Which civs should be left out?

[Shackel]

Well, Rys, when you think about it(to anyone who may get offended, I'm about to hit lose all modesty and just go 1950s on the world 8D), America basically changed the world the second it started existing by winning a war against the strongest empire in the world at that time(try doing THAT in Civ), holding it's own only a few years later, taking the Industrial Revolution and blowing it sky high out of the water by building the first skyscrapers, CONSTANTLY getting the tallest skyscrapers, then being a major country in both WWI and WWII, then just getting into a bunch of wars for no reason, etc.

America was born at the PERFECT time, allowing it to almost EMBODY the Modern Age [/immodesty]

Basically, America is big enough in both technology, land, and industrial stuff. You'll NEVER be able to forget America, just like one will NEVER forget England, or France, or Germany, or Russia, or Italy, or (insert major countries here).

 

[CDarwin1701]

America is weirdly anachronistic throughout most of the game, but I wouldn't say it's substantially less important than a lot of other civilizations. It hasn't been around a long time, true enough, but the world has simply changed much, much more in the short time since American rose to pre-eminence than it had in vast swaths of the time that preceded it. In many ways, the world of 1300 AD had more in common with the world of 2000 BC than it did with the world of 1800 AD, and the world of 1800 has far more in common with today than with 1300. Henry Adams divided history (imperfectly enough), into ages of the Virgin and the Dynamo, the Virgin (i.e. the sacred authority) dying sometime between the 13th and 18th Centuries and the Dynamo (i.e. the modern forces of industry and trade) taking over full force in the 20th. Now he was working mostly with European history, but I think we can still say that America is the nation of the Age of the Dynamo.

 

[TheSorcerer]

Italy, or (insert major countries here).

Italy? Never heard of it...

No seriously:

Civ 5 should remove "Holy Roman Empire" because it's basicly Germany. The correct title even should be "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation". It's leaders could be added to Germany.

Portugal, Celts and Netherlands should not be removed! All of them had heavy influence on European Culture and Technology. Eg. Irish Celts where the first Christians in Europe and spread Christianity throughout Europe. Great Empires like the British one arised from also Celtic roots etc.

It should be reconsidered if questionable leaders such as Stalin, Mao or Hitler should be included in the game. While all of them where historically great leaders they brought alot of pain, suffer and death to their own countries and great parts of the world and are generally consider despotes. People could be offended by seeing those people show up in the "Great Leaders" tab.

Oh, and the USA shouldn't be removed as a Civilization. It played a great role throught the last centuries. And while it is a "crafted" Nation, patched together by a bunch of people originating from other - mainly European and African - civilizations: this is how most Nations are born.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Way too soon to tell, dude. Ask again in eight centuries or so.

So how many years must a civ exist? 1000? There are a good # of civs in this game that rose and fell in far less time than that.

 

[Camikaze]

Russia, with vodka and china with pretty much everything we write on

Yeah, well, that's obviously to the same degree.

Way too soon to tell, dude. Ask again in eight centuries or so.

That's my point. You can't just judge historical significance in retrospect without excluding a very large proportion of the world's major civilizations. So, you have to make an educated judgement based upon current significance, and guesswork. But you can be reasonably sure that America will go down in history as, at the very least, a very important civilization. Unless, of course, you're going for that whole modern-revisionist thing of 'nothing in the present day is significant', which is just not true. I mean, sure, you have to take what happens with a grain of salt, as to how significant in the grand scheme of things it is, but that doesn't mean that modern times are historically insignificant, or will be historically insignificant.

The poll, annoyingly. has no option for "leave out all of them and do not label the opponents at all"; myself, I feel that linking the civilisations we play against to real-world historical civilisation adds nothing to the experience of the game, and it has the disadvantage of encouraging people to think in terms of civ-specific unique units and buildings and traits rather than circumstance-specific adaptations leading to unique choices of units and buildings and traits.

(And also endless whining in the "Why can't we have X ? X was a historically significant civilisation too" direction.)

HERETIC!

