Civ 7 is just a Western colonist cosplaying as other civs
Really weirds me out that no matter who you play as, Spices and Sugar etc. are considered exotic.
Even if you play as a civ that historically would start near sugar or spice, for example Indonesia, you are forced to experience the world as if that were just not true. What happened to historically accurate civ start biases?
Makes the whole experience feel like you are a western colonist who has put on the costume of another culture.
The choice to make distant lands mechanics allow other civs to start there but not human players makes the whole experience lopsided and feels way less like you are on even footing with other civs in an open world map, and more like you as a human have a special role in this world of AIs who get special spawns and are entirely excluded from certain win conditions.
Really bad game design
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Redditor bitching aside, it's an interesting thing about the games.
They are actually quite western-centric despite the whole diverse civilizations thing. Game Eras like Renaissance or Exploration era were not experienced by non-European nations (well, not experienced in the same way). The same goes for technologies, you discover wheel with civilizations that never experience such advanced stuff, you discover castles, you sail on frigates.
No matter how many obscure black women leaders they can dig up, at the core the game says that alternative ways of being do not exists, only Western way of doing things can last the test of time.
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Ok fine play as a historically accurate african kingdom.
Heres your economic tech tree
Fire --> wheel --> Mud hut
And your discovery technologies
Hollow log to swim in --> a few logs bound together to form a raft
But hey at least you get pepper!
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Pepper -> Lawry's seasoned salt
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—> old bay
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-> crack
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If it's sub-saharan africa, you don't even get the wheel
the exclusive child soldier infrantry unit is pretty GOAT'd though
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You don't get the wheel, but you do get the tire as a weapon
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That must be that black negro magic they talk about...
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Something something necklacing, didn't know how to make the joke
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Oh no i got it and enjoyed the joke
, i just went for the low-hanging reply
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WE WUZ ROLLIN WIT SPINNIN 24s N SHEEIIT
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I think near-future tech is fine to add as well
Cumskin civilisations can get energy-positive nuclear fusion plants in exchange
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Shaka Zulu should be getting Impi spearmen right about the time European countries are inventing railroads if we want historical accuracy.
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You fricking imbeciles. How many times do I need to point this out? The wheel was not that useful in most places until recently. Your lily white ancestors in northern Europe (oh wait, who am I kidding, you're racist so you're probably half-Samoan/half-Gypsies, so my white ancestors) didn't get much use out of the wheel until around the 1700s. Have any of you strags ever bothered to go outside on a rainy day and look at the dirt?
If the wheel is so important and such a great display of intelligence, then
@sandkwinn is like 3000+ years ahead of everyone else here. And even I can't simp that hard.
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Obviously wheels aren't very useful on there own, but you don't need to climb very high up the tech tree to make them useful. North europe is well established to have been a backwater until very recently. "we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture" etc
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Umm... no. This wasn't a matter of people needing to "climb up the tech tree". (The entire concept of a "tech tree" is from Civ 1 btw.) It has way more to do with population density and productivity. People just weren't making a lot of stuff until around the 1700s when northern Europe very quickly gets roads, canals, and railroads in a couple generations.
By around the late 1500s Northern Europe was clearly not just the richest part of the world, but the place where you would get anything done if you wanted to be making moves on the street. Look at the Spanish Armada. Medina Sedonia kept saying not to try it because even Spain couldn't match the guns of England at that time. Look what the Dutch were doing all over the world: Indonesia, Brazil, Suriname, Curacao, New York, the Baltic, raiding up the Thames River, even goddarn Taiwan. They were doing all that while fighting off the Hapsburgs, a global empire, the greatest ever known to man. So no, this was the least backwater place on the Earth.
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So what's your point, you think they didn't have wheels in the 1500s? Some places aren't accessible by boat and a horse can only carry so much on its back.
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Netherlands, East Anglia, the rivers in northern France, Italy, the good parts of the Baltic, certain parts of China... these were all accessible by canal boat. Really makes you fricking wonder why this is where civilization took its next jump forward.
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So you don't have a point, your just being an annoying sperg. Jolly good
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Maybe the smart ones migrated out of Africa to more productive lands. The theory is that Africa had such abundant food that tribes could live off of that they never developed, but still the life was extremely difficult and dangerous
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This is the kind of thing where if I suggested it when I was 8 years old I would have been left frying in a hot car until my dad made sure I realized the obvious logical fallacy here: How did they get drawn to these other, more temperate regions? How did they they know that eventually there would be more food there?
