I just don’t want more European content because Europe is already overrepresented. What part of that is so hard to understand?
At best I’d want a Wallachian civ and a Celt split. Even a Italian or Viking split is taking it too far imo.
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Like Europe would be fine if ya know without just bastardizations of current units didnt feel forced to make it all feel “unique”
We already have some interesting units underutilized: Camels, Eagles, Elephants, Lancers.
Heck if your Euro civ has Dromon, it’s at least a start towards something individualizing.
This is why my most wanted Euro civ is Vandals: camels, Dromons… not something seen in most Euro civs.
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Yeah I guess I could be fine with a Vandal civ as well
Technically, it’s an African civ, no?
They came from Europe in the first place, but they’re mostly known for their kingdom that settled in Africa. It’s a bit of a grey area when people have entirely migrated from one continent to another over the course of their existence.
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To be honest, I would rather a South Slav umbrella civ than nothing (while being told I should be content because Europe is already overrepresented with Latin and Germanic civs etc.)
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And that would be wrong. Vandals were germanic and used horses for cavalry and, ironically, the berbers used camels against vandal king Thrasamund’s cavalry and defeated him.
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Didnt the vandals employe berbers as well.
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This would cover 90% of the Balkans with just 2 civs.
The current Slavs are clearly a representation of the Ruthenians aka Eastern Slavs, there’s nothing remotely Serbian, Bosniak or Croat in their design.
The current slavs are an umbrella, and a broad and illogical one aswell. Their castle is romanian, boyars were common among south slavs just as much, Vlad Dracula campaign has nothing to do with Rus either and would better be a Bulgarian campaign and so on
If the devs wanted a pure slav civ, they should do an early dark-age slav civ like the persians being sassanid, with equivalent archaic units like frank’s axethrower. eg:
What we have instead is a south-east umbrella, as the devs decided bohemians and poles (and bulgarians i guess) clearly deserve their special kingdoms while the rest of the slavs don’t.
Which is why introducing kingdoms or duchies was a bad idea imo (talking about you special cow Sicilians/Burgundians). It’s just opening a Pandora’s box
I don’t think the idea was bad. Slavs are roughly half of Europe, but only got 1 umbrella civ, which as you said is broad and illogical. The way it was implemented was bad though. They tried to merge as many civs as possible into Slavs including non-Slavic ones.
Adding the Bulgarians, Poles and Bohemians to fix this was a good step, but that leaves the Slavs as a umbrella civ in a non-umbrella civ roaster.
In Dynasties of India they made 4 new civs: Bengalis, Dravidians, Gurjaras, Hindustanis by splitting an existing civilization, the Indians. With Slavs they just didn’t split the Slavs and now we have the equivalent of Bengalis, Dravidians, Gurjaras, Hindustanis, Indians in game.
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I appreciate what you are trying to do, but I really don’t know about lumping together all western Balkan Slavs as ‘Slavonians’.
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In the first place, the name doesn’t really make sense. Slavonia is a region in Croatia, no one uses ‘Slavonian’ to refer to the peoples of former Yugoslavia.
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Second, while culturally similar, the Croatians, Bosnians, and Serbs, and their ancestors nonetheless had different identities represented by different kingdoms and empires with different religions, and I don’t know how their descendants will feel about them being lumped together like that. If the point is to avoid controversy by not excluding anyone, I’m not sure that would do the trick.
Personally, if I could do anything I wanted, I would just add Serbs to the game, not because I think the others are worse, but because the Serbian Kingdom and Empire was the most historically prominent. However, I realize this will lead to the sorts of issues the OP alludes to in point number 4, and game developers tend to be very weary of international controversy, which is sadly why we’ll likely never see Tibetans added to the game either.
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Malays are still an umbrella civ for the peoples of Malaysia and Indonesia (including notably Javanese and others). Arguably many of the current civs can still be seen as umbrella civs to varying extents.
However I’ll agree it’s a bit weird to have such a Ruthenian-themed civ represent South Slavs in campaign.
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I still think it was bad, and leaving the slavs just as one the better choice. Because now everyone is not happy, including how the western duchies are represented (remember Bohemia central europe architecture discussions? Poles with orthodox monastery?)
The thing with indians is the new civs represent different ethnicities within India, but czechs and poles are still slavs just aswell. For all practical considerations they’re variant civs in a game that shouldn’t (and originally had no) variant civs.
The other solution ofc is to add Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Moldova, Romania, Rus, Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Valachia etc etc. prepare your wallets^^
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Or maybe a better example to get my point across:
Imagine if there was originally a civ named “latins”.
That’s the correct slav equivalent for western europeans.
All the rationale for adding civs I read on this forum is not the same of the devs. If you ever tried to make a game or a story you would know how that works in practice.
Civs like characters in a story are not added for a sense of fair play or because you’re like a state bureaucrat that needs to fill certain gaps.
That said nothing wrong with being speculative, it’s a fan forum after all, but don’t imagine that Devs are gonna be like “oh we need to fill the Balkans but we can’t add Serbs without croats”. Even by pretending there aren’t economical concerns, they just look at what story they think is cool to tell. Why add Cumans or Sicilians really if not because they thought it would be cool to tell that extremely specific stories when they could have added Jurchens or Tibetans instead?
That’s the main concern of an artist: to tell a good story, the rest are speculations people do but most of the times they miss the mark unless they ever tried to do something similar. What I mean basically is that there’s a rule of practicality and spontaneity over one of abstract and detached fairness like I always see here. No artist really care if they’re being fair to X or Y but only if they’re being fair to their vision.
That said I’d have Serbs over Slavonians all day as the latter is clearly an artificially made up label only to include the most possible terrain in a single civ. I think at least Albanians along with Serbs would have a cool story to tell with Skanderbeg but it’s in part repetitive when you have Dracula and Romanians. I can live without croats and Bosnians or wait for them in 2040 if that means having better defined Serbs and Romanians.
As for Slavs they were added in a similar fashion to cover the most ground possible (Indians, Italians etc) but they still kinda made sense before civs became more granular. In fact the forgotten was a fan project and it shows, the rationale was not to tell a good story, just look at the mess that are Dracula, Bari or El Dorado.
We’re still dealing with that, trying to adjust the forgotten’s decisions to make sense of them instead of having civs trying to include everything and none and end up being just a boring mess like it’s always the case when trying to include everything just for the sake of inclusion and without a clear vision in your mind to stick to.
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You don’t need to add a new civ to tell a story.
Eg “Pax Mongolica” (6th scenario of mongol campaign) doesn’t need Magyars and their 16th century hussars to finish the 13th century plot. You’re replacing one anachronism with another.
Let’s be honest here - everyone wants a new civ primarily to larp as king of their own medieval nations.
The East European castle isn’t Romanian, it was built by the Teutonic Order (while the Central European one is a English castle).
I can help you out with that; they’d hate it. Calling a Croat a Serb or a Serb a Croat is a pretty sure-fire way to get punched in the face lol.
I personally agree with just adding Vlachs/Romanians and Serbs for now, and then in the future maybe we can come back to a Croat and Austrian DLC if we get to that point (after some more non-Euro DLC additions)
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