 

[AmazonQueen]

Italy? Never heard of it...

No seriously:

Civ 5 should remove "Holy Roman Empire" because it's basicly Germany. The correct title even should be "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation". It's leaders could be added to Germany.

Wrong. It originally included much of modern France and northern Italy. It's propaganda presented it as heir to the Roman Empire, it was a rival to the Eastern (misnamed as Byzantine in Civ) Roman empire, and under its more dynamic leaders came close to unifying continental Western Europe several times. In later years it became what you described except its leaders were usually Hapsburg. It was abolished by the time Germany became a country but as a historically significant entity was around for longer than the state of Germany has been.

Portugal, Celts and Netherlands should not be removed! All of them had heavy influence on European Culture and Technology. Eg. Irish Celts where the first Christians in Europe and spread Christianity throughout Europe. Great Empires like the British one arised from also Celtic roots etc.

If the Irish were the first Christians in Europe what were all the Greeks and Romans? The Irish were still pagan when the Empire became Christian. The British primarilly came from Germanic roots (the Anglo-Saxons) although the Celts and Norse (amongst others) influenced them.

It should be reconsidered if questionable leaders such as Stalin, Mao or Hitler should be included in the game. While all of them where historically great leaders they brought alot of pain, suffer and death to their own countries and great parts of the world and are generally consider despotes. People could be offended by seeing those people show up in the "Great Leaders" tab.

I'd prefer it they were included. Hitler wasn't and isn't likely to be so.

Oh, and the USA shouldn't be removed as a Civilization. It played a great role throught the last centuries. And while it is a "crafted" Nation, patched together by a bunch of people originating from other - mainly European and African - civilizations: this is how most Nations are born.

I'd agree they shouldn't be removed but then I don't want anyone removed. The more the better.

 

[deanej]

It should be reconsidered if questionable leaders such as Stalin, Mao or Hitler should be included in the game. While all of them where historically great leaders they brought alot of pain, suffer and death to their own countries and great parts of the world and are generally consider despotes. People could be offended by seeing those people show up in the "Great Leaders" tab.

They are only questionable because they are recent. There are many older leaders (such as Genghis Khan and Alexander) that are as bad as they are if not more so. We only don't think of them as such because the memories of Hitler, Stalin, etc. are still alive.

 

[mago barca]

who voted for carthage they are a great civ it adds the what if bit what if hannibal had conquered rome all our latin bits in our langauge could be phoenecian he was far better then julius ceaser at being a general

 

[CDarwin1701]

who voted for carthage they are a great civ it adds the what if bit what if hannibal had conquered rome all our latin bits in our langauge could be phoenecian he was far better then julius ceaser at being a general

I think Carthage should be folded into a larger Phoenician civilization, really, which would include the Minoans and the Phoenicians of Palestine and environs. They were never united except as constituents of other empires, but neither were the Greeks, but for short periods, until quite recently. Poor "Phoenician" just gets to be a barbarian city. Imagine! And they invented our alphabet.

 

[mago barca]

I think Carthage should be folded into a larger Phoenician civilization, really, which would include the Minoans and the Phoenicians of Palestine and environs. They were never united except as constituents of other empires, but neither were the Greeks, but for short periods, until quite recently. Poor "Phoenician" just gets to be a barbarian city. Imagine! And they invented our alphabet.

i have no problems with that but making tyre and carthage not exist is not very civil

 

[Shackel]

I believe the Holy Roman Empire was simply a very "loose" empire, that lost most of it's influence, and was eventually turned into Germany, which is it's OWN empire.

Personally, I think there should just be an "Age" or something you can toggle on the countries, which would change their name and stuff like that, but, still.

I'm not so sure about the Vikings, either. The Vikings were mainly types of pirates.

 

[AlphaShard]

You know at first I understood why Hitler wasn't a Leader in Civ, but after reading up on all the leaders that ARE in the game, I think what's the difference? Isabelle started the Spanish Inquistion, Bismark is like Hitler Jr., not to mention Stalin, and really it just goes on how many religous fanaticals there are in the Leaders. Some people used to even call Napoleon the anti-christ!

