[R&F] Inevitable thread on "Flirtatious" and "Curmudgeon" straights-only traits

[Thormodr]

Hopefully there will be mods to remove agendas that you can never please.

Then it won't be a problem.

 

[Chasethemage]

Or maybe curmudgeon means that they're sexist. Like, "my gender is superior to yours" or "men/women shouldn't be leaders"

 

[JosephC]

What's with you kids today.

Definition of curmudgeon
a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man

I immediately took it they are sexist. It's that they don't think the opposite sex should be considered equal... that they shouldn't lead. Not that they're gay/lesbian..

*sigh* Here.. you might relate more to this:

edit: Thank you @Chasethemage

edit2: ...And stay off my lawn !!

 

[h0nk0815]

Why not be relaxed and don't care about that?

 

[isau]

I wish it was tied to the gender of your selected governors instead of your leader. That way you could decide to please them, make them angry, or go down the middle road with your selections.

I DO kind of like the idea of seducing a foreign leader with your all female/all male governor team, for the LOLs.

 

[iammaxhailme]

I wish it was tied to the gender of your selected governors instead of your leader. That way you could decide to please them, make them angry, or go down the middle road with your selections.

I DO kind of like the idea of seducing a foreign leader with your all female/all male governor team, for the LOLs.

This is a good idea, since you could actually play wiht the agenda isntead of just being screwed (literally!)

 

[bonafide11]

I'm as progressive as anyone, but I don't think just because a leader would prefer a leader of the same gender or someone of the opposite gender would make them straight. I don't really see how you can jump to that conclusion.

If anything, the problem is that assuming there are only two genders. There were historical rumors that Queen Elizabeth was transgender. If she was in the game, how would they treat that?

 

[Navelgazer]

It's fine for me gameplay-wise - so maybe you can't make a curmudgeon like you. You can still play that game in other ways, which is fun to me.

I think it'd be better with a mod that could make AI Leaders randomly gay, though. Seems like it could be a simple enough edit.

 

[Arent11]

which is still largely driven by the needs of 13-year old straight teenage boys

The greatest obstacles to "progress" are natural science & the needs of 13 year old straight teenage boys

Natural science is the eternal enemy of any kind of ideology & the needs of 13 year old straight teenage
boys could not even be tamed by christianity, although they tried for 1000 years.

 

[darkace77450]

I do think it might cause some stirr among some people if Saladin turned out to be gay in one game, even if it was random.

A gay Saladin is the exact reason I assumed they didn't make homosexual attraction an agenda. That would probably go over about as well as Muhammad being depicted as a Great Prophet. If this is what they wanted to avoid, they could have avoided any controversy altogether by just not adding the new traits. But @Scaramanga does raise a valid point; there's something to be said for adding a random agenda that you cannot satisfy or violate no matter what. It takes away agency, sure, but it still adds a new dynamic to the game. To say that you can't play around a neighboring Shaka who's going to dislike you from Day One isn't exactly true. You have the information you need to know he's coming for you sooner or later, so you have to prepare your defenses and expand your empire accordingly. The counter play isn't satisfying the agenda, it's preparing for it's fallout.

 

[Navelgazer]

A gay Saladin is the exact reason I assumed they didn't make homosexual attraction an agenda. That would probably go over about as well as Muhammad being depicted as a Great Prophet. If this is what they wanted to avoid, they could have avoided any controversy altogether by just not adding the new traits. But @Scaramanga does raise a valid point; there's something to be said for adding a random agenda that you cannot satisfy or violate no matter what. It takes away agency, sure, but it still adds a new dynamic to the game. To say that you can't play around a neighboring Shaka who's going to dislike you from Day One isn't exactly true. You have the information you need to know he's coming for you sooner or later, so you have to prepare your defenses and expand your empire accordingly. The counter play isn't satisfying the agenda, it's preparing for it's fallout.

Saladin, Teddy, Qin Shi Huang... there are a lot of places where this could cause a lot of furor, But I pretty much exactly agree with this comment, which is why, again, I think the best thing would be a well-distributed fanmod to handle it. (I wish I could code. I would happily do this myself.)

