What previously unseen civs would you like you see in civ7?

[BuchiTaton]

Purely Pastoral is a 'sub-Civ' that will remain such unless they also get the benefit of a settled City somewhere/somehow. The 'Royal Scyths' of the southern Ukraine managed it by simply dominating the Greek city colonies from the Don (Tanais) River delta to the Crimea. Several of the excavated city-sites show indications of having a population that was mixed: Greek and Scythian, and the Greek artisans were producing exquisite goldwork to Scythian art-styles so they were, basically, Scythian cities even if the political control was less than direct. Mongols and other later Central Asian pastorals managed it by simply conquering the cities and running them the same way more 'settled' Civs did. Having options to accomplish the same goal is Always Good IMHO.

And this could provide the 'path' to turn the choice of going from Hunter-gatherer Nomad (the 'default' start for everyone) to Pastoral instead of City Dweller early in the game from being a dead end pastoral sub-Civ to a Scythian, Persian, Mongolian, Turkic, etc. Civilization. The Powerful Warriors are already historically attested pretty specifically: horse-archers, mounted lancers, camel-riding cavalry. The spoked wheel chariot is also pretty thoroughly identified archeologically now as a Steppe Nomad invention that spread from west-central Asia (roughly, north and west of the modern Caspian Sea) south into the Middle east and east into China and west into Europe (along with many of the Steppe Warriors themselves) so there is a nice set of choices to make the Pastoral Warrior a possible city conquerer and set the Pastoral group on the road to Civilization Contestant from the Ancient Era onwards.

The easier way to achieve this is by gain a "specialization" from the food source you settle next to first. I mean:
1- In the first Era (pre-Ancient) you explore as a Nomad to find the best point while also hunt-gather food resources.
2- You need to find a good spot that have some kind of food source (also considering your civ bias) and found next to it your first Settlement, so when it grow enough it turn in your first city at the same time you advance to the Ancient Era, also you got your "specialization*":
A- AGRARIAN, from resources like wheat, rice, corn, potato, etc. Eureka for Writing and Calendar.
B- PASTORIAL, from resources like horses, camels, reindeer, etc. Eureka for Wheel and allows built Pastorial Camp that exploit resources, provide population and train units like Horse Archers and Camels riders. The objetive of this is to expand in steppe and desert without by a MUST to build more cities in early eras.
C- MARITIME, from resources like oysters, crabs, seals, etc. Eureka for Sailing and allow to build early boats.

The North American groups that moved into the Great Plains with horses had a 'special' resource that wasn't available anywhere else: the Massive Herds of Bison.
While they are too big to be easily herded (cattle are intimidated by a man on a horse or even a bunch of men on foot making noise, Bison are definitely NOT. Nothing less than a helicopter roaring at them just above the grfound (Nap Of The Earth flying) will make them move, so trying to herd them on foot or horseback is a good way to wind up being stomped into a pastoral pancake. At least, that's my conclusion from having herded cattle off a firing range in Fort Hood, Texas, and watching people try to herd Bison off the firing ranges at Fort Sill, Oklahoma) Bison provide far more resources from hunting than cattle or any other ruminant herd. Bison leather is thick enough to be bullet-proof, bison horn and bone sturdy enough to build small houses out of, and a single adult bison can provide enough meat to feed dozens of people for a week. The return in useful resources from hunting Bison is simply much, much better than hunting cattle, deer, horses, or any other animal available to groups in Eurasia.
That allowed the 'plains indians' like the Comanche, Lakota Sioux, or Cheyenne to develop lifestyles and material cultures every bit as rich as the Central Asian groups got from herding, and project political, trade, and military influence in the same manner as happened out of Central Asia.

Just need to point than central NA natives "skipped" the process and conditions for the domestication of horses, Eurasia used to have also great hers of Bisons and Aurochs, even wild Horses used to be the main food source in both sides.

 

[Henri Christophe]

I've seen here some suggestions for a hybrid civilization of Paraguay with Guarani

I like this idea of a hybrid of Paraguayan/Guarani civ, maybe a Paraguayan civ with some Guarani unique Unit should be amazing since the Paraguayans have nowadays Guarani heritage.

