Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas Oh My!

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

In AOE 2 there are three mesoamerican civilizations: Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas. These civilizations in the game, for some reason have access to technology that they never had in history. Please change in aoe4

Mesoamerican civilizations were classified as “stone age civilizations” because copper gold and silver were the only metals they had discovered. They did not have steel or iron. So why in the ■■■■ do they have two handed swords men. They didn’t have swords. They had clubs with pointy rocks in them. And amour. It was COTTON! whats that gonna stop. Maybe a dark age archer but that’s it. Give me a break they had no Steel Plate armor.

Additionally these civilizations did not even invent the wheel. THE WHEEL! The most basic invention of all time. That means no siege weapons or handcart. So why is there siege so good especially if they have no steel or iron. And trebuchets. Don not get me started about those. ReLLY? Aztecs had trebuchets? Ill answer that for you. NO, THEY DO NOT. Without any basic farming tools their farming should be atrocious anywhere other than by their fertile lakes and mesoamerican rivers.

And another thing. those eagle warriors. why are they so fast? Mesoamericans are a extremely short race and are very wide. Look art usain bolt hes six five. people who are really short and wide are not fast. They certainly could not keep up with a horse. Stop making them something they are not.

And then there are the Boats. Do i even need to say anything about this. They had canoes not galleons. They also did not have crossbows. Both of those things are just ridiculous for them to have. It really has gotten out of control.

Authors note: So um, I get what the devs were trying to do okay they were trying to make the civs all balanced and i get that. I just hope that in the next game that the developers (if mesoamerican civs are included) stay true to history.

If you don’t believe me about anything I said up above. Do some research and you will come to the same conclusion and besides i’m too lazy to post my sources.

Anyways reply and tell me what you think AOE4 should have different than 2

3 Likes
2

Medival 2 Total War did then right, in my opinion: endless waves of cheap, disposable infantry, archers and skirmishes.
In aoe3 all techs, units and building were renamed and given special skins. Travois replacing carts, cotton armor techs replacing cuirass tech, as well as some “westernization” aspects, like stealing cannons or gunpowder. They still have the same HP and attack as europeans units, but they try to mask it saying stuff like “raw aztec stength”, “elite army of the nation” or the floral wars. The farming techs were replaced by stuff referencing the chinampas, and mining buffs credit the tribute extortion of neighbours.
But it kinda bugs me that mayans were killed by aztecs before any europeans set foot in america. Also aztecs were killed only by the spanish, aswell as the incas. I never really understood why these civs were added. Remove their gold - which helped fix the bullion crisis in europe, this was hella important - and they have zero importance outside of america.
I must say, tho: the idea of a sunset invasion is cool, even being ahistorical.

I also fell like there’s not enough references to human sacrifice in the game. The entire aztec nation was based on mass human religious genocide, yet aoe2 and 3 have not a single reference to these mass murderings.

1 Like
3

Yes, we know that AoE2 is historically, extremely inaccurate. We also know that this is not going to be the case with AoE4. :wink:

The entire team of historians / relics experts, designers, producers and artists has traveled around the world researching civilizations to make sure we get these things first-hand. We want to be faithful to civilizations. Instead of a local expert, we preferred to visit a Mongolian historian in Mongolia to talk about what the Mongols did and what their tactics were. We went so far as to make sure that everything we did was historically accurate

1 Like
4

If you read the History, you will know that the Sultan of Khwarazm (Khwarezmia) killed envoys of Mongol Conqueror- Gengis Khan. So Gengis Khan to take REVENGE, he attacked and annihilated the muslims at Khwarazm. Millions died. ( It was also a campaign in the original Aoe 2 Age of kings.). After that the Sons of Gengis Khan annihilated the muslims in Abbasid Caliphate and destroyed Baghdad… Also Millions died.
Every big empire annihialted enemies. It is more important who is Ally and who is enemy.

2 Likes
5

ok uh… this seens i bit out of place, i don’t really understand what point are you trying to make, would you care to clarify?
Even tho the mongols wrecked the muslins, they ended up converting to islamism after and helped spread their relogion everywhere, so in the end the guys at mecca won lol.

7

As I said on some other topic a while ago:

I actually find this approach really clever and works very well to me.

And from where you two took so many misconceptions about amerindians?

No access to wheels; being short and wide; Mayans being killed before Cortez’s arrive; Incas and Aztecs being mostly killed by Spanish; Aztecs based on mass genocide. I’ve studied a fair amount about amerindians, mostly Mexicas, and have never seen anything near to a consensus on the literature that supports any of these allegations. These are miths, to the best.

