Want: 50%. I don’t know too much about this company, so I’m not familiar with it. With that said, a character from the company would be fun to play as. But overall, while a rep from that company would make a decent Smash Bros fighter, I don’t know who?
4X strategy refers to a genre, not a company. Think Civilization or Total War, those games. Top down perspectives, focus on strategic decision making, army management etc.
4X Rep (Which is in my wheelhouse!):
Chance: 6 %
Now, the real people issue is a significant one - while not all 4X games deal with real people, cultures etc., some of the most notable ones like Civilization do. While that hasn't exactly stopped Nintendo - after all, there's Dr. Kawashima, Codename S.T.E.A.M. and the Napoleon GBA game* have NPC representation in Ultimate - it nevertheless places a major potential roadblock. Civilization in particular bases its gameplay on playing as or against historical empires / nations with the leaders practically being used as the primary representatives, with other franchises like Total War and RotK being rather close.
Historical figures are wonky judgement calls and likely down to the individual person and their respective legacies. It's wonky precisely due to cases like Dracula: Bram Stoker's book was the first one to connect the real Vlad III Tepes to vampirism (300+ years after the real Vlad lived mind), but Stoker did not know much about Vlad Tepes himself. So it's possible that Stoker practically invented the connection based on the real Vlad's actions.
Now as Drifloon pointed out, there are certainly people who wouldn't mind a real leader being Civ's representative in Smash, and there's an argument to be made there. There's some uncertainty still though. Even as nuking Final Destination as
SharkLord
alluded to - whether Gandhi's playable or not - would be ****ing hilarious. Especially with Gandhi playable.
Oh **** I just realized. Combine Nuclear Gandhi + 
...
Oh god, imagine the sheer ****ing (beautiful?) chaos on the internet if one overlayed Nuclear Gandhi with this meme:
Anyway, I digress. Absent a super-definitive answer to that question, the safest bet might be someone who doesn't have a connection to a presently existing culture. Particularily, this would mean these three:
*
Sumeria - present in Civ IV and VI, Gilgamesh have been the leader in both. One of the earliest civilizations period and one of the earliest ethnic groups. Sumerian's been a dead language for 2000+ years at this point, and likewise the culture had been long assimilated by the point Julius Caesar roamed the Earth. Gilgamesh might've been a real king of Ur, but his historicity is not fully attested to as far as I'm aware.
*
Babylon - who's been present in every Civ game, Hammurabi is the most common leader followed by Nebudchanezzar II of Biblical fame. Babylon typically waxed and waned following periods of rise, instability, and conquest over the 1500 years the city was a major force. But Babylon ceased to be a major city by 275 BC - when a tablet from Babylon (
according to Encyclopeadia Britannica, 1911 edition) states that most of its inhabitants had been deported by one of Alexander the Great's generals -
Seleucus I Nicator - to found the new capital of
Seleucia for his Seleucid Empire. Seleucus and Alexander's other generals - the Diadochi - had established their own kingdoms / empires when Alexander died and were jostling for control over the spoils. After that Babylon gradually lost importance, especially in times of instability and conquest, until it eventually was completely abandoned by 1000 AD - the Middle Ages.
*
Scythians - who made their debut in Civ VI. Tomyris is their leader. A nomadic people who Ancient Greek writers knew and wrote about, they first emerged in archeological records around 700s BC when they migrated to the Russian / Central Asian steppes, around Persia / Iran. They roamed those steppes on horseback, and their most famous member,
Tomyris, has a legendary tale of revenge associated with her against the founder of Persia - Cyrus the Great. Scythian women followed Tomyris' example and regularily joined the men in warfare,
as warrior graves prove. As such, they're possibly one basis for the Amazonian legends. The Scythians were reduced to current-day-Ukraine at around the 300s BC, and were largely assimiliated by Greek influence at around the 200s AD. The closest living descendants are the Ossetians, who live around the Russia-Georgia border mainly - but 1800+ years separate the two.
Those three are more or less free from current-day implications (with the only real issues being that Scythian symbols have been used by Nazis and Turkic nationalists trying to claim them as their own, and Saddam styled himself as a modern-day Hammurabi). But time have effectively erased most barriers really. As such, I lean closest to
warubyun's
Gilgamesh challenger pack. Not only is Gilgamesh someone who'd fit Smash's particular style pretty well, he's also someone who can lean on a lot of different weaponry and fit nicely with the concept of Civilization as starting from somewhere to build something bigger over time.
