Navelgazer
Emperor
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2012
- Messages
- 1,153
So, of all the upcoming Civs in the base game, I'm probably most excited about Kongo, not from any personal experience (I'm a european-descended white dude who's lived most of his life in America) but because African civilizations always, to me, present the most potential promise for this series to give us something awesome and new. I don't resent the Eurocentricism (the game is mostly going to be sold to an audience for whom that is the history they understand the best, and due to found written records it is, in fact, the history that we understand the best) but since there's much more history in Africa, and we as a global community are piecing it together more and more every day, those civilizations and peoples and empires are the most interesting to me.
But there's an issue: this is a game, with gameplay mechanics, and again that pesky problem of an audience coming in with what they know.
So let's talk about Songhai.
Aside from Egypt, which can just as easily (from an American standpoint, at least) be considered more a part of the Middle-Eastern region, Songhai was the only "African" civ included in the base game of Civ V. Now, their base-game bonus was pretty weak and weirdly situational, but as the game progressed and they got reworked, they ended up being one of the most well-rounded, interesting, consistently good, and most overlooked civs in the game. To remind us all, their traits are:
UA: Triple gold from conquering cities and destroying barb camps.
UA: All land units get two free promotions: amphibious and war canoe
UB: Temple that also grants +2 Culture and requires no gold maintenance
UU: Knight that has no penalty for attacking cities.
That's a crazy good Civ, right there! The UU synergizes with the UA to let you purchase buildings to quickly offset happiness loss from expanding through conquest, Culture and Religion grow simultaneously at a time when you normally have to make tough choices between the two, and you can even rock it on small continents or archipelago maps if you want to! And we all mostly ignored its existence.
And I think the reason is that the design did little to give us a flavor for a civ we didn't know much about going into it.
Civ VI designs seem to allow for a lot more small touches of flavor, but I'm worried about Kongo getting lost in the shuffle like Songhai did.
I guess my question is: what do you think is necessary for a relatively unknown civ to "break through" flavorwise, and be interesting, while still keeping their history intact and making them work gameplay-wise? Especially for an African civ, but also for things we're hopeing for in the future? (Vietnam under the Trung Sisters, Gran Colombia under Simon Bolivar, anything else in this line...)
But there's an issue: this is a game, with gameplay mechanics, and again that pesky problem of an audience coming in with what they know.
So let's talk about Songhai.
Aside from Egypt, which can just as easily (from an American standpoint, at least) be considered more a part of the Middle-Eastern region, Songhai was the only "African" civ included in the base game of Civ V. Now, their base-game bonus was pretty weak and weirdly situational, but as the game progressed and they got reworked, they ended up being one of the most well-rounded, interesting, consistently good, and most overlooked civs in the game. To remind us all, their traits are:
UA: Triple gold from conquering cities and destroying barb camps.
UA: All land units get two free promotions: amphibious and war canoe
UB: Temple that also grants +2 Culture and requires no gold maintenance
UU: Knight that has no penalty for attacking cities.
That's a crazy good Civ, right there! The UU synergizes with the UA to let you purchase buildings to quickly offset happiness loss from expanding through conquest, Culture and Religion grow simultaneously at a time when you normally have to make tough choices between the two, and you can even rock it on small continents or archipelago maps if you want to! And we all mostly ignored its existence.
And I think the reason is that the design did little to give us a flavor for a civ we didn't know much about going into it.
Civ VI designs seem to allow for a lot more small touches of flavor, but I'm worried about Kongo getting lost in the shuffle like Songhai did.
I guess my question is: what do you think is necessary for a relatively unknown civ to "break through" flavorwise, and be interesting, while still keeping their history intact and making them work gameplay-wise? Especially for an African civ, but also for things we're hopeing for in the future? (Vietnam under the Trung Sisters, Gran Colombia under Simon Bolivar, anything else in this line...)
