Safavids and Mughals

[Zirk]

I wonder why these two great empires aren't included in any Civ games. I mean, Mali was included in Civ IV, and that was good, but the Safavids/Mughals were two of the most powerful empires in history, and their influence has shaped the middle east and Pakistan/India into what they are today.

A Swedish civilization would be sweet as well considering they were the dominant power in Scandinavia for centuries. Maybe Charles XI or something as leader.

Does anyone agree?

 

[702]

I think both would be included under Persia/India.
Sure Persia mainly represents the Achaemenids, but it's still "Persia".
And India is of course an all encompassing civ in the civ games, representing lots of different empires, states, kingdoms, etc...

Having Safavids and (Achaemenid) Persia would be like having Mali and Songhai, or Germany and HRE. Oh.

No problems with having Sweden, but I don't expect it to be one of the original 18 civs.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

I agree it's a travesty that only the Achaemenids are represented, given that there's three other useful monarchies (Parthian, Sassanid, and Safavid; the Qajars were useless and the Pahlavis didn't last too long). Personally, I think that the best choice for a Persian leader is actually Ayatollah Khomeini; it's been 21 years, which is about how long after Mao's death the original Civilization was released. Given the absolute game-change that Khomeini represents for both Iran and the world*, I'd like to see him in.

As for the Mughals: They're covered by "India." There's no way to include them without kicking out Gandhi (or perhaps Nehru, if they choose that route, which they won't because Gandhi's a Civ tradition), who (besides being a tradition) is more recognizable, more certifiably Indian ("Mughal" means "Mongol," after all, even if they did become thoroughly Indianized in terms of culture and even blood), and a generally more monumental figure in Indian and world history than any Mughal leader could ever hope to be.

Spoiler * :

As in, he represents the beginning of political Islam as a viable mass/popular movement. Today, political Islam represents the only serious intellectual challenge to liberal democratic capitalism; all other "alternative" models (e.g. whatever the heck China's doing) represent degenerate forms of LDC that are on some level ashamed of not being truly liberal, democratic, or capitalist.

 

[civ_king]

Al-Andalus deserves representation first

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Al-Andalus deserves representation first

Why, exactly? What about Al-Andalus isn't covered by the Arabs and Spanish? Especially given that the current leader of the Arabs, Saladin (1) isn't even all that Arab (he was Kurdish by ethnicity, although he likely used Arabic as a court language) and (2) never ruled all of the Arab lands, we could justifiably put Abdulrahman III as leader of the Arabs. Also, the Romans and Carthaginians have cities in Spain (and Portugal) is over-covered by Civ.

 

[Graceheart the Leopard]

Personally, I think that the best choice for a Persian leader is actually Ayatollah Khomeini; it's been 21 years, which is about how long after Mao's death the original Civilization was released. Given the absolute game-change that Khomeini represents for both Iran and the world*, I'd like to see him in..

Yeah! Let's screw 5000 years of history for 1 guy who died a couple of decades ago! And maybe we can have Margret Thatcher as England's leader and Brezhnev as the Russian leader too!

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Yeah! Let's screw 5000 years of history for 1 guy who died a couple of decades ago! And maybe we can have Margret Thatcher as England's leader and Brezhnev as the Russian leader too!

1. It was just a suggestion.
2. A monarch is a monarch is a monarch. Even for a great monarch building an empire (both in the sense of "expand" and in the sense of "build up") when many have done so before takes little imagination; it does require great skill, to be sure, but after Cyrus, the goals of a Persian monarch were painfully obvious (not so much the means, of course). But to lead a genuine popular revolution, seize power, and establish a new political order based on your own principles? That is the very definition of political greatness. Who cares that it happened thirty years ago and not three hundred or three thousand? Such a man has truly overcome himself; to use a Nietzschean turn of phrase (not that I particularly care for such things, but it's apropos), Khomeini led a revaluation of Iran's highest values. He's succeeded marvelously, and today the effects of that revaluation are felt everywhere. True, he did not start the movement; that title goes to Muhammad Ali Maududi, in India and later Pakistan. But it was Khomeini who made the broad Islamist philosophy a political reality. After the Iranian Revolution, Islamists across the Muslim world saw the possibility of their success; the '80s were a period of expansion and guerrilla war for most Islamist organizations. Even though that war has since died down at home, the fringe elements have penetrated the West, and all major powers today are painfully conscious of its effects (India, China, and Russia have...complicated relationships with the movement). Make no mistake, the '79 revolution was no mere aberration. It was an epoch-making event, and it is inescapable.
3. (Semi-reiteration of (2)). Why do you think we included Mao? He led a revolution that helped define the second half of the twentieth century and turned communism into a viable motivating tool for revolutionaries in the developing world. Khomeini did much the same: political Islam/Islamism is the sole honest intellectual challenge to the Western liberal order today (Hugo Chavez's "socialism" is a painfully transparent means of holding onto power, and neither China nor Russia even pretends that ideology guides them). The argument between liberalism and political Islam will likely define the lines of political thought for most of the rest of our lives; heaven knows, it's defined the last ten years. This is not a mere flash in the pan.
4. Neither Thatcher nor Brezhnev could be called great in the way Khomeini was great. Thatcher's reorganization of Britain was very important for Britain, but at the end of the day, nothing fundamental changed, and the effects weren't felt very much outside Britain. And Brezhnev, put simply, was a dolt.