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Idk why did the Vikings leave Europe and make settlements in barren Greenland and why did natives cross the bearing strait? Competition, ego, power, natural male curiosity to explore new stuff, etc
in canada we have every sort of immigrant and you never see black people exploring trails or skiing and going out of the city. Ive see plenty of asians and Indians going into the northern nature areas. Black (and arabs to a degree) seem to like their isolated urban settlements and have little interest in stuff outside that world. Maybe it's cultural or genetic selection from their history
But I'm very neutral on the race question, I lean heavily on long running culture and historical environments.
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Calm down grandpa. I was referring to historical accuracy of a video-game, not the real world historical importance of the technology.
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Surprisingly r-slurred take from a historycel.
Rome could build roads where you would 100% find use for wheels and Rome was like a thousand or more years old at that time.
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so you admit other cultures never invented the wheel?
also lol, what an ignorant statement
trans lives matter
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It was invented all the times all over the world, r-slur. Look at the US Army OOB in 1942. There's entire divisions that use pack animals instead of the wheel. Is that because America was a primitive country that couldn't build cars?
Look at the 101st Airborne in the 1960s. They could haul all their stuff (including nuclear weapons) around by air. Is that because they "never invented the wheel" or because found a better way to?
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The amount of force needed to pull something is significantly lesser if you got wheel. Everyone has to pull things.
Simple as'
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Have you ever had to deal with mud? Any time? Any time in your goddarn life the rain came down?
So no, in most situations if there isn't a road you're better off with feet.
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Wrong! I was getting rad air on my bmx in the mud all the time as a kid.
(you on the left)
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I don't think that's historically accurate.
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Even stone age tribals living in the amazon bassin built roads lmao.
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did they make pullies and mills before good roads?
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I like most (or at least many) of your takes, but this is...
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Cope aside. Sometimes things are created because they're useful, sometimes things need to be created before they can become useful. Lasers were useless when first invented, and are now extremely important.
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That's an incredibly r-slurred example to use. Lasers were invented in the 1960s, in the 1970s we had the Copperhead artillery round. We had Paveway. It was immediately obviously what their practical use was. Gyroscopes. All kinds of stuff.
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R-slur.
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/284158_townes.html
Also, how many hundreds or thousands of years behind were these primitive civilization compared to the West?
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This must have seemed astonishing to women, but any red-blooded man when he finds a laser, his first instinct is to use it in targeting artillery fire or dropping bombs.
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ummm sweaty is the cradle of civilization a joke 2u??
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Um, the people of the Fertile Crescent were all white until the Muslims made them all brown, r-slur.
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weak b8, many iraqis including me still have fair skin
we are arabized, not ethnically arabs 
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You're probably not lying
, as Iraqis have not too dissimilar genetics to Greeks. But I need a hand dox to be sure.
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why would I be lying? I'm far from palest iraqi, there's even some who are fully ginger https://rdrama.net/post/59651/i-need-a-lobotomy-case-study
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If you think gears are only useful in the right terrain then I don't know what to tell you
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I used to live on uneven stony terrain and wheelbarrows had to have HUGE rubber wheels to not be useless
that fricker was always getting stuck, my pull wagon with 4 wheels was always getting stuck... worse than the stones was the sinking mud that eats wheels and shoes
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You think you'd just be gliding along because you're that smart.
Do you even know how they made wheelbarrows, dipshit? They would take a big iron ring, get it glowing hot, then cool it off in the pond so it closed up on the wooden wheel. They were still doing that in France into the 1900s. That's your idea of advanced civilization? No, they didn't need rubber, because they weren't going anywhere.
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Uhhhh... fill me in. How else did they make wheels in 1900s France?
You can point and stuff but you just like a eurotrash cute twink with no leg to stand on when you do this.
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That's just the truth though
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Some chinaman archaeologist is going to laugh at you saying this when he digs up your hard drive in 2525 AD.
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Go keep yourself safe for sidevoting me I didn't even read what you said
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You're just butthurt because Brazil wasn't included as one of the great civilizations in the original game. Admit it.
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Go keep yourself safe for sidevoting me I didn't even read what you said
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Okay, maybe this will make you happy.
