The wheel to build roads? (Not a big deal but:)

[dearmad]

Well, usually I'm all about gameplay trumping history, but this is a dumb one- the American Empires prior to Columbus had roads and no wheel.

It would be nice if civ tried to stick to history a little more than this.

Another little thing to mod when I get it.

[Fried-Psitalon]

If you want to be wildly picky, they DID have The Wheel; they just didn't see it as a tool of industry for some reason. (I don't know why.)

Incan/Mayan/Aztec toys for children were sometimes found with wheels.

[dearmad]

Which, in game terms, is not the wheel, but a round object. beads could be seen as wheels with that definition.

Can't blame it on no draft animals either, as HUMANS are draft animals (reference how plows are used in many cultures prior to invention of the yoke- which allowe horses to be hitched up without strangling them).

[Fidel]

well i am no historical buff but if you want complete realism there would be no American civ 4000 BC. also, one leader leading a nation for 6000 years...

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Fried-Psitalon
If you want to be wildly picky, they DID have The Wheel; they just didn't see it as a tool of industry for some reason. (I don't know why.)

Because wheels are not much use in mountains or jungle. It's much easier to just pack your cargo directly on a mule (or whatever's available) and transport it that way. Wheels are only useful in (more or less) flat and open terrain, which is scarce in the areas the Incas and Mayas lived in.

Originally posted by dearmad
Which, in game terms, is not the wheel, but a round object. beads could be seen as wheels with that definition.

No, they used it as wheels, think of toy cars and the like (no, of couse they didn't have cars, but similar toys). They also used other forms of rotary movement, such as the use of rollers to move giant stones for temple construction. And scarcity of draft animals *was* a problem, as it's very heavy work, animals are much better suited for it than humans and there's a high fatality rate among draft animals (the Inca *did* of coures use humans for transporting large objects but only for 'special projects' and indeed at a very high fatality rate, which would surely have discouraged them for using humans for more mundane tasks). Also, just because we haven't found evidence that they had invented the wheel doesn't necessarily mean they didn't. What if all their wheels were made of wood? Wood decays fast, especially in high humidity climates such as that of Meso-America. Not many wooden objects from Incan times or earlier have survived to today, if any.

But most important, Civ4 is a game and it's about reenacting history, not about replaying it. The Greeks don't have democracy in-game either, the Americans didn't really originate n 4000 BC and the Romans never used Chariots in any significant numbers (if at all) and Music was invented long before 4000 BC. Get over it...

[ss4johnny]

What the native americans did not have were horses or many other domesticatable animals. It's all in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.

[James]

No horses?

[Addled Platypus]

War LLamas

[molly bloom]

Re: The wheel to build roads? (Not a big deal but

Originally posted by dearmad
Well, usually I'm all about gameplay trumping history, but this is a dumb one- the American Empires prior to Columbus had roads and no wheel.

Easy peasy- in Central America they knew of the wheel, but had no suitable draught animals- chihuahuas, anyone ?

In the Andes they had draught animals of a kind, but according to various sources, llamas and alpacas aren't too tractable when it comes to being ridden, although they have been used as beasts of burden, and occasionally have been known to pull a small cart or trap.

This would also seem to indicate a lack of prolonged direct south-north or north-south trade between the advanced civilizations in Mesoamerica and South America.


If only they could have hired some Polynesian ocean going vessels and shipped llamas and alpacas to Central America by sea...

[Addled Platypus]

ooohhhhh

amphibious war LLamas

one heck of a UU