Which Polynesian civ?

Because the Balkans are already overflowing and nothing that came out of the Balkans was ever interesting anyway.

Brittany spoke Breton or Gallo, depending on the era, so no. And the Normans only spoke French if you define every langue d'oïl as "French." Norman is generally regarded as a separate family of languages under langues d'oïl.

Oh, I don't really expect any of these to be added, but if Alexander the Obnoxious can get his own civ, I don't see why Alfred the Great can't.

 

While we are on the topic of a Polynesian civ, what abilities and UX would you like to see?

 

I was hoping for a "Hawaii and Maori" option but since there isn't, and Maori isn't in short supply of votes, I'll give my vote to Hawaii. Hope it isn't too greedy to hope that we'll get 2 Polynesian civs in the game.

 

Well, in the spirit of the thing, I will presume its a Polynesian blob civ. In which case, I would do:

Polynesia

UA: Wayfinders - Coast and Ocean tiles act as sources of fresh water. Naval unit production time is reduced.

UB: Tiki - Replaces the shrine. Should have been what the Chemamull is, frankly. I am baffled at how Firaxis implemented those. "Your ancestors died, so now everyone in the world wants to come see their graves." Except no one actually travels to Chile to look at chemamull; they travel to Hawaii to look at tikis. Because tikis come with mai tais and kahlua pork and hula dancers. THAT is culture and tourism.

UU: Va'a - Outrigger canoe, replaces galley, increased visibility. Available at the start of the game.

Liliuokalani

Ability: Aloha Oe - Coastal districts generate tourism. The Beach Resort is a UI that generates gold and tourism and additional tourism if placed next to an aerodrome or harbor.

Agenda: Mahalo - Likes civs equally, and especially civs with open border policies. Dislikes casus belli as much as warmongering, except for Protectorate Wars.

Hongi Hika

Ability: Ngapuhi Rangatira - Encampments and Harbors generate culture. The Haka is a UU that fights at full strength when damaged and gains science and culture when promoted. It replaces the swordsman (stole this idea somewhat from the VI mod).

Agenda:Taua - Likes civs who attack his enemies. Dislikes civs equally, and especially dislikes civs who ally with other civs on his continent.

I would actually prefer Te Atairangikaahu and Kamehameha, but their personalities are practically the opposite of how the civs would likely be portrayed.

 

@TahamiTsunami I must admit, looking at your wishlist and being from Canada, I find Samuel de Champlain an odd choice for THE ideal leader...

 

@Patine Before I had Canada on my list, a few people were mentioning how if they had to have Canada in the game they'd want Samuel to be the leader so that it would be a French speaking civ and not another English one. Ultimately what language is used isn't nearly as important to me as fun game-play but those talks did get me curious about doing my own research into Samuel. I found him to be quite interesting with his explorations, relationships with the natives, founding of settlements, and being the Governor in everything but name. I do think Lester B. Pearson is also a strong choice to lead Canada and I could switch him in if I really want to, I just still find Samuel to be just as interesting with fun possibilities. If we aren't allowed to continue this here, feel free to let me know your thoughts in a message or a topic. I'd certainly like to hear a Canadian's view on this!

Speaking of my list while being in a topic about civs I'd like....

 

Nice ideas there! Although I especially want to keep the ability for all units to embark across oceans from the start of the game. There have been some other ideas as well, so maybe we can put our heads together and collaborate...

As I mentioned already in the Design your own civ thread, 2K Landen on the 2K Forums suggested the idea of a 5% combat strength bonus to cities that do not share a boarder with other cities. This would encourage players to act more like Polynesia actually was historically, with spreading out into the ocean. He also suggested that at some point the Moai statues could give a +2 culture and +2 gold output when the Moai statues are built adjacent to eachother (but they can only be built on coastal land tiles).

My idea is for a UU that helps with their wayfinding ability: Outrigger, which replaces the Scout. Can move swiftly across ocean tiles, and has good line of sight when in water tiles...Perhaps it can also move on land, so as not to lose their land-scouting ability? ~ Personally I would much prefer something like this to the Maori warriors we had in Civ V.

Here's what another member suggested...