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Not sure what prompted this I am going to imagine you are drunk
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Are you that desperate?
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If he can recover shit off our HDs in 500 years he's welcome to read every dumb joke about a computer game he wants.
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Of course they're European centric, they're called 'civilisation', the thing we invented. If it was called 'eating dirt and sand for 4000000 years' I'd expect a more African centred experience.
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Civ 8 will be more accurate.
The western nations will get a tech tree, and the other nations get to exist in their village.
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Whoa let's not get crazy here.
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Only relevant IRL nations went through that stuff. Playing a Native American civ is basically just fantasy, since you are already well beyond their real life capability when you research writing. Especially since you aren't being conquered by literates with blue water fleets and guns to do so.
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imagine the seething THAT game would generate
discover:
fire, flint arrows, tanning leather
then:
wait for white man
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Sequoyah did a good job rushing Writing research once he learned of the invention from other Civs
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You know what they say: better 4000-5000 years late than never!
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You should be able to make choices like going for fork or chopstick technology
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Going with Chopsticks allows you to eat/farm "inedible" wildlife and bugs, the fork leads to industrial farming.
Man you could make so much fun designs and varied choices if you were just willing to chud out as a dev....
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western colonization was actually quite kind, don't look at eastern colonization
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Eastern colonization was better until the 1930s.
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Which is what is mega fake and straight about games like EU 4, especially post vanilla. Every civ is just a new skin slapped on a European base
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Yeah, the earlier games I thought it was a little bit inaccurate and even offensive to have rules like "Muslims can't research new technologies". There's maybe some grain of truth to that, but it always seemed to me like a really cheap way of cheating, to make history go the way you want without actually modelling it.
The modern games where everyone is just the same, I find this about 10x more offensive. It insults the memories of people in these cultures who fought for progress.
Also I like how they made northern European Protestants smarter than everyone else.
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black people inventing the wheel? Woke has gone too far!
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The only civs should be european, everyone else is reskinned barbs
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Civ IV you had new world mode. There was continent only inhabited by barbarians that you could colonize.
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well yeah that's bc we're the best duh
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Despite their wishes to be less Eurocentric, they will not succeed until they switch their thinking around.
All of their arguments and grievances revolves around the Western World, but it is worse because they are unaware of it.
All of those r-slurs should just quit and have people who just want to make good games to work on it.
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Imagine the sneed if they locked all technology to "exotic trickonology" if you tried to invent anything outside Europe
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Victoria 2 effectively did this with westernisation. You were locked out of the entire tech tree until you westernised.
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I didn't like how that was just an on/off switch. What I wanted to play in that era was Iran. Big country, long long history of civilization, lots of potential. But then at some point the game asks if you want to stay as a third world shithole run by spineless Qajar r-slurs or just magically turn into a European country on the level of Italy overnight. I don't want either. I want a challenge but not an insane one.
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Turkeys another good example of lost potential
Maybe Egypt if they didn't have an Arab population disruption by Malmuks and other invaders
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Turkey: I think has always had this kind of love-hate relationship with being civilized. Do we identify as the Romans, Persians, etc. or as the noble savage barbarians on their borders? So they're either very hit or miss.
Also everyone who's ruled Iran for about the last 500 years has been ethnically Turkic. Nobody likes to talk about that. You didn't think the Shah was Persian did you?
I'm not just saying this to slobber on Aevann's balls, I do that enough already. Egypt would be a really interesting choice if we're starting in, what is it, 1830? It was ground zero for Arab and Islamic culture for the whole planet without selling out, it was rapidly modernizing, they made it like halfway to Istanbul to overthrow the whole empire, but they probably got cockblocked by Britain or somebody. You could make an interesting civilization out of Egypt + the Levant + maybe Greece.
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Eu4 did this somewhat better with institutions, where the (early) modern world is broken down into a lot of systems and ideas that didn't appear all at once.
That said I don't mind Victoria 2's westernisation mechanic, it's unabashedly a game about victorian imperialism

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It's okay for a game to be about something. We don't get mad at Pirates! because it doesn't accurately portray how 1600s Caribbean trade routes worked.
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The advantage of the westernisation mechanic was it kept uncivs sticking to what they did in actual history but it made playing the majority of them a chore. Victoria 3 tries to go down the institution route but even when liberalisation is difficult no nation is that far behind in technology to not be able to catch up fairly easily.