 

[Patine]

I like this idea of a hybrid of Paraguayan/Guarani civ, maybe a Paraguayan civ with some Guarani unique Unit should be amazing since the Paraguayans have nowadays Guarani heritage.

This could work, and that way you don't have to have a suboptimal leader like Sepé Tiaraju.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The easier way to achieve this is by gain a "specialization" from the food source you settle next to first. I mean:
1- In the first Era (pre-Ancient) you explore as a Nomad to find the best point while also hunt-gather food resources.
2- You need to find a good spot that have some kind of food source (also considering your civ bias) and found next to it your first Settlement, so when it grow enough it turn in your first city at the same time you advance to the Ancient Era, also you got your "specialization*":
A- AGRARIAN, from resources like wheat, rice, corn, potato, etc. Eureka for Writing and Calendar.
B- PASTORIAL, from resources like horses, camels, reindeer, etc. Eureka for Wheel and allows built Pastorial Camp that exploit resources, provide population and train units like Horse Archers and Camels riders. The objetive of this is to expand in steppe and desert without by a MUST to build more cities in early eras.
C- MARITIME, from resources like oysters, crabs, seals, etc. Eureka for Sailing and allow to build early boats.

Just a point, but Calendar was also required for hunters, to be able to predict seasonal migrations and intercept them for optimal hunting. There are wood and stone 'calendar circles' archeological sites in Central Asia and eastern Europe where there are no indications of agriculture. I suggest that Calendar could still be kept for Agrarian for Game Purposes, but Archery could be added for Pastorial, since the horn, bone and sinew from animals are all prime raw materials for bowstrings, arrow points and bows.
Likewise, the earliest indication of woven fibers (pre-agricultural gathered flax) was to make fishing nets, so Maritime could also get a Bonus for Weaving/Sailing. And a 'maritime' location could be a marshy river as well as a coast, since marshlands were prime grounds for fish and waterfowl that could be hunted or trapped with woven nets.

I would, therefore, modify your Initial Choices as follows:
AGRARIAN - requires access to Grain, Maize, Rice, or Potato, starts with Agriculture, provides Bonus for Writing and Calendar
PASTORAL - requires access to Cattle, Sheep, Horses, Camels, or Reindeer, starts with Animal Domestication, provides Bonus for Wheel and Archery
MARITIME - requires access to Fish, Shellfish, or Seals, starts with Boating, provides Bonus for Sailing and Weaving.

Note that the 'starting' Tech in each case would 'lead' the Civ into a specific Food resource area from the first City/Settlement/Mobile Camp founded. That would make the initial Choice have both immediate and long-range Importance to the Civ and how it develops - and how you have to play them.

Just need to point than central NA natives "skipped" the process and conditions for the domestication of horses, Eurasia used to have also great hers of Bisons and Aurochs, even wild Horses used to be the main food source in both sides.

The European and Steppe Bison were never as dominant a food and resource animal in Eurasia as the Bison was in North America. I suspect because in Eurasia they competed for grazing with aurochs, cattle, sheep, goats, and horses. Counts of bones from food middens in archeological sites, at least, don't show a lot of bison bones, while, based on their location, they show quantities of deer, sheep, goats, cattle and/or horses.

Once they got access to horses, the NA natives jumped to domestication of the horse very quickly (in many places, less than a century), and groups like the Nez Perce and Comanches also developed selective breeding for traits they desired in the horses. The speed with which they started exploiting horses, in fact, may speak to how fast the horse was originally domesticated, although the whole question of first domestication and types of exploitation of the horse (as draft animal, food animal, or mount) is still one of the most debated topics in Old World archeology.

 

[Krajzen]

Didn't Comanche, similarly to most other Native Americano groups, had extremely low population spread extremely sparsely over huge land?
I mean, my problem with taking stuff from Native Americans and applying it on the level universal to the entire game, is that their tribes were simply disproportionally small in comparision to, well, civilisations, and this makes comparisions between them really weird. Usually when I go to check population estimates of a given Native American tribe, it turns out it ranged from few thousand individuals to like, well, I have yet to find one which matches the population of Uruk city in the year 3000 BC. I have always assumed that - since we want to include them anyway - the game treats them as if their cultures were taken out of context and put on the "ancient Eurasian civilizations" playing field and patterns of development, to give them any sensible chance against organised states with populations of milions.

