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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27338 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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So apparently there’s some online strategy game called “Civilization VII” scheduled to be released next year (I’m not terribly interested in the entire subject of such games) and there’s an ongoing drama on Reddit and other venues due to the creators adding Harriet Tubman of all people as a playable political leader.

This rang a bell for me because I was reminded that there was some sort of political campaign a long time ago to replace president Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill with hers, because he was a slaveholder genocider racist and so on. I looked this up on Wikipedia and it seems that this has merely remained a plan so far.

Anyway, concluding that she must be some relevant figure in the US culture wars, I looked around on the SSC and Motte subreddits, plus this site, but I found that there has never been even one discussion on her so far. I looked up Askhistorians and other similar subreddits and concluded that any discussion on her life is resolutely suppressed by the mods (all dissenting comment chains get deleted basically).

Being a dissident rightist this obvious case of information suppression piqued my interest, so I looked up John Derbyshire’s website because I’ve usually followed his work. I found this rather hilarious piece of information (emphasis mine):

We have very few facts about Tubman's life and activities. Most of what people think they know comes from her own testimony, as narrated to friends after the Civil War. There are two problems there.

First problem: Tubman, who escaped from slavery in her mid-twenties, was illiterate all her life. She left no paper trail in the way of letters or diaries. Until her forties, when friends started taking down her reminiscences, we have only her word for the events of her earlier life.

This wouldn't matter so much if we didn't know she had brain problems: narcolepsy, delusions, apparently epileptic fits. Tubman acknowledged these problems, saying they were the result of a blow on the head she received in childhood. Perhaps they were; but again we only have her word for it.

Whatever the cause of the brain problems, they surely weren't Tubman's fault. They weren't my fault either, though, nor yours, nor Andrew Jackson's, and they do cast a cloud of doubt over her stories.

Second problem: Tubman's friends got Sarah Bradford, a successful fiction writer, to produce Tubman's autobiographies. This was after the Civil War, but the tradition of abolitionist propaganda, whose greatest success was of course Uncle Tom's Cabin, was still alive, and Sarah Bradford likely saw herself in that tradition, as the literary heiress of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Tubman then sank into obscurity until leftist writers of the 1930s took an interest in her as part of their general critique of U.S. society, which they compared unfavorably with the new system of justice and equality being established, according to them, in the Soviet Union.

In short, the Tubman story originated with her own unreliable recollections, and was then promulgated by people all of whom had agendas.

Harriet Tubman may have been — on the scattered evidence we have, probably was — a brave and resourceful person. Still, her story belongs much more to the realms of myth and propaganda than to history.

I found this mildly amusing. And on a scale of 1 to 10, the level of my surprise is maybe 3.

I remember learning about Tubman in middle school. Now, the textbooks probably weren't as progressive as they are now, but I clocked her as clearly a murderer. I don't know if this is now consensus, or if something else is, but the case presented to me by the text at the time was TRYING to portray her as some sort of liberator, but to me she was clearly a terrorist and murderer. And I am from a northern state. The story really never adds up aside from the homicides.

...who did Tubman murder again? I'm not that familiar with her story, but a quick skim of Wikipedia entry would indicate that if she ever directly killed anyone, it would have been within wartime context.

I'm not American, and know a limited amount about Tubman. I'm more interested in the art of mythmaking itself.

The public's reception of every currency-note-resident is colored by myth more so than historical facts. The choice to put a person on the note is an ideological statement. Does it matter if Tubman's story is fiction, if it was mean to be apocryphal anyways ? It's about what Tubman stands for, not her actual exploits. As a counter, the same argument applies for George Floyd, whose public portrayal and personal reality couldn't have been more distant. However, Tubman at her worst, was a perfectly normal person. George Floyd was a criminal and a drug addict. I endorse one, not the other. There is a difference.

I am sympathetic to oral history narratives. The culture of transmission through writing is more prominent among European (Christian) & Chinese peoples. It is no doubt a superior technology to oral history, but there are good reasons for why some groups didn't favor it. Slaves were illiterate. Indic peoples had already developed a strict culture of oral history, and had notorious tropical degradation problems. Nomadic peoples such as native Americans didn't maintain keepsakes at all, books or otherwise. Yes, their historic accounts are by definition less trustworthy. But, they aren't fictitious. The mean truthfulness of oral vs written accounts is probably pretty close, but the oral stories definitely have higher variance. The strong coupling of religion (Bible, Protestantism) with the written text, obviously accelerated the adoption of writing among the west's population like no other place. Even among the inventors of paper (Chinese), historic accounts of non-royals aren't preserved that well.

From that POV, I don't think it's fair to hold Tubman's muddled history against her. She wasn't illiterate by choice. The absence of first person written accounts shouldn't be a reason to keep her out of the currency-note.
There are other good reasons to not replace presidents with civilians, but I digress.

P.S: Every passing day, I sound more and more like a woke cultural relativist. I bet it's the contrarian in me. Now that the right is ascendant, I rush to the left's defense.

She wasn't illiterate by choice.

While a slave, yeah. But like... remaining illiterate till 91? She escaped when she was 27.

The state of her mental health probably precluded that at such an age.

Does it matter if Tubman's story is fiction, if it was mean to be apocryphal anyways ? It's about what Tubman stands for, not her actual exploits.

It absolutely does matrer, especially since there are so many other individuals whose involvement in abolition and the anti-slavery movements have much more concrete documentation. Why jump to hold up the apocryphal one?

I suspect it's the human tendency towards imagination that lets us place so much mythological importance on the unverifiable. Everyone wants to believe the heroic legend, that people existed who were larger than life itself and who did incredible things. The air of mystery may in fact be more tantalizing than the surety of reality, for some.

It's not apocryphal, it was just exaggerated by her biographer. Tubman was widely known in abolitionist circles in the 1850s and there is documentary evidence suggesting that she was involved in the Underground Railroad. That is beyond reasonable dispute. The scope and volume of her work is where the variance is between popular accounts and the accepted historical record. Tubman was interviewed for a Boston newspaper in 1863 and described nine rescue missions between 1850 and 1860 during which she helped about 70 people escape slavery. All of these trips were to the same part of Eastern Maryland where she was born, and all were family or other people she knew. Bradford later claimed 19 trips, and a magazine article estimated that she must have rescued at least 300, and thus we end up with 300 people over 19 trips, even if Tubman herself never made such a claim. Bradford did speak to Tubman, but she admits that Tubman had no recollection of some of the trips she (Bradford) was claiming and said that instead she got the information from unidentified "friends". Her activities during the war and afterward are well-documented.

