I'm curious about this. Surely they haven't drawn and animated 61 different leaders. That sounds like an intense amount of work.

Maybe you just communicate with the civ art. The same art that you click on when choosing your new civ upon era change. That could work maybe

The only answer to this is, that all leaders are Horatio. Problem solved. Also this would give an extra meaning to the fame victory. Who is the most famous Horatio of them all?

Jokes aside, different leader portraits is only interesting, if they all have different personalities, for example aggression, expansion, science focus and so on. They could do maybe 8 different personalities. But than again, this would not add much besides personalities if all gameplay mechanics come from the choosen civs. I can't wrap my head around how this will work. Changing the portraits to the actual civ could lead to some confussions. "Why am I talking to this Civ right now? Ah, era change, got it." I guess the easiest way could be to only interact with the coloured banner.

I really loved how Endless Legend was done in this respect. In Humankind I really wish we could do something else than a figurehead that repeats one of three phrases every time you interact. I admit I actively disliked that feature in ES2.

I'm kind of hoping for either:

a) No leaders: you interact with your neighbours more organically rather than through a Civ-style trade/diplomacy screen; or,

b) Changing leaders over time as great people become available each era, a la Through the Ages.  So Napoleon, for example, is a possible leader, but not strictly a leader for a civ that selected the French-traits.

But then, I'm envisioning this game as a collection of cultures that borrow historically-inspired cultural traits, rather than as a game where you play Egypt, America, etc. I could be off base in that.

Perhaps they have us make an avatar, and the avatar remains constant but gets cosmetic changes as you hop cultures?

...that seems like more work than just 61 animated leaders though

SpacesuitSpiff wrote:

Perhaps they have us make an avatar, and the avatar remains constant but gets cosmetic changes as you hop cultures?

...that seems like more work than just 61 animated leaders though

LOL!  ... But oh so worth it!!

I hope the people represented in diplomatic engagements are emissaries and diplomats rather than civilization leaders.

One of the drawbacks of Civilization is that needing to have a leader effectively omits cultures where the names of the leaders were lost to history, like the Minoans, Mississippians, or Great Zimbabwe. Not that any of these are more likely than others to appear.  But they could be modded in.

EaglePursuit wrote:

I hope the people represented in diplomatic engagements are emissaries and diplomats rather than civilization leaders.

One of the drawbacks of Civilization is that needing to have a leader effectively omits cultures where the names of the leaders were lost to history, like the Minoans, Mississippians, or Great Zimbabwe. Not that any of these are more likely than others to appear.  But they could be modded in.

Another aspect of this is that if there aren't civ-specific leaders, then I hope the AI civs are rendered in an interesting enough manner that it doesn't feel like "I have blob civ red to my south, blob civ blue to the east".

Coding the other empires that inhabit the world to be interesting and distict without relying the personality trait of an immortal leader would be great if the dev team can carry it out.

On the other hand, since there's been nothing said (to my knowledge) about leaders or the lack thereof in HK, I may be jumping the gun.