The intro says that Mstislav entered the smoky hall. Russians didn’t smoke. Not because they are so good, but because many centuries will pass before Peter 1 brings tobacco from the west. Though in Rus’ they really could smoke hemp, use incense and medicinal herbs. But allowing all this to happen at an official event of the princes is too much. Just cut it away.
We collect bogatyrs on the map. Bogatyrs are almost fairy-tale characters, superheroes of the Middle Ages. Most likely they had real prototypes that were embellished beyond recognition. And even about this historians are not sure. Perhaps Ilya Muromets is Ilya Pechersky. That is, we could meet exactly him on the map, if we don’t have a fairy-tale game about fighting dragons. Same with other bogatyrs.
And even if we allow the fabulous Ilya of Murom here, then according to the canon he died from a spear of a cuman, and not from an attack by the Tatar-Mongols.
In the end, the people come to idea that Russia should be ruled by a single tsar. But it’s too early for such events. Maybe someone has thought about this, but it looks ahistorical. There were still 2.5 centuries left before Tsar in Rus’.
Overall, this is one of the worst scenarios in AoE 2. I wanted content about Rus’, but obviously not like this. Literally everything that could be done wrong has been done wrong here.
If anyone has noticed other historical mistakes in this mission, please share.
No one would do that in the face of the evidence. This is the palatial room that session was taking place in. Perfectly conceivable that the room could be filled with incense or smoke from a warming brazier.
This is a wooden palace! (there were almost no stone ones then). They tried not to light a fire in them. This is not a church! And this is not kitchen, which was located separately. At most, the priests could consecrate the room with incense before a social reception, but this would not be enough to call the room “smoky.” It doesn’t work that way.
I would interpret this as “they have lots of fires burning to heat the hall” = a sign of wealth
william wallace wins against the english
conquistadors in the el cid campaign
there is MAGIC in several scenarios!!
ahistoricity is not the biggest issue of V&V. It’s far behind price-gauging, bad gameplay, bad optimization, bugginess, weird mechanics, unnecessary timers and dishonest communication
In Ru version “smoky hall” was translated with a word “прокуренный” that means dirty smocked to black by some bad people to the point when you can’t breathe.
William Wallace did not win Englishmen. I don’t know why people here think so. It is shown that he had a local temporal win and then the story interrupts. Same with Pachakuti - they won for a time, not completely.
But I was actually calling to discuss Mstislav mission mistakes. And yes, V&V is bad in general. I liked Drake and Seljuk though. And I truly hate timers. And unbeatable on gold scenarios (Vortigern and Otto seem to be such ones).
I personally enjoyed Mstislav scenario in V&V. Gameplay was good (better than many V&V scenarios), finally a Slav scenario… I think it was historically coherent enough: divided slavs, an invader…
I find this very strange. Did the Rus’ really not have indoor fires? Medieval wooden buildings were heated by fires, and I don’t see what the alternative would be, especially in cold regions like this.
I don’t know anything about Rus’ architecture specifically. In English wooden buildings, you’d usually either have a fire in the middle of a hall, away from the walls, or (in the later middle ages) have a stone fireplace and chimney in an otherwise wooden building.
The rest of your issues don’t seem out of line with other AoE2 scenarios and campaigns, especially the point about the Bogatyrs. I can understand why you would be annoyed about them, but I don’t share your annoyance.
I wasn’t annoyed. It’s just - they didn’t exist. Those are fairy-tale warriors. It’s like having Hercules in history game. I’d like to play them in a fantasy game but not here. And what’s interesting is that it’s enough to simply rename them to their supposed real prototypes and everything would become normal.
About fires - they used ovens. The Rus had one of the best stove technologies, they were safe and did not emit smoke into the room. And open torches that could smoke were almost never used.
I think that something like this “smoke-filled hall” error was inevitable given that V&V was made by just one person. The scenarios cover a lot of different cultures, and there’s no way that he can know this level of detail about all of them. (I don’t mean this as a defence, just an observation – I think having just one person make a DLC for AoE2 on their own is kind of silly.)
You totally right. The Russian stove is an important and still well-known element of culture. It is interesting because it combines several functions:
warms the room
they cook in it
there is also a “heated bed” on top of it
European analogues had only 1-2 functions.
The illustrations in the article show a peasant version of such stove. In princely estates they were larger, but the principle was the same. There was no smoke. Living all the long winter with clean air is well known historical detail of Rus.
And yes, it is a common mistake when a script for one culture is written by a representative of another culture. I am Russian. What will happen if I start writing stories about ancient Thailand, Vietnam or Indonesia? I will make mistakes there that Americans, for example, may not notice, but the local people will laugh at the fact that I am describing simply impossible and incompatible details.
A recent example: the French are finishing development on a game about assassins… in Japan… with a black samurai… and it shows sakura blooming at the same time as peasants harvesting rice, although this happens at different times of the year.
Mistakes in Mstislav’s scenario are of approximately the same nature.
