Y'know, I could respond by quoting myself for the umpteenth time- but instead I'll just leave you with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1WSD_cnRbA

And with that, I bid you adieu.

Emiscary wrote:

Y'know, I could respond by quoting myself for the umpteenth time- but instead I'll just leave you with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1WSD_cnRbA

And with that, I bid you adieu.

Yeah thanks for that non-sequitur...

This was already dismissed, of course, but I'm also in the camp that anyone can be a villain in the ES2 universe, been one a couple of times. As much as faction quests try to railroad them into single 'feeling', the actions of a player (or AI) during the game can tell completely different story. Absolutely nothing stops you from conquering your enemies, killing all the people and turning the planets into dust (the ordinary one, not the Dust). Such emergent assholes are much more appealing to me than some set in stone stuff, like you grew to hate Montezuma in civs.

Every faction (well, maybe aside of Cravers... has anyone tried to play, uhm, how would you call it? Vegan Cravers?) seems to be flexible enough that you can take their motivations to justify your deeds either way and I like it.

Emiscary wrote:

Y'know, I could respond by quoting myself for the umpteenth time- but instead I'll just leave you with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1WSD_cnRbA

And with that, I bid you adieu.

So a 1-deminsional villian? Thanks for clarifying that cause now I see the problem of this thread. No one wants than, no one. So I'm sorry to say that you probably are alone here. I'm done here.

Have a nice day.

Emiscary wrote:

Y'know, I could respond by quoting myself for the umpteenth time- but instead I'll just leave you with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1WSD_cnRbA

And with that, I bid you adieu.

Man I even threw you a bone and agreed almost word-for-word on the idea that a roaming monster type thing would be cool. What a lovely character.

Ah yes, where are my manners.

Thank you kindly for agreeing with a point I raised on the very first page of the thread nearly a month later.

(It's almost as though that reply was directed at the guy who posted immediately before I dropped the link.)

Suis3i wrote:

Just gonna make a quick comment about "an example of evil" from history; don't mean to get into politics or anything (as that is not the purpose of these forums), however, in my view a more "evil" historical example would be Mao Zedong, as one of his signature reforms, the Cultural Revolution is believed to have exterminated approximately 45million people within China, with extensive records showing that much of the genocide was on the basis that many Chinese were not "useful" to his vision of China. Thought I'd point that out, considering many of Western societies often hold up Hitler, Stalin, etc as the worst of the worst, but seem to forget/are ignorant of the atrocities committed by Mao that arguably place him as the most horrific leader ever seen.

Emiscary wrote:

Around 2 of those 45 million were reportedly tortured to death.


One colorful example involved a father being ordered to bury his son alive after said son was caught stealing food.

This is slightly off-topic, but for the sake of historicity, I have to chime in, and it does relate to the topic, albiet in an ancillary way.

If you add up the people who died during the Great Leap Forward famine with the number of people who died from persecution or outright violent conflict, you might be able to put together a high number like 45 million deaths, but I'm not here to argue with the figures since we only have rough estimates in any case.   

More importantly, I need to point out that the events before and during the Cultural Revolution was not a singular government policy or Mao's "signature reform" by any stretch of the imagination.  He may have put forward the impetus from which those events unfolded, but by the time the Cultural Revolution was in full effect, it spun beyond his control.  It was an anarchic period with factional in-fighting between different cliques of zealous Red Guards, neighbors turning on each other due to conflicting interpretations of ideological treatises, and many times, petty squabbles between people using the political atmosphere as an excuse to oppress each other and escalate it to the next level, violent or otherwise.

Back to how this relates to the topic of purely "evil" villains, it's hypocritical to claim Westerners are ignorant about this period of history, and then make the same kind of shallow assertion that Mao was "arguably... the most horrific leader ever seen."  While I agree that a majority of perspectives, both Western and Chinese, view his decisions as evil or malicious in light of the outcomes, which having the benefit of hindsight lets us make these type of judgments.  However, at the time, it wasn't nearly as obvious to many people living through it.  Therefore, I think it's a pointless example in the context of this discussion about "evil for the sake of evil."  

I don't think it's productive to use historical personalities as comparisons when debating a cartoon character villain or some kind of sadistic fictional trope.  If you want that sort of faction and/or character, it's your perogative since we're suggesting charateristics for elements within an in-game universe, but using historical figures to describe this lack of depth is ridiculous, in my opinion. Even Hitler, who wanted to wipe out peoples based solely on birth and not necessarily what they did or even said, still doesn't fit this sort of criterion.  The Gang of Four (Mao's successors and perpetrators of a portion of the atrocities attributed to him) who wiped out political rivals and bystanders purely for power, still don't fit.  Stalin and his purges don't fit.  More recent terrorists and extremist groups don't fit either.  

I could go on, but I think I made my point:  It's cool if you want this type of faction in ES2, but I don't think it's cool to attribute this abstraction to real people.

why the topic suddenly jump to the old event of my country it is werid

One thing that should be pointed out is that this is a game and what i mean by that is the lore should really only fill out the backstory of the universe while we can let the questions of morality kinda happen during the game. One thing i like about the factions is that each of the factions has the POTENTIAL for evil but doesnt necessarily have to be evil for instance you could as the United Empire let the Sheredyn war hawks take over and embark on a great crusade to subjugate the galaxy or you could build a multicultural scientific society, you could as the hissho be a race of honorable warriors or you could turn that behemoth into a giant death weapon and turn entire systems to ash. Do the ends justify the means? The onus is on you to figure out the morality of it all and i like it

jacob19831217 wrote:

why the topic suddenly jump to the old event of my country it is werid

I mean one of the devs chimed in citing Stalin as a real world example of an "evil" political leader, someone else pointed out that Mao was arguably much worse, I added an additional factoid about the guy, someone apparently took enough umbrage over that line of thought to create an account specifically to complain about it- and here we are.

Also all things considered it's not *that* old. Tail end of his shenanigans were 50 odd years ago, that's less than one old lady's worth of time.

A year late to the party, but I just came here to say
1. OP is a jerk
2. The Horatio are evil, they turn everyone who isn't a Horatio clone into gene paste for fun. Incredibly evil to everyone who isn't Horatio, who is a psychopath.

Who are the villains in the game Civilization? Why does this thread assume there needs to be villains in a 4x game?

I didn't read a lot of the thread, so I don't understand where the jerk comment is coming from, but this post had a the underlying assumption that there should be villains, which is presumptious. I'd rather there be a discussion first about why the game would benefit from them; what the pros and cons are. 

You don't need evil faction in endless space because every one of them has the tools to play as a righteous empire or total jerks, which I think is totally fine

Locking this thread, this doesn't need to come back