I’ve been making some scenarios recently, and one way I do it is look into the conflicts of the time & place, and get an idea as to who I will need. So I recently was designing one and came across a significant issue with one area that just does not have any civs that even come close to representing the people and empires there.
It’s not Africa, or the Americas. As those have been talked about plenty of times before, and there wouldn’t be much point to mentioning them.
Instead I am talking about the area covering the modern areas of East of Iran, West of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and most of Uzbekistan. The various Indo-Iranic groups that lived here basically have no civ that even comes close to representing them in-game. These are groups like the Hephthalites, Sogdians, Alans and the various groups under the Huna/White Hun/Red Hun umbrellas.
Sogdians you could represent with Persians…if you squint a bit. But the others have no relation to basically anyone else in-game right now. The Cumans are further West, Tatars are later and further North East, Mongols are way off (despite them being used as a stand-in in Bukhara) and the Huns are related only by name to some of them.
This wasn’t really a post with ideas how to present them as civs (yet…), more just to raise a bit of awareness that there is a fairly large chunk of map that once contained big Middle Ages empires, that is barren and un-represented.
I have seen a few interesting concepts on the forum for civs such as the Sogdians, the Gokturks and Hephtalites, but it’s an area that not really many people are interested in unfortunately. The Greater Khorasan is a highly underrated region.
Huna is already kind of “umbrella term” among historians. The relation to the European huns is unclear. One of the few contemporary sources, Procopius, said that they may have a common origin, but that by that point they were quite different.
So, I don’t really think they can be covered by the current Hun civ.
In my opinion, I wouldn’t even make a Huna civ (it would also be easily confused with the current Huns), but a Hephthalite civ specifically, but that’s just my opinion.
Yes they use Tatars for the Hunas in one level, but they don’t exactly fit them. I already mentioned that the Mongols were used for the Hephthalites, which is an awful fit.
Well welcome forum!
You could make a Dlc about the hunnic invasion of Iran and India. It could have had a Sassanid campaign if they splitted Persians with the previous one.
Guptas (or whatever you wanna call them), Hunas, Hepthalites and Gokturks (for Bukhara) are all possibilities. Others are Chionites and Rourans (creating the first khaganate in history in the 4th century AD).
Kushans are on the limit, I think they were basically gone by the mid 4th century so they would fit better an antiquity mode unless they have some achievement in that century.