8

An RTS game needs to be balanced as well. You have to sacrifice some of the realism or else it would be pointless to play with Aztecs just to get steamrolled by European units. It’s not a documentary after all, it’s a video game, there has to be a mix between accuracy and fun to play.

5 Likes
9

Okay bud, First of all, I can assume from your name your probably white. Have you actually seen central indigenous americans in real life. I have. I have been to there villages while I was volunteering abroad. These people who are of the same ethnicity of these civilizations, are not even chest high compared to me (im six two). They are extremely short and are very thick similar to Islanders but shorter.
Furthermore, just type into google did aztecs use the wheel. Everything you just said as a myth is real. Obviously you need to do some more research. Start with this. and this

10

Has anyone ever heard of the battle of Otumba. 500 conquistadors fought against 20,000 aztec warriors and won. On horse back there was nothing the aztecs could do and they were massacred. I wish AOE would have a campaign on this.

11

dude chill a lot of civs have or don’t have techs that doesn’t fit accuracy. They did it for gameplay balance. You complained about the eagle going as fast as a horse, they already lose their stables for accuracy they needed something with speed and mobility so they got eagles to fill in blank there. If they also destroyed the entire infantry line AND their seige they wouldn’t really have anything or would have to totally have a different set of units for 3 civs then everyone else in the game.

AOE4 is going to try and address this by not binding themselves to the same tech tree however as is the nature of a GAME… if they add meso civs they’ll probably tweak them in a way that’s not entirely accurate for gameplay balance reasons.

No one disagrees with you but in an actual match up these civs would’ve been destroyed… look what a handful of people who shipped themselves over did.

12

Citing ES Sandyman (original Ensemble dev): “the possibilities were New World, India, or Africa. Frankly, we thought the New World civs were the most exciting. Don’t waste your time flaming us about how they were stone-age savages. All you do is show your ignorance. Go read a book or something. We knew that the Aztecs were cool, had name recognition, and were defeated by a concatenation of lucky flukes. Maybe we’ll do India and Africa another day.” and I completely agree with him. Featuring only European civs would have been incredibly boring. Based on those statements Forgotten Empires added basically all civs Ensemble ever wanted to add for AOE2.

Source: Conquerors Expansion – Age of Kings Heaven

Human sacrifice, not genocide.

You seem to forget that the Spanish won due to the help of Natives. Noche Triste, which is a scenario in the Aztec campaign shows that at some point the Spanish were an inch away from being defeated which would have led to an interesting alt-history.

2 Likes
13

They had tons of Native Allies. Aztecs were pretty hated back in the days due to their Garland Wars which main aim were to take captives to sacrifice to the Gods.

14

your right i know. I just get really mad because i always lose to those civs in aoe2. They made the aztecs and myans way too good.

15

I mean yes but they did some damage. someone even posted a battle where they decimated.

16

I mean theres ways to beat them…I’d rather them be good then have no purpose being in the game because they’re terrible.

18

Yeah i kinda mentioned genocide to add a bit of sauce and catch people passing by. And of course the spanish would have lost alone, Cortés had like only 1000-2000 spanish with him lol. How do you expect to take down a proper army with that?
A full “stack” of hardy spanish - tercio come to my mind (even if early), horses, gunpowder, technology and the most powerful navy of the 16th century - could be absurdly effective, even more outside of the aztec homeland. And remember Pizarro, he had less than Cortés, yet here aren’t the incas.
About the alt-history, this is what i meant by “sunset invasion”, where aztecs invade europe back.This is explored in ck2, and i think Medieval 2 TW has a mod for it. Cool, but hard to justify considering lack of navigation technology.
Wow @mopester2710, chill bro. One could say you are being disrespectful.

19

Well i would love to see Aztecs in Age IV (even in AoM too!) but im aware as many here said, that if they go fully realistic and accurate with Aztecs history, it would be the most unballanced civ in the game because they will be in huge disadvantage against european civs because of their technology at the time.
I think Age III did it pretty well with them even if they masked the things as they should be in Age II but the stats are the same as other units, their playstyle is as it should be. Cheap units that creates really fast. In an AoE world, they should be a civ that wins because of overwhelming you in units (cheap & fast production) and not by quality or technology.

1 Like
20

Don’t you be stupid and arrogant to try assuming anything about me, you don’t know me .

