Civ VI and civilization choice

[VoxRationis]

Canada is coming up in the new expansion. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg0PYsWK1dc)

Why yet another ex-British colony? Being independent as a state is different from being a distinct civilization. One might as well have separate North and South Koreas, or add Taiwan, or stick in the UAE, Jordan, and Syria. (The last three would be, I would think, more distinct from Arabia than Canada, Britain, Australia, and the US are from each other.) The fact that the entire suite of bonuses and abilities offered to Canada sound like jokes about Canadian stereotypes* should indicate to Firaxis that Canada is insufficiently distinct from other Anglophone states to really be worth including. This could have been the Incas, or the Ottomans (as many below have suggested), or Ethiopia or Mali from V, or Nabatea—the people who built Petra, and a civilization perfect for an expansion centered around humanity's relationship with its environment. Heck, even Guatemala would be better, because at least they don't speak English there.

This ties into a general quarrel I have with a lot of Civ VI choices. I generally don't like the inclusion of modern states as civilizations, because they tend to either be ex-colonial powers or ex-colonies, and as such don't really represent distinct "civilizations" so much as they represent offshoots or local variants of the general modern European civilization (in a broader sense) or the specific colonizing power (in a narrower sense).

*Other people play hockey, and if we're dead set on including sports arenas as civilization-specific buildings or features, the US should get football stadia, because it's far more specific to us than golf is to Scotland or hockey is to Canada and such buildings are the only public works projects we build nowadays.

[Winthur]

While my favourite entry in the franchise (IV) has the weird creation that is the Native American Empire, I have to say as a mostly-bystander to Civ6 development (I stopped following the game mostly because it has problems with handling its own AI) that the available civilizations and leader choices seem really uninspired. Some mainstays of the series like Gandhi are left untouched while classic civilizations have leader picks that wouldn't be my first choice (Catherine de Medici for France, for instance).

I also feel like the thought process behind Canada's inclusion is that Americans have already been here in every single Civ game (and probably aren't going anywhere, since that would presumedly lose sales) and since the US can be here, why not other modern states? There was always a little bit of whiplash here and there when you had Gandhi or Mao representing India or China, arguing for the civs being their "modern" iterations perhaps, but then Gandhi gets to command his own War Elephants and Mao has repeating crossbowmen or a special horseman unit.

On a personal note, Civ6 marks just about the one game where I'm less than thrilled in general with leader/civ choices. I thought 5 was a bit of a step backwards in terms of gameplay, but I really liked the artstyle and leader choices in that game, whereas in Civ6 I feel like I'm picking from a flurry of Monopoly board game pieces or Clue characters. Some feel like particularly dubious choices of "the eternal stateman" (Jadwiga, who died young) and some simply... look weird. I can't take Wilhelmina or John Curtin seriously at all.

Maybe they decided that the overtly cartoony leaders now means you can roll with obvious comic relief civilizations? I know I can't imagine actually wanting to play Canada unless I got it from a random roll in an all random, "play the hand you're dealt" kinda game...

[Kato]

I've never cared much about the civ choice, apart from gameplay reasons. I guess there's some vague sympathy / distaste between a few I know and some very basic appeal towards German leaders for me but usually I either pick random or pick what I want to suit my playstyle.
As such I hardly care about them. But... I can see why people would be disappointed with the more cartoony Civ VI leaders. I never really took them serious but now I can see why it would be harder if you tried.

That said... I still quite like the game, though I'll probably wait to get GS until I catch it on sale.
And I'll admit, selling individual leaders feels like a rip off.. But if it works...

[VoxRationis]

To be fair, I don't think the US should be a civ either. It's jarring enough to play, for example, England starting in the Ancient Era. Playing a ab origine United States is nonsensical. Our entire cultural identity, our national values, our national etiology, exists in terms of a reaction to another, earlier culture, largely inspired by stories from a third, even earlier culture. However, the United States is a dominant military and economic power in the present era, and our actions as a country have had globe-spanning and era-defining effects on world history in the past century, and so I can kind of see why it might be included. The same cannot be said for Canada, or Australia, or Brazil.*

Really, what the developers should have done if they wanted to include ex-colonies is make it so that new players can enter the game in a way similar to how they came about in real life. The Rise & Fall expansion laid a good foundation for that in the concept of free cities, but instead of following through with the concept and allowing free cities to truly operate as their own entities, at least at the level of the city-states, the developers chose to make them into barbarian camps with walls.

