Context: The “Civilized” mechanic in Victoria 2 won’t be coming back in 3. It was an arbitrary system which gave “uncivs” (countries that haven’t westernized) maluses and an inability to access the normal research “tree”.
Instead, the countries in question will be modeled after their actual circumstances that put them at a disadvantage to Western powers (agrarian society, decentralization, no infrastructure, poor literacy, etc). You know, a materialistic approach that’s in line with the rest of the game.
Also, white chuds won’t shut up about some capeshit that came out years ago and it’s hilarious.
One of my favorite quotes on civilization is from Anthropologist Margaret Mead when she was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. This is an excerpt from Ira Byock’s The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life:
Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others.
A civilization does not exist to build riches, expand its domain, advance technologically, or enforce its will upon other civilizations. All of these are cultures within civilization, but not civilization itself. Civilization, at its core, is a method to care for others and ensure a better quality of life.
I mean yes, to put it simply all leftists are trying to achieve the same end goal and just can’t agree on how we get there
there's only like 3000 billionaires. i don't get how we can't at least reach an agreed upon starting point knowing that.
Nah, nah. Let’s give them what they want and make it so Germany is hardcoded to fail no matter what choices they make. For immersion and all.
I think it's hilarious that the white guy crying about it implies that Africans are superior to Europeans because if they had the same starting chances as Europeans, they'd immediately colonize and destroy Europe.
Like if you look to a lot of the other games in the series the point is to have a historic basis but for the player to do weird shit at the same time. I ran a CK3 -> EU4 campaign where I started as Mali and united Africa and colonized Australia and the Americas and reclaimed Spain for Islam. Moving to Vic2 it just immediately acted like this giant empire greater than the UK at its peak was this backwater country with no civilization and the brits were this superpower with all these bonuses. Even trying Vic2 before that pretty much every non-white european contry feels needlessly punishing. After finally breaking in and sorta understanding Vic2 my first real attempt was in Japan where I literally sat around doing what felt like absolutely nothing and the overall feel felt nothing like Japan during the era, just waiting for technology to do something. Challenge is fun but just cutting out the legs from under you isn't. Then again these crybabies complain about CK3 improvements, like being able to have equal succession of genders or inverting it. Fun fact, it's harder when you invert the genders because women can only have so many babies at once while men can just go from woman to woman, almost like the entire system was designed in a severely patriarchal way and playing around in an inverted world shows some of the limits of that kind of world, but also that in equal succession you have better options overall.
Why play these games if you don't have at least some understanding of the literal history you purport to claim you love? It's being made more accurate to history rather than less.
They like European military history from the renaissance to the early modern period, that's it.
Only parts of it. They have an idea of it that they like, but they do not embrace or understand the full scope of it.
They already did something similar in eu4 a while ago too. As a non-western nation you used to have to “westernize” to get cheaper technologies which was a brutal process that took at least 5% of your game, but they removed that for a more open system of institutions that spawn throughout the game that you have to “embrace” for the cheaper tech costs. Only two (renaissance and printing press) of the eight institutions are hardcoded to spawn in Europe which vastly improves the gameplay, especially outside of Europe where you are no longer essentially saying “if you are Chinese it will always be 30% harder for you to advance technologically”
Nice. The China thing would be especially funny given that it was about 80% harder for Europe to advance to their technology prior to what the 1600s?
Yeah a player controlled China is easily able to spawn most of the institutions. It makes it very fun for alternate history that is still realistic
From a gameplay perspective I liked the westernization mechanic though. I liked playing native american nations and the change to institutions made contact a lot less interesting because all you had to do to "westernize" after the addition of institutions was just look vaguely in the direction of a white person and suddenly you know how a printing press works. It was fun when you felt like your nation was going through massive internal social transformation and reform and it was just removed when they added institutions
Except it’s fundamentally flawed as a game mechanic because it implies the only way for your people to learn and adapt to a technology is to become like the west which is racist, untrue, and historically inaccurate
A game mechanic can be both fun and historically inaccurate though. Yeah it was racist but it added for a period of interesting gameplay
good. Unciv mechanic was trash. It made most of the world extremely boring to play
Get ready for Wakanda to conquer Europe every other game.