 

[Zirk]

I can't really agree with classifying Mughal Empire as India. I think the Mughals are the ancestors of modern-day Pakistan more than they are India. The reason northern India and Pakistan are largely Muslim is due to Mughal influence, right? I could be wrong, but the Mughals weren't really Indian as far as I know. I mean, they may have adopted Indian culture and military style after a while, but they still had a different religion and spoke a different language from what I recall. I don't think India was even united until the British colonized it.

We have the Holy Roman Empire as well as Germany, even though those two entities large existed in the exact same territory, not to mention that the Holy Roman Emperor was "King of the Germans."

 

[Oishi]

To include new civs to their engine, then they'll make the Earth map larger than what they call in civ4 "huge". Having lots of civs will only complicate gameplay.

 

[Zirk]

There's enough ******** civs to get rid of to make room for the good ones. Like, why do we need 50 different South American empires, all having existed in the exact same time period? Yeah, maybe they built some big temples and stuff, but in what way are the Maya more worth representing than the dozens of significant North American tribes that survived for hundreds of years longer?

 

[Oishi]

No. Do you want an empty South and Central America? They were included for balancing issues, and to be as cannon fodder to invaders. These "********" civs are actually good in multiplayer.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

I can't really agree with classifying Mughal Empire as India. I think the Mughals are the ancestors of modern-day Pakistan more than they are India. The reason northern India and Pakistan are largely Muslim is due to Mughal influence, right? I could be wrong, but the Mughals weren't really Indian as far as I know. I mean, they may have adopted Indian culture and military style after a while, but they still had a different religion and spoke a different language from what I recall. I don't think India was even united until the British colonized it.

Being Indian means more than being Hindu. Pakistan, in retrospect, has proven to be a massive failure--and I speak as a Muslim with many Pakistani friends. It was a power grab by the Muslim elites, backed by the British, who wanted to keep India down after independence. The whole project was idiotic, creating all kinds of problems for the otherwise well-integrated Indian civilization, causing sixty years of needless bloodshed, and threatening everyone with nuclear war. There's a reason that both Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Maududi (the founder of South Asian Islamism) both agreed that India should have remained united.

While the Mughals did from time to time encourage the growth of Islam in India, Islam already had a life of its own when it got there. Mahmoud of Ghazni had already conquered more or less the whole Indus Valley, and then some, and Islam had been spreading into India from nearby Persia in any case.

The Mughals were the Mongol dynasty that happened to get ahold of India. India is one of those civilizations that even after you conquer it, it manages to conquer you. By the end the Mughals were completely Indianized, to the point where they ceased to use Persian as a court language and started to use Urdu--a highly-Persianized register of the local Hindustani language.

We have the Holy Roman Empire as well as Germany, even though those two entities large existed in the exact same territory, not to mention that the Holy Roman Emperor was "King of the Germans."

The HRE is an abomination and should not have been in Civ. In any case, it was meant to represent the (really quite underrepresented) civilization of Central/Eastern Europe. I must say, however, that the HRE was really quite ill-conceived, and the title should have gone either to Poland/the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or to the Austrian Empire instead (playing as Maria Theresa or Franz Josef would be interesting, to say the least...)

 

[bohemian]

think it would be more fun to try out aboriginals, mauri, maya, or eskimo civilizations. but there are resons why these civilizations never raised to stand the test of time, or to make significant contributions to world history. look at europa today as an exsample, we could name countless nations who have come and gone, but these are nations, not civilizations as such.
in europa we basically have 3 civilizations. the anglo-gemanic, the latin-hespanic, and the slavic.
so very diffrent in language, genetics, and cultur as they possibly can be, in such a small spot, thou woven together.

maybe within the next 100-200 years we will have the emerging of a hole new civilization called the intra-euro civilization, but it will still consist of thous 3 civilizations, no regards to religion.
a 1000 years ago we had the same 3 civilizations who have spawned from 3 diffrent parts of europa, the roman/greek-interrelation, the saxon-anglo-interrelation, and the bysantine-russian-interrelation.
the roman/greek-interrelation kicked the north-african malineese-cartegarian-interrelation out of spain, or we would have had 4 civilizations in europe.
(sorry to the turks, who are of persian-arab-interrelation, (we still love you guys )

so what civilization were the original european people you might ask... -the oldest civilization on the european penesula are the greek, they were the first people to develop what we would accept as "civilization", and as such the mother of all the european tribes. while most of europes tribes was making stone weapons, greeks were melting bronze. when Athens, Sparta, and Tyre were build, most other european tribes were emerging from the stone age. most likely tribes that orginally had spawned from the greek civilization.