*There are so many things that I dislike about Brazil as a civ that I could go into a full-sized rant about it specifically. They are exacerbated by the fact that, based on the Let's Plays I've seen, the random faction picking for AI players seems to favor it highly, and so Pedro's hirsute face crops up in almost every game, scowling daggers at the player for daring to have a great writer.

[Winthur]

Really, what the developers should have done if they wanted to include ex-colonies is make it so that new players can enter the game in a way similar to how they came about in real life.

Civ4 had a system like that (with being able to grant colonies independence, turning them into an entirely new nation), but the problem with that was that colonies were virtually incapable of contributing to the game in a meaningful manner; it didn't help that the player himself couldn't start off as a colony at a more advanced starting point, and it feels like it would also shift the game dynamic quite a lot (you are generally given scraps of a small island, the game is in a very advanced state so you're a few turns from conclusion anyway, you hardly get to control your city placement [and heaven knows the AI is awful at this], and you're forced to somehow break out in the first place, which is cool except a huge war of attrition with a high-level AI that starts off stronger than you simply often means that you bleed yourself out and Poland quietly goes to space.)

I don't think there's much to do about the standard Civilization gameplay loop without making it a completely different game, otherwise we run into questions like "Why is there a random hodgepodge of completely different cultures developing in the exact same hemisphere? Why is Gandhi in charge of ancient India? Why is Gandhi in charge of India at all, he wasn't an elected or despotic leader anyway??? Why do all of those civilizations run off the exact same Eurocentric tech tree?"

I think custom scenarios are a fun way to explore options like this, but I think they're a novelty in an actual, 4000 BC->victory condition 4X experience.

I have my own reservations about Civs like America, but from an entirely gamist perspective (as I'm pretty capable of suspending my disbelief at the various Civvisms like the great Babylonian-Chinese feud that has finally been resolved with tanks against longbowmen) - "modern" civs tend to have utterly useless features in a game played most of the time in an Ancient Era start. It's the early game that always propels you up and your Civ's progression is pretty much always linear; I can hardly envision a game that I won because my Marines or Tanks were slightly better, mostly because by the time the tech comes online, the game is over. Most Civ games, a "good" unique unit is either an Ancient/Medieval gamechanger or a fantastic addition to your standard Renaissance breakout (Renaissance usually being a massive jump in attack power and mobility, allowing the human player to surprise the AI that's still relying on weaker, Medieval technology). Some fighter plane or tank is usually either not used or has a seldomly relevant bonus. If you pick Germans or Americans in most Civ iterations, you are usually taking a solid, mid-tier Civ with good leaders and/or starting techs and completely ignore the unique abilities they have, and that's just kinda boring.

Civ5 was a step in the right direction with the Minuteman being somewhat more relevant in the big picture. Now Teddy Roosevelt has Mustangs. Does anyone really care about those? The AI is going to fall apart harder to airstrikes either way.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

As a Canadian, I must respectfully lodge my protest against this discussion. The features for Canada were enough to get my entire family, including my mum who hasn't played since Civ 1, interested in playing again.
Civilization isn't a serious historical strategy game, and it's easier to play it as what it is; a strategy game with a whimsical sprinkling of historical flavour on it. As such, hell yeah give me Canada and the two Koreas and Taiwan, because they've shown that they can come up with fun ways to make these 'civilizations' different.

[VoxRationis]

Make no mistake, my objections lie not with criticisms of Canada as a country, but with a broader opinion on the sorts of decisions about why something should be counted as a "civilization" in-game.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

It's almost certainly there "for the memes", as the folk say these days.

[LibraryOgre]

A lot of the historical disconnect is why I prefer GalCiv, now that someone has introduced me to it. I can't get over the jarring aspect of Catherine of Aragon founding Buddhism in 46 BCE and turning it into an expasionist and imperial religion, and going to war with someone because they're Catholic. Or the fact that there IS a BCE/CE split, when Christianity might be founded in 400 BC. For me, the historical window-dressing is a distraction from the game.

[halfeye]

Has Meier's Civ shifted to a spherical world yet?

