Taŋyáŋ Yahí
Welcome. Be ready to get annoyed at me once more as I ever-stubbornly push for Native Americans again.
Bit different this time - Less suggestions on the game, more of me wondering, “Am I wasting my time here?”
Am I?
Honest question, am I wasting my time? I’m pulling this interview from World’s Edge to help make my point here, because there’s a couple things I want to address;
The mining was just nonsensical for Native people, too.
It’s nonsensical for Lakota people, not Haudenosaunee. It is specifically a Lakota belief that prevents us from mining, and that same belief prevented us from moving into farming.
The belief centers on the ground being the body Unci Makha, or Grandmother Earth. You do not dig into the body of your grandmother, you do not tear apart your grandmother in hopes of making yourself rich, you respect her and defend her.
Here’s a fun example of just how far that belief went; There’s only a single tuber plant we regularly harvested - the timpsila, or “prairie turnip” (it’s like a mix of a potato and turnip tbh). Anyway, harvesting the timpsila is interesting because it borders on this belief of “do not harm Grandmother’s body,” right?
So it turns out the timpsila is a tuber plant that you can pull out, harvest, and replant. Not only is this easy, it’s healthy for the timpsila plant to have its tuber harvested year after year. It helps the plant live longer and get bigger and produce a larger timpsila the following year.
So, even when harvesting a plant’s roots, we were still careful to put the plant back in the ground because the culture had discomforts about pulling plants out from the roots entirely.
This is not a belief shared with the Haudenosaunee.
And yet, the game decided to make both civs incapable of mining and ignored the very clear fact that the farms and estates are violating the exact same rule that prevented mining.
On the other hand, the Haudenosaunee helped establish mines in the Northeast and long traded basic metals. Hell, their main form of permaculture was to decimate entire forests by burning them down and logging them, an act that would ####### any traditional Lakota person of the same era.
It’s also like, for all Indigenous people, there is the Fire Pit: like a one-size-fits-all thing, which just doesn’t work given how different we all are as Indigenous peoples.
Having something like the Fire Pit be so central to the game’s play continues to reinforce these rather pernicious notions about us. With its presence, it subtly says, “it’s okay to utilize these kinds of images of Native people.” Unless we change these kinds of representations—big or small—in a way, we will all be stuck dancing around a Fire Pit.
It's also like, for all Indigenous people, there is the Fire Pit: Like a one-size-fits-all thing, which just doesn't work given how different we all are as Indigenous peoples.
Then please, for the love of Unci Makha, explain why the ####### Aztecs, Haudenosaunee, and Lakota all share a basic platform and gimmick in their civ design. Age of Empires 3 is the one Age game where asymmetry can be explored to the extreme, yet here we are, grouping two continents (arguably, three, considering just how different Mesoamerica is from Tortuamerica) into a single faction design.
The Fire Pit was bad design. The Community Plaza is no better. Even from a gameplay standpoint, all it does is shove a bunch of the power budget of these civs into a building that wildly shifts power back and forth in an attempt to compensate for what the civ lacks that other civs get as a baseline. As a result, the Native units are either wildly underpowered because of the expectation that the Fire Pit ahem Plaza ahem will compensate (or more) or they’re stuck at extremely high training times because, again, the expectation is that the Fire Pit will compensate.
Because of the Fire Pit, all these civs are chronically underpowered past the mid game because they have to sacrifice villager seconds to keep up with civs who can leave their villagers passively collecting resources for the same benefit, but with the knowledge that they won’t fall off in the late game.
Just remove it. The Native civs don’t need some magical enhancement gimmick to make them interesting, they need an interesting identity that shows off just how different the economy and culture of these cultures was from their European counterparts.
I mean, seriously, the Haudenosaunee (among other eastern nations) were so industrious with their logging they likely helped cause the Little Ice Age from the number of trees they removed from the eastern seaboard. The Lakota (among other prairie nations) come from a line of peoples who lived on the prairie and likely helped create the Great Plains through population manipulation of the American Bison and pushing them around the prairie. It’s worth noting that, even through all the mass hunting the Americans did of the bison, it wasn’t until the prairie nations were well and truly shoved off the prairies that the bison numbers took a heavy dive.