 

Well I gave them the va'a, which is the most common term for a polynesian outrigger. I like the idea that it replaces the scout rather than the galley; forces sea exploration and maximizes ship options.

I would just drop the naval unit production time then and keep the freshwater bonus, which encourages settling on coastlines.

The problem I have with that is how circuitous and unintuitive it is. Not to mention borders can still grow together on islands. I would sooner just outright say that they get bonuses to cities on islands and peninsulas. It's not like you can fit many cities on an island anyway.

No Moai. I want to keep this as purely Maori and Hawaiian as possible. Both use tikis. Both use va'as (Hawaiian wa'a, Maori va'ka). Neither of them built Moai, and Rapa Nui didn't really do tikis or outriggers. And, unlike the Maori and Hawaiians who represent over half of the Polynesian population, the Rapa Nui are extinct, a "ruins" culture.

The Moai don't need to be thrown into a civ that can make both Maori and Hawaii feel like legitimate, specific civs in the same vein as Athens and Sparta. Rapa Nui is perfectly represented by a universal wonder, like the Venetian Arsenal or Kilwa Kisiwani, or, at the moment, Chitchen Itza.

I know that the reason you want them in as an improvement is so that you can make walls of Moai like in V. That's silly and makes Polynesia somewhat of a joke civ. I'm trying to do better than V.

I don't like the sound of that, really. Trusting the AI to choose the best adjacency bonuses seems like it will breed a lot of resentment and frustration. A civ shouldn't need a specialized priority tree to consult just for adjacency bonuses; this is too complicated. An easier method of granting inter-island bonuses is to tie it to naval trade routes (which is how the Polynesians actually benefited from each other's islands).

So, say, naval trade routes between your cities grant adjacency bonuses between all X districts. And then limit the district just to make sure it's not too powerful. I would recommend limiting the bonus to only Holy Sites for my example, for several reasons:

• Faith would thematically fit as a secondary resource for a Polynesian civ, given its strong polytheistic history. The tiki UB is designed to benefit both Hawaii with tourism and Maori with culture, so building more of either naturally suits either leader.
  
• The design dissonance of Holy Sites fit thematically with my leaders, since Liliuokalani was a devout Christian and Hongi Hika encouraged Christianization.
• Holy Sites are normally encouraged to be built near Mountains/Woods/Natural Wonders; since these are less likely to be found near ocean tiles, they are much less likely to get the additional terrain bonuses, which not only forces a cost-benefit analysis of where to settle but generally limits the number of adjacency bonuses a Holy Site can have.
  
• Holy Sites tangentially encourage the construction of Campuses and Theater Squares. This can also be justified thematically since both cultures have a strong philosophy of sustainability and scientific research. The Theatre Squares (and Man-Made Wonders) facilitate Hawaii's primary tourism agenda; the Campuses facilitate Maori's secondary military agenda.

You could even set a further limitation saying that Holy Sites do not get adjacency bonuses from their own city, but only from other cities. It could still be possible to get more than 6 adjacency bonuses, but the player would have to work for them and wouldn't get any direct gold, production, or amenity bonuses from it.

 

Ok cool, so the Va'a (Outrigger) replaces the scout.

What sort of bonuses for cities on islands/peninsulas would you think would work?

Alright, you've changed my mind on the Moai statues. I hope they do add them as a wonder however. Tiki would definitely work as a shrine replacement.

Regarding the Rapa Nui, they are not extinct. They did have a self destructive period that nearly made them extinct, but they still exist as an ethnicity.

Ok, this makes sense.

 

Hmmmm...I guess you could grant a bonus that scales with how many water tiles are adjacent to the city (encouraging players to fill out islands and peninsulas). Maybe additional food and amenities (encouraging a taller playstyle).

I meant the "civ" more than the people, but you are correct. I don't really consider the Rapa Nui a successful civ, given that they are an archetypal example of self-destruction. The Moai heads, while cool, serve no infrastructural purpose and are a testament to the hubris of the Rapa Nui chieftans, spending more resources building monuments than taking care of their communities. I admit that, in addition to not really having anything to do with the Maori or Hawaiians, I don't want them to be a repeatable UI because any benefit more Moai heads grant would be an outright historical lie. Not to mention a line of Moai heads evokes existential dread for me more than humor.

