Currently, we only have one Merchant culture in the Contemporary Era. Though income may not be at the front of most player's minds at this point in the game, I still feel as though this branch of culture is underrepresented and I would love for an Irish culture to fill that blank space.


With these two things in mind, I have created an outline/fairly detailed idea for how an 'Irish' culture would look, I've included speculative options for a Legacy Trait, Emblematic Unit, and Emblematic Quarter.



I have drafted this idea in the style of the Humankind Encyclopedia website/resource, to better encourage you, and the developers, to visualise the potential culture, as I want to give it the best odds I can of being seriously considered for addition.


I am not the best player of the game, but I am still passionate about it and would welcome feedback/tweaks/changes with regards to balance that people would speculate on. I will list these, if necessary, in the thread, and discuss my choices if prompted to!


I am especially pleased with the Legacy Trait of 'Celtic Tiger' as it feels very much in flavour with the choice of Merchant culture, I've tried to capture the flavour of Ireland's want to do business outside of its own borders, but others may have more salient ideas with regards of execution, there.


I am also pleased with the idea that a player can stand to benefit from friendly wonders in a combat sense through the 'Oral Tradition' feature, making defensive wars and protection of said wonders a priority for the culture.


With regards to the Emblematic Quarter, this is perhaps the part of the concept that I'm most willing to accept pushback on as I am not entirely sure how balanced it would be in practice, and I'm sure other people that are better at the game would be able to inform me; I have used the standard formulas for similar emblematic units/quarters for cost, too, which I think should be fine.


I'm also uncertain if I'm happy with the meager Industry it provides and would potentially want something more related to trade routes (but, again, I'm afraid to make something imbalanced). The LT or EQ could both/either benefit from something explicitly trade route related to channel the Irish cultural flavour a bit better, but I'll leave that to people smarter than me to decide!


Thank you for reading, please consider leaving an upvote so that the idea can be seen by the devs!