I don’t think that Europe really needs any more civilizations, but I will keep advocating that the Middle East and Himalayas receive some of the civilizations that have so far fallen through the cracks.
Personally I have little interest in seeing a further breakdown of the Italians. I’m not crazy about the premise of more African civs, either.
The proposal to make unique regional models for villagers/monks/military units indicates otherwise. As I play mostly campaign, I’d love regional culture models for all units.
Venetians are represented by the Portuguese to make the Sforza campaign more diverse. Same applies to Bayinnaung, where various Burmese factions are represented by Malay, Vietnamese, Bengalis, Khmer and Chinese. Venetian AI names and history description are included in the Italian civilization.
Worse thing is that Mombasa (Swahili city-state) is represented by the Malians. (more thousand kilometers away from East African coast) and the Muslim Kilwa Sultanate by the Ethiopians.
Was this done for the sake of variety, or because Venice is so militarily and culturally different from the other Italian states? I suspect variety myself, and don’t see what makes Venetians particularly different from other North Italians to justify designing them entirely new.
As a principle, future campaigns should minimize mirror civ scenarios as much as possible.
I get where you’re coming from, but there are two problems:
Why Venice specifically? I remember it being different civs in different campaigns (others where you couldn’t really justify it not being Italians because the campaigns were already diverse enough).
Pachacuti, for instance, was 100% Incas. Why didn’t they have a problem with that?
I’m not exactly an italian history expert, but I think Venice developed a bit differently from the rest because of its ties to Byzantium. If anything, they should’ve been Byzantines like in other campaigns or just nominally Italians.
I dunno if there was a full Inca campaign that didn’t revolve around those wacky Spanish invaders again, then seeing everyone played by Incas is going to get exhausting very fast.
Dunno about them, but I did. I tried replaying it recently and I didn’t get far. Interest waned when I remembered it was just Inca Mirror matches in different contexts, with the occasional Plumed Archer thrown in for some token variety. The first time through was already kind of meh, but to me it had exactly zero replay value, despite depicting events which I find extremely interesting.
Also, like the new avatar @WillWalrus
Surely you’re referring to the Aztec campaign (no Spanish in the Inca one). The Aztec campaign was technically fine because the native enemies were people very culturally similar to the Aztecs, but even then, it could easily be spiced up by having more New World units/architecture to choose from.
Let’s say the campaign is 5 or 6 scenarios large and it’s Incas before Spanish. So wary 1400s. If it’s against other tribes and peoples such as Chimu and they all use the Inca civ… that could be incredibly boring to play as or against.
Well kinda. But let’s say it’s an Inca leader that fights the Chimu which is a generation or 2 before the European arrival but every civ used is Inca. Sure maybe they throw in a Mayan or Aztec here and there but that just feels a bit weird.
I mean, I’m not sure if they were just nominally Incas but acted like Mayans/Aztecs or were just Incas with Mayans/Aztecs UUs, but the latter sounds like a good way of doing that. In any case, Venetians represented by the Portuguese instead of altered Italians or Byzantines felt extremely odd to me. This and the fact that (afaik) they were a bit of an oddball as far as italian city-states are concerned, I think they make for a valid civ candidate (at least if the question is “never split italians” vs “maybe split italians someday”).
Again, I kinda feel like campaign-only civs can easily be implemented as altered versions of current civs, especially because you don’t need to consider how fun or balanced they are as much and can make use of the plethora of campaign-only units and models.
Tbf the Jaguars were very annoying and made some scenarios much more interesting.
I am sure that there are jaguar warriors. Maybe plumed archers too.
Some people try to use this game to pursue the ideal of fairness of the modern real world, but I think this game should reflect the Middle ages more, rather than the modern real world.
Thus, one of the greatest obstacles to civilization for Africans, and some Native Americans, is the lack of reliable medieval historical records. At least, as far as I know, our understanding of medieval Zimbabwe and Swahili is still foggy. The Kingdom of Kongo is in better shape, thanks to the Portuguese who arrived in time at the end of the 15th century.
Of course, according to your illustration, the official may also launch 2 DLCs with 3 civilizations each. But I personally think that the pressure on the civ volume is the bigger issue. The final number is limited, which makes European or Asian civilizations, which tend to have richer records, more competitive. When those potential Bantu civilizations may have less available material content than the equivalent amount of Asian civilizations, how can we not think about the impact of having each Bantu group be its own civilization on the final number of slots? Reality does not allow for pure optimism.
If the Bantu were to end up being just one civilization, I would guess that it would be a Kongolese-based design, and meanwhile having both good navy and decent defense and economy to symbolize the Swahili and Shona respectively. The campaign can revolve around the civil war in the Kingdom of Kongo and cooperation and confrontation with the Portuguese. I think it would be still fun and engaging.
In order to avoid anyone trying to falsely accuse me, I have to go to the trouble of stating that this is just one way of doing things, and I personally think the advantage of this approach over others is that it can bring benefits to the development of the game. If the dev adopts other ways, there are other benefits as well.