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So apparently there’s some online strategy game called “Civilization VII” scheduled to be released next year (I’m not terribly interested in the entire subject of such games) and there’s an ongoing drama on Reddit and other venues due to the creators adding Harriet Tubman of all people as a playable political leader.
This rang a bell for me because I was reminded that there was some sort of political campaign a long time ago to replace president Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill with hers, because he was a slaveholder genocider racist and so on. I looked this up on Wikipedia and it seems that this has merely remained a plan so far.
Anyway, concluding that she must be some relevant figure in the US culture wars, I looked around on the SSC and Motte subreddits, plus this site, but I found that there has never been even one discussion on her so far. I looked up Askhistorians and other similar subreddits and concluded that any discussion on her life is resolutely suppressed by the mods (all dissenting comment chains get deleted basically).
Being a dissident rightist this obvious case of information suppression piqued my interest, so I looked up John Derbyshire’s website because I’ve usually followed his work. I found this rather hilarious piece of information (emphasis mine):
We have very few facts about Tubman's life and activities. Most of what people think they know comes from her own testimony, as narrated to friends after the Civil War. There are two problems there.
First problem: Tubman, who escaped from slavery in her mid-twenties, was illiterate all her life. She left no paper trail in the way of letters or diaries. Until her forties, when friends started taking down her reminiscences, we have only her word for the events of her earlier life.
This wouldn't matter so much if we didn't know she had brain problems: narcolepsy, delusions, apparently epileptic fits. Tubman acknowledged these problems, saying they were the result of a blow on the head she received in childhood. Perhaps they were; but again we only have her word for it.
Whatever the cause of the brain problems, they surely weren't Tubman's fault. They weren't my fault either, though, nor yours, nor Andrew Jackson's, and they do cast a cloud of doubt over her stories.
Second problem: Tubman's friends got Sarah Bradford, a successful fiction writer, to produce Tubman's autobiographies. This was after the Civil War, but the tradition of abolitionist propaganda, whose greatest success was of course Uncle Tom's Cabin, was still alive, and Sarah Bradford likely saw herself in that tradition, as the literary heiress of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Tubman then sank into obscurity until leftist writers of the 1930s took an interest in her as part of their general critique of U.S. society, which they compared unfavorably with the new system of justice and equality being established, according to them, in the Soviet Union.
In short, the Tubman story originated with her own unreliable recollections, and was then promulgated by people all of whom had agendas.
Harriet Tubman may have been — on the scattered evidence we have, probably was — a brave and resourceful person. Still, her story belongs much more to the realms of myth and propaganda than to history.
I found this mildly amusing. And on a scale of 1 to 10, the level of my surprise is maybe 3.
I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.
That said, Civilization has always dabbled in some measure of political grandstanding. I recall reading about a minor controversy from Civilization 2 and the fact that it included a global warming mechanic back when the concept of global warming was far less accepted. That said, there is still something dispiriting about Civilization scraping the bottom of the barrel of "current year" so hard they have turned Harriet Tubman into, whatever she is in that game. I don't want to beclown myself criticizing it, because I honestly haven't kept up with the mechanics of how this new Civilization will work. That said, she probably would have had a quote attached to a tech tree upgrade (like "Emancipation" or the like) in previous games had they decided she were important enough to include over other abolitionist leaders.
Like I said, I haven't kept up. I don't know if they have 700 leaders in the game with an exhaustive and expansive coverage of even niche historical figures from around the globe. Or if they've developed a myopic focus on black hagiography and include the current year talking points to puts "The founding fathers were slave owners" above "Wrote some of the most important documents on human rights ever in history, and then fought and died establishing a free nation that lived those principles"
All that said, Civilization 7 will have 26 leaders at launch, and I guess 20 of them are known at this time. The white ones are Augustus, Benjamin Franklin, Charlemagne, Isabella, Machiavelli, Napoleon (two versions?). The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman. So I wouldn't exactly claim they've developed any sort of myopic focus on blacks.
That said, Harriet Tubman is still just goofy.
Granted we're on the same side here, but THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH.
Death stacks. Death stacks? Death stacks!
