from Hacker News

Partnering with the Shawnee Tribe for Civilization VII

by moelf on 2/23/25, 10:06 PM with 265 comments

• by ending on 2/23/25, 11:57 PM

  Given that the content described in the partnership here is part of a DLC, I wonder if the Tribe is party to any profit sharing agreement with the game company.

• by kgeist on 2/24/25, 8:33 AM

  >Shawnee language

  >Native speakers 100-200 (2024)

  Imagine knowing every single speaker of your language personally. You could invent neologisms and make them spread quickly.

• by CSMastermind on 2/24/25, 12:08 AM

  It sucks that all the Civ competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.

• by rsynnott on 2/24/25, 12:44 AM

  > With each Civilization title, we take great care to thoughtfully and authentically portray every culture on our roster of civilizations and leaders

  Especially Gandhi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

  (Note that while the original bug apparently wasn’t real, they _did_ play with it in subsequent games, at least V and VI).

• by 29athrowaway on 2/24/25, 12:36 AM

  Civ was completely changed after Civ 4.

  The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack".

  Blitzkrieg style operations were death stacks too (e.g.: schwerpunkt)

  And almost every major conflict involved a decisive battle with two death stacks on each side.

  The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic. This is the moment Civ became a completely different game. The last true Civ game was Civ 4.

• by iandanforth on 2/24/25, 12:11 PM

  That press release is written in the most servile fashion. Delete "carefully", "respectfully", "authentically", etc you get the exact same content except it doesn't sound boot-licking. I'm all for getting a culture right, but the proof is in the product, not in easy to type adjectives that describe how you should always act without expecting praise for it.

• by ensignavenger on 2/24/25, 1:33 PM

  "With each Civilization title, we take great care to thoughtfully and authentically portray every culture on our roster of civilizations and leaders."

  Like making Gandhi hurl nukes around like no other? :) Love my Shawnee neighbors though, happy to see my One More Turn habit helping them preserve their language.

• by ysofunny on 2/24/25, 9:52 AM

  I want some kind of LLM for every rival civ so we can have natural language diplomacy

• by LightBug1 on 2/24/25, 12:42 PM

  Civ II will always be peak Civ

• by adultSwim on 2/24/25, 2:47 PM

  I'm proud of these efforts. I'll probably buy a full priced copy of the new Civ because of them.

• by ProjectArcturis on 2/24/25, 12:25 AM

  I would have preferred they partner with some UI experts.

• by viewhub on 2/24/25, 1:04 AM

  Definitely LOL'd watching the video when it opened up with the singing native American trope. Marketing content is torture. I'll die on this hill.

• by meristohm on 2/24/25, 12:51 AM

  Cautiously optimistic, though I'm skeptical a game based on "explore, expand, extirpate, exploit, extract, exterminate", capitalism, and colonization will change sufficiently in this next iteration. To be fayuh... I mostly played Civ3, Civ4 and only a little bit of CiV, and put Civ6 on my Steam Ignore list after reading enough about it (and now I've gone and (gladly, willingly) deleted my Steam account, so this is academic for me).

  Awhile back I daydreamed about other "victory" conditions (what other victory is there but an interesting story across generations, a sense of meaning and purpose to life, and the continuation of a diverse interrelation of life forms on Earth?), and would like to have played a game where I set up the initial conditions, played out as many turns as I wanted, and then turned it over to the algorithm (not AI, not the current ML/LLM fad, but something far cheaper to run, and with just the biases of the devs as a result of all their research) to see how things shook out over the next ten thousand years.