passing similarity with a nordic rune that was used by the nazi, but to commemorate deaths of their own people, not to mark others for death. The similarity was pushed by pro-Vietnam war elements, presumably to discredit the pacifist movement. How it got from there to specific antisemitism I don't know.

Which change nothing to what that particular woman believed or her reasoning from that belief, and to your conclusions from that story.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Just a few notes on that story - the peace symbol does have some passing similarity with a nordic rune that was used by the nazi, but to commemorate deaths of their own people, not to mark others for death. The similarity was pushed by pro-Vietnam war elements, presumably to discredit the pacifist movement. How it got from there to specific antisemitism I don't know.

Which change nothing to what that particular woman believed or her reasoning from that belief, and to your conclusions from that story.

To muddy the picture even further (another characteristic of symbols that stay around long enough) the same peace symbol/rune was the divisional tactical sign for the 12th Panzer Division of the Wehrmacht in the first half of WWII: it was used to mark every vehicle in the division, as well as on signs leading to divisional elements in the field.

And between the symbols themselves and traumatic memories there is more than enough room for confusion between what the symbol was supposed to mean originally (especially when, like the Swastika, the meanings were entirely different for different groups) and what it means to each individual.

 

[Evie]

The 12th panzer insignia I can find, mind you, is missing half the central bar compared to the peace symbol and the arms are raised up rather than falling down. The similarity is no more than passing (the symbol I find is much closer to the mercedes benz logo!), though again enough to trigger emotions in a person who has a history with it.

 

[Bast]

The fact is, in Civ we don't play the Leaders except in our fevered imaginations: we play their coded attributes, bonuses and agendas and play against them when they are our AI opponents.

Really? I guess they would be losing those players who do use their imaginations when playing the game for a historical narrative then.

I don't know. I just think it seems silly when they had a pretty good formula. If it's just about numbers and we're just supposed to think that well Machievelli can be Richelieu and I just pretend that Catherine is Genghis Khan when she's leading Mongols, what is the point of all of this. Actually read a review or saw a video can't remember that said that everything just feels the same. So perhaps it is correct that you're just playing stats against stats and there is nothing that's really differentiating anything to give a decent story.