EUIV review - "the best genocide simulator of the year"

[MengJiao]

the separation of gaming and living?

i dont want something im doing in my relaxing time to ask me any moral questions, or put another way i dont want moral questions to be part of my relaxing time

  Why build a simulation of some part of history if the historical part is supposed to be read as pure fantasy?  I like war games because they put some kick into the imagination.  You can read (as I often do) about the Stalingrad Campaign, but it seems like the best games about the Stalingrad campaigns would be the ones realistic enough to make one see the world from the point of view of somebody involved in that warfare.  To see the world from a point of view that is not your own is something that is both relaxing (in that you leave your cares behind) and stimulating in that it brings up questions and many of those may be moral questions.

[MengJiao]

Is the author unaware of exactly what those Mesoamerican cultures did to each other, long before any Europeans showed up?

  Well, if you look at the detail of the reviewers complaints, some of them amount to a compliant that I always have over representing Indians in the New World: there is no real detail at all.  Whatever the Indians may have been doing to each other -- it doesn't show up in the game.

   I agree the "genocide" thing is a bit silly -- in a lot of fighting the Indians did okay and it was mostly disease that killed them off and for the most part with no help from the Europeans.

[endfire79]

I thought this had been modded at one point (detailed Amerindian, cultures), but I may be mistaken.  MengJiao, definitely a worthy suggestion for Paradox to add in the next EU release.

[JasonPratt]

Part of the problem is that the reviewer overtly blames the designers for something the designers didn't have much control over. Minor factions get represented as minor factions wherever they are in the game, and historically most of the American factions would count as minor by EU4's time standards. The designers can put in lots of bling details for events and whatever, even for minor factions in Europe and the Mediterraneans, because we have written histories to work from in that area of the world; not so much in the Americas. The reason North America looks so desolate when European explorers and colonists arrive in-game, is because historically there was some kind of catastrophe that wiped out 90% of the relevant population groups only a few years before the colonists began to arrive (the obvious guess being a series of pandemics, though we have to make educated guesses because no written records could be left behind.)

And the fact of the matter is that some cultures didn't get around to developing socio-cultural disciplines to foster and spread widescale technological advances. So no, without some modding the Amerindians aren't going to advance as fast as European cultures did. That isn't racism, that's realism. (Nor is showing how a typical warrior looked when he fought racism, any more than showing a typical warrior from any other culture.)

[GDS_Starfury]

just another reason women should stay in the kitchen and leave gaming to men.   O0

[MengJiao]

Part of the problem is that the reviewer overtly blames the designers for something the designers didn't have much control over. Minor factions get represented as minor factions wherever they are in the game, and historically most of the American factions would count as minor by EU4's time standards. The designers can put in lots of bling details for events and whatever, even for minor factions in Europe and the Mediterraneans, because we have written histories to work from in that area of the world; not so much in the Americas. The reason North America looks so desolate when European explorers and colonists arrive in-game, is because historically there was some kind of catastrophe that wiped out 90% of the relevant population groups only a few years before the colonists began to arrive (the obvious guess being a series of pandemics, though we have to make educated guesses because no written records could be left behind.)

And the fact of the matter is that some cultures didn't get around to developing socio-cultural disciplines to foster and spread widescale technological advances. So no, without some modding the Amerindians aren't going to advance as fast as European cultures did. That isn't racism, that's realism. (Nor is showing how a typical warrior looked when he fought racism, any more than showing a typical warrior from any other culture.)

  I know this 90% pop drop thing has recently gotten embedded in accounts of what happened to the Indians and at some points it has some truth...though often for later encounters.  There are far more exceptions to this model than there are events that conform to it.

  For example, the Mexica didn't have any recorded disease losses until after Tenotitlan was besieged.  They and their enemies and allies could field really big armies and on a good day, they could come close to wiping out the Conquestadors and their allies. So (as so often happened), it wasn't disease that overwhelmed the Indians, it was the first few years of 500 years of geopolitical moves and of course, the Indians did not always loose.
  In the case of the MesoAmerica, it was after the destruction of the Mexica that the population drop occurred, so the drop explains a lot but not the most notorious initial conquest and it doesn't explain all that much about other events in MesoAmerica -- for example that the last Mayan Kingdom fell in 1697, long, long after the initial encounter.  And the New Mexican Indians completely threw out the Spanish in 1680, in the midst of a population drop, but obviously not a crippling one. 
   As for technical and social adaptation, the Indians were actually extremely good at that.  In fact, you could argue that any Indian group that put up any sustained fight or adopted any trading relations with Europeans was doing a lot of socialization of technical work very fast.  The problem for simulations is that it takes some level of detail to bring these things out. 

[Nefaro]

Good points. I just hope it doesn't become the norm to piss over a great series of games. 

I also found it ironic she felt more more secure about uniting the principalities and states of the Holy Roman Empire. 
How she plans to do that in the game without the Reformation, Counterreformation, forced conversions or 'heretics', the 30 Years war, etc, etc, (well, you get the picture - either way, it won't be pretty, but her conscience is eased).

Just goes to show these self-proclaimed "Progressives" have little to no concept of history, other than how selective bits of it compare to their own little modern fantasy reality.

Rainbows and Unicorn farts in abundance.

Maybe the reviewer used a little irony there?  I mean if you have any interest in the HRE, you can't be unaware of its various quirks.

I noticed nothing extra that would indicate an intended jab at such people.  Therefore it was taken at face value.  Perhaps it was a fecetious jab.. I don't know.  Not too difficult to believe with just such narrow pre-programmed thoughts and opinions being the norm with youngsters these days.


Edit:

This quote from the article just reiterates:

And it's here where things started to get a bit...fucked up. I was still having loads of fun, but suddenly I couldn't get into playing a jovial dictator relentlessly pushing her borders back and using the bones of dead peasants as the mortar in her new palace. Somewhere, deep in my chest, a little voice was whispering this is really fucking sick.

Let's be clear about one thing: in real life, the colonization of North America by European settlers was only possible because of the accompanying slow-motion genocide of the people who were already living here. The First Nations of the Americas did not have castles, or royal dynasties, or a continent-spanning church like the Europeans, but they did have a civilization.

Sounds serious to me.  Plenty more "genocide" references and such in the article, too.