Don't be the guy who has to produce the counter-reasoning objective to every post.
Shoshone was a rushed together and a obscure replacement for the Pueblo. Even Firaxis admits it in the article when they talked about how hard it was to find anything relevant to them to put in Civilization.
That admits they were obscure, not that they were 'rushed together'. Maybe their ideas for the Pueblo sound so unappealing because they were preliminary, but I'd rather have the Shoshone as they are than the Pueblo they described, and either way it doesn't seem they'd avoid some form of Native American stereotyping.
Then they throw together a few more Indian cultures into it like the Comanche. The idea they were going for a peaceful Indian civilization and then throw in the Comanche makes them hypocrites since the Comanche were one of the violent, warlike tribes
That's quite possibly an artefact of the limited research they did (or claimed they were able to do) on the Shoshone.
Then they top it off making the Shoshone UA be about land grabbing which goes against them being peaceful.
That's exactly the point the article made - it doesn't go against them being peaceful. "Peaceful expansionists" is not an archetype that currently exists in the game, and their UA allows them a mechanism for doing exactly that. There's nothing incoherent or inconsistent in their approach there.
Venice I recognize as a worthy empire but it was still just a city state with territories it didn't raze.
Which is basically the way it plays.
Before Italy was deconfirmed it was one the most popular choices to include in the expansion with Venice just being a alternative.
It was popular on threads in the BNW forum, at least following the revelation that an Italian city-state had apparently (and we now know definitely) been replaced, but by the time the forum was up and running the expansion had already been made and the civs determined. I haven't seen many requests for Italy elsewhere, and don't think it was high, if at all, on the forum list of most requested civs.
The idea they couldn't get around the same capital name was just a excuse.
It's not a question of the capital name, it's a question of conceptual conflict with the city-state mechanic and the fact that unified Italy, while economically relevant, is not particularly notable for any of the things people wanted an Italian civ to represent.
Then the idea it wasn't unified for most of its history is basically saying Greece, Celts, Vikings, Shoshone, Iroquois, China shouldn't be in the game.
It's not that it wasn't unified for
most of its history, it's that it wasn't unified for the
specific part of its history when it was culturally important. This is emphatically not true of Greece, which even has a leader who represents its unified period. It's quite evident from its uniques and its playstyle that the game's Greece does not represent the pre-unification states.
The Celts shouldn't be in the game (and certainly not in their Civ V form), nor really should any Native American tribes with the possible exception of the Iroquois who, while having nothing as formalised as a central government, did have a unified identity.
The Vikings were replaced with the unified state of Denmark perhaps for that very reason.
Despite territorial changes and several periods of internecine warfare, it's a myth that China hasn't been united for the larger part of its history, and it has been important both historically and in modern times during its unified existence.
Then finally the Brazil is UA doesn't make sense, but Italy's great people weren't just Artists.
No, but at least it had Great People. It's downright bizarre that Brazil gets a UA that increases GP production, when so far as I know there isn't a single Brazilian in the GP names lists.
Leonardo Di Vinci falls under every category for a great person in-game
I don't know, he'd struggle as a Great Admiral, Great Prophet or Great Musician.
We still don't have a have civilization representing all the Italian wonders yet since Venice didn't build the Sistine Chapel, Leaning Tower of Pisa, or produce the most famous great people like Leonardo, Michelangelo, etc.
So? There was no Burmese civ in Civ IV but that didn't stop them including Shwedagon Pagoda. There's no Khmer civ in Civ V, yet we have Angkor Wat. Gustavus Adolphus was a Great General in Civ incarnations (vanilla Civ V included) with no Swedish civ. Wonders and GPs have never been tied to the identities of in-game civs.
Then Morocco was just made into a little and slightly better Arabia. Would be better but Camel Archers are currently overpowered. The forts they build are basically free Petra's. I also don't recall them being popular requested like Kongo is.
Not under that name, but "the Moors" were a heavily requested civ. That in any case should hardly be the main criterion for including them.
I think the overlap with Arabia is an unfortunate consequence of the fact that Arabia in Civ games is apparently meant to be an amalgam that includes the Caliphate and Morocco together - as I noted, the Arabian intro text in Civ V is somewhat confused, describing the Moroccan conquest of Spain for example. Morocco was the great trading power of the medieval Islamic world - Arabia should probably be reinvented as a science civ to reflect its key advances in that field.
also, it's significant that the quote in the article does not necessarily say that the consumer markets of indonesia and brazil were a big factor. the quote is: "'Even though you don't think of, say, Indonesia, as a big video game outlet and consumer market, the country is huge now,' says Beach. 'More and more places like Indonesia and Brazil, you just can't ignore how important their growth is here in the 21st century.'"
this can be interpreted a few ways, maybe ed beach is saying that the "hugeness" of these countries contradicts the notion that they're not big markets, but he could also be saying that despite not necessarily being the biggest markets, their "hugeness" makes them significant to the game. i think "huge" here probably refers to the population: indonesia and brazil are the 4th and 5th most populous countries and #1-3 (china, india, USA) have been in every civ.
It takes a somewhat creative approach to English syntax to derive this perspective. To clarify for non-English language natives, it is not conventional for a comma ("'Even though you don't think of, say, Indonesia, as a big video game outlet and consumer market, the country is huge now") to separate unrelated concepts (such as "Indonesia's not thought of as a big game market" and the separate claim "Indonesia's now an important country"). All he's saying here is "You don't think of Indonesia as a big game market, but it actually is now". Note also that he doesn't reference Brazil as a country not thought to be a large game market in this sentence. Indeed, Brazil is (according to Wikipedia) the 15th largest video game market in the world, with "potential" to overtake Mexico as the largest market in Latin America, while SE Asia as a whole is thought likely to double its video game market by 2015.
Taken out of the broader context, it might seem reasonable to interpret the comment about these countries' growth being hard to ignore in the 21st Century more broadly ... but while I don't know about Brazil, Indonesia was the fourth most populous country in the world when Civ I was released. In terms of economic growth, I already noted that Brazil's prospects for economic superpowerdom looked considerably stronger when Civ IV was released than when Civ V was. They aren't obviously harder to ignore in the early 21st Century than they were in the late 20th. In the context that both areas are growing and considered "places to watch" in the video game industry, it's most likely by far that he was referring to the game industry specifically.