You can choose not to believe Tubman, which is your prerogative, but keep in mind that the kind of first-hand account we get from her is par for the course in history. Having read her accounts, there's no reason to believe they are any more or less reliable than any other documentary evidence we have from the period. Certainly, corroboration of details would be desirable, but keep in mind that she was engaging in secret activity that had dire consequences if discovered. If we aren't willing to believe firsthand accounts without corroboration, then our evidence that the Underground Railroad existed at all is based on a rather shaky foundation. And this has implications for a lot of other things as well. We don't torch entire fields of history just because we're skeptical that people won't lie.

Shouldn’t there be, or shouldn’t there have been written evidence available of at least those 70 slaves escaping from a specific plantation? News published, notices put up, searches ordered? Diaries, journals mentioning it? Anything?

A big part of the issue with Tubman is that professional historians didn't really start taking African American History seriously until the 1970s, which was coincidentally around the same time that popular "revisionist" history started making inroads. Tubman is an interesting figure because her contributions to American history aren't unique, but her status is because she's identifiable. She's representative of a group of anonymous people who did similar things but didn't get the same profile. The upshot is that she didn't attract the same interest from historians looking to examine her life in detail. While social history, also of increased prominence since the 1970s, does look at people who aren't "great figures", it also consciously avoids trying to create them. For instance, a social history of the Underground Railroad would gather recollections from as many people as practicable and avoid placing emphasis on any one individual.

It wasn't until the early 1990s that the idea of examining the American mythos itself became the subject of serious discussion. Mystic Chords of Memory looked at how historical myth is created and how it changes over time. James Loewen isn't a historian and his work is controversial, but Lies My Teacher Told Me was a popular success and thus drew attention to the idea of heroification and raised general awareness that history isn't the pat story you got from high school textbooks. It still took another ten years before historians started looking at Tubman, and by then the process of making her into a heroic figure was complete, her life story filled with the kind of anecdotal detail that historians find suspect.

The consensus that emerged in the 2000s was basically that ther broad arc of her story is true but that some of the details have largely been either exaggerated or fabricated. She was a well-known and respected conductor on the Underground Railroad, but the number of people she helped escape was not in the hundreds but was more like 70. She did work as a nurse and spy during the Civil War. She had some kind of relationship with John Brown; she was prominent enough among the abolitionist community that she is mentioned in his writings. Bradford heavily relied on interviews with Tubman, but she also wrote to contemporary figures Tubman had mentioned for verification, and these letters survive.

I believe her participation in the Combahee Ferry raid is also pretty well supported.

I actually looked into this the other day. As it happens, Tubman was posthumously promoted to one star general last month, and her participation in that raid is given as part of the justification. Wikipedia says she lead it, linking to the website of the National Mall eyesore as a source. It says:

On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman, under the command of Union Colonel James Montgomery, became the first woman to lead a major military operation in the United States when she and 150 African American Union soldiers rescued more than 700 slaves in the Combahee Ferry Raid during the Civil War.

As its source, it links to History channel website:

Working in a series of camps in Union-held portions of South Carolina, Tubman quickly learned the lay of the land and offered her services to the army as a spy, leading a group of scouts who mapped out much of the region. Tubman’s reconnaissance work laid the foundation for one of the more daring raids of the Civil War, when she personally accompanied Union soldiers in their nighttime raid at Combahee Ferry in June 1863

So her leadership in that raid has already turned into just accompanying soldiers.

I looked at other sources talking about her promotion, like NPR and Smithsonian, both obviously very sympathetic to Tubman. They are much more careful about describing her role. NPR says she “helped guide” soldiers, which makes sense if you understand her role as a spy and a scout. Smithsonian says she “oversaw military operation”, which is close to claiming her to be leading it, but then it clarifies that she “worked with” Colonel Montgomery on it, and anyone with experience in corporate performance reviews knows that “worked with” means “been there but hasn’t actually contributed much”.

So, it seems like the Wikipedia and NMAAHC are basically full of shit when they say she led the raid, but somehow the belief that she did is widespread, apparently thanks to Wikipedia. Additionally, promoting her to Brigadier General for her military role is extremely jarring. While I think it would definitely be reasonable to posthumously grant her a military rank for her spying and scouting role, a 1 star general rank is much too high, and frankly insulting to other Civil War participants, like eg Colonel James Montgomery, who actually led the raid.

Either way, in my mind, Tubman joins the long list of diversity heroes whose actual achievements have been wildly overstated, like Ada Lovelace, or Margaret Hamilton.

All of this is really just a fancy way of them stating that she basically showed the path to the Unionist unit.

Strategy games have always had a degree of DEI in the past, usually overstating the accomplishments of various factions. Even Civ itself had cope wonders.

I don’t understand (but in some sense I obviously do) the obsession with Tubman in particular. Frederick Douglass was vastly more prominent and famous in his lifetime, especially in the prewar period. Are black women leaders really that much more valuable to DEI types than black men? It’s not like we have any black men on currency either, so why not push for Douglass or some much more universally hallowed figure like MLK?

Edit: I'll just add, although seemingly forgotten by comparison Sojourner Truth was also a black woman and actually somewhat famous and moderately known pre-war, something that can't be claimed for Tubman.

Some stats: I searched newspapers up until 1860 on chroniclingamerica and although the record is extremely limited the relative frequencies should hold. Number of mentions:

Harriet Tubman: 1

Sojourner Truth: 104

Frederick Douglass: 2003

My understanding is that Tubman's fame only shot up during/after the US Civil War, so that may not be the best finishing date.

Unlike Frederick Douglas, the median american hears the name ‘Harriet Tubman’ and goes, oh yeah, badass, helped people escape slavery. Frederick Douglas is more likely to get a literally who response because even if his contribution is important, it’s not sexy. Ditto for sojourner truth.

For an influential African American everyone has heard of, and who has mostly positive associations- try MLK(yes, yes, he wasn’t actually a good person, whatever, but the normies don’t know that anymore than they know who sojourner truth is).

Someone like MLK would fit much better as a Civ leader - he's much more obviously a political leader, and he fits a similar tradition in Civ games of giving prominent leaders of social movements a spot as Civ leaders (most notably Gandhi).

I assume they didn't choose MLK or Douglass because they're both men. If you have a black quota and a female quota, that limits your selection pool substantially.

That, and for a video game they also have to balance the type of leaders. Tubman works as a militaristic-type leader. There was a certain amount of criticism of past civ games in that most of the aggressive/warmonger type leaders came from extinct civilizations in Asia/Africa/MesoAmerica, while the financial/industrial leaders were clustered in Europe and America. The latter tend to be better leaders, and also feel more "civilized." In particular there were very few female war-type leaders.

