In other words, the game lacks a critical element of imagination that would have allowed players to see what a modern world might look like if, 400 years earlier, the Aztecs had repelled the Spanish invasion, developed their own powerful ships, and successfully overrun the Iberian peninsula. Or if the Iroquois had defeated the European migrants trying to settle their land. Chances are they wouldn't be building cathedrals, or researching chivalry, and maybe they'd figure out the secrets of 'ecology' before they even got around to developing a code of laws.
... Crusades, but they got stuffed in the long term. The Renaissance in Europe, and the corresponding wave of colonisation which reached its apex with the United States. It's not pretty, nu Marxists, but it's the truth. And if the US does decide to go all faith-based, the same sort of decline might happen to it.
Anyway, CivIII wasn't quite as dodgy from a correlation to reality point of view as say SimCity 3000, which paid little heed to the way, say, European or Asian cities tend to operate, in that they're smaller and more pedestrian orientated. But then SC3K and CivIII were both developed in California.
Hmm. Sorry about the long comment(s). :)
Probably yes. But then that article seems to ignore the fact that the Aztecs, Zulus, et al, were stuffed before they began, largely due to the lack of diversity in the surrounding ecology, and the resulting paucity of domesticable plants and animals, as Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" points out. Most successful civilisations in the present and past have tended to originate from the Eurasian landmass. China, India and the Muslim diaspora might have been dominant today if they'd followed a similar rational path; (In the case of China, if they'd decided to do something more with gunpowder than just use it as a toy. And now they have to import planes from the US equipped with bugs. Heh.) It's particularly telling that the Muslim civilisation, for five hundred years at the forefront of scientific and cultural development, suddenly went downhill around the time of the Crusades, as much through the rejection of reason by the Muslims in favour of a more religion-based society. They effectively won the Crusad