Yeah implicit in this has been that these polls and online communities weren’t representative of the playerbase as a whole. I’m trying to frame it like an election where you have polls vs election day, where the steam achievement rate and pick rate represent the actual result.
I remember people bringing this up sometimes. Maybe it’s time for another chart to see if the marketing team was correct about this, that popularity of the civ would correlate to the population of that country (or maybe how many people have historical ties to that civ?). Unfortunately we don’t have a great way to estimate who actually plays the game in each country.
That’s probably the real lesson in all this. We spend so much time bickering over whether we should add one country or another, but almost no time arguing over what those civs should look like from a gameplay point of view.
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USA being popular isn’t surprising because I’d imagine Americans make up an outsized percentage of the customer base.
Mexico in Treaty is basically Otto in Sup. It’s totally nuts.
I’m inclined to think WR and playrate have a correlation, but just anecdotally, I had a 131 Portuguese HC before the Grapeshot buff and I think before the TC trickles. Before both of those cards the civ wasn’t very strong, but I like the civ mechanically. I also played a lot of USA at release before the OP strats appeared and based shed ELO because I couldn’t win outside of USA mirrors for a while. I’ve also lamed OP strats at times. People play what they like or what they will win with, sometimes those are the same thing and other times they aren’t.
Mexico is popular because a big chunk of the playerbase is latino, dunno why that’s so hard to grasp.
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Those polls are definitely not representative, but they don’t even hint at a desire for USA or Mexico. The only colonial civs with strong demand are South American ones.
This is my point. Most people don’t give a shit what a civ is and the pick rate will depend largely on how playable that civ is (ease of use, relative strength, variety of viable strategies).
Just look at the TAR civs alone. I think it’s safe to say that demand for Hausa was effectively zero before they’re announced because the average person in the west or Asia has never heard of them before. But people still tried them at almost the same rate as Ethiopia according to the steam achievements (2.5% vs 2.7%). Maybe Hausa being OP on release, and still more fun to play equalized which one people wanted to try? And Hausa has a much higher play rate than Ethiopia despite a smaller number that tried it once, so that should disprove prove 1v1 play rates = civ demand like you’re trying to claim.
Another thing to consider is that at least 36% of people that bought TAR tried one civ but not the other (collect 10000 influence achievement is 4.2% vs play Ethiopia at 2.7%). So DLCs with 2 civs as a whole are more popular than USA or Mexico, but they seem to split the selection of the individual civs so they’re individually less picked. And civ selection must be pretty sticky given the complexity of civs so the don’t necessarily end up trying out the other ones.
No one claims a large Turkish or British player base is the reason behind the popularity of those civs. Why is it only Latino civs that can only be popular because people are from there?
Obviously this will factor in, but it’s not the end all and be all. Arguably most people couldn’t care less what a civ is, and playability is more important to them.
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I was just speculating, and perhaps insufficiently clearly. Do you think another country has more players? I know there’s a perception that a lot of the player base is European, but for a single country I’d assume the US would be the biggest.
It’s not, especially considering the population.
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China most likely has more players.
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That’s weird yes but at least they have someone to revolt from in the game’s time period
The name Indonesia is completely anachronistic though.
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The Indonesian revolt refers to Java War, as the HC name is Yogyakarta, and there are Kraton Guards and Yogyakarta Resistance in their deck.
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Maybe the rev should have been called Java or Yogyakarta then?
Yes, Javanese would be better
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or Malay is also a good choice
Why is Evil so widespread? Evil always finds its way.
I agree the forum would be a lot more fun if we could discuss well made faction designs, sadly that is a rarity on the forum.
Hoop has made a couple of good ones, i believe myself to have made a good one but i think that is kind of it? There is a Persian one that’s also descent although it could have been a bit more focused on game design i think.
Like i still don’t really want a Chile but i still respect hoops attempt: Civ Concept: Chile (yes. really)
Like at least there is an attempt at cobbling together a design based on the countries history.
That said though it is easier to make designs based on countries with long and well documented history. Esp. if you are looking for solid ideas for unique units that aren’t just regiment names of otherwise relatively standard military units.
If you want elephants then Argentina is probably not the place to look, if you want a good cavalry faction then Poland is probably a good place to look at etc.
This isn’t a buggy game. The game itself is a bug. (As far as some people are concerned, of course.)
For them, the patch means removing us from the canon.
I mean to my credit, I did end up making the Chile civ a reality.
I also have a half coded Persia civ already as well, if you want I can come back and start dropping civ designs left and right, I’ve got dozens of them, I just didn’t think anybody in this forum cared cuz most of them weren’t well received lmao.
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I personally always enjoyed reading and discussing them. Might not be everyones cup of tea though, is what it is.
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I’d be interested in seeing what you’ve got cooking for Persia.
