[Singollo]

I am suprised that a person with a degree in antropology would be disagreeing with me on this actually. I would think you would be of the opinion that we all are pretty much the same at our root, not intrinsically differant than one another.

Actually, "universality" and "cross-cultural truths" are big no-nos in academic anthropology. The trend is to say that, yes, at the base, we are all the same thing: homo sapiens, developing on an oxygen planet with 1G, requiring the same basic nutrients, etc.....but that's all that we share. Everything else is due to cultural conditioning, which is vastly different in different contexts. So, to quote your post, we are indeed "pretty much the same at our root"...but our "root" is before cultural conditioning crops up, and when that is taken into account, we are indeed very different creatures. I am not arguing that we are "intrinsically different from one another", but that we are culturally different from one another, and that culture (however you define that term) is so ingrained, so powerful, that it may as well be intrinsic.

My idea in proposing this mod was not to take the end result of Roman, Greek, or Cartheginian culture and compare them and compete using their various historically accurate strenghts and weaknesses. But to modify the game and place you at the head of an empire early in it's history, before those cultural differances arose, and allow you to choose the path to domination that you feel suits you best.

Hmm...maybe I've given the wrong impression here. I don't mean to say that, in my idea, you would take the Romans and then have to play a Religious culture, a la CivIII. (Actually, I want to move away from the association of Romans with religion, since it isn't really as intense as other things. Let's go with Egyptian.) Of course, each culture would be free to choose whatever the player wanted, just like with the SEIV empires. I am saying that if you were to choose Religious for your culture, you would be describing your culture as having the kind of intense, dominant fascination with religion that characterized the Egyptians, and that this complex, interwoven religious nature is not something that another culture could just "pick up". You would be saying that your culture has a long, complex, evolved history that involves religious beliefs, which influences the government, the state as an institution, etc. The same would be true of other Cultural "Technologies". Now, certainly, any other Culture could do the same thing...but then that culture would also have Religious as a cultural trait. That's all I'm saying; I didn't mean to suggest that a particular culture had to be married to a certain trait.

By the way, this is how I get around the strict literal view of technologies in SEIV. As you said, the technology could indeed be intrinsic to the race, having to do with the race's history, society, mentality, or something else that can't be reproduced--or even understood--by other races. This pretty much already exists for Psychic and Religious technologies, since you couldn't just learn such things, and it also probably exists for Temporal races...if your race's brain patterns can't intuit the concept of Temporal warping and such issues, you wouldn't really be able to fathom the technology. It isn't all that hard to extend this to Crystalline and Organic technologies, too. Again, though, this depends on one's view of the racial techs as being something more than literal, physical paths of learning; if you hold that view, I can see how the idea of culture-specific techs is kind of illogical.