Eulogos wrote:

Cultures should be definitely be represented in their own names for themselves. They haven't announced any cultures past Ancient Era but if Japanese or German are in I hope they are called Nihon and Deutsch respectively, for further example.

Actually, we are about halfway through revealing the medieval. For easy reference, in alphabetical order:

Ancient Era

• Assyrians
• Babylonians
• Egyptians
• Harappans
• Hittites
• Myceneans
• Nubians
• Olmecs
• Phonecians
• Zhou

• Aksumites
• Carthaginians
• Celts
• Goths
• Greeks
• Huns
• Mauryans
• Mayans
• Persians
• Romans

• Byzantines
• English
• Franks
• Ghanaians
• Khmer

The only dynastic name you are using so far are the zhou and the mauryans right?

Persians is another one where you are using the greek name instead of the farsi name which is iranians. Tho iranian term may also include other people like elamites, medes, parthians and alans. In the other hand the term persians may also include other dynasties besides the achemenid like the sassanian or the safavid. 

I believe in this case going with achemenids instead of persian would have been a better choice as you did with the zhou and the mauryans.

Another weird one is Byzantines, they never called themselvs that way. For them they were just Romans. But since you have Romans in another period i understand you didn't want to use the same name.

We're announcing one new culture each week on the Humankind twitter account (@Humankindgame).

Regarding territories: Unlike Endless Legend (and the example of CK2 you mention), territories in Humankind are not pre-named at the start of the game, but only receive a name when fully settled.

no Dacian no fun

I would argue against starting any game as a specific tribe/civilization, this would encourage a more free form game. Players should be free to call their civilization anything they want and their subsequent development throughout the course of the game determines their whole culture and outlook. Thus a player could decide to call himself the Sioux but over the course of the game develops a civilization that has aspects of Greece, Rome and the Mongols.

In addition in a multiplayer game a player could call his/her civ Roman but they are actually more like the Zulu nation with fast moving lightly armed but disciplined military units. Instead of the heavily armed and by comparison, slow moving Roman legions his opponent might be expecting.

Specific civilizations shoehorn players into playing to the strengths of the civilization rather than developing something unique that takes the best aspects of 3 or 4 real world civilizations.

Unfortunately I have yet to play Humankind so cannot be sure there is not the option to do this. Here's hoping!

I know I'm probably being a bit nit picky, but I really hope they rework this whole culture map especially the Medieval/early modern eras. From the Cultures they have picked so far it seems poorly designed. For one they put "Teutons" (the name is confusing in English since it refers to the ancient tribe but here they use artwork from the 13th-15th century) and Franks in the same era but they were many hundreds of years apart and somewhat representing of similar peoples. While Ming is placed after the English despite the English as we know them (not simply Anglo-Saxons but after the Normans were assimilated) not really existing until after the Ming were founded. Even from a design point it seems wrong to have so many European cultures followed up by so many Asian ones as it leaves them quiet lopsided. I would like it to be a bit more balanced so if you want a historical run you can hop from European to European and like-wise with Asian or African.

It is interesting to see these ideas. Since (maybe) everyone want to add current or historical civilizations from his own origin, it can imagine that the names and numbers of civilizations/cultures will be a debate during the whole gaming time and may introduce political correctness from real world (just like endless DLCs from other games).

I agree with the loose link between name and real civilization, and I agree with that the game should look more worldwide. So my ideas for your consideration will be:

To introduce a civilization/culture or not should depend on some standards. Based on human species, or a stable regime in a region, or has hold as long as being recorded? Even in each country there are so many dynasties. Since they are so different, they can even be considered as different civilizations. Besides, the diversity of these dynasties are surely more obvious than encient tribes or some clays, and some entities (tribes or clays) are not so complete in every aspects as a fully functional civilization, due to many reasons like lost of records. If you consider all of them, that will be too much for players and too much for developers. This is a game, not an encylopedia. Even when you read wiki you need months or years to go over all the history of humanbeing. So this could be a hard work for developers but players will never be satisfied. They can always find a clay from some island.

What I think could help is that, we don't take complete civilization, but take terms of civilizations. Just like technologies which are somehow shared by the whole world, the features of each civilization can also be put in a pool and wait to be chosen by players. More specifically, when I start, with no specific civilization belongings. When I need to take actions, I have a list of existed historical policies and then I choose one which is the most benificial based on my situation (geographical, political etc). When I choose, the game can show some information or not, but when I have chosen, there can be a message like "You are as wise as Sumerians 4000 years ago!""You are as wise as Bismarck!" to indicate what policies you have chosen. Of course from beginning there are not so many possibilities because the terms still need to develop.

After turns, my civilization can be a mixture of terms from many historical civilizations. And I have a pie chart to show all the terms in my civilization is 30% similar to China, 25% to Babylon, 5% to The Third Reich and 20% to Greeks. With time going the term developing, this chart will change all the time. The logic is that, in the development of civilization, it is possible to be coincidential to have similar decisions based on the similar situation and you can never duplicate one civilization from the beginning to the end.