Can CUSTOM CIVS be ADDED to the playble mix in a standard RANDOM MAP game?

[Arator]

Firaxis never did answer this question, so I suspect that the answer is no.

Could someone out there please confirm or disabuse me of my suspicion?

[Walking Target]

You read my mind

I have been wondering the same thing for weeks! I have looked all over for an answer and asked a million different people, but nobody can give me a solid answer.

I really hope that you can because one of my favorite aspects of Civ 2 was to customize my civ and see how well my own personal civ would do in competition with the others of the world. I was really hoping that would be something that was included and expanded upon in this version.

I would love to be able to name my own civ, name the cities, create my own custom units, have my own custom graphics for teh leader (ok I would need some help with that one) and basically just create a completely custom civ for the game. Now that would be great...to be smooshed bananas , with their leader Peel von Smooshy, their capital of Split and the special unit the Mounted Banana Peels. (can anyone guess what I am eating) Regardless of my poor example, I would still really like to have that option... I can only have the same cities and capitals so many times before I get a little bored.

[Steve Clark]

But several screenshots from Firaxis and elsewhere shows custom civs (remember Bluto of the Deltas?), albeit replacing an existing one, which is absolutely no big deal.