1. Back in March, CA added female Important Characters to the game in an update. (Important Characters are those that can serve as Generals, Admirals or Politicians.) In many factions (Rome, Carthage, Hellenic/Greek except Egypt, Eastern) the female Important Characters can only take part in the political and family parts of the game. They can never lead an Army or Navy. In others they can also be generals/admirals, based on their culture/history. (Barbarians because of people like Boudicca, Egypt because of their Queens such as Cleopatra, Masaesyli because they're Nomads and Kush because it's kind of their "hat.")
The spawn rates for female characters was (and still is) fairly low. Kush it's 50%, other factions which can have Female Generals it's 10-15%, and factions who can't have Female Generals it's something like 6% (and they can never be Generals.)
2. In August, CA released another update (Ancestral Update) which added family tree, political intrigues etc. This also added the family tree retroactively to campaigns people had which were already in progress.
One of the effects of this was that spouses of Important Characters now themselves became Important Characters (having previously only represented them with a "card" on the Important Character's details.)
Reason this is important, is that if you loaded an old save, the game had to turn all those wife and husband "cards" into Important Characters. So if I was playing say Egypt, and I had 5 married male Generals before the update, when I loaded after the update I'd now have 5 new female Important Characters (the wives.) And because Egypt can have female Generals, they will all also appear as possible choices whenever I appoint a General.
So it appeared that peoples campaigns were being flooded with new female characters, when in actual fact they'd been there all along, just in a different form.
3. Because of this, as well as there being new ways to create characters (male or female) such as the Seek Spouse political intrigue, people started seeing more female characters appearing in the campaigns.
4. Someone shared a screenshot which "appeared" to show them only having the option to recruit female Generals. I say "appeared" because if you play and are familiar with the game you can clearly see they have more than the 5 candidates they are showing and at least one male candidate. Also if you read what they wrote about how they were playing, that's also likely a contributing factor. Finally, as randomness and probility are involved, you end up with results that are on the extreme ends of the range. Just because Player A ends up with 5 female candidates, doesn't mean Player B isn't going to have 5 male candidates under the same conditions, and Players C through Z will mostly end up somewhere in between.
5. Also around this time there were a spate of threads about female leaders, almost all of which quickly devolved into insults and namecalling, escalating to some particularly nasty stuff, often by the same small group of people.
CA Ella and other moderators handled this in a professional manner, warning them and ultimately some bans were handed out, to people who had repeatedly or very seriously violated the Steam Rules we all agreed to when we joined the forums. Despite what some have claimed, from what I saw (as I was following those discussions) nobody was banned for objecting female leaders, only for violating the Steam rules due to their abusive language (and in some cases saying they were going to aquire the games in a non-legal fashion in future, which is a straight ban by the Steam Rules.)
Threads about the topic which had not devolved like this, and people who had expressed their opinions on it without violating the Steam Rules weren't locked/banned.
6. On August 13th (more than six weeks ago!,) after yet another one of these threads had gone exactly the same way, with more insults, namecalling, abusive language etc CA Ella locked the thread with the following:
"This thread is a mess so I'm locking it (and bans have been issued for those who repeatedly violated Steam community guidelines).
As has been said previously: Total War games are historically authentic, not historically accurate - if having female units upsets you that much you can either mod them out or just not play."
Source:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/214950/discussions/0/1698293068433895118/?ctp=8#c1746720717351059516The final parts been quoted a lot in isolation, but I think it's worth keeping in mind the context of it, as well as the fact it was directed at a small group of people not the entire community.
Also note that the authentic vs accurate quote comes from an article released in 2013 before Rome 2 was even released:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/totalwar/placing-authenticity-over-accuracy-total-war-rome-iiIt's also worth noting this got barely any attention at the time.
7. In the past week, a Youtuber (ArchWarhammer,) a gaming blog (OneAngryGamer,) and a far-right website (The Daily Stormer,) all did pieces about the addition of female leaders (often getting the facts wrong,) the screenshot (again getting the facts wrong and in some cases cropping it to be just the female candidates) and CA Ella's post (without the context.)
8. Over the weekend we suddenly saw on Steam and some other forums a rush of people complaining about the female leaders (which had been in the game for 6 months,) the current patch (which had been out for 6 weeks,) about CA Ella's post (from 6 weeks ago,) and such a huge spike in negative reviews that it actually triggered Steam's mechanism for alerting people to a possible review bombing.
9. Finally yesterday (September 25th,) CA released an official response:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/214950/discussions/0/1735465524721186900/***
So that's basically it.
I've tried to keep this as unbiased as possible, but I think it's only fair to state that I personally like the way CA has implemented female leaders, and the only real issue I have with CA Ella's post is she forgot to mention you can also roll back the game to an earlier patch using the Betas tab.
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Topic: Total War: Warhammer! Now with 2! And 3! (Read 516300 times)