So, we know, that nations in humankind divided into following categories: builders, agrarians, expansionists, merchants, aesthetes, scientinsts and warmongers.

Wich of those classes can your country be classified  as?

As for me, a russian, I do think that both The Grand Duchy of Moscow and The Russian Empire can be an expansionists , while The Novgorod Republic can be a merchant state. As fo USSR it's either a warmonger or a builder. I'm not sure about modern day Russia though. 

Most modern day country can be classified as most of the above. France for example is Aesthete for sure, it's also a major economic power and trade a lot, one of their main source or trade are firearms, making them somewhat of a Militarist (also they have a pretty powerful army), France has a strong scientific field and build some pretty cool thing like surgeon robots or planes, making them both Builders and Scientist, and of course France has a strong agrarian tradition. The only thing modern France isn't is expansionnist and it can apply to most of the developped country in the world. So really those kind of country could be classified as anything, if we choose what's represent them the best tho, Aesthete is deffinitly the way to go for France

KurouRingo wrote:
one of their main source or trade are firearms

What ?! Really ?! I thought it was camembert and red wine :P

I came from germany and i would say that we went from barbarian german tribes in the ancient (warmongers, agrarians?) to militaristic, religious trader and builders in the middle ages (rater builders and merchants), to cultured, scientifical progressiv nation in the 18. /19. century (aesthetes, scientists) to nationalistic warmongers in the first half of 20 century. Nowadays i would classified "the germans" as scientists, agrarians, merchants and diplomatics ( i miss some categorys).

If you asked me in 2019 I could've told you.  Now?  I have no idea :)

Good question! 

To take my small contry, Norway I would say merchants. 

Our main trait in populare culture is the fearsome raiding vikings, so many would perhaps say warmongers. 

But the truth is that the main ploy of the vikings was trade. One fun example, there are several accounts of vikings promising great armies to aid the continental royalty in thei wars in exchange of gold. This was of course a lie, the vikings where never that many and did not have the strength so they never showed ut to any of the battles. Good marketing based on the little information available in those days! And today, we only survice though some substantial savings , and the sale of raw materials (fish and oil).

I would like to mention that the other "viking nations", Denmak should be aesthetes because of their great design and sweden builders (as I am a chemist I would also give a shout out to all the elements discovered in Sweden so also a "scientinsts" for Sweden).

THX

Brazil would definitely be merchant right after independence, and after that, agrarian. As said above, it's currently supposed to be a bit of each, but i think it's still too much agrarian, unfortunately.

For Trinidad & Tobago, I'd say either merchants or aesthetes. We do export a lot of oil and natural gas, but we focus a lot on the arts too. We have original genres of music (calypso, chutney, soca, etc), Carnival, and a lot of famous painters and designers, past and present.

Brazil, definitly would be agrarians!!!! But if u consider Dom Pedro II, nicknamed "the Magnanimous", whom was the second and last monarch of the Empire of Brazil, we should be known as expansionists!!! All the wars we fought we won and We are the largest country in South America!

The United States is quite clearly the child of Great Britain.  It was, throughout most of its history, expansionist.  Not just in North America, either - there were designes on Cuba, and at one point an adventurer went to Nicaragua to incite rebellion with the ultimate goal of bringing the territory under US control.  

Now, we've been ever other one of those categories at one time or another - even in the beginning.  But overall?  If I had to pick a single overarching theme?  Expansion.

I disagree. I think amarica is better characterized as a builder nation. I mean it bootstraped itself from a backwater agraian socioty to the world power over a scant few centuries. Further amarica has heped many contries to rebound from economic devistation throgh industrial might.

Now that's interesting, my country (Italy) has been literally every single class at one time or the other. Expansionist / warmonger / builder /agrarian as Roman empire, merchants during the middle ages, aesthetes and scientists during Renaissance, agrarian / expansionist in 19th century, warmonger / expansionist in early 20th century.

Hayard wrote:

Brazil would definitely be merchant right after independence, and after that, agrarian. As said above, it's currently supposed to be a bit of each, but i think it's still too much agrarian, unfortunately.

I have to agree, unfortunately, we are pretty much an agrarian nation nowadays. We had an aesthetes side, specially with music, in the last century and we have some good scientist but usually exported to other nations.

As a french, I'd say agrarian, but there's was also some expansion during the Napoleon period.

...I really wonder how we would be categorized in the early stage. At some point france was more like Aesthete.

Asking the wrong question. It is more of a question of nation at a time period rather than overall.

Such as Rome, Classical Era. Expansion, builders. Surely. As a lot of what they have done stands today.
Britannia, Renaissance. Merchants? Expansionists? 
Scots or Picts?
Francs or France.
Norse or Norway?
Germany or Prussia?

Leaders and time periods really define what a nation was about at that current moment.Then its framed on what they were most famous for.

When it comes to Poland I think it's quite wrong. 

Trait - militaristic. I disagree. Poland was never truly militaristic (or more militaristic than any of her neighbors) and having winged hussars and winning some awesome battles with them is not good enough to justify it. True, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest countries in europe, but it never had any real imperialistic plans to conquer everyone. Also the army was often underfunded and relied on the nobility (which doesn't mean it was militaristic, since many other countries relied on nobility as well) which, of course, loved military life, but again - nobility in most coutries back then was expected to undergo military training and fight in wars. 

