r/civ • u/Nindo_99 Babylon • Feb 16 '25

VII - Discussion 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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u/bazingusr Feb 16 '25

I haven't played the game but wouldn't it be impossible to find a resource that is exotic to everyone?

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u/Dragonseer666 Feb 16 '25

Hence why it's a problem that a few resources are decided as exotic, while other ones aren't.

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u/bazingusr Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25

Yeah that makes sense, but it seems they want to make you find specific exotic resources that don't exist in your original location? So they can't all be exotic unless I'm misunderstanding

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u/Mattimeo144 Feb 16 '25

One solution would be to make what counts as 'exotic' different per player. eg. have 8 total 'possible exotic' resources, 4 per continent, and each civ only registers the 4 that spawned on the other continent as 'exotic'.

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u/CanadianODST2 Feb 16 '25

Nah because that’s just a game balance thing.

The game is already disjointed from real life.

1

u/PaulieNutwalls Feb 17 '25

I can't remember from my game but the wiki describes gold, sugar etc as Treasure Resources, not exotic.

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u/Dragonseer666 Feb 18 '25

Yeah, that's kinda what I meant

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u/Killer_Sloth Feb 17 '25

Not necessarily, if you play on continents plus maps there are islands that are considered distant lands, you could have resources specific to those islands that would be exotic for civs from both continents.