So going to hard into making their socioeconomic systems realistic eventually hits the obvious problem "no matters what, in the end bison herding lifestyle is not a good conduit to match the power of ancient Greece", so you have to push American Indians towards Eurasian development paths anyway.

This is also why I'd be reluctant to add tribal peoples to Civ game if I were a developer - you either have to make Comanche develop cities and industry sooner or later (and they don't feel like Comanche) or make their traditional bison herding culture capable of going against great empires on equal terms, which feels absurd.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Didn't Comanche, similarly to most other Native Americano groups, had extremely low population spread extremely sparsely over huge land?
I mean, my problem with taking stuff from Native Americans and applying it on the level universal to the entire game, is that their tribes were simply disproportionally small in comparision to, well, civilisations, and this makes comparisions between them really weird. Usually when I go to check population estimates of a given Native American tribe, it turns out it ranged from few thousand individuals to like, well, I have yet to find one which matches the population of Uruk city in the year 3000 BC. I have always assumed that - since we want to include them anyway - the game treats them as if their cultures were taken out of context and put on the "ancient Eurasian civilizations" playing field and patterns of development, to give them any sensible chance against organised states with populations of milions.

So going to hard into making their socioeconomic systems realistic eventually hits the obvious problem "no matters what, in the end bison herding lifestyle is not a good conduit to match the power of ancient Greece", so you have to push American Indians towards Eurasian development paths anyway.

This is also why I'd be reluctant to add tribal peoples to Civ game if I were a developer - you either have to make Comanche develop cities and industry sooner or later (and they don't feel like Comanche) or make their traditional bison herding culture capable of going against great empires on equal terms, which feels absurd.

Trying to 'project' characteristics of one culture, in one biome, with another that is different in time, space, and other conditions is always a dangerous game.

However, in this case ALL the pastoral cultures in all areas had a very low population/space ratio and a much lower absolute population number compared to City Dwellers. As far back as the late Neolithic the Cucuteni-Trypillia Culture had agriculture/domestic animal-based cities of up to 40,000 population - each city probably had more people than the entire pastoral population within a couple of thousand kilometers. Yet the pastoral groups drove them off of the western Ukrainian steppe and into the Carpathian Mountains, where the city sizes dropped by 2/3. Reason was not invasion, but raiding: you cannot farm extensively when mounted raiders can catch you on foot in the fields and trample your crops, drive off your domestic cattle and sheep, and take your families as slaves, and you can't chase them down on foot or react in time. Much the same thing happened to the Apaches who had moved onto the central Texas river valleys when the Comanches raided them: they were farmers on foot, and simply could not defend or exploit their agricultural base in the face of mounted raids. In their case they ended up moving west to (re)join their fellow Apaches in New Mexico- Arizona.

It has been argued that the only reason that the pastorals posed any kind of threat to heir neighbors in the cities was that virtually the entire adult population of the pastorals were potential warriors, having riding and shooting skills developed to protect their herds.

Even then, it has been convincingly (to me, at least) shown that the Long (Great) Wall was built not so much to keep the nomads out as to keep Chinese peasants in, since they were escaping the rigid government controls of the Chou and Han to join the herders, and later to control trade by keeping the points of contact with the herders and outside merchants limited to a few fortified gate structures.

The few (Turks, Persians, Mongols) instances of a pastoral group 'overwhelming' and conquering a neighboring 'civilized' group tend to overshadow the many instances of the much larger mass of city dwellers encroaching on the pastoral territory: it was China that expanded into central Asia for centuries, not so much the other way around, and an examination of the borders between, say, Persia and the mounted tribes of Central Asia shows that most of the interactions were individual trading and raiding, not massive invasions either way.

So, on the one hand the game should reflect the influence of the pastoral cultures/groups as trading partners and extenders and raiders and potential conquerors (only if conditions are right!) while not over-estimating their power, which was always based on a very much lower population base than the groups that settled down and adopted extensive agriculture to support urbanization.

 

[Patine]

Trying to 'project' characteristics of one culture, in one biome, with another that is different in time, space, and other conditions is always a dangerous game.