Also, it looks like Ben Franklin is the male leader option for America alongside Tubman.

He'd definitely hit that.

I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.

That said, Civilization has always dabbled in some measure of political grandstanding. I recall reading about a minor controversy from Civilization 2 and the fact that it included a global warming mechanic back when the concept of global warming was far less accepted. That said, there is still something dispiriting about Civilization scraping the bottom of the barrel of "current year" so hard they have turned Harriet Tubman into, whatever she is in that game. I don't want to beclown myself criticizing it, because I honestly haven't kept up with the mechanics of how this new Civilization will work. That said, she probably would have had a quote attached to a tech tree upgrade (like "Emancipation" or the like) in previous games had they decided she were important enough to include over other abolitionist leaders.

Like I said, I haven't kept up. I don't know if they have 700 leaders in the game with an exhaustive and expansive coverage of even niche historical figures from around the globe. Or if they've developed a myopic focus on black hagiography and include the current year talking points to puts "The founding fathers were slave owners" above "Wrote some of the most important documents on human rights ever in history, and then fought and died establishing a free nation that lived those principles"

All that said, Civilization 7 will have 26 leaders at launch, and I guess 20 of them are known at this time. The white ones are Augustus, Benjamin Franklin, Charlemagne, Isabella, Machiavelli, Napoleon (two versions?). The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman. So I wouldn't exactly claim they've developed any sort of myopic focus on blacks.

That said, Harriet Tubman is still just goofy.

I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.

Granted we're on the same side here, but THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH.

Death stacks. Death stacks? Death stacks!

According to the complaint, the problem with this game is that it allows you to combine several units of disparate types all in one area and attack with them in the same turn.

You know what we call that in the real world? A mother fucking ARMY. In other words, it's just how things actually work.

Yeah, you know what, it is troublesome when an ARMY shows up at your door and your defenses weren't ready for one. So what are you gonna do? Prepare, or bitch about it? Here I'm imagining any great military commander of yore whining that he lost because his opponent utilized (implicitly, fake and gay) 'death stacks'. Honestly! 'March divided and fight concentrated.' This is central to warfare in the human experience.

And it's not like the game is un-self-aware about this! In fact several mechanisms exist to moderate the power of death stacks armies. For one, a much smaller defensive force can almost always hold against one in a fortified position given rough technological parity. So, again, reality. For another, multiple classes of units exist just to punish the behavior of packing too many units in too small a space. Siege weapons, early on, and later we have things like bomber squadrons. Enormous, ruinous collateral damage. Sure, put all your units on that square. Pack 'em in. See what happens.

Also, the sheer logistical challenges of actually getting all those units to one place at one time seem to go almost wholly unappreciated. It's not an easy thing to do! And concentrating your military at one point on your frontier means that a whole lot more of your land borders go undefended. Do you have the roads and railroads and bridges to get them back to defend if necessary? There's a lot of tradeoff and investment considerations here!

When we do get to aircraft, there's a whole consideration about also sending along fighter squadrons to maintain air superiority and protect your armies from enemy bombers. So now you've got firefights blazing across the sky while you try to establish forward airstrips to keep control of the heavens and avoid getting your entire army wiped out before it achieves its goals. This is GOOD. This is RIGHT. This is FUN.

Civ4's treatment of unit consolidation and movement makes vastly more sense than any later entry in the series. V was a mess in general (terrible game design mostly across the board) but what really killed it for me was the ridiculous traffic jams and archers shooting across the English Channel. I don't want a cutesy pegboard-style tiny-scale European board game-esque microcosm of tactical combat played out on the apparent scale of a continent. I want vast armies clashing! Oh, sorry, the swordsmen can't get to London because some (allied) archers are hanging out in Northumbria. What the fuck.

Anyway, the very existence of the (craven, weak, and effete) term "death stacks" fills me with disgust. Civ4 is by far the best game in the series and when the primary salient complaint about it has to do with modeling reality well and generating interesting logistical and defensive considerations, because, apparently, a bunch of losers failed to prepare adequate defenses and got caught with their pants down when a lizard-brained AI managed to show up with something resembling a coordinated assault, which was entirely foreseeable, and rage-quit in protest at their pretense of being a brilliant mastermind strategist being exposed as the comforting, but baseless schizophrenic fantasy that it was, well, I, I disagree.

Do yourself a favor and stop repeating the phrase 'death stacks'. It's unbecoming.

Based and IV-pilled.

God favours the side of the big battalions, the whole point of war should be about building a big strong army. And if size doesn't matter, it just removes a potential opportunity cost, it removes strategy from the strategy game. If I don't have to choose between universities or musketmen, what's the point?

Anyway, the Advanced Civ mod is quite good, the AI gets quite cunning tactically and strategically, they somehow made it run significantly faster too.

I don't think that people complain about army stacks in Civ IV (and earlier) because it's unrealistic, or too hard. It's because it's motherfucking boring. There's no gameplay at all there. Figure out your army composition, mash it into the other army. Yawn.

I started Civ with IV, and I still have a lot of fondness for it. I think it has a lot of soul, and they tried (and succeeded!) to capture historical details in a way that V or VI just never did. I still play it sometimes. But there's a reason that I never, ever went for domination victory in IV whereas I actually do in V and VI. It's because military sucks ass as a game mechanic without the one unit per tile system. It might be more realistic, it certainly is easier for the AI to work with, but it's way less fun and that's ultimately why people didn't like it.

There's no gameplay at all there. Figure out your army composition, mash it into the other army.

Well, again, you just elided a huge number of complicated and involved tasks and decisions under that sentence. I mean I could do this with any game, right? "Just do the correct things needed to win and then you win the game. Boring."

It's because military sucks ass as a game mechanic without the one unit per tile system.

Are you sure you're not just doing it wrong?

Well, again, you just elided a huge number of complicated and involved tasks and decisions under that sentence.

The extent to which army composition matters is pretty similar in either system. Which is to say it matters not at all versus AI (just bring more units and higher tech units and you win), and a decent bit versus humans (from what I've seen anyways, I don't play MP Civ). So I think it's perfectly fair to elide that decision tree as it isn't a differentiator. The gameplay that happens after you have an army is a differentiator, and again... there is none under the stack system.

Are you sure you're not just doing it wrong?

Pretty sure. But if you think I'm missing something crucial that would make the stack system actually fun to play, feel free to elaborate.