According to the complaint, the problem with this game is that it allows you to combine several units of disparate types all in one area and attack with them in the same turn.
You know what we call that in the real world? A mother fucking ARMY. In other words, it's just how things actually work.
Yeah, you know what, it is troublesome when an ARMY shows up at your door and your defenses weren't ready for one. So what are you gonna do? Prepare, or bitch about it? Here I'm imagining any great military commander of yore whining that he lost because his opponent utilized (implicitly, fake and gay) 'death stacks'. Honestly! 'March divided and fight concentrated.' This is central to warfare in the human experience.
And it's not like the game is un-self-aware about this! In fact several mechanisms exist to moderate the power of
death stacksarmies. For one, a much smaller defensive force can almost always hold against one in a fortified position given rough technological parity. So, again, reality. For another, multiple classes of units exist just to punish the behavior of packing too many units in too small a space. Siege weapons, early on, and later we have things like bomber squadrons. Enormous, ruinous collateral damage. Sure, put all your units on that square. Pack 'em in. See what happens.Also, the sheer logistical challenges of actually getting all those units to one place at one time seem to go almost wholly unappreciated. It's not an easy thing to do! And concentrating your military at one point on your frontier means that a whole lot more of your land borders go undefended. Do you have the roads and railroads and bridges to get them back to defend if necessary? There's a lot of tradeoff and investment considerations here!
When we do get to aircraft, there's a whole consideration about also sending along fighter squadrons to maintain air superiority and protect your armies from enemy bombers. So now you've got firefights blazing across the sky while you try to establish forward airstrips to keep control of the heavens and avoid getting your entire army wiped out before it achieves its goals. This is GOOD. This is RIGHT. This is FUN.
Civ4's treatment of unit consolidation and movement makes vastly more sense than any later entry in the series. V was a mess in general (terrible game design mostly across the board) but what really killed it for me was the ridiculous traffic jams and archers shooting across the English Channel. I don't want a cutesy pegboard-style tiny-scale European board game-esque microcosm of tactical combat played out on the apparent scale of a continent. I want vast armies clashing! Oh, sorry, the swordsmen can't get to London because some (allied) archers are hanging out in Northumbria. What the fuck.
Anyway, the very existence of the (craven, weak, and effete) term "death stacks" fills me with disgust. Civ4 is by far the best game in the series and when the primary salient complaint about it has to do with modeling reality well and generating interesting logistical and defensive considerations, because, apparently, a bunch of losers failed to prepare adequate defenses and got caught with their pants down when a lizard-brained AI managed to show up with something resembling a coordinated assault, which was entirely foreseeable, and rage-quit in protest at their pretense of being a brilliant mastermind strategist being exposed as the comforting, but baseless schizophrenic fantasy that it was, well, I, I disagree.
Do yourself a favor and stop repeating the phrase 'death stacks'. It's unbecoming.
I don't think that people complain about army stacks in Civ IV (and earlier) because it's unrealistic, or too hard. It's because it's motherfucking boring. There's no gameplay at all there. Figure out your army composition, mash it into the other army. Yawn.
I started Civ with IV, and I still have a lot of fondness for it. I think it has a lot of soul, and they tried (and succeeded!) to capture historical details in a way that V or VI just never did. I still play it sometimes. But there's a reason that I never, ever went for domination victory in IV whereas I actually do in V and VI. It's because military sucks ass as a game mechanic without the one unit per tile system. It might be more realistic, it certainly is easier for the AI to work with, but it's way less fun and that's ultimately why people didn't like it.
Well, again, you just elided a huge number of complicated and involved tasks and decisions under that sentence. I mean I could do this with any game, right? "Just do the correct things needed to win and then you win the game. Boring."
Are you sure you're not just doing it wrong?
The extent to which army composition matters is pretty similar in either system. Which is to say it matters not at all versus AI (just bring more units and higher tech units and you win), and a decent bit versus humans (from what I've seen anyways, I don't play MP Civ). So I think it's perfectly fair to elide that decision tree as it isn't a differentiator. The gameplay that happens after you have an army is a differentiator, and again... there is none under the stack system.
Pretty sure. But if you think I'm missing something crucial that would make the stack system actually fun to play, feel free to elaborate.
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