Officially the civilizations are classified as either Infantry/Archer/Cavalry or other military unit types. But this doesn’t give you any idea about what units the civilization have. For example, Spanish and Chinese both are officially classified as “Gunpowder Civilization”. But they don’t share a single Gunpowder Units with each other.
So I classified the civs based on available regional and gunpowder units. There are 14 major classifications.
If you consider all the small varieties the number goes up to 29!
I think at this point, it is very wrong to say that AoE II civs are 95% same with 1-2 unit varieties.
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I would classify based on “what they have better than fully upgraded generic counterparts.”
Like, I wouldn’t call Persians a “camel civ” or “gunpowder civ.” I’d just call them a cavalry and eco civ since they have a full stable, all the eco techs, and multiple eco bonuses, which is distinctive enough.
That’s how the civs are officially classified. Though they don’t use “Eco” as a classification.
Mine is based on tech tree which is more useful for new players. At their level it is more important to know if the civ have gunpowder or knight than whether their civ has faster firing archer or cheaper archer.
Defensive civs are also tower rush civs overall, ironically.