I played the original on the ST in squares, that shifted to hexes on the PC for two, you can do a sphere in hexes, but so far it hasn't happened (I'm up to Civ 5).

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Has Meier's Civ shifted to a spherical world yet?

I played the original on the ST in squares, that shifted to hexes on the PC for two, you can do a sphere in hexes, but so far it hasn't happened (I'm up to Civ 5).
Still a cylinder as far as I know.

[Kato]

Still a cylinder as far as I know.

Yup, the world is square, er, cylindrical. And the poles are pretty identical and uninhabitable. I wonder if at this point they're doing it on purpose.

Also, regarding the actual topic, given the fact that the games (since they introduced leaders) not only suggests any culture lives from the beginning to the end (which is maybe true for what, three or four real cultures?) it also suggests you're some kind of immortal emperor of your realm, conversing with other immortals, any pretense the chosen civs are unrealistic seems pointless to me.

[factotum]

Yup, the world is square, er, cylindrical. And the poles are pretty identical and uninhabitable. I wonder if at this point they're doing it on purpose.

Of course they are? :smallconfused: It's a video game--the cylindrical world may not be realistic, but it's a heck of a lot easier to represent on a rectangular display and a lot easier for players to understand as well.

[Aeson]

Of course they are? :smallconfused: It's a video game--the cylindrical world may not be realistic, but it's a heck of a lot easier to represent on a rectangular display and a lot easier for players to understand as well.
On the other hand, a regular hexagon is a (poor) 2D approximation of the surface of a sphere between about 60 N and 60 S, it'd be an easy map to make on a hex grid, and it covers most of the inhabited surface of the planet.

[halfeye]

On the other hand, a regular hexagon is a (poor) 2D approximation of the surface of a sphere between about 60 N and 60 S, it'd be an easy map to make on a hex grid, and it covers most of the inhabited surface of the planet.

Mapping hexagons to spheres is better than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_icosahedron

That's used for soccer balls, which are near perfect spheres (imperfect because made of matter, but pretty danged good for all practical purposes).

If you divide the hexagons and pentagons into triangle, you can subdivide the triangles into as many smaller triangles as you like, and you can make hexagons from all of the small triangles (I have a suspicion that there might be a number of triangles per hexagon and pentagon, either even or odd, that doesn't work, but I have looked at it and it works at least sometimes). The hexagons in the pentagons are irregular, but systematically irregular, you need to either make the centre of the pentagon a pentagon (there are twelve on the whole sphere), or fudge with its edges to make it look like a hexagon, but apart from that it's natually hexagons all the way.

[Aeson]

Mapping hexagons to spheres is better than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_icosahedron

That's used for soccer balls, which are near perfect spheres (imperfect because made of matter, but pretty danged good for all practical purposes).

If you divide the hexagons and pentagons into triangle, you can subdivide the triangles into as many smaller triangles as you like, and you can make hexagons from all of the small triangles (I have a suspicion that there might be a number of triangles per hexagon and pentagon, either even or odd, that doesn't work, but I have looked at it and it works at least sometimes). The hexagons in the pentagons are irregular, but systematically irregular, you need to either make the centre of the pentagon a pentagon (there are twelve on the whole sphere), or fudge with its edges to make it look like a hexagon, but apart from that it's natually hexagons all the way.
I am aware of that mapping, but unless you have some overlap between the tiles you cannot eliminate the pentagons from it, and there is also no particular value in including the poles on the map.

[halfeye]

I am aware of that mapping, but unless you have some overlap between the tiles you cannot eliminate the pentagons from it, and there is also no particular value in including the poles on the map.

In Civ 5 you already have fuzzy graphics at the edge of hexes, you have to switch to the hex based map to see the hexes clearly.

The advantage of having the poles on the map is that routes are shorter near the poles than they are at the equator, and you can travel across the poles, passenger jets do that.

[Aeson]

In Civ 5 you already have fuzzy graphics at the edge of hexes, you have to switch to the hex based map to see the hexes clearly.

