Dude, you wouldn’t know Herodotus if a sizable portion of his work wasn’t confirmed by modern historians and archaeologists.
Also, how about Diodorus Siculus, whose writings on that battle are fairly consistent with Herodotus’ writings; is he a liar too?
I liked that one more than the first. Both are good though. I was on the fence about buying this DLC but right now I’m starting to lean towards buying it. Amazing what AOE2 can achieve, both visually and gameplay-wise. Chronicles is nothing like AOE1.
Only thing I believe is missing is new faces on the loading screen. I was expecting three ancient guys there.
Says the guy that said “Believe whatever you want to. I don’t care.” after acusing the entire world of only knowing about Sparta and Athens from the movie 300. Very respectful of you.
He doesn’t give any exaggerated numbers for Persians.
Probably. It’s a pity, since the Babylonians would be a great addition. Let’s see if that can be the case in the future.
Greek histories are based in real events, but their primary purpose was to teach some manner of moral or societal virtue using the individual in question as an example. Therefore, when said individual didn’t fit the moral of the story they were trying to convey, those aspects would be altered or left out so they did fit. There’s enough real history there that they are the best source we have for the history of the Greeks and those they interacted with, but they can never be taken as 100% truth, and must always be read with a grain of salt.
I don’t like Han. I mean, when I see that the Greeks can be divided into two or more civs based on city-states, I feel that it is quite a waste to have only one civ for Chinese.
If this DLC wants to focus on the battles within ancient Greece, hence there are the Athenians, Spartans and their foreign enemy Achaemenids, instead of a Greek civ and a Persian civ in the typical way, what will the other DLCs focus on in the future? Diadochi? Spring and Autumn period and Warring States period of China? Three Kingdoms period of China? Heptarchy period of Britain? When the civs of Chronicles are more granular than ones of AoE1/ROR, how can we only have a Macedonian civ, a Han civ or an Anglo-Saxon civ? For example, besides the Achaemenids there can be the Parthians and the Scythians, rather than making the Achaemenids the only Persian civ.
I’m counting on this. Just like when a new civ is released they update the AoE2 campaigns with the new civs, I expect they do the same here.
If a campaign depicts a united Han, then there should be just a “Han” civ. But if it depicts a divided Han, they can make civs from the Wei, Wu, Shu, Yellow Turbans, etc.
Just because Han is in the game doesn’t mean other Chinese factions can’t be.
The Persians conquered half of the world, that doesn’t mean that all those civs can never be in the game, right? Same goes for the Romans.
I think this setting has a huge potential in making Chronicles popular in Asia.
So many Asian, not just Chinese, games, movies, books and so on are based on that setting, or at least inspired by it.
It’s one of the biggest unused settings in the franchise. AoE2 is just a little too modern to do it well and there is only one Chinese civ.
It depends on what does this Han civilization mean?
If it’s the Han Dynasty, then that means taking the dynasty or kingdom as the reference,and then we can have the kingdoms or warlord forces from the Spring and Autumn Period, Warring States Period, or Three Kingdoms Period as their respective civs. The possible issue is that the Han Dynasty and these kingdoms are directly or indirectly related to inheritance. I don’t know if this will cause problems.
If it refers to the main ethnic group of China, there will be no inheritance problem, but it will return to the typical problem, that is, all or at least most of the Chinese kingdoms will be this Han civ .
Even though I could see the Parthians and Scythians being distinct from the Achaemenids, I don’t know if there might be the similar issues for Romans and Persians. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are.
They are likely to have several different characteristics.
Wei: Good at using cavalry.
Wu: Good at using water troops and often using fire attacks.
Shu: Good at using crossbowmen, often fighting large numbers of units with a small number of elites. According to legend, Chu Ko Nu was invented by the Prime Minister of Shu.
In addition to the typical three kingdoms, there can be also Yellow Turbans, Liang forces (Dong Zhuo & Ma Teng), Yuan clan, Nanman tribes, etc. Xiongnu can be there too.
But I don’t think we’re really going to get that much. I have basically same concerns about the samurai clans of Japan’s Sengoku period and the kingdoms of Britain’s Heptarchy period.
I don’t even dare to expect these to happen. It’s better to wait for Dynasty Warriors Origins in January next year.