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And africa's most important resource is slaves LMAO
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That's something Victoria 3 did better. No westernization so you can stay a semi feudal kingdom as long as you want and still industrialize but you don't gain in tech so quickly because your population is a bunch of starving illiterates until you start to use fertilizer and build schools.
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/u/Nindo_99 muhammad will colonize your cute twinky butt
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As if. Firaxis would never releast Colonization nowadays (even though it kicks butt)

It might also give people weird ideas like how you can just kill your way out of a 50% tax rate
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Civ is the game where I went "You know what, maybe Genghis Khan did have the right idea about simply burning down all the cities and killing everyone inside them just to save some time and effort"
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Colonization is great. It's almost like an RPG in that your specialists are like characters. You only have so many of them, and they have character arcs where they go from fishermen/merchants/priests/whatever to soldiers when the Revolution starts
Some of them die fighting redcoats and it's like losing a companion 
Funnily enough Civ 7 seems to have borrowed Colonization's great people system
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Mine all start out as criminals
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I'd get a few converts from the local tribes as well. Hard workers.
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the
whites havent been doing that since 1619, why shpuld anyone else
!slots100
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So many are seething like r-slurs "well, Chinese treasure fleets between India isn't really that far, we know this is all about the Spanish." Civ used to have a bunch of history nerds. This is the audience they're trying to appeal to, and that same audience is
when it's missing all the other good features.
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Does this r-slur
not realize that Indonesians would
probably consider
things like thyme and oregano to be exotic, luxury spices?
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And they pour all kinds of bizarre local spices onto their own food. !asians what's the one that makes everyone in the house cough as soon as it hits the pan? This has gotta be a major trade commodity there just like the French value wine even though it comes from nearby.
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The only cooking ingredient thats not native to Asia is probably like....tomato or cooking wine.
Tobacco too I guess.
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Not to mention chili peppers
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Crusader Kings 2 has a 'expel the jews' button.
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Expels Jews
-50 lawyers
-1000 banking
-5000 entertainment
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Civ ain't close to that
But I'm sure OP is the type of person who would b-word about EU4 trade steering cuz it "favors the vile euro" even though that game is just trying to simulate colonization (kinda) historically accurately
Also what does realism have to do with a civ map where England spawns next to bananas? The whole situation is obviously a game.
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When did you start next to civ-based luxury resources? Except for ivory because you've got a special elephant unit, I haven't seen this in 5 or 6.
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I think if you chose abundant resources you got 1 luxury within range? But I used a lot of mods so may be misremembering.
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Yeah, you do, but there aren't any civ-specific luxury resources unless you have a special unit that requires them. He made it all up (or is so delusional) because he wanted to complain about imaginary colonization of an imaginary civ in his video game.
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Did they change the name to exotic resources or is he sneeding based on his own assumptions? I wouldn't change the name, but if there's some kind of "exotic" bonus, it would make sense from a trading system that a rare, local resource would be be more valued as exotic to the rest of the world.
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They're all worth the exact same.
At first he's saying that stuff like spices aren't exotic to civs that developed around spices, but nothing in civ calls these luxuries "exotic," so I don't understand what he's yapping about.
Maybe it's schizo nonsense.
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Did they change it in civ 7 though?
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Ohhhh, yeah I guess so.
So, there's distance mechanic for luxuries. Sounds lame.
I guess he's bitching that spices are exotic even though
he's playing the heckin civ that heckin made spices, 
Civ 7 keeps sounding like trash the more I learn about it.
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I'm not against the mechanic, pretty sure there was a similar feature or a mod I used in 5 or 6, but maybe he would have felt better if it was called "precious" or "special".
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What a cute twink!
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Sounds like Indonesia is just coming from a place of privilege chud!
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Literally r-slurred because civs have some bias but it's not like the entire determining of spawn, that's why mods exist
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I think
if you play as a tribe that historically has no concept of the wheel
or iron it should
he locked
out of the tech tree.
Also from the same game where
you could staty in 6000 bc as chacka zulu.
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Snapshots:
https://old.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1iqvmvv/civ_7_is_just_a_western_colonist_cosplaying_as/:
undelete.pullpush.io
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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Really bad game design
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