Speak for yourself. It is perhaps a little boring, but significantly less so than moving a hundred units one by one because they cannot occupy the same space together.

Well, obviously I am speaking for myself. ;) But I strongly disagree with your statement there. I fully admit that moving a large army in the 1UPT system is tedious. But that's a small percentage of the time spent, and the rest gives you very engaging gameplay. Whereas the old army system never gave you engaging gameplay. It's a clear upgrade in my eyes.

Honestly, if one could mod Civ IV to have the unit mechanics of the newer games that would probably be the ideal Civ for me. The stacking army system just plain sucks and it's the only serious blemish on an otherwise great game.

What of HoI's combat width?

Granted civ is too light and too historically broad to model the wax and wane of army sizes, but there is no denying that infinite concentration removes a lot of tactics about terrain and positioning.

Concentration has also waxed and waned as a valid tactic over time. You sure should be able to put a million men in a small area, but that means that they can be devastated by artillery and bombing.

Civ is just too abstract to model this. It's closer to chess than anything that actually involves armies as a meaningful concept.

Granted civ is too light and too historically broad to model the wax and wane of army sizes, but there is no denying that infinite concentration removes a lot of tactics about terrain and positioning.

I deny it. What is true is that in wars where the human player is the aggressor, there's often one decisive battle followed up by a slow roll over the now-mostly-defenseless territory. And so the tactical considerations for that battle are going to be minimized, in that they only need to be figured out once. I.e. a well-researched and -implemented invasion can accomplish a lot by choosing a favorable initial battlefield, yes.

Concentration has also waxed and waned as a valid tactic over time. You sure should be able to put a million men in a small area, but that means that they can be devastated by artillery and bombing.

Which is how Civ4 works, yes. Literally with artillery and bombing and the 'collateral damage' mechanic. Your units standing shoulder to shoulder will get absolutely shredded by AOE damage if you're not taking steps to prevent that, and first-line enemy defensive cities usually have multiple artillery units in them for this reason. Even the AI.

Civ is just too abstract to model this. It's closer to chess than anything that actually involves armies as a meaningful concept.

That's true of NuCiv, sure, but it's not true of Civ4.

I'm with you, civ4 has a ton of tactical depth to its combat system, and I get annoyed when people don't see it. I think the main problem is that a lot of new players don't like seeing their catapults die (which they usually do when used for collateral damage), so they never really figure out the 'collateral damage' system. They also seem to feel guilty about using nukes in the late game, for some reason. Notably the AI does not share that guilt, and will freely use catapults or nukes all over the place.

I do think you're not alone in missing 4, I hear that a lot but I always chalked it up to 4 being the most featureful and having insane levels of content in the base game compared to any modern release.

I was too young to dig deep into the combat so my memory of it mostly comes from the later instalments.

What I remember of 4 is that the combat was a slog in the late game because everyone had so many units you couldn't make any progress.

I guess that's actually a pretty decent portrayal of modern warfare, ironically enough.

Death stacking is a derogatory term for a common theme in GSGs and RTSes that the best strategy to beat the AI is just to have a huge blob of units that overruns one's enemy like a horde of ants eating a hot dog. The idea is that games should heavily discourage this beginner strategy. It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.

Although there's a lot of merit in what you say, microing dozens, if not hundreds of units in the late game - in a turn-based strategy game like CIV - is a huge pain in the ass. It's not fun. It may be more 'realistic', but games like EU4 and HOI4 do it better. CIV's combat usually amounts to out-producing one's enemy rather than elaborate strategic maneuvers, which is fine, but let's not pretend the IV combat system was deep or anything. It wasn't. It was the garnish on top of a city manager.

Although there's a lot of merit in what you say, microing dozens, if not hundreds of units in the late game - in a turn-based strategy game like CIV - is a huge pain in the ass.

BTW, and I mention this sincerely, there's a 'move all' button that a lot of people seem to manage to miss.

Death stacking is a derogatory term for a common theme in GSGs and RTSes that the best strategy to beat the AI is just to have a huge blob of units that overruns one's enemy like a horde of ants eating a hot dog. The idea is that games should heavily discourage this beginner strategy. It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.

Maybe I'm a scrub*, then, but that's exactly what I enjoy. I'm not a micro fan. I don't want to care about my APM. I want to build infrastructure, and then crush my opponent witb superior logistics and production.

*No maybe about it. I'm terrible at RTSs, but I love me some late game tech trees

Yeah, the complaint that IF you manage your nation well enough to invest in logistical infrastructure and research and production while hindering your opponents from doing the same, while navigating politics and making the best of the (inevitably awful) start location you rolled, and put a lot of thought into sophisticated combined-arms deployments while spinning a whole bunch of other absolutely-vital plates and taking care to avoid getting penned in and AOE-wrecked—

That IF you do all that, you're more likely to win than they are—

Well, it just doesn't strike me as credible. And neither do the people who make such a complaint. And somehow I'm sure that this is a window onto what is basically wrong with the world, and why democracy needs to be acknowledged as the hideous mistake it was.

There's something to be said on this topic about League of Legends and other games like that, but I've only a glimmer... something about stat-checks and outplay potential.

Just different genres. I for one like games where the player can end up in unrecoverable situations not due to reaction time, but poor decision-making.

Man, you occur to me as being like one of those guys who complains about 'capitalism' and then when someone tries to dig down into what you mean, it turns out you're actually just describing reality.

It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.

Well, first of all, all else being equal, isn't that exactly how it should work? And if a game were indeed that simple, and someone were still complaining about it, my analysis wouldn't be that it's a bad game, it's that either he doesn't care for it (valid) or he simply sucks at it and is whinging to cover for his wounded pride (invalid).

But this doesn't describe Civ4 at all.

A lot of things can come into play to add depth and complexity to a (realistic) system wherein, all else being equal, the side with more units wins. Including but not limited to:

  1. Terrain modifiers such as hills or forests being more defensible
  2. Penalties to, e.g., attacking amphibiously or across rivers
  3. More than one enemy such that throwing one's forces at A leaves one vulnerable to B
  4. Logistical challenges in coordinating a united attack
  5. Economic difficulties in even fielding and supplying a force above a certain size
  6. General homefield advantages favoring the defender
  7. Area of effect damage to discourage clumping
  8. Diversity of units such that some are strong or weak against certain other types
  9. Ability to specialize/promote units such that they can surprise or circumvent the dynamic from the previous item
  10. Sheer potential to tech up and field fewer superior units over more (but inferior) ones
  11. Diplomacy to allow for multiple weaker players to collectively outweigh individual stronger ones
  12. Additional layers of combat e.g. air or naval superiority which can radically shift the balance of power in the 'main' (in this case, ground) layer
  13. Espionage/intelligence systems to allow for seeing/delaying enemy deployments to counter them in time
  14. Some element of randomized results such that surprise upsets can and do occur

And you'll notice that not only does Civ4 do all of these things, but I could jump into any of those items and talk more about additional complexity within them to make it even more interesting and fun.