That does present a gameplay issue though. I did post a possible Civ moveset idea
here (edited a bit because the Civ VI devs added more interactions with barbarians just after I posted that):
Civilization as a game is heavily reliant on the early game - usually the normal 4000 BC start point to the end of the Medieval Era. When one is starting out, settling the first couple or so cities, scouting and getting the needed techs for early game resources, formulating plans for later on. Oh and dealing with barbarians, as well as prepping for or guarding against any aggresive AI neighbors like Alexander or Cleopatra.* Or if one is playing multiplayer, everyone's going to go aggro sooner or later for teh win.
That's where I think a Civ representative in Smash could work - cities in Civ work by giving "zones of control" to surrounding land. The more the city can grow, the larger territory it will control. As such, a Civ representative could maybe work by establishing a similar, but lets say more fluid "zone of control" that strenghens the longer one attacks and / or keeps oneself from getting hit too much, but it shrinks after consecutive hits. The ZoC could offer various small but useful buffs to the character and possible teammates. Late game units like tanks might only buff the player if the ZoC is "strong" enough. In order to prevent excessive camping problems it might be worth it to make the ZoC semi-autonomous and not staying entirely in place, but moving a bit on its own so the player also has to react a bit.
And one could perhaps build from there, regardless of who one chooses to use really.
As for the genre itself, it has mostly confined itself to the computer scene. This is evident with the primary franchises: Total War's long been content with the PC and historical settings, although it has for the past few games branched out into fictional territory with Warhammer. Hypotheoretically I do believe that there would be an audience for a Fire Emblem: Total War or something similar, but that would require Nintendo / IS to work with Total War's developers Creative Assembly, who are under SEGA. Koei's RotK seems to have somewhat of an indirect chance, although that chance is mostly tied to the sister series Dynasty Warriors. The chance does kinda rise due to that.
The others are basically out of the question. Take
Heroes of Might and Magic for instance - a fantasy 4X series that started out in the 1990s, based on the computer RPG series Might and Magic. HoMM II to IV were published by...
3DO. Yes, the company behind that console. Until they went kaput in 2003 following HoMM IV's expansions.
After 3DO went down the drain the series became part of Ubisoft's catalog, and while V was pretty well recieved, VI and VII have not been to my knowledge and now the series is in a strange limbo. Besides that, its height - HoMM III - wasn't long lived enough to help sustain 3DO or its devs. Particularily, its devs left after IV - IV is a good game, but has some weird design decisions like a wonky unit production system. I didn't even know HoMM had a small Nintendo presence via HoMM I and II being ported to the Game Boy of all things (plus a spin off on the DS post-Ubisoft takeover)!
The fact I, who is very familiar with HoMM III and IV, didn't know that says quite a lot.
Like Phantom said, it's incredibly difficult to rate the entire genre, although its historical distance from Nintendo hinders its chanches a lot. Dynasty Warriors + RotK may be the best shots here by virtue of Koei being so close to Nintendo. Civilization may actually have a small but noticeable shot as Drifloon pointed out, so it'd be wise not to count them out.
Want: Abstain on the whole genre, 90 % for Civilization specifically.
As a long time fan of the genre,
absolutely. It's one of those I personally grew up with alongside the RTS, so of course nostalgia's going to put its glasses around my eyes. Civ in particular - I started with Civ IV - would also be an interesting gameplay experiment as well, so immense bonus points for that.
Also, a Civ rep appearing would give me, as
SharkLord
alluded to, the excuse to post the really-underrated Civ VI soundtrack (by far the best part about that game don't @ me). Ever listened to
the ****ing oldest surviving piece of music (Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, composed 1400 BC.) being remixed with modern electronic instruments?
Well, these madmen did it, and the results are glorious:
*(Total sidenote: It feels a bit weird that they released the Napoleon GBA game only in Japan and France. Those two countries make sense, but it could've been released elsewhere too. Especially since it was Intelligent System - the FE devs - who devved it.)
Noms: Ryza x5
Preds: Crazy Dave: 3,1 %
Megadoomer
en.wikipedia.org
SKX31
flip their %$#@ over Civilization in Smash and get an excuse to post the new Smash remixes all day, every day, and that would be a sight to behold.
