It depends on your definition of what leftist is. If we just claim that everything good and progressive comes from the left than you are of course right. But if we, for example, would look, how dominant economic policies have been changing, we will see that they were almost libertarian for the most of 19th century, then there was a swing to the left between world wars, then again to the right, then again to the left, to the right after 1980 and to the left again nowadays. So, I don't see any clear trend here.
I believe you are thinking within very small chunks of time here. Of course, XX century was very turbulent and importnat, but taken within larger context of human history, measured in centuries, I think the trend I've described still stands. But that isn't even relevant to our discussion, because...
Actually, very long ago I argued that you don't have anything to represent Thatcher's and Reagan's "neoliberal" economic policy. "Free market" is a rather weird civic both historically and mechanically. Historically I would ask, what economic civic did US have in 19th century when they had very restrictive trade tariffs but a very liberal domestic economy. Mechanically we have a civic which is either OP or very weak, depending on whether you have someone to trade with or not. In both cases choice is very clear in 90% of cases and doesn't seem to be an interesting decision.
(I don't have much practical experience with the current incarnation of free market, so I may be wrong here.)
...I think you are misunderstanding the basic philosophy of the civic system. The civics represent extremely basic ideas that underlie the processes in that general area. Basically, when economics is concerned, I'd argue that all civics in all categories were basically "discovered" by the beginning of XX century.
For instance, in economy category, there are only so many basic ideas one can follow: either you let the market forces figure out all the main issues and government intervention is kept to a minimum (which is basically what "free market" civic is about, be it the extreme forms of Smithian economy or what most Western states use today, as exempified by the existence of WTO), or you let the basic premises of market economy exist but the state tries to significantly affect it through various restrictive policies (and you get the "protectionism" civic, once again whether it manifest itself through the Navigation acts of XVII century England or protectionist policies of modern China), or you believe that the economy has to be steered by the state through direct control of some or all the main contributors to the economy (which gives us "state property" civic, whether through ever popular state capitalism or - in more extreme forms - through Soviet-style planned economy).
If we wanted to represent finer differences between various economic models, we'd need to have 20-30 civics instead of 8 we currently have - but we don't really want to, because civics aren't supposed to work that way. They flesh out the aspects of your society only in the roughest way, and within each civic, a very broad spectrum of social models can fit. While they both fall under the same civic, for example, the realities of slavery in, say, ancient Sparta and XIX century USA are very different. Yet the basic premise of treating people as property stays the same (within the constraints of differences in definitions of "people" and "property" between the ages as well, of course
).
Enjoying the mod. One question: when I have less than 15 military units in one of my cities, but then move several transport ships full of units into that city, all the land units get the "crowded" penalty. This happens even if I don't unload any of the units from the transports. Is this intended? Currently using SVN revision 4370.
Of course intended. Otherwise you could exploit the system by loading parts of your army onto transports to avoid overcrowding.