The advantage of having the poles on the map is that routes are shorter near the poles than they are at the equator, and you can travel across the poles, passenger jets do that.
There are no passenger jets in Civ, ICBM and long-range bomber equivalents are very late-game technologies, and a map in which the hex grid forms a regular hexagon with a major diagonal at the equator has upper and lower edges which are half as long as the major diagonal forming the equator. Interestingly enough, the circumference of the planet at 60 degrees North or 60 degrees South latitude is approximately half of its circumference at the equator. There is of course greater error for the intermediate rows between the 'equator' and the 60 N / 60 S rows, but it's a very simple approximation to make and the error isn't that bad, especially considering that it's a game rather than anything with any particularly high accuracy requirements.

Also, if you go more than maybe a century into the past, doing much of anything inside the Arctic or Antarctic circles (~66.5 N or ~66.5 S latitude) was not particularly practical, and even now the polar regions remain pretty much completely uninhabited and little exploited. Restricting the map to the regions of the globe between 60 N and 60 S latitude gets pretty much everything on the planet except for Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, and parts of Canada and Scandinavia. Fudging the surface approximation a little more and adding an extra couple rows at the top and bottom of the map to extend that to the Arctic and Antarctic Circles or maybe slightly further would get you pretty much everything of any importance whatsoever until you're fielding end-game long-range aircraft and missiles while costing you absolutely nothing earlier in the game.

Is a hex grid in the form of a regular hexagon a perfect representation of the surface of a sphere? No. Does it need to be for a game? Also no. Is there any real advantage in including the polar regions, which we'd be cutting off in order to represent the sphere's surface as a regular hexagon? Not until extremely late in the game, and even then you're not losing much.

[Destro_Yersul]

Make no mistake, my objections lie not with criticisms of Canada as a country, but with a broader opinion on the sorts of decisions about why something should be counted as a "civilization" in-game.


As a Canadian, I must respectfully lodge my protest against this discussion. The features for Canada were enough to get my entire family, including my mum who hasn't played since Civ 1, interested in playing again.

And this is why. Canada's population isn't that big, comparatively, but it's a population with the disposable income to buy videogames. You mentioned America earlier. Can you imagine how many Americans just wouldn't buy Civ if there was no America in it?

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

And this is why. Canada's population isn't that big, comparatively, but it's a population with the disposable income to buy videogames. You mentioned America earlier. Can you imagine how many Americans just wouldn't buy Civ if there was no America in it?

This is true. We're also, even beyond that, one of the most internet- and computer-savvy nations in the world, as well as having a huge love for seeing us get represented in stuff (it comes from being America's smaller neighbour)

[Serenity]

Incidentally, the OP called out the Inca, Ottomans, and Mali as 'better' choices--per a leak which has been 100% correct so far, all three of those are going to be in Gathering Storm. Inca are popularly speculated to be the next announced, even, based on the llama in the last Livestream and the mention that they'd be doing something related to mountain tunnels next time.

[KillianHawkeye]

I'll never understand people who don't understand that games sometimes have to make design decisions for gameplay reasons or for simplicity reasons rather than clinging to hard realism at all times. :smallconfused::smallsigh:

[VoxRationis]

Incidentally, the OP called out the Inca, Ottomans, and Mali as 'better' choices--per a leak which has been 100% correct so far, all three of those are going to be in Gathering Storm. Inca are popularly speculated to be the next announced, even, based on the llama in the last Livestream and the mention that they'd be doing something related to mountain tunnels next time.

Well, it appears that your source is correct, as the Inca are out, and they're looking strong. Very food-focused, and I like how they have the ability to work mountains, so that if food growth outstrips science growth, the citizens can still do things while you're still developing new buildings to put them in.

@KillianHawkeye: It's not a matter of "simplicity" or "game design" reasons coming up against realism; Canada is no simpler than any other civ, and in some respects is more complicated, since it breaks a lot of the normal rules related to several facets of the game, and they could have quite easily given those game design aspects (either individually or together) to another faction.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

On the other hand, a regular hexagon is a (poor) 2D approximation of the surface of a sphere between about 60 N and 60 S, it'd be an easy map to make on a hex grid, and it covers most of the inhabited surface of the planet.
It's more a UI thing; instead of having a uniform scroll around, the best way to represent a globe map is to feature a bona fide 3D interface, even with slight curvature.

If you try for a sphere map with an apparently planar field of view, that gets really sticky to render smoothly. Much moreso than simply having a planar map that has a single seam, where you can just scroll back and forth instead of honoring the curve of the cylinder.