Please make it a little less ... sexist

[Crea]

Hi so I just started playing this game. (Technically I haven't gotten beyond the tutorial of the game so maybe that's all that needs fixed?) I'm female and got pissed at this game in the tutorial. I get the time frame women can't "fight" aspect of that time but could you at least make a little less sexist by making it so there are male gathers that also can't fight? Or making it so there are like amazon warriors? Or better yet both? Here's more on the amazon warriors: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141029-amazons-scythians-hunger-games-herodotus-ice-princess-tattoo-cannabis/

If this is already a thing an updated to the tutorial would be great! If not I, and I'm sure your other female players of this game, would greatly apricate some changes in this regard.
 

[Rolf Dew]

@Crea The mauryan faction's champion unit is a female unit (The maiden guard unit), can't think of any others at the moment. 

Edited November 30, 2020 by Rolf Dew

[Stan`]

There is also Boudicca, Cleopatra, Amanirenas as heroes.

I'd be interested in a cosmetic change for some civs though. @Nescio
 @borg-
@badosu
@Genava55
@Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

Do you know which civs could use both male and female as citizens ? With the Phenotype feature it should be easy to do. Not sure how to make the citizen aura a bit more fitting

[hyperion]

Woman can indeed fight, they are even decent ram counters. Spartan woman are even stronger. It can basically be said woman are like their male counterparts, they just don't run around with armour and a weapon meant for war all day long. So if the tutorial states they can't fight that's wrong and should be fixed.

Though the base hit points of woman is to low and could arguably use some tweaking. Would also help reduce the impact of early cavalry rushes.

[Stan`]

11 minutes ago, hyperion said:

Though the base hit points of woman is to low and could arguably use some tweaking. Would also help reduce the impact of early cavalry rushes.

Would you consider uploading a patch for that? Let me know if you need assistance.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 hour ago, Stan` said:

I'd be interested in a cosmetic change for some civs though. @Nescio
 @borg-
@badosu
@Genava55
@Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

Do you know which civs could use both male and female as citizens ? With the Phenotype feature it should be easy to do. Not sure how to make the citizen aura a bit more fitting

Lol. 

[Imarok]

2 hours ago, Stan` said:

There is also Boudicca, Cleopatra, Amanirenas as heroes.

I'd be interested in a cosmetic change for some civs though. @Nescio
 @borg-
@badosu
@Genava55
@Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

Do you know which civs could use both male and female as citizens ? With the Phenotype feature it should be easy to do. Not sure how to make the citizen aura a bit more fitting

We should just have female and male workers with the same stats. This seems more accurate. I think working on fields or in mines was more a concern of class/caste than of sex in these times.

Regarding female warriors: I lack the historic knowledge about that. But it seems that newer research doesn't support this thesis that in the past (without some exceptions) only men were warriors throughout the history. (not sure if this research applies on 0ads timeframe)

Edit: @Sundiata
might know something about that topic as well.

[Genava55]

16 minutes ago, Imarok said:

We should just have female and male workers with the same stats. This seems more accurate. I think working on fields or in mines was more a concern of class/caste than of sex in these times.

Indeed, it is slavery. Men and women were mostly equivalent on the matter. It is a very important aspect of ancient societies (sadly). The exception being the Mauryas and the Han dynasty of China with little slavery.

16 minutes ago, Imarok said:

Regarding female warriors: I lack the historic knowledge about that. But it seems that newer research doesn't support this thesis that in the past (without some exceptions) only men were warriors throughout the history. (not sure if this research applies on 0ads timeframe)

Obviously, female warriors were an exception more than the rule. There are cases of female leaders in the Celtic societies but nothing indicate they were fighting on the battlefield. Although it is possible that some women were warriors in the Germanic societies, and it is known and demonstrated that Scythian and Sarmatian warrior class included women. Unfortunately, both civilization are not in the game.

Finally, the game mechanisms are restrictive and it is difficult to portray anything else than productive and military forces.

Edited November 30, 2020 by Genava55

[maroder]

According to wikipedia there are quite a few examples of women fighting on the battlefield.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare#2nd_century_BCE

So why not make a certain percentage of fighters female. I mean we do have 15 variants of a mace

 

[wraitii]

I think we should consider this on a per-civilisation basis. Our "women / citizen-soldiers / champions" distinction really mimics a typical greek city-state, and then again not perfectly.

