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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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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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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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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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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