It doesn’t care if you, I or anyone saw mezoamerican originary groups in contemporany days, their ethnical traces surely remark their cambrian time ancestors, but obviously don’t match what that people were five centuries from now.

Certainly the Spanish killed and conquered many people from the Teotihuacán valley and dissolved the Aztec Confederation, but the Mexicas and other Aztec people weren’t wiped by Cortés, nor the later criollos. Actually the europeans meshed in, enslaved and employed many amerindians on their colonization after the conquering was stablished (I recommend reading Tzedan Todorov about this subject). What is a consensus as of today is that the actual wipe of amerindians on mezoamerica was done by northern americans settlers expansion to the west and indigenous genocide policies through XVII century and beyond.

As for the wheel thing, it’s funny how you mention that as a matter of the rudimentarism of amerindian people technology, and the second link on your suggested google search have a Historian that says about the lacking of finding a wheel as a tool instrument:

a question that implicitly presupposes two pernicious ideas: 1) that technological changes are part of an incremental and unilinear development of the human intellect detached from a social, political, and economic context, and 2) that the concept underlying the use of the wheel is only applicable to mechanized or motorized transport technologies. Hence, the absence of rolling conveyance in pre-Hispanic times is used to paternalistically compare the “achievements” of various civilizations, perpetuating in turn a western and colonialist perspective in the study of ancient Mesoamerican cultures.

And:

Several authors cling to the idea that cultural and technological innovations can only have a point of origin in time and space, and adopt the diffusionist model to argue that the concept of the wheel in Mesoamerica, even if it had a symbolic application, must have been a loan from the Middle East or Europe

Other authors take technological innovations as a teleological process. In the same dialogue headed by Caso, Stirling suggests a notion of technology that is exclusively focused on efficiency and progress. He states: “It seems unbelievable that having known for five centuries the principle of the wheel no one would have thought of using it more generally. It is more acceptable to assume that by relying on human locomotion, and being constrained by the limitations of the terrain, they did not realize its value as a practical means of improving transport

And finally:

In more recent discussions it has been commented that “transport technology was also quite simple. Although the use of the wheel was understood (as evidenced by wheeled toys), it was not applied to transportation because of the lack of suitable draft animals and the tortuous mountain topography.

(Actually thank you to linking me to that discussion it was really interesting)

You just linked me to a source that says you’re absolutely biased by and perpetuating western white colonialist view about these people (and you come call ME a white person, huh).

And about the human sacrifice: up to this day there is no academic consensus about how, why, and in what scale human sacrifice and anthropophagic rituals were done by amerindians. Most of the sources we have are relates made from Spanishes, and these can be very exhaggerated and are heavily biased towards demonizing the indigenous people, thus fairly innacurate. You can read about culture and society on the mezoamerincans with Jorge Luiz Ferreira and Jacques Soustelle book about Aztecs, as they are really accesible to the reading. On the topic of sacrfices, the anthropologist Josefina Oliva de Coll has the book “A Resistência Indígena” that bring this debate very well.

Sorry in advance that I don’t have literature in english, I only have it on portuguese and spanish, but you seem to be a smart boy and can figure out how to find these books on your preferred language.

2 Likes
22

The topic is you praying for some more historical accuracy at depicting amerindians on AOE4. I’ve never departed from that, just pointed out that what your asking is actually fairly innacurate. XOXO :kissing_closed_eyes:

3 Likes
23

Dude, he is trying to provide everyone with the best information as possible (and it is relevant to the topic unlike what you said) and just look how you reply! And seriously?

I mean come on, did the pyramids erect themselves 11

I don’t know, kill the horse and watch the rider get crushed? I mean they lost because they were not used to them, not because on a horse = invincible. And if you read the entire article you would have seen things like " The Castilian cavalry spearheaded the attack, breaking through the ranks and decimating the Aztec lines, preparing them for the assault of the Castilian rodeleros and Tlaxcalan infantry. Though this approach was successful, the sheer numbers of the Aztecs still managed to overwhelm the Castilians." “Spanish success was also thanks to Cortés’ strategy; he had instructed his troops to strike primarily at the captains and leaders of their opponent” “The Aztecs regarded the Spaniards as already defeated, and were looking to gain glory from capturing live Spaniards to sacrifice to their gods” Surprise surprise, there is not a single but several causes to the outcome of the battle.

That’s indeed true. Genocide = extermination of a particular group of persons because of who they are (exemple: the Armenian, the Jews, ect) while in the case of sacrifices, it could be prisoners, or volonteers… and the purpose wasn’t to completely eradicate any group

1 Like