[nani]

You are free to submit patches to https://code.wildfiregames.com for all the changes to the code needed, new models, new units, historical background and units balance required to make the game less offensive.

[Genava55]

Well maybe the easier way is to give to all women the ability to fight as a soldier, but they are not as much strong than the men. Currently, the women do not fight automatically when attacked, am I correct? Some civilization could have bonus related to women fighting/defending themselves better.

1 hour ago, maroder said:

According to wikipedia there are quite a few examples of women fighting on the battlefield.

The list is actually short on the matter of women fighting on the battlefield. And when it is the case, most of the time it is women defending themselves.

[Nescio]

@Crea, you're completely right, the game is quite sexist. The problem is that history is rather sexist, and 0 A.D. generally values realism and historical accuracy. That said, I'm not quite happy with 0 A.D.'s current situation either. A minor improvement in the development version is that female citizens can now initiate all structure foundations, just like (male) citizen soldiers, but yes, that's just a small step and more has to be done. Unfortunately, while identifying what's wrong is relatively easy, the difficulty is how to solve something properly.

4 hours ago, Stan` said:

Do you know which civs could use both male and female as citizens ? With the Phenotype feature it should be easy to do. Not sure how to make the citizen aura a bit more fitting

Citizens as in citizens (i.e. citizenship), or citizens as in 0 A.D. (i.e. workers)? If the former, all, if the latter, none: just male workers is probably more realistic.

As for the aura, just delete it. It's not only sexist, but also unrealistic and without historical justification. Moreover, I doubt the AI understands how to make use of it.

2 hours ago, Genava55 said:

Indeed, it is slavery. Men and women were mostly equivalent on the matter. It is a very important aspect of ancient societies (sadly). The exception being the Mauryas and the Han dynasty of China with little slavery.

Yes, slavery existed, and yes, slavery was important. However, slavery is not the only form of labour, and not everyone owned slaves. Society was largely rural, agriculture the main form of employment, and most of it done by men working their own land, or poorer people working that of richer landowners.

As for Han China, there were indeed only small numbers of slaves, and most of them household slaves working indoors, however, corvee (of ordinary people) and forced labour (of convicts, debtors, prisoners, etc.) were very important there.

2 hours ago, maroder said:

According to wikipedia there are quite a few examples of women fighting on the battlefield.

There are numerous examples of women having political power (often through a husband, brother, or son), and even a few of women leading armies or being present at the battlefield (e.g. Ptolemy's sister and wife Arsinoë was with him during the Battle of Raphia (Polybius V.84.1)). However, women actually fighting is something quite different.

1 hour ago, wraitii said:

Our "women / citizen-soldiers / champions" distinction really mimics a typical greek city-state, and then again not perfectly.

Actually it really does not. In Greek society women were kept indoors, while men worked the land. And citizenship implied political rights. Mercenaries were foreigners, not citizens, and having soldiers quarry stone or mine ore is rather unrealistic too.

 

Anyway, in 0 A.D. female citizens have different work rates than male citizens. In my opinion male workers should be introduced with exactly the same values as their female counterparts, for all factions. In Age of Empires II, there were no differences between male and female villagers either.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

I already said a good deal of what I thought on the matter in my topic, The Role of Women in 0 A.D. back last year.  Here's the link. 

A few ways in which I saw increased potential representation for women that would be the following: Vestal Virgins could be a trainable healing unit for Rome.  Also it seems that women were the priestesses for Athen's cult of Athena, and a handful Athenian women who were citizens apparently were merchants.

[Stan`]

4 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Lol. 

I'm disappointed No reference to DE? Come on

35 minutes ago, Nescio said:

As for the aura, just delete it. It's not only sexist, but also unrealistic and without historical justification. Moreover, I doubt the AI understands how to make use of it.

Is there a patch for that?

36 minutes ago, Nescio said:

Citizens as in citizens (i.e. citizenship), or citizens as in 0 A.D. (i.e. workers)? If the former, all, if the latter, none: just male workers is probably more realistic.

Yeah I meant the latter. Using the phenotype feature one can make the units alternate between male and female actors.

