Honnêtement même si je ne participe que rarement aux débats sur ce forum, je trouve les idées de civs généralement intéressantes et je pense que je vais commencer à m’intéresser aux civs mods, continuez comme ça les gars 
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If you had asked me to pick some new civs to add at the very start of the DE being made I would have 100% gone with more Native American civs and then from there maybe gone Middle East or Africa - the US and Mexico would never ever cross my mind.
I’m not from anywhere near latin america or the latin parts of europe but Mexico is absolutely my favourite new civ added in the DE after all this time. I love the flavour, the uniqueness, the crazy revolutions. It feels like the civ with the most passion behind it. Honestly I think I would enjoy an AoE3 remake where they change everything else about all the other civs to make them fit around Mexico’s timeline and style haha
I love The Last of the Mohicans and that kind of damp, mysterious early colonial world and setting, the clash of worlds, the Native man as master of his world and the European interlopers, the end of an era and the start of a new one. The promise of discovery, of opportunities, and getting the upper hand to be the masters of the new world to come. I always loved that theme in AoE3 (pre-Asian Dynasties) and I would have loved if the DE had leaned more on that rather than opening up the “Old World” path it went down. I still love what we got of course, the royal houses are fun and I like the Italian civ a lot, but I think it made everything pretty confused. With the game focusing more on European great powers it feels a bit weird now having Native American civs as options to play as. They feel orphaned.
Personally I never had even a little bit of interest in seeing a Polish or Danish civ. Maybe like with Mexico I would have been surprised and loved them but I find it hard to imagine. After seeing how great Mexico was I would have much preferred a Brazilian or Argentinian civ. To get like poetic for a second I think civs like that had the mandate of the times, they were exciting places of revolutions and activity - people fighting and full of passion and glory, great deeds in the making, the clash of old and new world, the times changing. The Old World (outside of the occasional war and the industrial revolution) doesn’t seem to have as much excitement going on.
One more ramble: if I were king of the DE at the start, with hindsight and no obligation to actually make money, I think a good way to have taken it would have been to double down on the revolution system instead of adding more and more civs. Keep the original lineup (maybe even remove the Asian Civs…), add a handful of new Native American civs, and then give every civ a bunch of revolution options all along the timeline (like Mexico’s revolutions) so you can pivot from England to the British East India Company in age 2 and then from there continue to the Raj or revolt to Batavia or back to England in age 3 etc.
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Well, if you ask me… Inca and Sweden were the best civs to come out of the gate for DE.
Sweden just played really well into DE’s team’s strengths by being an european civ (DE is mostly made by former Napoleonic Era devs after all), you can tell the influence there and it’s something that just added really well into the game’s themes while having wide appeal.
The Inca however, well, they pull a lot of work to make the world map feel more complete. Literally the only civ in South America and the only new Native American civ, it demonstrated that the DE team was willing to branch out out of their comfort zone, regardless of how the end product ended up being.
The African royals was amazing as a first DLC, it’s just what everybody would have wished a third DLC for the original game would have been. Africa just made the game’s world feel more complete, again, complements the game’s theme excellently, it’s a shame the civs ended up being a tad bit wonky gameplaywise (Although Hausa is probably the best DE civ design both gameplay and balancewise, it’s fair while not being boring) But researchwise it’s leaps and bounds much better than the DLCs that approached other continents. I wouldn’t have had any other first DLC in its place.
United States was certainly a weird flex, probably came out of being an easy asset flip? Particularly considering some of the unit voices are AI generated lmao. But then Mexico is surprising because it’s very much not that. Each unit has new voice lines, just all of them. It’s impressive, no new bset of course, which seems to be a problem plaguing Age of Empires as a franchise, it seems they just can’t invest into creating new ones on a budget, it’s the sole reason Variant civs became a thing in AoE4 and let’s better not even get started on AoE2.
Researchwise however Mexico is bar none the best civ in the game. It just went in a completely different direction than everything else in the game, it’s not really built upon stereotypes of Mexico but just, loads and loads of deep cuts about Mexican history, and I do mean really obscure stuff they pulled there. It’s the one civ where they took historiography seriously.
Knights of the Mediterranean felt like a gutpunch when it got announced I remember. It makes sense in hindsight to build a DLC in Europe, it’s the biggest market you can appeal without having to invest much into, since, again, you don’t have to create new bsets from scratch. I’m still annoyed that half the random maps are european now though, really breaks the immersion since the game doesn’t feel like I’m building colonies anymore.
The second European DLC felt downright insulting when announced for the same reason, just… more Europe, even though they pretty much had covered all corners with KoTM. Still sad we didn’t even get that, but it, again, points out towards a constant, eery feeling that the devs have issues implementing new buildings into their games, for whatever reason.
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It has more RMS, but fewer biomes and other new assets. Much of what they have is recycled. Maps from other continents have more variety.
The best thing about the European maps are the minor factions.
Good natives and Outlaws are great things when it comes to European maps.
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While i agree that the mexican faction is very flavourful, with a lot of uniqueness to it that makes it fun to try over and over again for different combinations of revolutions and age up options, it is also a thing that i think could only work 1 time.
When the Civ came out a common complaint was that it was too random, it was too hard to predict what it would do, which might be fine for 1 or maybe 2 factions but imagine 10 factions where you would have to be able to predict them radically switching their play style in an instant the way mexico does it.
I also think it would be a nightmare for a player to learn, i don’t think mexico was bad to learn but imagine having to memorise revolutions to each and every new civ to get out just to be able to play them reasonably.
I think the end result would have been that most of these factions eventually would push towards similar revolution designs, which then would mean they wouldn’t be that unique anymore. Like eventually you will end up with the age 2 options becoming 1 economic option and 1 rush options, with increasingly less unique tech and units associated with each of them.
I just think there is a limit to how much you can do this before it either becomes needlessly complex and taxing to remember or before you start seeing repeats. There is some value in trying to keep some features simple in an RTS with as many civs as AOE3 has, and it isn’t good for an RTS to just be “random chaos”.
If i were king i would have made the age up options for the europeans more interesting and in line with the later civilizations, less “get 8 crossbows” and more “gain access to cows” type of stuff. I also can kinda see why they didn’t do that as i could imagine the competitive community having an aneurysm if the game tried to slow the game down and focus more on long term upgrades.
If there where to be early revolutions for European civs i think they should be subtle, at least more so than Mexico. Like maybe have an option to become Huguenots as France or what have you, before you then “return” to France the next age.
Germany is another option where there really is a lot of options to show more interesting stuff from smaller states and entities within the HRE like Bavaria, Saxony, The Hanseatic league etc. If there ever was a good opportunity to make a “make your own faction” i think it would be Germany, but that would have been such a departure from the original game and civ and i understand why they didn’t do that.
I dont know how to put this in a nice way but the Asian civs are vastly more popular than the native american civs, you really wouldn’t do the games any favours by doing this.
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There are so many it almost killed me. Really shouldn’t have been so many and certainly not so many with river trade routes.
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Honestly KoTM made the game more interesting rather than keeping the boring “colonial” theme of not having European maps since it made the game feel too limited before DE.
I personally enjoy the maps and royal houses more than the civs themselves as it finally felt like a breath of fresh air from the constant OG theme. Now the game is more timeline-focused than the pop-culture “colonization” theme.
I do support non-European civs added to the game but for me Denmark and Poland feel like the civs that should’ve been added instead of Malta and Italy in KoTM, tho ofc the theme was Mediterranean instead of just European so it is what it is…
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But what beautiful maps they are.
I mean retrospectively i think they should have planned for the Baltic DLC to have been made and thus kept the DLC to the Mediterranean, and then made northern European maps with the Baltic DLC.
Also totally my personal opinion but i think the Baltic DLC should have been the priority, if nothing else Italy could have been added as a part of a “Forgotten” DLC.
Is this a big technical limitation? Like is it about making sure the river and trade rout don’t get murked by the RNG of the map script? How does it compare to more standard Land and ocean trade routes?
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The better question might be were those historical maps worth it?
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You can fine tune terrain to go exactly where you want and can scale with map size, but trade routes get placed down in discreet segments and kind of snap in place where they want to go, which may or may not be where you want them. So you might have a perfectly nice looking river with a trade route when the map is 3v3, but then if you reduce it to 2v2 the reduced size pops the trade route into the edge of the river and looks terrible. If the river is straight or wide enough to accommodate the trade route variation it isn’t a big deal, but a thin winding rivers like on Italy or Dnieper Basin would be a massive PITA to line up.