 

Yes, it would make sense to give them some bonus from adjacent water tiles, and would certainly be a motivation for the player to settle more Polynesian style locations.

It's true. The fact that they cut down all of their trees, every one of them down to the very last tree (that species of tree is now extinct), just to build these giant statues, really does make the Moai unrealistic to have some kind of benefit (outside of tourism later on), and does make them an unrealistic choice. Makes me wonder if terrans could really stop cutting down all the forests and jungles around the world before it's too late.

 

I would also say that Pearson is a strong choice as well. A lot of people (mostly non-Canadians) seem to gravitate toward William Lyon Mackenzie King, but he was had no charisma (he lost the first election where radio was used as a motive campaign tool, even though he did return in the election after that, largely due to R.B. Bennett's bungling in handling the Great Depression) - King was moreso a calculating, Machiavelian manipulator and schemer, master of political timing and playing his political opponent's against each other, etc., and his true vision, if he really had one deep down inside, is somewhat opaque. Pearson wanted to make a Canada a respected "Middle Power" in it's own right, standing independent of both Britain and the U.S., without unnecessarily offending or alienating either, and forging a unique Canadian identity. As for the English-French language, although neither were Francophones (although Pearson was fluent in French), both relied heavily on the Quebec and thus French-Canadian concerns became far more important to them than to their Conservative, Social Credit, or CCF/NDP political opponents (without the caving in to almost every demand one often sees in Canadian PM's since the Quebec separatist movement got traction).

 

Well in a book I'm perpetually about halfway through, Jared Diamond says that there are several factors which contribute to civilization's collapse, and it boils down to a lack of infrastructure. Excluding external factors (which don't apply to the Rapa Nui), these include, if I remember correctly:

• Sprawling settlements too far away from resources.
• Deforestation and depletion of resources.
• Excessive resources spent on monuments.
• Internal warring.

Ultimately this can be broadly categorized as a lack of infrastructure, which although usually isn't the direct cause of collapse, enables one of two things to happen. Either a natural disaster (usually a drought) occurs which naturally decreases resources, and without a robust infrastructure to deal with it (like storing food, transporting water, or simply living closer to reliable resources) things fall apart. Or the civilization itself has such a consumerist, unsustainable structure that it depletes resources to a point where even in good climate the region can't sustain the population (this second model applies to the Rapa Nui).

So, taking into account that Rapa Nui happened in isolation and can basically be boiled down to the population growing larger than they could feasibly model and manage (and on top of that they didn't want to manage consumption); I'd say barring a world government and unprecedentedly massive PR campaign the Earth is basically a larger Rapa Nui waiting to happen.

• More than half the world's population already live in cities, which have to import in many of their resources and would collapse without those supply chains.
• Deforestation has already been happening at an alarming rate in many areas of the world, not to mention several crucial deep earth elements are running low.
• We won't stop building stadia and skyscrapers; in fact half of the American population is oblivious to the fact that the most vile, misanthropic, exploitative real estate owners is currently president and robbing the country of its own tax dollars to grow his penis-empire.
• Nearly every developed country has secession movements going on these days. Texas. Scotland. Bavaria. Catalonia. Veneta. People just want to fight and run away rather than work to fix things, and that's doing nothing except waste everyone's time and money.

So.........the short answer is, if we can only go half a century since near global destruction before we start wrecking the world even worse than before, it's only a matter of time before humans self-destruct.

 

Alright, I'll concede the Rapa Nui weren't the best alternative. BUT, as for "keeping it as purely Maori and Hawaiian as possible," I'm afraid I can't fully agree there with any good conscience. The Tongans, Samoans, and Tahitians are just as important, if not moreso, in the Polynesian legacy, as the Maoris and Hawaiians. The Tongans ruled most other Polynesians in a big seafaring empire for a period of time prior to Magellan, Van Deiman, and Cook's voyages, the warrior techniques, tattoos, and traditions the "Maoris made famous" were in fact originally Samoan and Tahitian warrior techniques, tattoos, and traditions later emulated by the Maoris, the roles, rituals, castes, traditions, and ideals of the Hawaiian monarchy and traditional Hawaiian society were dictated to them in the 13th Century (by open, long-standing admission in the Hawaiians' own oral traditions) by a Tahitian mystic-priest, and, it's unclear exactly which Polynesian culture specifically innovated their famous outrigger canoe, but it was NOT the Maoris or Hawaiians, given they were, as I've been implying, later down the cultural development chain from most other Polynesian cultures.

