Well after a little research, the Ming Dynasty’s emperor was nicknamed “Jade Emperor”
Jade Emperor in a Ming Dynasty ink and color painting on silk, 16th century.
“Jade Empire” - Ming Dynasty variation
This Jade Emperor is a chinese god nothing to do with the Ming dynasty in itself.
Really wondering how they came up with this “Jade Empire” some people were alking about the Jin dynasty after looking at it we could have something like Tang–> Liao dynasty -->Jin dynasty–> Yuan a northern china subfaction with maybe a more cavalry oriented design which sounded really interesting.
I hope it’s something similar and they just put this name as they had no idea or thought that “nothern chinese” was a bit bland.
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That is sad.
Let’s just hope it is not a mythical civilization.
If so I will refund my DLC instantly.
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When to open the test service
So, I guess props to the developers in this case because it did encourage me to do my own research and find out more about this.
TLDR first: ‘Empire of Jade’ is probably just a fancy name for China and the civ design may be influenced more by North China/Manchuria
Explanation:
Jade is by far the most culturally important material to the Chinese and Emperors were said to have a jade seal passed down along the line. ‘Empire of Jade’ is the Chinese Taoist version of heaven but Empire of Heaven, or ‘Celestial Empire’, was also a name that was commonly used for China across its history (Chinese immigrants in North America were even called ‘Celestials’ in the late 19th century) but especially during the Qing dynasty. Qianlong, a famous Qing emperor, was also renowned for having a huge collection of Jade. The Qing dynasty is more appropriate for the AoE3 timeline, so it wouldn’t have made sense to call them that, so calling them the ‘Empire of Jade’ may be their way around it. Their unique unit may be a heavily armored horse archer, for which the Manchu Qing were known. If they keep the Dynasty system, it could be something like Liao, Jin, Yuan, Qing but my thought was also that the devs may have wanted to try to redesign China into a simpler ‘single-landrmark-per-age’ civ so who knows. The new civ could also just as easily be completely unrelated to everything I just said.
If I was the developer I prefer to name them as Chinese (Central plain) and Chinese (Northern). Then we could have Tang→Song→Yuan→Ming for the original Chinese, and Liao→Jin→ManchuBanners→Qing for the variant.
Empire of Jade sounds inaccurate and fictional, cool in the AoM instead of AoE franchise.
The problem imo is the Qing dynasty is REEALY pushing this game’s historical time period window.
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