:sicko-beaming:
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Form Ethiopia
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Conquer as much as possible
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Industrialize and modernize to the detriment of absolutely everything else, radicalizing your populace in the process
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:troll:
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"muh immersion" bitch you're not a monarch you're a spiteful dumbass from Florida
Whining because a game has been made checks notes less political?
:whywhywhywhywhy: oh you silly gamers!
It's stupid that there's opposition to this when most of the fun from a paradox game is taking some small nation and building them into a giant that can destroy the other empires. Being a Native American tribal nation that secures the coasts by 1492 is fun, playing as Native Americans with the arbitrary and ahistorical restrictions on their expansion makes the first few decades terrible. One of the Polynesian islands can become a trade conglomerate that starves the rest of the world, peak EU4, but you're stuck doing nothing for centuries despite Ming China being technologically on par with Europe in that era. CK2/3 pagans are better and more fun than Catholics, but despite me pillaging France yearly my raiders never come back with an understanding of how to build one of the walls they destroyed dozens of. Completely walling off urbanisation limits the game to a standard narrative instead of an intuitive example of history evolving dialectically. There's very little feeling of butterfly effect in most of my paradox game rounds.
It’s stupid that there’s opposition to this when most of the fun from a paradox game is taking some small nation and building them into a giant that can destroy the other empires.
Not sure that this is a good argument, this is only true because PDX games try and fail very hard at being more than a paint the map blobbing simulator AND, very importantly, because the AI is purposedly handicapped in several ways. The case in point is Vicky was their only game(CK is more RPG more than "country management") where managing a country was supposedly more important than just blobbing.
But as soon as you are able to make a GSG that is deep enough to make civilization magagement interesting then the argument in favor of small/weak start diminishes. I think a good example of this is Distant Worlds which AFAIK is the only game that ever got close to that level of management and ironicaly because it had the ability to let the game basicaly run itself by letting the AI take over parts of the management.
The first step to their games being more than map blobbing simulators would still be changing this mechanic though. There shouldn't be arbitrary equal footing between Pueblo and Poland, but the internal mechanics of the tribal nation versus the feudal nation should allow for a similar depth of building the country. I can blindly conquer land as Caddo but I can't translate that material surplus into a city despite Native Americans in that region building a city (300 years prior) that was on par with London population-wise. A game that allows for Cahokias to develop is going to have depth that a game with a primitive/civilised split has never had.
Don't get me wrong I agree with the overall sentiment that this mechanic was bad and this is a step in the right direction. It is more about the nuance and context that PDX isn't good at making weak nations interesting without resorting to blobbing mechanics. The OP picture is nonsense of course because "wakanda" is no less ahistorical than a Ulm world conquest. Nobody actualy gives a shit about that.
I do think there is a discussion to be had about how PDX has resorted to DLCs and blobbing in order to for example sell you "Europa Universallis" at release and then slowly make it into "Rest of the World Universallis". Shit we need to have at release will surely be chopped away for a future DLC so we shouldn't be praising them blindly for making the rest of the world relevant on release day, I mean I should expect that to be the case and not have to wait 2 years for a DLC that makes Africa relevant.
I do think there is a discussion to be had about how PDX has resorted to DLCs and blobbing in order to for example sell you “Europa Universallis” at release and then slowly make it into “Rest of the World Universallis”
That reminds me of what a pleasant surprise it was when CK3 released with a bunch of content and concepts from CK2's DLCs integrated into the core game, and generally how it decoupled systems from completely bespoke cultures and religions into more generic systems that mean for the most part anywhere you look you're working with a full-featured set of tools instead of how vanilla CK2 only had the Catholics as playable and fleshed out and every CK2 religion was a bespoke and idiosyncratic system with special mechanics.
That “feature” of M2 really did suck. If I create an huge, stable empire as Egypt or the Byzantines, I should be able to field modern gunpowder units.
Then came the Americas campaign and I thought I’d be able to create a Westernized Aztec army akin to what the Inca were trying to do, but nope. The native rosters were so barebones while the Spanish roster/campaign was relatively fleshed out and complete.
good opportunity to reply wiht the ben shapiro wakanda isnt real tweet
This is basically an admission that they just play Britian, the US or Prussia (let's be honest it's Prussia a large majority of the time). Like if you played any 'uncivilized' nation you had to use console commands to westernized to make the game at all interesting.