So, in summary, the complaint that Civ4 has a 'death stack' problem is, by your own definition, entirely invalid. Therefore I conclude that you have no basis upon which to call it a bad game, only that you personally don't care for it.

(...Or.)

Are you a Civ multiplayer person? I think that probably explains it. Civ multiplayer is just so different of a game from Civ single-player that it's impossible to talk about the subject without mentioning the elephant in the room.

I play GSG-type games as single-player experiences. (Mostly because my internet was dogshit for the longest time.) And, in my experience, the Civ AI has always been dogshit, unable to comprehend the multivariate functions of its own systems.

IT VERY WELL MAY BE TRUE that those elements are present in Civ 4. I never got to experience them properly. I concede the point that the Civ 4 combat is not as two-dimensional as my hot take would imply but the game itself does a bad job of demonstrating it for the player. EU4 also has very bad AI, but the cheating is in such a matter that it has the pretense of emulating skillful play, and not just modifiers given to the AI just because.

(Yes, I know the AI gets buffs in Paradox games. But the buffs in Civ are much, much larger comparatively, to compensate for a lack of historicity and other railroady mechanics.)

The base game of CIV is piss easy, even on Deity: the AI is too incompetent and cowardly for the job of containing the player without obviously ganging up against him. You don't need to know any of that to win single player civ (although it will make your game go faster.) But that's not even the worst part of it!

The inability of players falling behind to catch up means that in Civ games, there is an obvious winner very early on, deincentivizing participation in casual play and ensuring a negative experience for the majority of players. This is the real reason why Civ sucks. No matter how clever you are tactically and keeping all of those modifiers in mind, the bigger blob will always win. I'm not going to fight to the bitter end for days for a predestined conclusion: I'm just going to quit before the birth of Christ.

death stacks

Appreciate the rant, but I'm gonna keep using it. I think it's awesome, and my primary enjoyment of the game is overcoming all the challenges you listed above and finally assembling an unconquerable death stack that end an entire civilization before it's exhausted. Maybe it's taken on a more derogatory tone since Civ 5, but I'm taking it back god damnit! I think it sounds awesome. You might as well be telling me to stop saying "head shot".

Yeah, the stakes here are low enough that any principled objection I could (and would) make would obviously be silly.

But since I apparently felt like dying on this hill today (defensive bonus btw) I'll superciliously argue that the analog here would be 'clicking on heads' instead of 'head shot'.

In fact there are games where head shots include a lot of setup, deep thought, consideration of range and windage, etc. plus a whole bunch of skill, and conflating that with 'click on head' is inappropriate.

But clicking on heads is even more awesome! It's like you have reached such a level of zen with the game, so mastered the physics and situational awareness, that all the ephemera melted away and you are literally just clicking on heads.

I mean, I get what you mean. Coming from a person who's never played an FPS, it sounds reductive. But if master Counter-Strike 1.6 players talked about clicking on heads, I wouldn't want to play a team game against them.

Yeah, clicking on heads is fine, it's just not my thing.

Also, my thing is better.

The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman

Man, deciding to have the two black women leaders being an abolitionist and a colonising, slave-raiding queen who was also an aprocryphal serial killer is choice.

Maybe they wanted to choose Amina and had to put in Tubman in for cover?

I mean, in part, it goes to back to some things I said about "DEI" not being about diversity per se, but about raising up the most questionable unqualified people deliberately. Because they fundamentally don't believe in merit, or accomplishment at all.

Apply that to a game about historical figures, and it results in some odd choices.

You know, it's funny reading over that post I made from the distance past of August 4th.

Now if Kamala picks an absolute loser idiot white guy because she feels the need to placate white liberals, I could accept that being DEI. But it's looking like she's going to pick someone that actually brings something to the ticket, unlike she did in 2020. Most likely counting on Josh Shapiro to deliver PA's electoral votes.

Yeah, I guess Tim Waltz was a DEI pick.

See also- beauty pageant winners. There are black women who’ve won legitimately(miss France, for example), but there’s also a cavalcade of troons and landwhales who get DEI boosted to the top spot. For some reason, the wokes are way more excited about the latter.

There are black women who’ve won legitimately(miss France, for example)

Bad example. Oldest miss france ever at 34. She finished first runner up of her departement fourteen years ago. So during a time where most women lose attractiveness, she managed to raise hers from regional contender level to national champion. And they just changed rules to allow women over 24, as well as married women or mothers, to participate. The rule change by itself is fine, but obviously it's just a way to put 'inspiring' 50 year old women up there 'with the most difficult job in the world'. Whatever, beauty contests are stupid anyway, they just got considerably stupider now that they're ugly.

I mean, in part, it goes to back to some things I said about "DEI" not being about diversity per se, but about raising up the most questionable unqualified people deliberately. Because they fundamentally don't believe in merit, or accomplishment at all.

I have been thinking of it more and more as a vastly less consequential form of a third world country just grabbing all of the farmland or positions on the grounds that the privileged stole it and things will run just fine when others are given their chance. Except we're redistributing glory instead of material assets. Which makes sense given the sort of person interested in this sort of thing.

At least when it goes wrong no one starves or gets shot.

I do disagree with you on Harris though. I think there was just no one else Biden could have picked that fit the demographic criteria he decided he wanted. It's not "deliberately pick the worst person" it's "set up criteria you can't meet given the number of qualified candidates in that class then shoehorn whoever you have into the niche"

As for Walz, they really did seem to believe that a "weird" lying sitcom dad was positive masculinity. That and Shapiro was apparently not as deferential as they wanted. (Which makes sense; if you're jumping on a sinking ship you should be compensated for the risk. All of the celebrities were)

I think not choosing Shapiro made sense. You don't want the VP overshadowing the presidential candidate. His speech and presence would tower over Harris like the Colossus. The fact that he copies Obama's speaking style would only make him better liked by Democrats.

There’s pretty good circumstantial evidence that Shapiro covered up a murder that his friend committed. Picking him would have been an absolute time bomb for both the campaign and Shapiro himself.

Except we're redistributing glory instead of material assets. Which makes sense given the sort of person interested in this sort of thing.

At least when it goes wrong no one starves or gets shot.

