I wonder if the Australian civilization would be worth it?

@ElizaKolmakov What would there be to argue? Everyone agrees with that. The only real problem would be assuming from there that they weren’t “advanced”, but that would already be well outside the scope of the game.

@WorthBeast96788 Why would anyone call you a racist? I would just assume a little ignorance perhaps, but only by using the problematic terms “primitive” and “advanced styles of organization” as I said above. This language is not used by current historians precisely because there is no sense of advance in the real world as there is in the game. There are only humans trying to live as they please. And given that we don’t know exactly what they did, how can we even begin to say what they must have done? The best thing to do is just suspend any judgment.

As for the game, no one has ever seriously asked Aboriginal Australians. The OP must have been joking or had some passing shower thoughts lol

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I’m not entirely sure why this is seen as problematic, or even how it would be rephrased to be less so, while conveying a similar meaning. Comparison and contrasting of some cultural aspects is inevitable, but most people have the common sense to not generalize an apparent lack of certain cultural or technological characteristics into a broad moral judgment of the “value” of a culture or people. In this context, significant and demonstrable socioeconomic and military organization during the AoE2 time period is needed in order to make a credible “Civ” by the standard of the existing civs.

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  1. Because you’re not allowed to say anything less than 100% positive anymore when its about an ethnic, national or other group without being called racist, usually by someone on twitter.
  2. Advanced styles of organization is a nice way of saying “they never reached the feudalism, confederation, kingdom, republic, democracy, etc.” stage.
  3. Primitive is also the shortest and least easily confused way of saying “they really wont match up to the rest of the game without it turning into science fiction.” There are currently some things that are a bit questionable like meso civs with full plate armor champions, but they slide for game balance and development resource reasons. If you look at most of the techs though aborigines had almost none, even of the feudal ones. How could you work with that? I’m sure you could but it would have to be from the ground up, for a culture that we know little about, has been tribal its entire history, had no organized miltiary separate from the civilian (just a militia type system all together, the village men fought if they needed to.)

It just wouldnt fit in my opinion, they never reached a feudal age, or a castle age and definitely not an imperial one. So after dark age its just a made up thing. I’m not saying theres anything wrong with these people, they did just fine its that they only had a small popuiation and deadly environment vs the rest of the world which shared ideas across all of us, in much safer and nicer places to live. But when you hold them up against every other civ in the game they just dont have a similar history at all.

Since they lacked a writing system and history was all oral their details are sketchy at best and extrapolated from artifacts. If they get added they would have to be an extremely unique civ that doesnt follow the same gameplay curve everyone else does or else its just a made up civ given another name.

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Only because you don’t understand it doesn’t make it “Primitive”.
The reality is that we actually have no right in judging other peoples cultures.
And btw “western society” is currently in the process of destroying it’s own cultural basis, everything becomes “mainstreamed”. I don’t know if we should call this “advanced”, cause we have no idea where this leads us to. But we just call it “advanced”.

And btw talking about

The thing that repeated itself during history all the time is when established cultures became arrogant, it was always the beginning if their demise.

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Eh, why let the offense-prone types on twitter determine the parameters of your conversation elsewhere? You make good points of course, but IMO the effort to pre-empt all possible future accusations of racism (that nobody was or is making) was not needed and steered the thread in a less interesting direction. Like I said, nobody is dying on the hill of arguing for Australians to be added.

In terms of overly broad moral or value judgments, I agree, although @WorthBeast96788 has been pretty clear that doing so isn’t their intention. In the context of this thread, “judging” just means evaluating the known information about a civ and seeing if it’s a good match for the game, which is quite necessary and has no moral valence whatsoever.

This can be a useful term within specific domains, or in the sum of whatever domains are considered relevant, but it has its limitations, and obviously a civilization or society can perform well in some areas and poorly in others, and can regress as well as progress.

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Ofc you can always argue that civs don’t “fit” in the game as it is clearly designed around medieval european warfare. But we also found a way to implement the mesos, so why not other cultures?

I see no reason for judgement there, it’s absolutely legit just to say “it doesn’t fit”. It would also be way more honest to just say that and nobody would have a problem with it.
(Imo this is one of the biggest like “flaws” of our “advanced western culture” that we raise people in the belief that honesty doesn’t leads to “success”. But it makes it just unnecessary complicated in situations like this were there is no “competition”.)

