I would be lying if I would say that I wouldn’t love to see 50 civs.
I know this might go a bit Off-Topic, but how do Mobas with hundreds of Champions work actually? They’re not very much simpler to keep track of either it seems. I mean this as genuine question.
Most people do not care about balance that much. It would take a long time to balance for sure, but it would also sell like hotcakes.
HD proved that this game can commercially get expansions every 2 years, and the playerbase wants it to.
As long as the civs are fun to play and are roughly in the 45-55% winrate it’s okay looking sadly at the Portuguese.
Ports are easy to fix, just increase the Gold discount.
But this is a competitive rts, so balance is important. There’s no point in destroying the multiplayer aspect of the game just because a part of the community doesn’t care about it
Balance is also important for the SP scene, contrary to what @JonOli12 says. Nobody wants to play weak civs or boring ones (subjective, I know).
I still think there are some interesting and strong eco boni left which could be used for potential new civs like a certain amount of free villager after each Age up or smaller farms. There are surely some I forgot but the modder scene proves time and time again that there’s still potential in terms of innovative civ boni.
I don’t think that an expansion pack with 5 civs in two years would completely ruin the balance. The community as a whole will be familiar with the new civs we got in the Last Khans expansion pack and some parts of it ready for some new civs. Maybe they’ll find interesting boni for even 10 civs after that, maybe not.
Wouldn’t a competitive nature even welcome new challenges to face and new civs to master? At least after being familiar with the new civs we got? The civs aren’t that fundamentally different either, they just are a different variation of the same recipe, at least in the mid-tier level. The most radically different one we got is Cumans and even that one is pretty tame compared to what was made in different titles in the AOE/AOM franchise. BTW I love Cumans <3
Correct me if I’m wrong. I genuinely would like to hear your opinion.
there are also a handful of unique units to cover, just ask aoe3
i hear everyones request for how much civs they want, i think 4 would be nice since itfits with the ltest expasions
however there are so many fan suggestions
sinhalese
tamil
afghans
bengals
kannads
oriyas
marathas
and thats to name the ones that the forum creator asked for
yeah but some of those are out of the aoe2 timer period, like marathas and afghans.
didn’t know, i just saw that they were popularly requested to prove my point
popular is subjective, but yeah, if new civs get added, India def needs a little more love.
i was trying to say that 4 civs keeps the theme that we have going, however there are alot of suggestions
marathas and afghan(pastuns) existed in the medieval era just less influencial than what they formed in 18th century
in the above video i have posted, yadavas are those marathis.
would you rather have influential civs or less influential civs? because i highly doubt if they add civs, they are going to go all in and give India another 7 civs. Could be very wrong, but considering what we see with other civs, i doubt it.
i do agree with what you mean to say. indeed, more influencial civs in medieval age should have higher priority. 
I made a big-long post on another related thread about ideas unique units and unique techs for different Indian civilisations. The AOE 3 units were quite useful in that case, especially for the flailing elephant and Urumi (am I allowed to link it or copy-paste it here?).
Yeah, but keeping civilisations from the relevant timeline in the game is more important than simply throwing in peoples for the sake of it. That’s why I considered the Kannauj tripartite and the Tamils as an ideal four, and beyond that I feel other regions of the world would need more attention (Bantu people, maybe?).
can we start a petition ?
If I have to select 4 indian civs then I will prefer to select one hindu civ from South and East India each. While for the northwest India 1 Muslim and 1 Hindu. I think this composition will better represent India in a balanced manner. One possible combination is Delhi/Punjabi/Sindhi (muslim North-West) , Rajput/Hindi (hindu North-West), Oriya/Bengali (hindu East), Tamil/Kannadiga (hindu South)
(I had an idea, read the last paragraph for it) But then you’re ignoring both historical accuracy and relevance for some sort of “equality” that can’t truly be had. Most “Muslim” kingdoms including the sultanates and their mamluks were often occupied by Hindus, not just as commoners, but even by the army. Moreover, by making a “Delhi” civilisation that isn’t Rajput, you’re putting the Prithviraj campaign immediately under a cloud of whether Rajputs are Delhi or not (Rajputs became north-west much later in history and before the Mughals they were much more spread out across the Indo-Gangetic plains).
The split into “Muslim plains” vs. “Hindu Rajput north-west” might really be a good thing for the AOE 3 timeline, given that it is much more relevant for the peak Mughal times (Akbar, Jahangir, Aurangzeb), rather than for the Ghaznavids, Timurids, Tughlaqs, Lodis, and others. Even so, till IIRC Shah Jahan, most Muslim Sultans in India were Persian: they spoke Persian and held courts in Persian. I would therefore represent every Sultanate Army in India before Shah Jahan (and therefore everyone relevant to this game’s timeline) as “Persian” and not any Indian civilisation (even though they seem to have been often referred to as “Turks”, especially by the southern kingdoms).
That’s why, in my opinion, the Tamils along with the representation of the civilisations of these three empires and the ones that followed them makes much more sense to me:
Another option: If we really want to cover the Sultanates too, we could combine the Rajputs and the Sultans into a “Hindustani” civilisation. Modern Hindustan is the whole of India, but there was a large period when Hindustan referred to the area between the Indus and the Ganga/Padma. (I have edited my suggestion reply in the other thread to reflect this; in fact I think this could be a suitable solution).