[Nescio]

34 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Is there a patch for that?

Now there is: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3172

34 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Yeah I meant the latter. Using the phenotype feature one can make the units alternate between male and female actors.

Feel free to introduce them, art is your area.

[hyperion]

8 hours ago, Stan` said:

Would you consider uploading a patch for that? Let me know if you need assistance.

If it were a simple git send-email no problem .

 

7 hours ago, Imarok said:

We should just have female and male workers with the same stats. This seems more accurate. I think working on fields or in mines was more a concern of class/caste than of sex in these times.

Regarding female warriors: I lack the historic knowledge about that. But it seems that newer research doesn't support this thesis that in the past (without some exceptions) only men were warriors throughout the history. (not sure if this research applies on 0ads timeframe)

Edit: @Sundiata
might know something about that topic as well.

We already have noteworthy historical figures (heroes), nobles (champions) and citizens/commoners/females/slaves/priests/cattle ... (the rest) according to selection marker. So the class/caste system is already mirrored in the game, maybe not that great of a job was done as it wasn't explicitly designed for but just grown as such. You can endlessly complicate that to more closely mirror history but ultimately I doubt it will make the game any better and if not careful actually worse.

Female soldiers always existed and will always exist but if it's the norm the civilization is screwed. Loosing 90% of your man is a big hit but so what, this can be fixed by men having multiple wife but losing 90% of the females means you are done for. Well capturing them from other places sort of works too but then those places are screwed. Cynically speaking females mostly not partaking in the same stupidity is termed sexist today?

Honestly I like that villagers (purely economic unit) as concept like in AOE doesn't exist in 0ad, everybody fights if it's a matter of life and death. That nobles (champions) don't farm is fine. From a game perspective female is just a unit type which is cheaper and therefore weaker than a sword-man and as a result is rarely sent to the front-line but it's not like it never happens. A female in 0ad is a melee type unit dealing hack damage and as it's easily optically distinguishable from other unit types makes it one of the best unit designs from a playability perspective. Go ahead and add variations in gender, size, body type, clothing and then give them all pink hair so we still recognize them as the same unit type at a glance. This works also for other unit types, like blue helmets for spear-man and yellow hats for slinger and so forth. The 15 variations of knifes earlier mentioned is pretty much a joke, I can't even tell whether it's a knife, a short sword or simply an iron bar which is held from the usual distance (zoom) I play (My hardware can cope with it so I won't complain either).

It's fine to give some thought to political correctness, which obviously differs based on cultural background (Waits for someone asking that females in game need to cover their faces) and historical accurateness but it's ultimately a game or how would you explain that a female can regrow a lost limb in 5 seconds in a temple while a hero needs 30 seconds to cure a broken finger.

Thorfinn seems to have found some possibilities for other female based unit types and I'm certainly in favour of looking into that. Female priest for some/all civs could be said to be a stroke of genius.

[Palaxin]

10 hours ago, Nescio said:

As for the aura, just delete it. It's not only sexist, but also unrealistic and without historical justification. Moreover, I doubt the AI understands how to make use of it.

Good change and thank you for the patch! Apart from what you already mentioned, it also introduced unnecessary micro (which should be shifted to other areas IMO).

10 hours ago, Nescio said:

Anyway, in 0 A.D. female citizens have different work rates than male citizens. In my opinion male workers should be introduced with exactly the same values as their female counterparts, for all factions. In Age of Empires II, there were no differences between male and female villagers either.

13 hours ago, Imarok said:

We should just have female and male workers with the same stats. This seems more accurate.

Disagree. Similar to many animal species, humans do have a sexual dimorphism, e.g. by nature men have a larger muscle mass on average (advantageous adaptation for hunting I guess) whereas women have a higher percentage of body fat on average (advantageous adaptation for pregnancy I guess). Depending on the activity/work, this dimorphism should translate into different work rates in some areas where the differences matter, e.g. where you have to use heavy tools or carry heavy load (lumbering, probably mining, but not gathering berries). At least this sounds reasonable and actually not offending to me. If you are looking for confirmation, compare the performances of women and men at the Olympic games.

Regarding Age of Empires II, I think 0 A.D. was born because of the opportunity to make things different from it, not to mimic it...

