Scythians are way too early. Even Forgotten Empires thought they were a bad idea:
Expanding
A hard choice
It was thus possible to add new civs without crashing the game. It was still buggy, but playable. Now the hard decision came up, which civs to add? I think we all thought about this before: what civs would we add to AoE2 if we had the chance to? Many essays and long discussions in various online communities were held on this topic but none could be turned into reality so far. I still remember my first list, it consisted out of 5 civs. Why 5? It seemed like a good number and it it was also the number of civs added in The Conquerors Expansion. My first list had: Lombards, Tibetans, Incas, Magyars, Scythians. The Lombards turned into the more general name “Italians”, the Tibetans changed to the more military orientated Indians, the Incas stayed Incas and so did the Magyars. The Scythians felt too out of place and were changed to the broader and more beefed Slavs. None of these changes were decided by the flip of a coin, but came by reading through history article after article, trying to figure out which civs would fit into Age of Empires II and could bring up interesting units, tactics or story lines to our favourite virtual battlefield.
Eventually the decisions on the civs seemed to have some surprising support from the past. Apparently when making the decisions on which civs were to be added for The Conquerors, the civs that we eventually picked were all considered in the design process and were only left out in the final voting round. Magyars and Slavs lost to the Huns, Italians to the Spaniards, Indians to the Koreans and the Incas already had two brothers up north
Do Scythians fit AoE2? Eeergh kind of. They began to dissapear more or less during the beggining of the AoE2 timeframe. I mean, they could have a spot in the game, but to be fair, there are like 30 other civs that deserve it more.
This is my problem with Scythians. I mean yes, they were around in the Atilla campaign, sure. But by that point they were in full decline and basically assimilating into the cultures around them (like the Huns later did, ironically) and didn’t last much longer.
The Alan angle might work, they did last for quite a while (even to today, technically) and were a unique culture group so it wouldn’t be hard to justify their place in the game timeline-wise. It would also be a good choice for a hypothetical Caucasian DLC, as they settled in the region after being driven there from up north by other nomadic peoples and would add a (not in my opinion, but eh) non-European-esque Caucasian option for them.
My personal take, however, is that they clash a bit with one of my personal picks for adding a nomadic civ: the Khazars. The Alans were a subordinate tribe to the Khazar Khaganate, which was a much larger and far more influential state in the same general area as the Alans. Although they lasted longer as a cohesive culture than the Khazars did (barring the Ashkenazi theories), they didn’t really have as much of an impact abroad, and were again subjugated by the Mongols later, at that point either being pushed fully into the Caucasus or dispersed either east towards China and Mongolia or West into Hungary. The Khazars imo deserve more of a spot than the Alans do, even with the fact that it would be cool to have post-Antiquity Scythians in-game.
I am worried about the homogenization of the new nation,Although the newly added four new nations have two unique units, this does not effectively solve the problem, which is really a headache.