It really seems sad that people don't really read up on history and just focus on Hitler being the worst Leader ever, when there are plenty of others. It just seems wierd to have a leader like Bismark in and pretend he's any better or nicer then Hitler was.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You know at first I understood why Hitler wasn't a Leader in Civ, but after reading up on all the leaders that ARE in the game, I think what's the difference? Isabelle started the Spanish Inquistion, Bismark is like Hitler Jr., not to mention Stalin, and really it just goes on how many religous fanaticals there are in the Leaders. Some people used to even call Napoleon the anti-christ!

It really seems sad that people don't really read up on history and just focus on Hitler being the worst Leader ever, when there are plenty of others. It just seems wierd to have a leader like Bismark in and pretend he's any better or nicer then Hitler was.

Most if not all the leaders you mention have a critical difference compared to Hitler: success.

Hitler's economic recovery of Germany was smoke and mirrors (based heavily on war expansion to be sustained). And how did his only significant war go again? What happened to the German empire after that? Genghis Khan successfully conquered his way into having one of the largest empires ever before he died. Germany...got beaten senselessly by drawing ire from multiple directions and wound up getting cut in half for a long time. When you play civ, do YOU deliberately antagonize or declare war on civs on either side of you simultaneously and then get steamrolled often?

Calvin Coolidge of the USA makes more sense than Hitler of Germany. We'll just be adding Nero to Rome too...

All his atrocities aside, face it...Hitler also just sucked as a leader in terms of what ultimately was accomplished while he was in power.

 

[morss_4]

All his atrocities aside, face it...Hitler also just sucked as a leader in terms of what ultimately was accomplished while he was in power.

I agree. Hitler's primary accomplishment for Germany was to turn it into two distinct piles of rubble, one with a Nato flag and one with a Warsaw Pact flag. The fact that he did so in spectacular fashion does not change the fact that he seriously screwed up.

But then again, one could argue on similar lines that Napoleon should be out too, although at least his temporary successes were longer lived and his defeat less crushing.

 

[AlphaShard]

Yeah Hitler was pretty stupid, when the RAF bombed his military bases around Berlin he decides to go bomb London instead of the RAF air bases themselves.

I do understand your point about using Succesful Rulers but what about Zara Yaqu, while reading the Civpedia entry on him and his Civ they mention several rulers who seemed to be more succesful, or at least less insane then he was.

It's not that I want Hitler in I just wondered what the difference was between him and some of the leaders that were in the game. I mean if someone is going to be morally offended by Hiter, which is why I thought he wasn't in the game, then why not at some of these other Rulers?

 

[deanej]

Time, mainly. The memory of Hitler is a recent one. You can bet that if an edition of civ was released shortly after the death of Alexander, he would not have been included as a leader for the same reasons Hitler isn't included today (they would never have been able to release a Persian version with Alexander).

And Stalin was on the winning side of WW2. I guess people must not care that much about the gulags.

 

[AlphaShard]

I've often heard of Stalin being refered to the Lesser of two evils. You'd think that once he was dead and Russia trying to wipe his name from history would make them rethink putting him in game. Still I think putting Hitler in would get more of a response of outrage.

 

[Shackel]

Hitler lost.

Napoleon was 200 years ago.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Only the HRE as a dublicate. Change them to Austria.

I feel that linking the civilisations we play against to real-world historical civilisation adds nothing to the experience of the game,

It does for me. Especially with Varietas Delectat. It gives flavour to the game and easier allows you to construct stories about the game and civs in it in your head.

The poll, annoyingly. has no option for "leave out all of them and do not label the opponents at all"

What do you propose? "Team A" and "Team B"?

I'm not so sure about the Vikings, either. The Vikings were mainly types of pirates.

The Vikings in that game just represent Scandinavia.

 

[Shackel]

Yes, Scandinavia. That's what they SHOULD be called. :3