Citation needed. I'd argue misaligning our culture is even more damaging than naked redistribution of assets. At least that can theoretically be undone. A population demoralized by propaganda seems to just commit slow suicide. When Stalin caused a famine in Ukraine, they didn't stop existing. We'll see how Ukraine fairs now that they've fed the flower of their nation into the meatgrinder of war, and NATO nations will probably flood them with 3rd worlders to get their GDP up and pay back all the money they've borrowed.

Things like the fertility crisis that make it harder to bounce back (and act as a justification for migration) seem to predate people lying about black women inventing telescopes.

I was just at the African American history museum recently. My mother recently published a paper on the graves, names, and locations of slaves that our ancestors owned.

I bring those both up just to say that in my observation there is a large amount of myth and uncertainty even in things that feel like recent history.

Even internet history is convoluted and difficult to untangle. And we often have all the logs and evidence available!

Harriet Tubman's general exploits seem plausible. There were almost certainly former slaves that worked in semi clandestine roles to ferry other escaped slaves up north. There were almost certainly stories of harrowing close calls. We know for certain there was an "underground railroad" for those escaped slaves, or at least as certain as we can be about these things (maybe a bunch of people all lied convincingly in a similar way).

It also seems like she isn't a very trustworthy narrator. She probably lied about her personal role or took on the stories of others she had heard from. Or maybe she under embellished and the truth is crazier than the stories we got. History sometimes has some off the wall weird shit happening.

I'm not entirely sure how much it matters. Even prominent placement in a video game seems underwhelming. Those leader portraits can and are replaced by game mods. I'm almost certain there are mods that switch out the German leader for Hitler.

Most importantly of all, stick with Civ 4. It's the best in the series, and the peak of the genre. We need more autists like the dwarf fortress guys making video games. Work on the same thing for twenty years and retain all creative control within a family sized social unit. If it was them making the civ game they would have just encoded a whole leadership class that represented Tubman and stuck a random name generator on top of it. We wouldn't have this silly controversy, and more importantly no one without an extreme interest in the game would even be able to articulate a culture war critique of how it was handled.

I've been a big fan of the Civ series since buying the Civ II disks at Kmart in 1996. I'm somewhat up to date on the Leader drama, and I haven't really seen much about Tubman tbh. There has been Leader choice drama since the first Civ forum (Civ Fanatics) was made in like 2002 or so. Most of it is international, and less about which leaders are chosen and more about which nations are included. The fan groups for Korea and Poland both launched aggressive, decade long campaigns to get included, which were successful. Both also got female leaders who were minor characters from their nation's histories with very little good information about their actual lives. Tubman at least lived in the moden era.

Hot take, Civ rankings from best to worst imo. 4 - 6 - 2 - 5 - 3 (I never played 1) . Honorable mention to Colonization II, which is built on the Civ 4 engine. Alpha Centari (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

The biggest thing going for Civ 4 that makes me (any many, many others) consider it the best was the incredible freedom for modders to alter the game. Vanilla out of the box Civ 4 was mid, the mod community was amazing. Civ 5 changed a great deal about how the game worked, a significant overhaul of the underlying mechanics that turned a lot of people off. Civ 6 addressed many of the problems with 5, while bringing back a lot of the modding freedoms of 4. 3 was a buggy disaster with the main challenge coming from the AI acting in ways that were largely considered cheating by the players, ie. the AI opponents always had perfect knowledge of the entire game world that its decisions were based on, and very limited modding.

never played civ 1

I'd recommend giving it a try sometime. First because its such an iconic piece of gaming history, and its amazing they managed to include so much and get it right on the first try. But even today, it holds up.

Its very simple and streamlined, compared to later civ games. There's a quirky charm to its simple cartoon graphics. Theres no "filler", so you can play a full game reasonably quickly.

And the combat! Its highly random, just a single dice roll based on the stats. A tank (attack 10) vs a spear (defense 2) has a 1 in 6 chance to lose, even without any defendive bonuses. And if you lose on defense, you lose everything. This leads to wild fluctuations back and forth, so you have to be flexible and adjust on the fly. It also means that the technologically inferior civ still has a good chance to catch up and win, whereas the later games are something of a foregone conclusion once someone gets a solid tech lead.

edit- now that i think about it, a lot of the stuff they added in civ2 really broke the balance of civ1. The harbor makes ocean tiles way too strong, and being able to negoiate with barbarians and other civs makes your undefended cities way too easy to defend. Throw in the pikemen to deter early mounted aggression, and the ridiculous power of Mike's Cathedral in civ2 to deter unhappiness, and it's just way too easy to expand in civ2. civ1 has a much better balance between economy and warfare.

Alpha Centauri (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

Its story holds up better than its mechanics, the exploitability of which limits the replay value. But I'd still give it more than a "pretty good".

Civ IV wasn't just about the mods. It was also that the developers were bold enough to include things like slavery and religions in a way that had some real mechanical meat. Made you think, as the player, without preaching at you.

3 was a buggy disaster with the main challenge coming from the AI acting in ways that were largely considered cheating by the players, ie. the AI opponents always had perfect knowledge of the entire game world that its decisions were based on, and very limited modding.

Of the limited mods, though, 3 does have a very enjoyable LoTR mod, if you just want a 4x LoTR game. Which I often do, and have yet to find a good game/mod equivalent.

There has been Leader choice drama since the first Civ forum (Civ Fanatics) was made in like 2002 or so.

The first major Civ forum was Apolyton, established in 1998, which used to be considerably bigger than CivFanatics until it started dying sometime after mid-00s (around that time I also stopped participating, incidentally). Fond memories of that forum, including first encounters with a very smart teenager who later established a moderately successful blog.

Alpha Centari (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

Very good! But, bad replay value. And I still don't know why we haven't had a remake.

It's been a long time for me, but IIRC there was only the one map, and no real functionality for good random maps. So, same map, same factions, same locations every time. Is very limiting.

I believe AC had randomized maps?

Like I said it's been a long time but iirc the random maps were non workable for some reason.

Like maybe there was functionality that only worked on the default map.

What do you mean bad replay value, I've been playing it for 25 years

The vibes are great, the mechanics are deep, the controls and discoverability were dogshit. Or maybe I'm just too zoomer brained.

No, I'm a millennial and ideal target audience for SMAC and played the hell out of it when it dropped, but when attempting to replay it, I just can't get over how ass the graphics and controls are by modern standards.

They made one (or at least, a spiritual sequel). It was rubbish.

I mean, there was Sid Meier's Beyond Earth.

It was OK I guess.