Focus the economy of these cultures on their own history, not by copy/pasting the economy of the European civs and giving them a new model.
Unless we change these kinds of representations—big or small—in a way, we will all be stuck dancing around a Fire Pit.
They need changing.
This Statement
Read it? Great!
Let’s not kid ourselves. The only thing of value done was giving us the right name. This promise to “value authenticity and respectful representations grounded in truth” is not being upheld; Nothing of value was changed.
Devs: The whole reason I am here consistently is because of this statement made at the launch of the game. My living culture, the one I experience on a daily basis, was used as a marketing ploy in your game in hopes of garnering political brownie points, yet no meaningful changes have been made to the in-game representations have actually been made.
A bunch of meaningless, hypocritical changes have been made, yes, but if you think that is worth defending, that’s another argument entirely.
So, at this point, I return to my first question: Am I wasting my time here? It’s becoming clearer and clearer that little to nothing I say is noted, and the small mini-update the Lakota and Hauds got last year is almost more offensive than helpful at this point when you compare the scope of the European updates compared to the Native ones. The clear lack of effort is apparent when you put the two updates side-by-side; The Lakota and Hauds still have a single historical military unit between them (the Tokala Soldier), yet the European civs are getting individual uniform updates based on each nation.
There are now 9 Royal Houses and 40 European maps. In a single update, the smallest and most culturally ########## continent in the game* now has more maps than the Americas and only 6 less minor civs.
It’s fairly obvious that effort was put into this European update. Don’t get me wrong here - I’m not saying this shouldn’t have been done, I think it’s brilliant and I love it… What I’m saying is when will this level of update be given to the Natives and Asians?
And honestly, the Africans need it as well. Not to the same extent, there’s nothing wrong with being the most difficult faction in the game to play and I’m all sorts of down for them to retain that title, but they could certainly use some brush-ups from release.
The Future
So I’ve made a lot of posts about potential changes to the Native civs, but I want to go ahead and largely toss those specific expectations aside and sum up the needs here;
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Remove the Community Plaza. Yes, I’m aware the devs put a lot of effort into animating it and the “consultant” OK-d it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. I know it’s the sunk-cost fallacy at play here, and I’m sorry to all the effort put into it, but it, frankly, just needs to be abandoned. The game will benefit greatly from it being gone.
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Rework the Lakota + Hauds to separate them from the Aztecs + Quecha Maybe something could be done for the Aztecs + ###### down the line, but I am not the person to have information on that. For the Lakota + Hauds, focus their “gimmick” on having special things to do with their hyper-focus on specific natural resources; the Lakota hunted bison, the Hauds chopped down entire forests. Maybe something like Export or Influence, but they can only get it by focusing on their specific resource. For Gold, add the Haida at a later point.
- the best part about this is that it opens up room for a large faction (Tortuamerica) civs to have subfactions - the Prairie civs, like the Lakota, Comanche, and Iron Confederacy would focus on food. PNW civs like the Haida, Tlingit, and Coast Salish would focus on gold. Eastern nations like the Haudenosaunee, the Five Civilized Tribes, and the Anishinaabe would focus on wood. These could effectively create 3 sub-factions of one larger faction.
- Give the Natives a way to access Mercenaries. Every other civ in the game can have them, even if they can’t use them well; There’s no reason not to include them with the Native civs.
- additionally, create some North American mercenaries. I’ve dotted some ideas all over the place.
*(Australia is more so, but they’re also not in the game… and they’d likely also include the entirety of Polynesia and other Pacific Islanders.
And for those wanting to challenge the ############ statement, 90% of Europe comes from 3 language groups; America has over 40 and even more languages as isolated from these groups as Basque is from the rest of Europe. It’s not a contest, it’s just something I want to point out.)