Gormongous

"Shitty wizard disenchanted my stuff!"

Yeah, that's what I thought too, but I wanted to gather more evidence before making an accusation.

It's really jarring that the garb of the Assassins has been more or less unchanged after five hundred years. Now that the monks that they were supposed to look like are gone, surely it'd only take a few generations for people to start saying, "Watch out for the dudes wearing bracers and goofy eagle hoods. They're part of a weird murder cult!"

All interpretations are valid. All interpretations should be critiqued and discussed. Yeah, post-modernism is self-defeating in the end, but that doesn't mean elements of it can't still be used to inform different perspectives on a video game. It's not zero-sum; we can criticize Civilization for having a Western bias, then you can criticize our criticism for having a Western bias, then we can all go home happy and a little more self-aware. I wouldn't be so sure. Last history class I helped teach, the most missed question on the final exam was "What nations won World War 2?" These are college freshmen, by the way.

I forgot to mention on the stream that a medieval German emperor actually was assassinated once. Philip of Swabia was killed by a disgruntled vassal, Otto VIII of Wittelsbach, who had held a five-year grudge after being denied a betrothal to one of Philip's nieces, though from contemporary reports it sounds like he suffered from severe mental illness as well. Anyway, they caught him after a year of running, chopped off his head, threw it in the Danube, and preserved the body in a barrel. Lucky for us, Sean Vanaman avoided such a fate. Good times!

So no more need for struts between sections?

You're kidding, right? I love Crusader Kings II to death and actually think it's more accessible than it looks, but the UI is hardly "sublime." Basic usability features like "embark all" are still missing after a year and the discoverability of UI elements like plots is next to nil. It's hard to see from the inside, but this game is pretty unfriendly, even compared to something like Star Wars: Rebellion. It's no Victoria, I still have nightmares about that UI, but I still wouldn't risk any newbie with it.

Alternately, http://thehistorynetwork.org/blog/category/ancient-warfare-magazine/. I'll give it a listen this weekend and get back. They have a podcast on Pyrrhus of Epirus, the treatment of whom will probably figure disproportionately in my judgment of the entire podcast.

You made a mistake, you could have just edited your post so it'd look like Twig was just enthusiastically agreeing with you.

Possibly? If you have a good Spymaster, you can send him to Scheme at the capitals of the other most powerful vassals. If you succeed, they'll be forced to join your faction and unable to quit. Beyond that, just be a cool dude and make everyone love you. Excommunicate those who won't.

Those are both good suggestions. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was the best of the series, really. Plus, like I said on the other page, if you don't want to go that far, you could at least have win conditions that aren't just about accruing different kinds of power (money, culture, science, territory). The diplomacy victory introduced in Civilization III was a good start, as is the way the culture victory can be achieved with fewer cities in Civilization V. But there's still not a victory that requires you to stay small and focus inward like the military victory requires you to get huge and focus outward. Also, it may be a pretty pointless distinction, but it's really not censorship to say, "Your cool, fun game also happens to be about some pretty shitty things." No one's saying it shouldn't be made, it's just a critique of the game as it is made.

You play much more pragmatically than me. I'm all about neat borders and controlled expansion. I'll edit this post with a screenshot of my 867 Armenia game tonight. EDIT: Here we go. The darker purple blob is me, with the lighter purple blob what remains of Byzantium, which is now ruled by my cousin. I grabbed a bunch of Muslim emirs through holy wars, then swore fealty to the Empire before the Abbasids could eat me. I inherited Georgia and grabbed Alanica and Taurica through holy wars while the Seljuk invasion gutted the Cumans, then gobbled up all of Anatolia before breaking free. Jerusalem, Syria, and the beginnings of Egypt are all since then. I reached the tipping point maybe fifty years ago, so once I conquer Egypt, it might be time for me to move on. Cool things to note? Denmark ate Sweden. England united under a Frisian adventurer, then went Christian. Lithuania holds Poland, Pomerania, and most of Rus, though it's hard to tell since it's been fighting a ten-year civil war to keep them. Same with Mauritania, which holds everything north of Ghana, west of Cyrene, and south of the Pyrenees, except for Aquitaine's few toeholds. I kinda hate how the Karlings never sort themselves out in the 867 start.

