Yes, I meant Spain as an Exploration Age civ makes sense. I wouldn't be sold on playing a Modern Age Spain, Portugal or Netherlands.
Unless you are Dutch like me or Portuguese, or Spanish I guess? Because it would feel really, really bad for me. (though I should already be happy to even have us in the game at launch, we mostly only get in with the 1st expansion)
Neither of these countries/people are at the same level as the US, China, Japan, Germany or India of importance nowadays but especially Spain and the Netherlands aren't that far behind.
In Humankind the same thing happens; The Netherlands are in the Early Modern Era and Spain even an era before that and Portugal isn't even in the game, and 2 of the civilizations that were chosen for the modern era were New Zealand and Sweden.
Nothing against Sweden or New Zealand (nice for them to get represented in the game too) but Spain and the Netherlands have bigger economies (15th and 17th worldwide) or populations then those two nowaday's (23th and 52th).
Unfortunately we are at place 6 and 7 in Europe (after Germany 3th, UK 6th, France 7th, Italy 9th and Russia 11th) and are therefore mostly overlooked and aren't even officially invited for the g20 (top 20 economies in the world) and there spots were given to Agentina (24th) and South Africa (40th) to have more diversity and countries on other continents. (at least Spain gets a guest invite every year, but the Netherlands has to beg each year to even get an guest invite and sometimes if the host nation doesn't like us we won't get one).
And yes I know we (the Netherlands) are a little spot on the worldmap and only have 18 million people, but we are very OP and have a lot of influence for such a small nation, lol.
But above all of that it just feels wrong if your civ is in the exploration age only and suddenly you have to choose an unrelated civilization in the Modern age.
At least in Humankind I could still keep playing as the Dutch, but only from the Early Modern era on if I wanted too. But without any new buildings, units and bonusses in later eras, like new other civs would get.
But that was better than to turn into another civilization all together. Also finding the best fitting path through the ages that would bring me to the Dutch felt weird.
While for the French or Chinese there was always a logical civ to take that was related to them in every era somehow, but not to strange as it is a French company that made the game.
I did feel disconnected with the game after a few games, with always the same avatar you made of yourself dressed in clothing of the civ of the era you played (which sometimes looked realy weird) in that era and all leaders spoke English.
And after a while you also knew which civ was the best to pick in each era and it was hard to not pick that same civ in each playthrough because you knew it was just the best or you didn't want the AI to pick it.
I tried hard to like the game because it was in the same genre as my beloved civilization games, but I just didn't and after a while I uninstalled the game because it was collecting digital dust on my hard drive.
Later I even tried Millenia but that was so bad I uninstalled that after a few days.
So for me it came as a shock to see that each civ is relegated to 1 age only in civ 7.
And even though I play the Netherlands more then other civs I also love to play the 'what if' story as every other civ and leader and even persona in game from the ancient times to the future and get them through all the ages and have them withstand the test of time in every civ game I played since civ II.
But I always put my home country in the mix of AI civs I play against just for fun and I am still amused to hear William of Orange (civ V) or Wilhelmina (civ VI) speak in Dutch towards me.
And even after all this above, Civ 7 still looks and feels like a civ game to me from what I have seen and as a civfanatic since 2002 of course I will buy and play it even if I don't like the changing of civs each age.
Hopefully the modders will help me and many others like me out.
