Bret Devereaux

Quite so (though I anticipate such scrutiny by someone academically versed in the era with dread and fascination!). I cut my teeth on EU4, however, and I think this manner of appraisal serves well to inform our design decisions and continue innovating.

Yeah - EU4 is a lot more careful in its historical approach, I'd say, than EU3 or Vicky2 was (warning: I am one of those people who would celebrate in the streets if Vicky3 was announced) and Imperator actually includes devastation and population loss as key mechanics.

Though I might have built the social pyramid a little differently. It can obscure differences in social structure between different regions (e.g. Mesopotamian serfs, like the mushkenum of the Code of Hammurabi, get lumped in with Greek and Roman chattel slaves)

And because each pop type - for understandable design reasons - does different things, it pushes the player to reproduce a Late-Roman-Republic social system, which I think obscures that other systems were possible (freeholding farmers rather than latifundia, for instance)

Very true.

Though again, as a historian, I'm not sure I can complain - that model of conquest-driven population change is straight out of K. Hopkins, *Conquerors and Slaves* (1981) and while it's not the only argument out there, honestly, it is the rare historical game where...

...I can look at a game system and think, "oh yeah, I know where they're getting that from the scholarship. I wonder if they read..." Much like Eu4's debt to G. Parker and W.H. McNeill in its design.

Absolutely. It's interesting to track the evolution of scholarly theory to the progression of game design in GSGs particularly. As you noted, eurocentrism decreases strongly in later iterations of EU, and in Imperator's case, we begin to rely heavily on....