However, in this case ALL the pastoral cultures in all areas had a very low population/space ratio and a much lower absolute population number compared to City Dwellers. As far back as the late Neolithic the Cucuteni-Trypillia Culture had agriculture/domestic animal-based cities of up to 40,000 population - each city probably had more people than the entire pastoral population within a couple of thousand kilometers. Yet the pastoral groups drove them off of the western Ukrainian steppe and into the Carpathian Mountains, where the city sizes dropped by 2/3. Reason was not invasion, but raiding: you cannot farm extensively when mounted raiders can catch you on foot in the fields and trample your crops, drive off your domestic cattle and sheep, and take your families as slaves, and you can't chase them down on foot or react in time. Much the same thing happened to the Apaches who had moved onto the central Texas river valleys when the Comanches raided them: they were farmers on foot, and simply could not defend or exploit their agricultural base in the face of mounted raids. In their case they ended up moving west to (re)join their fellow Apaches in New Mexico- Arizona.

It has been argued that the only reason that the pastorals posed any kind of threat to heir neighbors in the cities was that virtually the entire adult population of the pastorals were potential warriors, having riding and shooting skills developed to protect their herds.

Even then, it has been convincingly (to me, at least) shown that the Long (Great) Wall was built not so much to keep the nomads out as to keep Chinese peasants in, since they were escaping the rigid government controls of the Chou and Han to join the herders, and later to control trade by keeping the points of contact with the herders and outside merchants limited to a few fortified gate structures.

The few (Turks, Persians, Mongols) instances of a pastoral group 'overwhelming' and conquering a neighboring 'civilized' group tend to overshadow the many instances of the much larger mass of city dwellers encroaching on the pastoral territory: it was China that expanded into central Asia for centuries, not so much the other way around, and an examination of the borders between, say, Persia and the mounted tribes of Central Asia shows that most of the interactions were individual trading and raiding, not massive invasions either way.

So, on the one hand the game should reflect the influence of the pastoral cultures/groups as trading partners and extenders and raiders and potential conquerors (only if conditions are right!) while not over-estimating their power, which was always based on a very much lower population base than the groups that settled down and adopted extensive agriculture to support urbanization.

Now, the real question is this. How would pastoral civ's stay competitive when Industrial and Modern techs become the norm in a given game, and Improvements and Units that realistically need large urban centres with large-scale, organized, and centralized production to produce come to dominate in the later game?

 

[BuchiTaton]

I am of the idea that since there is too many civs like Berbers, Somalis, Arabs, Sakas, Hunas, Karluks, Mongols, etc. That could use the Few Cities + Many Pastorial camp way. The real very unique gameplay should be saved for a Central NA native civ, idealy Comanches.

This model could be something like could found your first settlement in any place next to a vacant tile get a Bison resource. Once you reach Ancient Era you can not build more cities but instead get a relocatable Unique District instead of the regular Pastorial Camp, something like two free of these each era for Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance*¨and Industrial (these free UD also spam a free Bison or Horse resource next to them). After this they can finally found more cities.

 

[happysheep]

idk if this has been mentioned before, but I would really like to see at least 1 of the Chinese dynasties, preferably the Tang dynasty maybe as a separate civ from China. Or u could have like 3-4 dynasties as separate civs.
Idk I just find it really annoying that "civs" like the IROQUIS make the cut but not a Chinese dynasty

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

idk if this has been mentioned before, but I would really like to see at least 1 of the Chinese dynasties, preferably the Tang dynasty maybe as a separate civ from China. Or u could have like 3-4 dynasties as separate civs.
Idk I just find it really annoying that "civs" like the IROQUIS make the cut but not a Chinese dynasty

I mean I can understand the argument for a separate Tibet, Yuan Dynasty, and Qing (Manchu) Dynasty separate from China, but why Tang?

 

[Phrozen]

This is also why I'd be reluctant to add tribal peoples to Civ game if I were a developer - you either have to make Comanche develop cities and industry sooner or later (and they don't feel like Comanche) or make their traditional bison herding culture capable of going against great empires on equal terms, which feels absurd.

The Comanche had conquered tribes which they did demand tribute from, usually in the form of food, as well as farmers and ranchers in Northern Mexico. Each band did seem to have their own territory which they controlled wholly as the Meusebach-Penateka Comanche Treaty shows.