I don’t see a problem with that, I actually see chances for new unique mechanics that make the game more diverse. As long as we don’t have like 30 % “atypical” civs it is fine imo.

Ignoring limiting factors of tech, organization, economy, military, time period, which arguments have already been laid out, creating an Aboriginal civ would present huge design problems and would have to be very different from existing civs. You’re familiar enough with civ design threads to know that people are generally not receptive to designs that deviate from the norm in significant ways, as an Australian civ would almost certainly have to. You may like the idea of radical new mechanics (I do, to a degree), but that doesn’t mean that they’ll be good for the game.

Pretty sure this is already what people have been saying. As well as being the subtext of most of the arguments here even if people didn’t explicitly put it in those terms. So I’m not sure how the implications of dishonesty are justified.

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Best way to see if a civilization concept fits or not is to see if it has the basics to make the civi.UU name UT names wonder building(hopefully historical not madeup) 10 leader names and a story for a historical battle/campaign.

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They would make no sense in AOE2. They didn’t build buildings and they didn’t come into contact with other cultures in the medieval period (at least not in a meaningful way if they did). The civs in the game have very little differences between them - they have to fit the basic template. There are some civs in the game that are a bit of a stretch to fit with the basic medieval European and Asian design, but can work because you can believe they had equivalents of things like castles and just ignore the obvious diversions from history like Mesoamericans having petards and trebuchets. But Aboriginal peoples had no equivalents that would make any sense. There’s also just no point to adding them because we know very little about their history from the medieval period.

As an Australian, I would like there to be Australian maps in AOE3 with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander native settlements. An Australian revolution probably wouldn’t make sense with the time period (ignoring that it was a peaceful independence and not a revolution).

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The Australian independence is too recent for a revolution, but it wouldn’t be the only one in the game that was achieved without battle.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. My answer to @WorthBeast96788 was referring to the real world and not the game. And I wasn’t referring to value judgments either, his caveats at the end imply that he understands that (which is precisely why I ask why anyone would call him a racist).

In the real world, there is no way to objectively measure an organization style as advanced/primitive among different peoples, since each people had its own way of measuring. Like, what if the Aboriginal style of organization was what best suited their needs? Or even if they could change, but preferred that one because it was pleasant to them? Not every people in history wanted to found an empire.

(WALL TEXT ALERT)
A historical example using technologies: Portugal shared a lot of knowledge with Kongo in their initial friendship. Some things Kongo adopted, some didn’t suit their needs and some they didn’t want. The plow and masonry are good examples of common techs in Europe that didn’t happen in Kongo. Due to the disease, there were no draft animals, so the plow was impractical. In addition, some observers claimed that the Kongo people harvested a lot without much effort, with just a small hoe (possibly no-till, better suited to certain tropical soils), and knowing that they could maintain a high population and a professional army, the hoe should work very well. As for masonry, Kongo kings tried to spread it starting with the royal palace. But the native ideas of impermanent housing + the inadequacy of the masonry for the environment (the palace itself was exchanged for a big earthen house later), limited it to the churches in the end.

So, in the end, each people adapts in their own way with technologies and ideas that they think are best for themselves. Based on this, is one technology really more advanced/primitive than the other, even if it fulfills the same objective? Were Aztec chinampas, another example, more advanced/primitive than other agricultural technologies in the world?

Tl;dr: given how little we know about the aboriginal people compared to others, there is no way to say their situation, let alone judge whether their technologies and other achievements were advanced or primitive (of course, unless we use a foreign and consequently biased metric).

Now, when it comes to the game, yes, the aboriginal people don’t fit the aoe2 model and so no one has ever seriously considered adding them.

Being an Australian (caucasiuon) and being married to a gorgeous Aboriginal woman, I can honestly say that as a Civ, Australia simply doesn’t come up to par so far as the time period alone is concerned. The English didn’t colonies the continent till late 1700’s. Sydney, the capital city of N.S.W. which is the most populace city in the country, wasn’t founded until 1788 so it is way outside the time period for the dev’s to consider.

