Most likely, the next DLC will have other new main civilizations, it won’t have India yet. I say this because these civilizations received a lot of votes in old polls, and would be next after the Byzantines and Japan, being:
- Aztecs
- Vikings (Denmark)
But following the new polls, other names are also strong, including:
- Spanish
- Incas
- Persian
I really wanted to see a new main Indian civilization, … but most likely we will get a new variant in the next DLC and only then, who knows, another DLC would come with an entirely new civilization like India (if we are lucky).
And if I were to say which new major Indian civilization would come in the future, my guess is the Vijayanagara Empire.
There is a very good concept for the Vijayanagara Empire, link below:
Now, returning to a possible variant:
I would like to see Mughals as variant of Delhi Sultanate.
Mughals would be a more modern variant, focused on firearms, cannons, elephants with cannons and more modern gunpowder weapons than seen in the Delhi Sultanate. The period would be the 16th century and part of the 17th century (the story to be told would be between the 16th and 17th centuries, as Mughal have lasted much longer).
We can now include part of the 17th century, as the Japanese are also inspired by that same century in AoEIV, remembering that we now know that variants can focus on very short periods, in short, so anything could come here as a variant, be a famous army or dynasty or some empire that existed in the same place and used the same architectures and so on.
NOTE: I previously wrote that Mughal was at the end of the 16th century, now I have corrected it and removed the word “end”, and updated a little. The Mughal still begins in part at the beginning of the 16th century, in the year 1526.