Edited November 30, 2020 by Palaxin

[Dakara]

History is sexist, don't forget that

maurya champion and some heroes are already womens 

somes mens can't fight in 0AD : Monk for exemple 

[smiley]

11 hours ago, hyperion said:

Loosing 90% of your man is a big hit but so what, this can be fixed by men having multiple wife but losing 90% of the females means you are done for

There is nothing that can fix losing 90% of one sex and the gene pool that goes along with it. That's just extinction.

[Player of 0AD]

The game also contains:

- excessive violence

- slavery (all units are your slaves)

How can sexism be much worse than that? Shaking my head.

I think nothing should be done against the "sexism" in the game.

[Boudica]

Oh, look who is commenting? It's Boudica herself, the best performing heroine to have in your champion army.

On 30/11/2020 at 8:22 AM, hyperion said:

Though the base hit points of woman is to low and could arguably use some tweaking. Would also help reduce the impact of early cavalry rushes.

I'm sorry, but it kind of offends me how you imply that it's a good thing to "reduce the impact of early cavalry rushes". First of all, many types of rushes have already been made less powerful in the recent alphas. Not so long ago, cavalry used to be cheaper, stronger, tougher, faster and more accurate. If you want to be an eco bot playing the same 20 minute start every game, there Sandbox Petra AI is still there to serve you (funny enough, the AI is a female too).

[Genava55]

I must express some nuance regarding the discussion, history (aka the field of study) is not sexist but the "object of study" are human societies and human societies were very sexist for a long time. So the role of the women in past societies is far less known and recognized.

Furthermore, AoE and other RTS are inheriting a culture built from wargaming. The scope of this kind of RTS is really restrictive, think about it, primary production and military forces. There is little room for anything not revolving around physical violence and industrial exploitation of the resources. Which further ostracize women and other civilians in the RTS.

There is a physical dimorphism between men and women but that's not really the origin of the ostracization of women in RTS. The issue is the scope of such RTS where everything revolves around heavy physical activities and violence. Violence is the realm of the men, this is one of the strongest bias in the society. Most crimes are made by men and most of the physical violence is caused by men.

The issue of this restrictive scope is not only causing difficulties about portraying women but also anything else not revolving on violence. Religion for example. Religion is a very very very important aspect of ancient societies and yet, how it has been portrayed by 0AD (or AoE)? Healing. As a support to the other real forces of the game: productive forces and military forces.

Fundamentally, playing RTS and other strategical games are similar to little boys playing with small figurines imagining they are killing each others. I don't think we should consider it more of an issue than this example. This is mature boys playing with numeric figurines, there is no issue with girls playing the game but I think that if we question this kind of complex issue (portraying fairly women role in society), the basic core of rules and concepts on which the game is built became questioned as well. This is too much a challenge for an opensource project, already struggling with its simple goals.

Edit: so my point is simply to say that it is pointless to reach a decent portrayal of women in 0AD. It will always be insufficient or at worst clumsy.

Edited December 1, 2020 by Genava55

[Sturm]

It is true that the history of mankind is full of examples of extreme violence, slavery, sexism, misogyny, etc. If the game 0 A.D intends to be historic accurate, for good and for bad it will reflect these negative aspects that, sadly, are typical of human beings. So I think that if 0 A.D community wants to keep all of this at in-game (which does not seem like an absurd idea), I believe it would be important to shed light on the issue. And my solution here is the same as I proposed in other topics: whenever there is a descriptive box using plain text in order to describe a civilization, a hero, a construction, a weapon or whatever, it would be nice to have links to its Wikipedia articles. This will allow the game to have a much larger educational dimension, as there is no space in the game to describe any of these aspects as described in Wikipedia. Thus, whenever the theme "sexism" is relevant in the game, in an appropriate box, there could be a suggestion for reading articles such as: Sexism and video games - Wikipedia and Gender representation in video games - Wikipedia , for instance.

Edited December 1, 2020 by Sturm

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

There is at least one other way to represent women who lived in male-dominated societies (Granted, all were more or less that.), excluding more exceptional cases such as Sparta and the Celtic tribes.  Have them as actors in houses, sitting doing some task like weaving.