Originally posted by stormbind The reason I question the literal meaning of "Eldest son" is because of the issue of excommunication. If one is booted out of the family for having a conflicting moral/political view, they are no longer the heir and they lose any title (I think).
NO. Under English law a man can only "disinherit" a son from those possessions over which he has a legal right to direct the inheritance. Titles of nobility pass as of right to the eldest legitimate son or - if he predeceased his father - to his eldest son. The same is true of heraldic arms. In the landed nobility, most land is similarly "entailed". Even if there has been the most monumental bust-up in the family, daddy cannot divert the title, the estate or the arms to anyone else. Disinheritance as the big paternal weapon derives from the 19th century nouveaux riches, who had wealth which was not entailed, and so could use inheritance as a tool in family arguments.
Excommunication has no meaning here, being a legal term belonging to the Catholic church. There is no common law equivalent for families!
The only circumstance in which someone could be denied his legitimate birthright was "attainder" - someone guilty of treason could be attainted by law, which would result among other things in his losing any rights of inheritance he might possess. That was, however, externally imposed - a father could not attaint his son just because they argued.
The USA does have a big airforce, but not for it's size. Civ3 makes the assumption that each civilisation will develop in the same way that it really did - when the chances are they will not! So if America turns out to be a couple of cities on the far edge of a continent, where's the logic in giving it a more influencial USAF?
There isn't any. But then, that isn't really the assumption Civ3 is making. What Civ3 is doing is to assume that civs will develop
one particular factor of how they fought wars in the same way regardless of how their overall in-game development progresses.
The UUs are in the main fairly minor tweaks to normal units that could have arisen in a situation-independent way, and are allocated to civs according to how they panned out historically. The problem is, the USA arose too recently to have ever possessed a style of making war that was unique or even particularly distinctive either in type or degree.
Mind you, you can say that about other civs. France gets the musketeer - why? Not really because of any unique lead France ever had in early musket fighting, but because everybody has heard of the Three Musketeers, and they were French.
Most of the UUs make some sort of sense - either the civ in question was the first, or the only, or the best at using a particular combat system (although I have me doubts about the Egyptians and the war chariot). I suppose the F15 as a UU has a sort of slender justification.
Civ-specific traits are also a little strange (IMHO) because it's the player's traits that influence the game!
It's the terminology that's at fault there. As far as the AI civs go, it's reasonable to refer to them as traits, as they will somewhat influence the AI's actions. For the player civ, it would be better to refer to them simply as "built-in advantages", since the player can choose to play totally against them if he wishes.
