Do they shove "liberalism is the only way" down your throat or nah?
Like if I want to shape my nation into a fully communist state is that possible or does that just make you immediately lose?
You can do communism, but it doesn't affect all that much.
That being said, hand-wringing over media consumption is the 69th form of liberalism.
Civ5 has "gunboat diplomacy" as a fascist policy.
...which usually leads to me picking England, building a big navy, and going fash.
Civ 4 also had both Stalin and Mao as leaders so that’s kinda cool
There are no real politics in the game. It’s a lot more like a very complex game of risk or catan than an actual civilization simulator. Picking fascism, liberalism, or communism as late game government styles just gives you a buff or debuff here or there to different units/abilities. There’s no actual political analysis of how these things would play out
As others said, Civ is more of a history themed board game than a game about history. There's a tech tree but also a "civics" tree where you research stuff like political philosophy or mass media. That's where most of the funny stuff comes up like the fact you have to "research" ideology to get the tier three governments, which are Fascism, Communism, and Democracy, and capitalism is a seperate civic that exists independent of ideology.
You can pick "Communism" as your government and its the best for science/production, so uhh based?
They really arent in depth enough for "full communism", its just a late game thing you pick that modifies stats.
It's fun if you like history and 4x games, dont think too much about it.
I wonder what a strategy game that focuses strictly on internal politics would be like? Though I guess the Democracy series sort of does this.
"increase X by 20% but decrease Y by 5%" and it's completely arbitrary whether it's called industrialization or theocracy.
and what would you expect in a game where Pericles of ancient Greece lives in Africa and nukes the Aztec empire, located in Asia?
It doesn't try to give the variables a meaning. To me that's a little samey.
I remember Sid Meier or some big Firaxis guy talked about how the game shouldn't be taken as a serious critique of social sciences, so at least there's some recognition there. In any case I wouldn't take it too seriously.
Civ 6 is the one I've played and the only real references to Communism is that it is a government system that is a good all rounder.
I really liked the smaller scale when compared to most every other mod or the base game.
The New Order: Last Days of Europe is a total-conversion mod for Hearts of Iron 4. It's a cold war mod set in a timeline where the Nazis won WWII, but then went into an era of decline shortly after. Unlike normal HOI4, which is all about building up to a world war, you cannot fight world wars in TNO because it will most likely lead to nuclear armageddon, though there are many proxy wars. It is much more focused on internal politics, which it represents through lots of events. It's sort of a cross between a wargame and an interactive novel. Has an insane amount of content despite being less than half finished, literally at least 50x what vanilla has. It's really good.
Also you can execute Margaret Thatcher as a Nazi collaborator.
Civ games are like a 6. They are too board gamey to have a strong ideological component outside the core concept of history as a march of progress. You can't really shape your state in a way that's meaningfully communist.
I really want to like Civilization and I used to play it all the time, but I think I want it to be a game it's not. It's essentially a dumbass tabletop game where your team wins if you do X Y and Z. What I want is to pretend to be a civilization ruler and crush others. It's just a bunch of bonuses and handicaps with names attached to them, they have nothing to do with the civilizations or ideologies or religions that you actually play.
In civ 6 communism is IMO the best late game government, as it the most balance and provides excellent production and science, two of the most important resources. Civ 4 was weirdly based, it had both Mao and Stalin as world leaders so that’s kinda cool. But other than that it’s mostly like a board game, no particular depth to political systems and it’s not hyper realistic. Still I like it and find it fun, but I’ve def sunk more hours into paradox games.
