Oh, true… but also remove hero units, shift the civs’ timelines to later and lengthen their time in power, change the DLC name to something completely different, and tweak or make different architecture and units to not so closely align with real history. Seems like un-binding the DLC from historical reality so it’s not as disappointing could be a compromise, no? A fair portion of discontent is due to actual history and 3K incongruence with AoE2’s timeline/civ parameters. There are several examples of fictitious units and such in AoE2 to make a funner video game, as it isn’t a history simulator. A future DLC can do all the things everyone asks for to do things correctly, maybe
Can’t do anything about the sentiment regarding devs apparently lying, though, no matter what concessions are made to the civs.
We can refer to this post for some perspective on the issues, which got 14 likes, showing a fair amount of the issues are due to being tied to historical context: