The Göktürks only had a short-lived empire in the 6th century, which is too brief and early in history to be included in the game, which is really more from the 9th to the 16th century. Additionally the Göktürks are Turks like the Ottomans and may indeed be ancestral to the Turks who migrated to the Middle East.
The Jurchens were always a minor tribal people, either under Mongol or Chinese rule.
The Khitans are a branch of the Mongols.
The Ghurids were a Persian dynasty, so Persians.
The Tamils are an ethnic group. I proposed a separate South India, but that cannot be called ‘Tamils’ as there are many other ethnic groups in southern India, like the Kannadigas that you also listed. A more generic term would be Dravidians, which would work well instead of ‘South Indians’.
The Gupta Empire is from the Late Antiquity, contemporary with the Roman Empire. It belongs to AoE1, not AoE2.
The Khazars were also too short-lived and too early in the Middle Ages (650–969). Besides they were ethnically and linguistically (Oghuric languages) the same people as the Bulgars, who are already in the game.
The Rajputs are not a country or civ. They are a Hindu caste, a subgroup of the Kshatriyas.
The best candidate in your list are the Javanese, but the makers of AoE2 seem to have assimilated them with the Malays. They mention Gajah Mada as a Malay ruler, even though he was really a leader of the Javanese empire of Majapahit. The Malays did expand over a big part of what is now Indonesia and Malay and Indonesian languages are basically the same language (bar some loan words from English vs Dutch).
You don’t understand. I don’t work for Microsoft. I am not one of the developers who made the Age of Empire series. Like I said above, I wish they had divided the Indians. But they didn’t and now it’s too late (except if they are willing to wipe out their current Indian civ and create new ones by region instead).
Yes, there have been many minor or short-lived kingdoms within China. But how many lasted long enough (let’s say at least 500 years) with a sufficiently distinctive culture to be included in the game? Most of them were Han Chinese, identical ethnically, linguistically and culturally to one another. They were merely political divisions, like the numerous counties, duchies and principalities within the Holy Roman Empire - just on a bigger scale because it’s China.
Jurchens, Khitans, Tanguts, and Nanzhao all had Non-Sinitic origins, saying that they were all Han Chinese is definitely wrong. And plus the notion of an unified Han Chinese ethnic group covering much of China didn’t even exist at that time, it was largely an invention of the Republican revolutionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Exactly, even though Asia had some massive empires, due to its sheer size it still had way more diversity than Europe. If we divide Asia in the same manner as what they did with European civs, then we can easily get a dozen more Asian civs and there’s probably still room for more. Same thing can be said about Africa and the Americas.
No youre the one who doesn’t understand. Literally the last couple expansions? Have broken up umbrella civs. So we literally can go and make new Indian civs.
aoe2 is a medieval game and 6th to the 9th century is medieval.
Swiss and Austrians were Germans
People of the Papal States were Italians
The Turkic people group was also much bigger than the Italian and the German
They were an empire that could crush Europe
Mongols are a bigger umbrella than Italians, Franks etc. and the Liao Empire was more important than any tiny state.
It is not known whether they were Persian or not
Most civs are ethnic groups, except the subs civs that were added later on. The Dravidian ethnic group is as big as the Slavic therefore you can’t add them together as a single civ
More like starting with the 5th century. We literally have the Gothic campaign centered around the fall of the Western roman empire in the late 400s, and then the Hunnic campaign picks up after that.
Wow, reading an entire thread arguing we shouldn’t add any civ to Africa, the Americas or even Asia and only Swiss, Austrians and the Papal States should be added after all the work I’ve put into my recent polls is quite the experience. I don’t want to add to the dogpile, so let’s just say it’s all wrong and utterly biased and go to sleep.
Well, I just posted the one about Europe tonight, so it wouldn’t really be fair.
I can however point at the very first poll I did before all of those, about the focus of the next dlc, in which Europe as a whole was beaten by three different parts of Asia as well as North and Central America, and was tied with the Bantu cultural area.
As a historian I should point out that this view is outdated. The period between the 3rd and 8th centuries is called Late Antiquity.
I did not say that I agreed with how the game was originally designed. I would not have included the Huns and the Goths in AoE2, but in AoE1, or a new game dedicated to the Late Antiquity.