How can you not be familiar with the
Brazilian Expeditionary Force?
I have heard of them. But they were also one division from a joke country. To play a bit off Stalin, might as well add a Papal States focus tree.
Millennia sounds like it could be okay. I've played around with Civ VI and it's fine. I actually get the same one more turn syndrome as most people, but it also - and it has this in common with grand strategy and Minecraft - just sucks my life because most of that time isn't exactly spent in rapture but is more spent in a state of zombification. There's always another minor task to finish. What I like is gardening my city (to borrow that faggy "national gardening" phrase from Victoria 3). What I don't like is the game running by so fast that I've put down just a city or two before it's the Middle Ages.
I think the steampunk age sounds really gay, but otherwise I like the idea of big historical events being rendered into triggerable events, like Black Deaths and Reformations and such. I'd kind of like it if more of these sort of games had the ages be strictly based on technology (probably defined in relation first to metals and then power generation). A "Renaissance" or "Enlightenment" is meaningless unless your culture is actually having one, right?
So the ages would be things like Stone, Bronze, Iron, maybe Alchemy (distilling isn't some mega invention like electricity, but it's a way to try and distinguish the Middle Ages), Gunpowder, Steam, Electrical, and things usually go with Atomic after that, but I think computing is actually way more significant than nuclear power, so Information.
There's no rule, after all, that says you only get one unit upgrade per age. Or that ages couldn't be subdivided into phases. T
I haven't played Old World, but I suspect I'd like it a heck of a lot more. The grand all-encompassing scope of Civilization sounds nice, but it means it's never able to deliver on it well (it's just always this weird board game, this meaningless jumble of real world place names and ideas with no connection to one another, behold my great Buddhist French Great Pyramid on the banks of the Arkansas River). What I'd really like to see (won't happen, nobody appreciates this period) is the same 4X style in New World colonization with Indian civilizations, Indian tribes, and European colonies. It's the only other setting where it makes sense, historically, to have players be exploring and building from nothing. I've also wanted a grand strategy for that. I have notes on what kind of content it could have; mechanically, Imperator Rome is the most suitable for a mod. One of the most interesting challenges, but I think fully do-able, is representing what it's like to be spirit of the nation for a stateless society. (My answer is that you have character management where instead of playing a lord with vassals, your choices for actions are constrained to what your chiefs want to do, with not acting potentially handing the decision to the computer, and so you want to execute decisions in combinations that get you the best outcomes and mitigate damage from the chiefs doing retarded things on their own/infighting.)
Anybody listen to that Rosencreutz wanker? He was shilling Victoria 3 like it's actually super good stuff. Has lots of long, rambly videos where he overthinks how these sort of games depict history. Which is my main interest with them.