I really wish we had the level of UI accessibility of that game combined with the deep mechanics and settings of alpha centauri. Friends have played beyond earth with me, nobody wants to play alpha centauri.

I will risk drama and say that I enjoyed V and VI more than IV.

IV just has too much that doesn't work that well in hindsight - in particular, IV has really bad and tedious combat.

The key element in IV that makes it work is how smooth industrialization feels. There’s not just two or three key techs that unlock massive growth. Almost every single advance between printing press and electricity gives a tiny productivity advantage too small to notice individually, but each one compounds all of the others. Nothing before or since has quite matched it in terms of aesthetics of play.

This is completely idiotic. If they wanted a black person who freed slaves and was actually a real leader they should have used Nat Turner instead. But we live in a fallen world and so have to deal with this BS...

Did they ever do Toussaint Louverture? He seems like an obvious pick. I'd take Frederick Douglass over Nat Turner--just a personal preference. Imagine John Brown, though. He'd be like, "Year 1: where are the nukes?" Tubman is a goofy choice; fake, lame and gay.

Toussaint L'ouverture was Haitian rather than American so that probably disqualifies him from leading the USA. John Brown would be amazing. That famous painting of him always reminds me of Moses coming down from mount Sinai preaching the right way to live to his people with the way Brown's holding the book resembling the tablets that Moses had.

How many people has his rebellion liberated?

The relevant fact is that Turner was provably the real leader of a real slave rebellion.

4X games audience is roughly split in two parts - people that have no fucking idea who Harriet Tubman is (every person outside of the US) and people that don't want to play as her. I don't know why the AAA games studios want to go the way of Hollywood to the rock bottom before reversing course. Disney removes trans storylines from upcoming projects. It is best if you learn from other's mistakes.

More suitable people for US leaders than Tubman - Barrack Obama, Colin Powel, Dennis Rodman ...

Yes, if an additional data point is needed, I had never heard of Tubman before there was some culture war nonsense about putting her face on money.

My opinion is that she seems like a silly, politics-driven addition to VII. I don't necessarily insist that leaders in Civ games always have formally occupied the office of head of state or what have you, but I do think that leaders in Civ should be people who can be meaningfully said to have been the leader of their civilisation. Gandhi was never prime minister of India, but he can be reasonably said to have been the leader of the Indian people in his time.

There's clearly no sense in which you could say that Harriet Tubman was ever the leader of the United States. She'd be fine as a Great Person in Civ, but... leader? No. That's silly.

I think like most AAA games, they want something easy enough that you don’t have to know anything about the mechanics or the strategy to win. The reason for the Hollywood stuff is exactly that, it’s designed to be an idle game where people pretend to be world leaders while also not having to learn to actually build or run an empire. Why not aim for the casual crowd with the appropriate heroes that they can girl boss with? They’re playing Barbie’s magic empire adventure, and putting out a cute hero for the casuals? Besides which there really aren’t enough hardcore players who want strategy games and would consider “Civilization” a good sim to bother catering to. Gaming has become TV.

Most people who would want to play a game like this would better power game by playing with, or against Washington than Tubman.

You don't have to be hardcore gamer to prefer more suitable historical figures. Part of the appeal of a game like civilization and it was more so with civ 4, was to see civilizations represented by those larger than life leaders that actually are identified with the civilization.

I don't agree that they succeed in appealing to more people by having Tubman as a leader. They are promoting based on their own politics, or pandering to video journalists or others with influence who want to push this. Rather than reasonably expecting to make more money, they probably think they can get away with some amount of woke pandering that they want to do because of their ideology, even if it does result in backlash. To be fair maybe there are people involved with such projects who do claim either as true believers, or pretextually, that this will bring more sales and others are unwilling to counter them.

In line with contemporary trends in feminist and Afrocentrist historical revisionism. The logic of today is no longer starting with some great achievement such as winning a war (like Stalin and FDR), enacting positive reforms (like emperor Meiji), or unifying an area (like Wang Kon or Lincoln) and discovering the Great Man actually responsible. No, it is searching for Africans and women, no matter how insigificant or incompetent, and inflating their every action. This is how a person whose sole accomplishment is freeing a couple of dozen of slaves leads a country of as great military, cultural, and economic importance as the US.

Tubman didn't help found the USA, didn't help it win any war, didn't lead any movement. She was like an officer in an army, being only the choice of means in limited capacity to accomplish what others had determined.

This strange racial outgroup bias, as most historians scouring history for Africans to elevate aren't Black, is sometimes taken to the absurd as seen by the oeuvre of an English teacher who identifies as a historian.

While texts he has written are by historians of the country where he managed to find an African treated as historical fiction novels, by those unable to read languages other than English he is considered to be a reliable source.

At least with Tubman an American unwilling to learn another language or use Google Translate or Deepl can read the primary sources for himself, and see what Tubman did. But if the life of an African in a country which doesn't use English is distorted, such a monolingual will most likely fall victim to the avaliability bias, and trust the persceptive of English-speaking hstorians, no matter how poor their knowledge of relevant languages is, and thus how poor their knowledge of primary sources.

I think what you're saying is you want to see Joseph Kony in Civ VIII.

I should get around to upgrading to civ 3 one of these days. Seems like most of these long running game series peaked at 2 (age of empires, star control) or 3 (homm, arguably, although I still like 2 better)

I also vote for 4 as the pinnacle of the older style of Civ (stacking units, quadratic tiles), especially with various mods, many of both overhaul and rebalancing ones are great.

5 imo worth trying out as well for the newer style (non-stacking units, hexagonal tiles), again there are lots of (but much less than 4) nice mods. There is also a very well made fully free(!, no ads, nothing!) mobile version called unciv.

Props to 5 for Venice, which is just catnip for people who love building tall.

The NQ Mod and balance stuff from the community patch has Civ5 in a good place for multiplayer.

I am the resident Civ 5 multiplayer expert, so if people are interested the links to the most recent multiplayer map/mod versions are always here.

Having played all of them, 4 is the absolute pinnacle of the series, especially with the “beyond the sword” expansion pack. I fire up a marathon campaign on a huge terra map (which has all the civs on one Eurasia style continent but leaves at least one continent unoccupied except for Barbarians) every single year, and it’s usually a 40hr investment or so. Been playing it basically since it came out in ‘05

Yeah I also play biggest map/marathon and find it sad that so little theory has been written on that playstyle. It's the only thing that even remotely captures the vibe of Civ2 which I loved so well.

