In Devapala campaign’s third scenario, Renunciation, you fight against the Huna invaders, represented in game as Tatars. I know nothing about this people, so could some nice history buff enlighten me about those guys? Everything I’ve found (beginning with their name) gives me the impression that they should have been Huns instead of Tatars. This confuses me a little bit because the Tatars now appear in way more campaigns than the Huns, and it would have been a nice opportunity to include the laters in a scenario. It kind of gives me the same vibe as Venice still appearing as a Byzantine or Portuguese civ in AoE2, by which I mean it feels like the devs are planning to replace it later with something else (in this case, possibly Hephtalites, though I wouldn’t have ever thought of them as a possible candidate for a new civ but it may be more likely than an entire Huna civ, not mentioning there would be less confusion with the current Huns).
Yeah, I know about the Hephtalites and I’ve read the wikipedia article about the Huna people (which seems to say that the Hephtalite were only a part of the Huna and not necessarily the driving force) but I was wondering if someone knew more than what a quick search could bring me to, maybe a book to recommend?
It also doesn’t really answer my question about why the Huna are represented as Tatars rather than Huns…
Probably because the architecture style fits somewhat better than the one of the Huns.
The Huns seem to be defined as those active in Europe, such as the forces of Attila and later the Avars.
Maybe one day we can get a civ that represents the Eastern Iranians, maybe called the Sogdians. This civ will be able to represent such as the White Huns (Hephthalites) and Hunas, and more effectively interpret the situation in Central Asia in the early Middle Ages.
But before that, it can only be replaced by a few other Central Asian civs like Tatars.
Well, the Bukhara historical battle represents the “Hun Raiders” in Central Asia/Middle East as Huns, though the “White Huns” are Mongols (?)
It also use the Turk civ for the Gokturks, which makes sense but is somehow surprising considering in every other scenario taking place in Central Asia the Turkish people tend to systematically be Tatars now.
The scarcity of Inner Asian civs has led to the need to replace them with relational civs from other regions.
The Gokturks are clearly another missing civ in my opinion. They had done a lot in East Asia.
The Sogdians and the Gokturks, really good complements to the Central Asia as a DLC content.
That doesn’t matter, you can change the architecture style in the scenario editor nowadays. They did it in the Edward Longshanks campaign whenever Sicilians are used as Normans.
I was expecting the Hunas to be Huns with a different architecture set in this scenario too, although I know nothing about the Hunas so wasn’t especially surprised that I was wrong.
Then the scenario creator decided that Tatars were good enough of an umbrella and chose to spare himself some clicks, or he looked at how they did it in Bukhara and went “ok whatever”. Or since the relation between the Huns and Hunas is debated using Tatars was safer.
Cough… add Uyghurs and Tibetans and Jurchens and Uyghurs can be the mysterious replacement for the Hunas. But the E European building set Huns do not cut it for an Indian campaign.
Architecture is not an issue in DE since you can set a different architectural style than what the civ has.