^^ yep, its based on historical recognition. Montezuma was a crappy Aztec leader, but he's the only one we know because the Spanish burned the ancient writings as heresy. Same goes for Huyana Capac, except he was less crappy than Montezuma and the Inca never had Writing so we can't read back about previous leaders. I don't know anything about Pacal II, my Mayan history is a little sketch... It's not the best leaders in history, it's the ones wwe remember... like Stalin.
Are you serious? The Spanish burnt many ancient writings, but the details behind these leaders is FAR from sketchy.
For the Aztec and Maya, a few priests were nice enough to smuggle some of their writings home. Along with this, the Spanish couldn't destroy the stone carved writings on the numerous ruins scattered across all of mesoamerica, and that left a very vivid record of their history behind. In fact despite your strange belief that the Spanish destroyed all of the Nahuatl (The Aztec) language, they managed to leave behind enough to create numerous books of Nahuatl poetry. Due to this there's a great amount of information about every leader of the brief Aztec empire, including their parents, children, etc. If you bothered to pick up a book talking about this, you'd see just what a wealth of knowledge there is.
As for the Inca, they didn't have writing, but they had something even better, something that the Spanish really couldn't burn. The bureaucracy was FILLED with over one hundred thousand people who's sole duty in life was to memorize their own history, and recite it word for word. Due to this Inca history was vividly recorded, as well as the history of numerous other tribes and empires in the Andes. This is also why Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala was able to compile such a MASSIVE body of work in Inca history, and why scholars still use his work to this day to explore Inca history. And don't think 'well memory isn't very good for recording history', as if you did further research you'd figure out that the Inca history as recorded then was so strict and at times on the dot that it has been confirmed by archaeological evidence.
I'm sorry for being so mean, but your blunt ignorance of pre-Columbian cultures kind of hit a nerve in me.
The one truly bad choice, in my modest opinion, is
Montezuma, also known as Moctezuma II. Why oh why was he picked over Moctezuma I (who's real name was possibly Ilhuicamina) is beyond me.
Why chose Montezuma, who inherited an Empire at its height and essentially dropped the ball when it came time to defend it over the ruler who expanded it the most is simply mind boggling. What the heck were the Firaxis guys even thinking? That's kinda like choosing Richard Nixon as the premiere American leader!
And yes, surprise surprise I am actually going to come to Moctezuma II's defense here. First a lot of you are studying the wrong history on this guy. The Spanish, after defeating the Aztec, gave a very different account of Moctezuma than the Aztecs did, so different that it feels like the Spanish's record of the guy was there for propaganda purposes. The Spanish viewed him as a fearful, weak-willed, and selfish, supersitious ruler, who was easily killed when he viewed the Spanish as gods and gave them all his trust, and even, in a widely misread speech given by Moctezuma, offered his throne to the Spanish. In fact the Spanish even said that his own people killed him.
On the other hand the Aztec recorded him as a highly religious and industrious warrior, who trusted the Spanish, and actually showed his superiority over the Spanish in that widely misread speech--in Nahuatl language, being overtly polite, and offering your home to someone, actually means you're basically saying you're the superior, dominant one here, because they 'can't offer a home of their own' or 'you're accepting my home over your own'. This was done regularly as a way to see if the other would submit, and acts a form of diplomacy. If they accepted, they're basically saying they're under the one who offered it. So in a way when Cortez accepted the offer, he was basically saying the Spanish empire is inferior. I personally think Cortez used knowledge of this custom to get Moctezuma in a vulnerable situation, but that's up to debate. As for him being a stupid leader, Moctezuma II actually expanded the empire just as much as Moctezuma I did, and Moctezuma II embarked on numerous large scale building projects, and under his reign the Aztec started making headway in some of their scientific and architectural discoveries. He even fine tuned the compulsory education in his empire--yes, every male in the empire had to go to school until they were 16--and expanded the Aztec church so well that the Spanish had an incredible amount of trouble spreading Christianity into the former empire even after complete defeat--and to this day, some Nahuatl speakers refuse to accept Christianity. Oh yeah, the Aztec accounts say the SPANISH murdered Moctezuma in the end, and then fled the city like cowards.