Being an avid and long time lover of the game AOE2, I would dearly love to see an Australian Aboriginal unit in the editor as a unique unit, that, like others have commented, throws a boomerang. I think this would be a nice way to pay respects to one of, if the oldest cultures and peoples in the face of god’s green earth. The Aboriginal people have been on the land for an estimated 50,000 years, and that’s a conservative estimate, so I think that they deserve a little recognition at least, not as a Civ so far as the game is concerned but as a people with a UU.

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I see it very difficult, the closest you would see in AoE 2 DE would be the Polynesians… now an Australian civ in AoE 3 DE is more likely, but so far only, not much…

Please don’t make three posts in a row when you could just edit one this time.

Mate, from an Aussie (Australian) and member of an aboriginal family, bravo!!! Very well put and written, I couldn’t agree more, although you aren’t quite correct in saying that we didn’t have writing. Yes the VAST majority of our communication through the eons was verbal, in that you are quite correct, but we did have a primitive form of writing. Most “educated” people would say that cave paintings and inscriptions aren’t writing but I strongly disagree. Much of the “cave paintings” throughout mainland Australia weren’t just a picture capturing a significant event or similar, the majority of it was actual writing, you just had to know how to read it. It gave the reader information about their surroundings, food and water sources nearby, dangers and threats and most importantly it let the reader know where there were other people in the nearby area. Unfortunately then the “white, educated” English came along an said we were uncultured, uneducated and barbaric, proceeded to wipe out 93% of the population and call our writings “paintings”.

I am in complete and total agreement that there should be NO Australian Civ in AOE2 as we simply never advance past “caveman” status on a technological stand point, we didn’t need to. The political stuff we didn’t need either and let’s face it, throughout history, all over the world, political systems only changed when the people rebelled against the ruling elite, who wanted that, not us.

So again, excellently written and expressed opinion mate, well done and thank you for not being derogatory whilst conversing about my people. it is appreciated.

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Tarascans are a slam dunk, Mixtecs, Zapotecs and possibly Toltecs are extremely viable, and Mississippians are strong contenders.

Totonacs and Tlaxcalans could be rad as well

Shirtless whip-sword dudes

Yeah what is it with the shirtless units in this game? First Jaguar Warriors and now these geezers.

I mean I don’t have a problem with units being shirtless if it makes sense historically, but they can’t then have positive melee/pierce armour/high hp. With the Plumed Archers it’s just ridiculous considering their stats (especially since they would’ve been wearing layers of cotton armour in real life!)

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Indeed, I’ve made scenarios where Tlaxcalans have their own civ bonuses that reflect a more defensive and less gold-intensive variation of Aztecs, kind of like a Meso Byzantines.

Although being that they’re culturally extremely similar, and ethnolinguistically basically identical with Aztecs, I can’t find myself arguing that they’re a priority to be added as a distinct civ in the base game.

Yeah, I don’t mind the Urumi’s depiction in that sense as they are kind of squishy, it’s more the crazy DPS that allows them, as shirtless units, to take on paladins in Maximilian plate armor. It’s like those action movies where some 5’2" malnourished supermodel tosses buff dudes around like they were sacks of potatoes. Versus having a credible badass like Brienne in GoT.

On the plus side, at least plumed archers are ripped out of their minds, so that’s got to count for something. :joy:
PA

Also,

This is probably worth reconsidering given that the OP hasn’t interacted with this thread at all since the…OP, and recently made another not-super-coherent thread that also references Nintendo for some reason.

And their public profile is hidden now, to prevent people from easily looking at their collection of posts. I think you might be right.

Normally I’d report possible bots in private, but since the extend of our speculations is basically what we’ve posted here I’ll make it simpler and just put @anon63664082 here.

My apologies to @johnnyauau2000 if you just happen to be a person who writes a bit like a bot does and are just really enthusiastic about the competitor’s console as well.

Of course, but that already for AoE 3, since the Maori begin to settle in New Zealand by 1500 (although they made some voyages between 1320 and 1350) and are more remembered for their wars with the British during the nineteenth century (1807-1837) and with Hawaii half that the same, it is only unified in 1810 and lasts until 1895 when it is annexed to the USA.For AoE 2 I settle for Polynesians or Tongans…