should there be more grim stuff in the game?

[Tigranes]

Like I told my friends when they invited me to a game of Hearts of Iron IV, what's even the point of being able to play Nazi Germany if I can't enact the Holocaust? /s

Unlike many politically correct games :ahem: this mod even has Hitler as Prussian leader under Totalitarianism. But let's ask Leoreth to push the envelop further and see the limits. Will be very fitting to add following requirements for 2nd Prussian UHV: "and ensure that only Catholic or Protestant religions are present in your cities". This will require to actually build Religious Persecutor (which works under secularism even and you can chose which religion to persecute but very few people actually train them in regular games). This persecutor can persecute Judaism but also Slavs and Greeks who have Orthodoxy!

 

[Leoreth]

Honestly I'm okay with the fact that the game does not require you to reenact the holocaust, and you should be too.

 

[1SDANi]

Honestly I'm okay with the fact that the game does not require you to reenact the holocaust, and you should be too.

I'm neutral on adding it or not. I understand both sides. On one hand you're reenacting one of the most horrifying acts in recent history. On the other hand the same game allows you to reenact the conquest and enslavement of native Americans and Africans, partaking in the space trade, taking part in the ritual sacrifice of your enemies, setting up gulags, working citizens to death, purging the Muslims from Iberia, wiping out millions of lives with a single nuke, etc etc.

So I guess the question is whether or not the holocaust is so much worse than all of the previously mentioned. Its definitely horrific, but are things like slavery that much better?

 

[Leoreth]

I don't want to discuss the relative morality of the holocaust and other historical atrocities here, this has been talked to death in the general Civ fora and you can go there if you really have the desire. This is an explicit hint to the usual suspects that I won't look kindly on posts that try to argue this point here.

My concern is mostly with how recent these events are. The holocaust and things like gulags etc. are still in our active memory and shape a lot of our current geopolitical environment and political consciousness. This makes every treatment of these events a political statement in one way or the other. There are multiple reasonable positions one could take for the representation of these events in that context but one that I do not want to take is to make it so that you explicitly have to commit these atrocities to win the game.

By comparison, there are no victims of the Mongol conquests or the Reconquista or the Flower Wars around, and neither are these events politically pertinent in modern societies. You could make a better argument about the transatlantic slave trade or the colonisation of the Americas in general but even there, nobody has the explicit goal to bring slaves to the new world.

I don't think the game is chickening out of these concepts. You can raze cities, trade slaves, persecute religions and drop nuclear weapons. You could enact a good enough approximation of the holocaust in this game. But I don't see why you would want to. And I certainly won't put anything in the game to encourage you to do so.

 

[1SDANi]

I don't want to discuss the relative morality of the holocaust and other historical atrocities here, this has been talked to death in the general Civ fora and you can go there if you really have the desire. This is an explicit hint to the usual suspects that I won't look kindly on posts that try to argue this point here.

My concern is mostly with how recent these events are. The holocaust and things like gulags etc. are still in our active memory and shape a lot of our current geopolitical environment and political consciousness. This makes every treatment of these events a political statement in one way or the other. There are multiple reasonable positions one could take for the representation of these events in that context but one that I do not want to take is to make it so that you explicitly have to commit these atrocities to win the game.

By comparison, there are no victims of the Mongol conquests or the Reconquista or the Flower Wars around, and neither are these events politically pertinent in modern societies. You could make a better argument about the transatlantic slave trade or the colonisation of the Americas in general but even there, nobody has the explicit goal to bring slaves to the new world.

I don't think the game is chickening out of these concepts. You can raze cities, trade slaves, persecute religions and drop nuclear weapons. You could enact a good enough approximation of the holocaust in this game. But I don't see why you would want to. And I certainly won't put anything in the game to encourage you to do so.

Yeah, recent event bias is annoying yet understandable.

Speaking of Religious Persecutor units, is there any reason to use religious persecutors besides Religious Unity Stability?

Does using Persecutors cause unhappiness in other cities with the purged religion?

Is there a Diplo penalty with nations running the purged state religion, secularism, or tolerance?

Currently I never really see a reason to use RPs, being able to move towards another shrine/monetary is just much better than a couple Religious Unity points.

 

[Leoreth]

It also removes the unhappiness from non-state religion, but you are right that you can also compensate for that by building the temple. Another possible reason are religious spread oriented UHVs.

I know that currently religious diversity is a net plus, and I have some plans on how to change the rules so that there would be a more pronounced choice between religious diversity or religious unity with each having different advantages besides stability for your civ.