Of course all civilizations had a bit of every trait, but if I had to choose I'd say that PLC was mostly agrarian. Plenty of grain was produced in PLC and exported to the western Europe. It was one of the most important trade goods actually. Then the wood exported to Britain from which English ships were made (and the English word "spruce" was created ;) ). Also nobility was greedy and imposed serfdom up to XIXth century where each peasant family had to work on the nobleman's estate for certain number of days per week. Then maybe scientific because some great discoveries and great scientist were either Polish or lived in PLC (Copernicus, Marie Curie, Hevelius, Fahrenheit and others whose names would probably mean nothing to most of you ;) ) but if I had to pick just one - then it's definitely agrarian. 

Unit - winged hussar. Well, that's perfect. If I had to choose one unit from the whole history of Poland then definitely it's them. Absolutely insane guys, with morale and training giving them ability to achieve unbelievable victories. Unfortunately the art (and probably the 3D model which was not yet shown) is ahistoric. It's based on a wrong reconstruction from XIX century. Real winged hussars had usually only one "wing" and it was usually attached to the back of the saddle, not to the cuirass.

Last two ones are from XVII century and are showing the original hussars. Sticking to the historic hussars would be a nice gesture from the devs.

Barbican - I'm not really sure it's really that unique. But I also can't think of any good replacement. Maybe the "folwark" (large farming estate) which would fit the agrarian trait.   

Us Indonesians are, truthfully told only good at two things: war and music making. But we are VERY good at them.

Hoo boy... For Germany, it's been and still is a hell of a ride through history.

Part Roman Empire, part barbarians. Then kingdoms,  Absolutism, Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon wars, then the fall of the Holy Roman Empire.

And after that... many kingdoms (again), German Civil Revolution in 1848/49, Otto von Bismarck founding of the German Empire  after the three Unification Wars. (Thus, I must say that, in the 19th century, Germany didn't consist of Prussia only. The founding in 1871 was something that Germans in all those kingdoms wanted after the fall on the Holy Roman Empire. Sidefact/Funfact: Our national anthem was originally written because of that but the first verse was misinterpreted after WWII which is why we only sing the third verse nowadays.)

20th century: World War I (1914-18), Weimar Republic (1918-45), World War II (1939-45), DDR and BRD (1949-90), peaceful revolution and unification in 1989/90.

So, how do I see my nation in the game?

I don't know, as long as you can recognize it as Germans and not picture it with clichés. xD

But I would picture the culture as an economic power, and less of a militaristic one. Well, thanks to certain people in the 19th and 20th century, Germany's militaristic side was more visible internationally.

Well I guess it's unimportant, since most of cultures/countries excelled or had huge interests onto much more than just one field.

Thus, picking one category for each culture can be arbitrary. And for the sake of Game-play, I would like to see various affinities across all eras.

For example, only expansionists or militarists in a certain era would be... lame and monotone. More flavour is always welcome.

America seems like agrarian earlier in it's history, than industrial, and, then commercial, currently we seem to have a case of the stupid's... not sure what that is, Aesthetite? :D

Dominican Republic

We would agrarian during the 19th century and Aesthete during the 20th and 21st century, since tourism and influence in the Caribbean would be our forte right now.

RabidHobbit wrote:

deo wrote:

I feel like America would probably be expansionist. One of our big ideas back in the day was manifest destiny and I feel like imperalization is a mix of expantionist and military culture which America also really likes doing, to the detriment of places like the Middle East and South America. Warmmonger might fit too, especially from Teddy onward but I feel like that would fit a nation like Germany better.

Compared to nations and empires of the past, Manifest Destiny was child's play. Even though it's popular today to talk about Manifest Destiny because it's one of America's sins (and it was), I don't think it is correct to choose it to be something that identifies the nation.

Science is definitely #1.  There are just too many inventions from the modern era that come from the US.  I think that technology is probably America's greatest contribution to the world.

After this, it's difficult.  Aesthete is a strong choice because modern performance, Hollywood and music, (from jazz, to rock, to R&B/soul/hip-hop) are the next greatest contributions the USA has made. This is ironic because Europeans I think like to poke fun at America for being so puritanical and anti-liberal, yet they still love our music and movies. Aesthete doesn't have to mean liberal arts.

Builder seems to make sense, but honestly, so much of America's early infrastructure was based on a slave economy, it's hard to paint that in a positive light.  

Although America may produce the most amount of wheat/corn/bread in the world (or at least used to), Agrarian doesn't feel right to me. I think that's because Agrarian makes me think of ancient empires only (Egypt), but maybe that's incorrect.

But Expansionist?  No way.  Wars in Cuba, Korea and Vietnam, and the control over the North American continent do not make America close to expansionist IMO when you compare them to other empires' expansionist accomplishments over the centuries (Rome, England, Mongolia, etc).

You have to remember that America in this game is in the Contemporary Era (End of WW1 onward), so Expansionist for Manifest Destiny doesn't make sense. Science I could see, for the companies in Silicon Valley and other places, but I feel like those make a better argument for Merchant. However, I would personally go for Militarist, for the US defense budget, which is larger than the next 10 countries combined.

P.S. The liberal in liberal arts has a different connotation than in the US left-liberal, or the European libertarian-liberal. The liberal in it means "befitting of a free man," and is used for any intellectual, mind developing, activity, as opposed to more servile, mechanical labor. This historically included science, but nowadays, science is seen as more practical.