And I'm saying that the extent and manner to which Civilization abstracts certain aspects of history (but not all aspects, I think) is a little problematic in its selection and simplification, such as culture spread and how captured cities are converted over time. It's like abstracting a disaster-relief event in a game into simply dollars billed from your treasury, without even noting the lives, time, and effort that such would entail. It's a perfectly valid design choice, no one's arguing against it ever being made, but it makes for a very partial (both in terms of "incomplete" and "biased") view of history with which I'm not completely comfortable. EDIT: Oh poop, I'm redundant. Never mind! You make the point much better than me, Dasein.

Does it really even need to make that statement explicit for criticism of it to apply, though? I mean, the game is called Civilization and its tagline is "build an empire to stand the test of time." That seems pretty authoritative, whatever the point-by-point intentions of the developers are.

But China westernized in the early twentieth century. It adopted European political and economic systems, European styles of dress and entertainment, and European military organization. It is as complicit as the European powers proper in the Western imperialist narrative, though it did so itself mostly to avoid annihilation during the Scramble for China in the mid-nineteenth century. And I don't know that I agree with you about consequence, Chris. The Greek city-state of Athens, which at its absolute height ruled over just the coasts of the Aegean Sea, laid much of the basis for all of Western science and culture, despite being a mote in the eye of such massive empires as Persia, Macedon, and Rome. The massive empire of the Habsburgs was hapless against a revolt of peasants and burghers in the Netherlands, which grew in their own right into a world power with time. World War I was started over the kingdom of Serbia, with the so-called Great Powers merely reacting. It's a pernicious idea that big and powerful societies call all the shots and always get their say.

Do you ever make the push to Absolute? I always do, but I suspect that says more about me than about its utility.

Not an inaccuracy, just an unfortunate and problematic coincidence that, in a game about civilizations by white Europeans, you win by being the best civilization by white European standards. That's all I'm really saying, at least.

It was made as a flippant comment to show how the Civilization games privilege certain playstyles, but I actually think it would somewhat. I think the series made a big step forward in Civilization V by including city-states, which aren't in the game to "win," and by making smaller civs viable, at least for certain playstyles. It's a far cry from the previous installment, which I feel was a better game in general but all about bigger being better. If Civilization VI not only recognized your playstyle as legitimate but sometimes even preferable, Chris, that would go a long way towards breaking up (or at least qualifiying) the Western narrative of expansion, conquest, and profit that the previous games have presented as normative. It's still unfortunate to some extent that Civilization is a game where someone has to win, but small changes would still count for something, especially since I think we've established already that no historical game is ever going to be wholly unproblematic. Early medieval Islam, especially in Andalusia, valued knowledge more than science, per se. Scientific progress, when it happened, was seen as a refinement of existing knowledge, not the discovery of new knowledge, which was not known in the Quran and therefore somewhat blasphemous. "Innovation" is by and large an invention of the Italian Renaissance, before which time the word was unreservedly pejorative. As for expansion, I could cite some of the sub-Saharan kingdoms of Africa, which were wealthy but more interested in trading with their neighbors than conquering them, but the obvious example is China. I was really fascinated to find out recently that the Jesuits that visited during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries didn't get much out of Chinese maps of the Far East, not because they were crude or inaccurate, but because China, once unified, didn't see much point in recording anything beyond its bounds, let alone conquering it. Thus the small kingdoms of southeast Asia, the tribes of Mongolia, and the kingdoms of Korea existed for centuries more or less unmolested. Not every nation saw the need to become a world power. For some, it was even considered a step down.

Well, beyond the idea of "winning" history, which is a pretty Western idea in and of itself, there's the concept of expansion as profitable and positive, of cultural assimilation as necessary and positive, of scientific progress as inevitable and positive, of religion as an empty opiate, of national character as unitary and manifest, and so on. This is the narrative of the European powers from the Age of Exploration onward, projected onto peoples and cultures that never had these values or behaviors, yet success in the game depends on embodying them and excelling in them. It's revisionist in an innocent but unfortunate way. Don't get me wrong, I love all the Civilization games and have played the crap out of them. I'm just under no illusions that I'm playing what boils down to a nineteenth-century Western imperialist's wet dream about history, which can feel pretty gross when I'm playing as a "loser" like Mali or Khmer. Why can't I win by having the happiest people or keeping with tradition or something? Why is it always power?

Yeah, but the upshot of inaccuracies in Spec Ops: The Line is that man can survive being shot hundreds of times, maybe that violence is ineffectual. The upshot of inaccuracies in the Civilization series is that the white European experience of history is the true one. Surely you can tell the difference between those two?