The big question is how will civilisations in Chronicles work compared to AoE2.
In AoE2 it’s basically always the case that every civilisation is supposed to represent a group of people for the longest possible time period.
So Persians are simultaneously Late Antiquity and Early Moden.
Chronicles now has the president of having Athens and Sparta as civilisations, but AoE2 also has a few exceptions to that rule with Romans existing next to Italians and Byzantines.
I personally would like an approach of adding big empires first, that can be used as stand ins for smaller sub factions like Han.
But then later add smaller factions.
Or with an Medieval Example. First adding The Holy Roman Empire but then later adding the Bohemians.
Bigger empires are more popular and they were more important, right?
I personally spend a lot of my time making scenarios in AoE and bigger more general Empires are better stand ins for civilisations that don’t exist yet.
Slaves were an ok replacement for Poles before they existed, but Poles would be a bad stand in for Ukrainians now.
And then we have a unique situation in Chronicles because all the AoE2 civs are still there.
Does Chronicles need their own Goths, Celts or Huns if you can just use the AoE2 civs. Even Romans are in AoE2 now.
In the Rome At War mad those civs were all basically identical with their AoE2 counter parts anyway.
I like the idea of making the Chu Ko Nu a unique unit of just one subfaction.
I wonder how Chronicles will deal with UUs that already exist in base AoE2 though.
Or even things like civ bonuses and UT effects.
Yeah. It would take decades to have that many civs.
If we assume a speed of:
Then it would take until 2034 to even have 30 civilisations in Chronicles, far behind the 45 AoE2 has now.
But maybe Chronicles DLC will release more frequent, like 2x per year then maybe it’ll only take until 2029.
This too is why I rather want to see Han first. Then we have at last one Chinese civ.
I think the Goths can be perfectly covered by the Germani.
The aoe2 Celts and Huns could be used as inspiration for more period-appropiate civs like the Gauls and Xiongnu, but heavily reworked both because of historical and gameplay reasons.
Possibly by not adding them. We already have an example, Cataphracts are absent in the Achaemenid civ. Although I guess the new Imperial cavalry is supposed to be the equivalent.
How would you deal with the states from different time periods that shared the name? For example, apart from the dynasty, there was a Han kingdom in the Warring states period and another during the Three Kingdoms. Something similar with Wei. What do you think would be the best approach?
Not really.
Western Germanic Tribes and Eastern Germanic ones were pretty different.
But I think if it comes to the historical transition between Chronicles and normal AoE2 a little civ mixing should not be an issue.
For Scenarios and stuff like that.
Can’t wait to rework my Fall of Rome scenario with new Chronicles assets and maybe down the Line with Chronicles civs like Germani too.
I really wish they would increase the player limit. 8 is just too limiting for my ambitions.
Yeah that’s right.
I think ever Chronicles civ should stand on their own and not just be a modification of an AoE2 civ.
The could share some bonuses though like no houses for Xiongnu but with different UU and UTs.
The warring state of Han is 韓, not 漢, the Han Dynasty. They are spelled same in alphabet, but completely different in Chinese letters. Western scholars frequently render the name of the warring state as Hann to clearly distinguish it from the Dynasty. On the other hand, the Han of Three Kingdoms was in historiography as Shu Han, and Shu that people are usually talking about is its often shorten title. As for Wei, people sometimes called the Wei of Three Kingdoms as Cao Wei to distinguish them from the warring state of the same name.
But to be honest I think the best answer is that we don’t have to focus on multiple periods of China. Just pick one of them. Warring States, or Three Kingdoms.
If we keep having only three civs per dlc, it will probably be the Three Kingdoms. But hopefully we get more at some point, I don’t understand how the entire game mode could start in this state.
Good question.
Maybe they still want to be able to pull the plug if it’s super unsuccessful like ROR without having committed too much money and resources into it.
Maybe they wanted to keep the price the same as normal DLC so they couldn’t inflate the contents too much to not make the normal DLC look bad.
They can’t really increase the price of DLC any more or they will start costing more then the base game.
They could probably have the warring period states with Qin and another major state being the playable civs, and then the Han civ acting as both the rebels led by Liu Bang and the Dynasty he created afterwards.