 

Ancestral Maori meeting houses could be a cool government district building, or perhaps a Pa, which was a Maori hill fort. This could replace the encampment, though it risks duplicating the Zulu warmongering too much if included perhaps. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pā

 

You take what you said about the Balkans back!

Breton sounds similar to French despite being a Celtic language. And when did Norman split from it's shared ancestor with the French language? Were the medieval Normans already speaking a completely different language from Old French?

 

I'm reasonably certain nasal vowels and /ʒ/ are all they have in common. I like Breton; it's probably my favorite of the modern Celtic languages.

Well, what we call "French" is an invention of French Nationalism. Sure, the ancestor of modern French, the langue d'oïl of Paris, existed, but French dialects (arguably languages) were a lot more diverse in the Middle Ages.

 

If we got a single Polynesian civ, I would wholly support Tongans (who also incorporated Samoa at some point).

I was merely taking Greywulf's prompt to make a Polynesian civ, not a Tongan civ. And Tonga simply can't represent modern Polynesia in its entirety, not when the Maori and Hawaiians make up over half of the native Polynesian population. Much as we've seen with the Cree and Mapuche, Firaxis are consulting with and representing large native populations. Tahiti only has a population of less than 300,000, Tonga less than 200,000. over 500,000 people claim Native Hawaiian race, and approximately 600,000 claim Native Maori race in censuses. Since the measure of tribes this time around seems to be modern success, I have no doubt that Firaxis will try to represent both Maori and Hawaii first (and gain all of that sweet, sweet vacation publicity) before they resort to doing extra research for a single Tonga civ.

You also have to acknowledge the civ player demographics and what they will respond to. Maori is by far the most requested Polynesian civ, for several reasons. It's iconic militarism. It fills New Zealand and Australia on TSL maps. And because the haka warriors were popular in V. Hawaii is the second most requested civ because Kamehameha was so popular in V. Because it's an insanely popular tourist destination that is only getting more and more prominent in the public sphere with things like Pokemon Sun/Moon and Moana. And because Hawaii is a memetic powerhouse in Battle Royale, alongside Brazil, the Boers, the Inuit, and Sparta.

I think Vanuatu was generally credited as being the "spawn point" for Polynesian exploration, so they probably deserve credit for the outrigger more than anyone.

 

I cut out the political things.

That list has much more to do with culture than resource problems. Texas however is a bit of a joke in that Texas is so big that it could actually split into several distinct cultural entities. The others you are looking at cultures who historically were independent and in the case of Scotland and Catalonia suppressed by the states they currently are incorporated into. Bavaria, Catalonia, and Venice have economic reasons for split as well and I know there is a decently sized cultural gulf between Bavaria and the rest of Germany.

 

The statistics on Tongans and Samoans are highly distorted. Most casual sources (such as the one you've quoted, judging by the number you gave and the fact you said it was the population of Tonga) is not accurate, especially when the "Maori," and "Native Hawaiian" are based on claimed ancestry and geographical place of residence. There are more ethnic Tongans, who fully recognize themselves as such, and maintain significant cultural and (in may cases) linguistic integrity, but who permanently in New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, and Fiji, collectively, than in Tonga itself, and, likewise, the Samoans between the American Samoa and the sovereign and independent Samoa together is significantly less than ethnic Samoans living in New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, Hawaii, Guam, the United States (in fact, ethnic Samoans are the most disproportionately represented ethnic group in the world, compared to their tiny global population, for playing all three of Association, Rubgy, and Gridiron Football at the professional level, even though no professional team, field, or stadium for any of the three types of football exist on the actual islands of Samoa). So, if you included Samoans and Tongans by total heritage, wherever they may live (like you did with Hawaiians and Maoris), and not just those who actually live in Tonga or Samoa (which is what you did), their numbers are actually much closer.