I forgot to mentioned that, thanks! Yes, in a realm with High or Absolute Crown Authority, vassals already holding landed titles are passed over for succession outside the realm and vice versa.

I was going to use an analogy about the implications of using the Holocaust as a management sim to make the same point. I'm glad someone else Godwin'd instead. Paradox has a... difficult relationship with non-white and non-European historical entities -- see, for example, the situation in Sub-Saharan Africa, the art treatment of Berbers & Turks as swarthy Arabs, and the absence of Jews, all just in Crusader Kings II. They have the typical problem of not including in their games mechanics and factors that don't interest them as white male Europeans, which becomes all the more problematic the closer their games get to simulation of an entire world. But that's a different argument, albeit valid. It's not like they're making Muslim and pagan societies operate in a one-size-fits-all way that conforms by coincidence to a Christian standard, which would be more the equivalent of what Civilization does. I think the lesson here is that all historical games (or, to concede a point to sclpls, all games using history as inspiration and theme) are kinda gross, each in their own way.

That's the relationship of a lot of people with Paradox games. Honestly, I like the idea of Victoria II more than I've ever liked playing it. Still, with Crusader Kings II, you don't really need to understand the systems in full, like I've laid out above, but just roleplay. Nine times out of ten, the game's responsiveness is such that you'll do fine. The tenth time, everyone you know and love will die, though.

If the map shows certain things but not others, bigger or smaller than they really are, it's fair to critique the mapmaker, whatever his intentions.

Generally speaking, unless you have specific goals you want to achieve in a given game, you should always create duchies and hand them out to the best of your relevant vassals, otherwise you're kneecapping your prestige income, since the liege gets the same monthly prestige as the sum of all his vassals' titles. Also, most of the laws only consider the vassals immediately below you when calculating eligibility, and four dukes are easier to keep happy than ten counts. Just make sure to give them the whole duchy, with all lands and vassals, or they'll resent you for it. Hard way: fabricate claims and gobble up the kingdom up over the course of a century. Easy way: marry a daughter of the King of Scotland. If she's first, second, or third in line for the throne, which can happen if Scotland is Agnatic-Cognatic succession and without a couple male heirs, she'll have a Strong Claim, but chances are it'll be a Weak Claim, which is given to each of Scotland's other children not as high in the succession. Wait for your heir to have a son, who will inherit the Weak Claim as an uninheritable claim, then press your grandson's claim, which being a Weak Claim is only valid if a woman or child rules, unless there's a succession war going on already. Alternately, you could press your daughter-in-law's claim, if the opportunity arises, but be warned that you won't have control of your son or any children he has subsequently until you die. Either way, you're probably going to need to be smart about it. Unless you've been making bank and building like mad, Scotland will have a five thousand-man advantage over you. If England's not still a big pile of shit after the Norman Conquest (or lack thereof), it might be good to send a spare daughter their way to ensure a blind eye, if not outright aid, in your bid for the throne. If you're pious and the King of Scotland is not, maybe throw an Excommunication his way too, since vassal levies are a function of opinion. When your grandson, the heir to both your son and your daughter-in-law, comes of age, you will get her lands and they will become a de facto part of Ireland, but not de jure until the entire duchy of which the county is a part has been under your control for a hundred years and is assimilated to your crown. Until then, the de jure king, if he exists, will resent you for holding it, though probably not enough to go to war over it, unless you're particularly vulnerable. If it's a real issue, you can establish a marriage alliance with the offended power. The AI is slower to declare war on allies, regardless of relations. The more pressing concern is that, since your son is unlanded and your daughter-in-law is a count, all their children will be born into her court, educated by whomever she chooses, and married to whomever she likes. There's not really much you can do, since the AI won't let a "foreign power" educate its children except in extreme circumstances, but when your son's firstborn nears the age of sixteen, you can invite a woman you'd like him to marry to court and then betroth her to him. Fingers crossed that the kid won't be a sub-ten wonder across the board. So long as you're raising crown authority every generation until you hit High in order to switch to Primogeniture, you're fine. I prefer Harsh Taxes and No Levies from towns and churches, as well as No Taxes and Max Levies from feudal vassals, but there are some people who don't like to piss off their baron-level vassals, even though they can be safely ignored once you've got your second duchy title, and others who think you should inch up feudal taxes as high as you can, since that makes you money hand over fist. Your call, really. Sometimes I like to switch to pure Agnatic succession, because it causes less headaches with female inheritance in the long run, but changing anything makes all your vassals pissed, so I don't often get around to it.