There is (or was in the past) a BetterAI mod who made the AI a bit more capable. In CIV 5 and 6 war is a snorefest, as moving many units with the new one-unit-per-tile is cumbersome, and the AI doesn't understand tactics. Multiplayer is okayish in CIV 6 though.

There is a fan overhaul mod called Vox Populi, that for my money, makes Civ5 the best in the series. I started with Civ way back in Civ 2 and have played them all, including Civ6. I highly recommend it. Its main focus is improved AI play and i think they accomplished their goal and made it much more replay friendly. Once you "solve" civ on Diety the game gets quite boring.

I've never played above King, mostly because I value my time, but also because I'm not the best player and would be cheating and reloading every other turn. What do you mean by "solve" at Deity? what's the trick?

What do you mean by "solve" at Deity? what's the trick?

Pick bablyon / korea / poland. The strat is tall + science. Get 3 to 4 cities ASAP. Trade resources to get gold per turn to buy settlers. Get a few workers out, then library in each city. You should have national college in your capital before turn 100. Your early game army should be compound bow. Tech tree wise you are basically just going for the science techs (library, university, public schools), and secondarily growth techs (for more pops and therefore science). You should overtake the AI in tech around the industrial age.

The problem is that this is very boring, there is basically only one way to win. All games on Diety start out the same way, see above. There is no building wonders, no early aggression (unless cheesing), no culture or religion. All game mechanics are ignored except for science maxing. There is an optimal way to play, and its also the only way you can win on Diety. So its boring, there is no player choice, even they tech tree path and order you take is more or less decided before the game starts. Same with army: you will go archer -> compound bow -> xbow -> gatling gun and then bombers. If you don't, you will die. It also relies on the AI being dumb and the player easily cheesing them (trading early res for gold, predictable diplomacy, total inability to fight on water).

Also some starts are mega OP and can decide the game for you - salt + plains is OP, jungle + luxury a restart.

To be pedantic it’s ‘deity’.

‘Diety’ is when the difficulty is so high you’re losing weight from stress :P

I think I first learned about her when I was about 9 years old (American public school). They present her as fact, just like everything else in history class, so we all just kind of went along with it, which was often um... less than perfectly factual. As I got older I learned a more nuanced/mature view about the other famous American historical figures. But Tubman just sort of... never came up again in school, so I never really thought about her much until recently. Like you said she really isn't a major figure in our history, so there's no reason to think about her much except as an inspirational figure and culture war talking point.

As a long time civ fan I... don't love the choice, but don't hate it either. The problem with a history-themed game is there's only so many famous leaders to choose from, and the obvious ones like Washington/Lincoln have been done to death. If you want non-white woman as an American historical leader you have to really stretch to find someone who counts. I'm just glad they didn't try to shoehorn in a modern figure like Rosa Parks or Kamala Harris.

When they made civ2 back in the 90s, it was a much simpler game, so they could easily add in tons of leaders. They made the decision that every single civ should have 1 male and 1 female leader, which made for some odd inclusions. For America it was Eleanor Roosevelt. For most of the other civs it was either "the male leader's wife" or "a mythological/religious figure who probably never existed in real life."

As a game they should just do the ultrafictionalized portrayals of ahistorical figures. In Civ Alexander rubs shoulders with Cleopatra and Gilgamesh and whatever other big name just like its right out of Fate Grand Order. In the same vein Civ should not be beholden to true existence or even semirealistic representation. The Japanese turned King Arthur into 6 different versions of big titted blondes, Sid Meier can genderbend MLK into a beyonce lookalike.

That should be left to the Chinese, that's what they do with their unholy Genshin mods for EU4, they just throw down 124 Genshin wonders into a formerly historical game: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3213222906

Lancer Arthur >>>>>> Saber Arthur

Hey, most of the versions of King Arthur in Fate are not big-titted. Saber was introduced in the original F/SN visual novel with a mumbo jumbo explanation of why she was the same age as the teenage protagonist. So most versions in the game are teenage and not adult. Visually, the teenage versions are distinguished by not being big-titted.

I will not tolerate this slander against the sacred numbers. The grand repository of interpersonal relationships curated by the loyal stewarts of pixiv and nhentai have assured me that Arthur and Modred and (insert saberface variation n) all are glorious vanguards with terminal weaknesses against phalli of any sort, especially goblin or orcs or black men (which is its own pathology to be unpacked at another thread). Work that into the Civ 6 leader bonus table, Firaxis.

Thomas Jefferson as the American leader, expect it is this Thomas Jefferson.

I don't think I mind the mythologizing all that much. There were a lot of brave people who helped slaves before and during the civil war, they deserve credit. As long as it's directionally true (Harriet Tubman did actually help slaves), I don't mind her being a stand-in for the credit that they deserve.

What I do object to is attempts to elevate her beyond that, especially in the role of a political leader, which she was not. Andrew Jackson was the President of the United States. He's on our money because we put Presidents on money (And Benjamin Franklin, because he was important in founding the nation). All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers, because you as the player are making the decisions controlling your nation. Harriet Tubman was not. Every single thing she said could be true and she still wouldn't belong on money or in Civ because, despite being a good person, she wasn't actually a political leader. It's a category error.

All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers

This used to be true but wasn't for VI. They had more than one leader who was not a ruler, nor even a real leader of their people (like Gandhi could be argued). Catherine de Medici was the leader for France, for example, which was very controversial at the time (and I still think was bullshit that they made her a leader).

He's on our money because we put Presidents on money (And Benjamin Franklin, because he was important in founding the nation).

And Alexander Hamilton, who was also never president.

He was first Secretary of the Treasury, among his other accomplishments, so the connection with US money is clear.

Right, obviously. Just pointing out that Franklin isn’t the only non-president on U.S. currency.

All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers

Gandhi (Indian leader as far back as Civ 1) wasn't, and as said elsewhere, Civ 2 included a lot of optional leaders that didn't actually lead their countries or actually even exist.

Ultimately the leaders as representation fails to accommodate their specific (a?)historical perculiarities, instead treating the leaders as avatars of national aspects.

In that vein, I still long for a true age of mythology style approach to a 4X game. Use regional gods and regional aspects as socionational representations, and go ham with it. I want Arminius channeling Wodans +10 Black Forest ambush rolls in his rebellion against Bismarck seizing the +6 cultural stability bonus of King Of Franks from Charlemange who needs that bonus in the campaign against Nelsons +4 global naval bonus. That'll be absolute tits and be much richer than the giggles of seeing Gandhi roflstomp Elizabeth.

100% up for this. Preferably with a small lore button on the tooltips so you can read more if interested.

Well, neither was Stalin until 1946.

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