That’s not really what people are referring to, though. What civs get played are not relevant to Euro-fatigue.
You play the civ because the gameplay fits you, I don’t think any serious player would think ‘well, I don’t like Asian civs so I’m going to pick Franks and Britons instead’.
They pick Franks and Britons because ‘haha super knights/sniper arbs go brrrr’.
But my point is that players enjoy or prefer playing those eurocivs, even more than no eurocivs…
Why would the devs would make less eurocivs if they are very popular?
The question is not the popularity of euro civs, but the opportunity cost of adding more euro civs by splitting existing ones, rather than adding civs in other parts of the world where the map is quite empty (like the heavy gunpowder-enjoying Jurchen horde for example).
Actually, it doesn’t. Portuguese are part of Europe, not Africa. Just imagine a DLC called “The Asian Kingdoms” having Turks, Malay and Japanese (with little to no historical contact with each other) + Portuguese (because they had contact with everyone, obviously).
However, I also don’t think it was to court the Brazilian playerbase because it would be a huge missed opportunity not to place a civ for Kongo/Angola as the 4th or 5th addition, the peoples who had the most contact with Portugal (and unsurprisingly from where most Afro-Brazilians are descended).
They could even have added Somali so that the Ethiopians would not be so isolated and have the Portuguese in their campaign. Wouldn’t that make more sense?
In fact, what it seems to me is that they didn’t intend to do more than token civs and/or didn’t believe the DLC would be successful with horseless civs. It’s okay that Malians and Ethiopians were and still are more famous than the alternatives, but a shallow reading would already show that it would be ideal to divide Africa into several ############# And given the pre-TAK discussions still visible on the AOKH forum, it’s clear that they could have given more thought to these things.
But anyway, as much as it may seem, I’m not complaining, the addition of Portugal was a good thing.
Of course, did this addition further set the precedent for the current trend of breaking umbrella civs (renaming to Iberians and adding a caravel would do the trick imho)? Yes, but it also set a new one to add Early Modern Age civs, which allows us to see more African civs.
This is more of a trivia night factoid than anything useful, but “Iberians” would not be a good distinguishing term, as Georgians (yes, Georgians) also went by “Iberians.” In fact, one of the original Georgian kingdoms was called the Kingdom of Iberia.
Yes, and that is not relevant to the comment about Euro-fatigue.
Civs being enjoyable to play have nothing to do with their point of origin. Very few pick civs because of its ethnicity. You don’t really pick civs because they’re European, for example. Once a civ gets added, it will get played. Or as I said earlier - you pick Franks and Britons because they’re really good civs that are smooth to play, not because they’re European.
of course, and infact it’s not a priority. but that’s not in contrast with saying that also italians could be splitted into 2-3 very different and interesting civs. the two statements are not in contrast with eachother, we could simply have both
They aren’t in contrast, that is correct. What I’m trying to get to is that to get new interesting civs it’s not necesary to split Italians
Italians already have condotieri and some water bonuses, I assume the water bonuses and a trade bonus cover the merchant republics of Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi (Milan was also strong on trade, being up the Po river on the main way to Germany through the Alps) while condotieri cover the mercenaries used by everyone operating in Italy in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance era, and a bonus for universities for Bologna and Florence. The civ is already a good umbrella civ for everything north of Rome, I don’t see the point of splitting them.
Maybe change the galleon to be a venetian galeass, making it a second UU.