 

[Inhalaattori]

The whole "gay identity" is modern Western concept that has little historical meaning. Just like historically marriage has practically nothing to do with romantical love. Modern western ideas of love/sexuality/marriage are alien to people who lived in the past and actually they are still alien to 90% of people living in the world today.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

civ fans are hard to satisfy

Is that a treaty in your pocket?

It's fine for me gameplay-wise

Disagree, the agendas are junk. Whether my avatar in game is male shouldn't be the driving point on whether they're trying to send 15 tanks my way. What should matter is what I'm doing in the game and how close I am to winning it.

Creating game objectives and then instructing player replacements to ignore those objectives and play a different game is anti-gameplay design. This problem is not unique to these two new agendas, but adding garbage doesn't reduce garbage. You just get more garbage.

 

[conorbebe]

And also, in the historic context, do we have examples of any openly gay leader? I don't doubt for a moment there have been many, but I would find it very artifical and forced in a leader vs leader historic interaction setting.

There are no confirmed homosexuals in the game currently, but Frederick the Great comes to mind.

 

[Vandlys]

"WE MUST HAVE EQUAL REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN in the player screen because it's 2018 lul"

*also goes out of their way to make heteronormativity relevant to gameplay in a forced, random, historically inaccurate, and strategy-blunting way*

"Civ VI is good guys buy it from us please please"

smfh. One step forward five steps back.

Remember that non-binary, heteronormative relationships (i.e. man - woman, woman - man) existed many, many centuries ago, simultaneously in different empires with monogamy. Just because we, nowadays, are "used" to monogamy (nudges slightly towards rates of adultery in the US), doesn't mean this is -the- way to go.
The Ancient Greeks didn't have the same values put on relationships we do now, neither did the Romans, neither did the Indians, neither did some African tribes/civilizations. There probably are many others that I don't know about, and yeah, there probably are also a lot of relationship standards that exist like some current ones, the ones you may call "normal". That, again, however, doesn't mean it's the only way to go.

Firaxis making a game about alternate history, but history nonetheless, should not have been so blunt and blind in my opinion : )

The whole "gay identity" is modern Western concept that has little historical meaning. Just like historically marriage has practically nothing to do with romantical love. Modern western ideas of love/sexuality/marriage are alien to people who lived in the past and actually they are still alien to 90% of people living in the world today.

This. 100% this. Can't support this statement enough, thank you for writing it so eloquently!

 

[kamex]

There are no confirmed homosexuals in the game currently, but Frederick the Great comes to mind.

Well... Alexander maybe...

Nevertheless I don't think this agenda should be in the game as there is no reasonable play-around, with possibly exception of a future Catherine the Great normal agenda - but that's mostly for civ tradition.

 

[DeutschDachs]

I don't mind curmudgeon as a gameplay mechanic. Some people are predisposed to dislike you. That's life. I don't agree with the idea that every leader must be possible to be friends with every game.

That they based it around sex is kind of awkward. Can you imagine if they made an agenda where leaders disliked others based on the color of their skin? Both would be entirely accurate historically of course but it probably wouldn't go over very well.

 

[Disgustipated]

And the thing is, is there any evidence leaders let their personal affections affect their interactions with other world leaders (Cleopatra aside)? While many leaders do have affairs, I don't think a single one pursued an affair with a head of state. John F. Kennedy was happy enough with Marilyn Monroe (though that's not confirmed), I doubt he ever once flirted with a head of state.

 

[PhilBowles]

It's a stupid set of agendas, but if they can tweak leader preferences so that Gandhi prefers nuke-heavy more often than not I'm sure they can have Alexander be Flirty less often than normal.

 

[earlc]

Yeah, they probably should have gone without this. It's clearly too complex for broad strokes, and to add the nuance necessary it probably wouldn't be worth the amount of work. If their goal was further humanizing the leaders, I don't think this does much to that end. Just take sex out of it.

Only other way to handle it is to approach it in a more absurd and humorous way, but that's not really the type of game civ is or needs to be.