I know, this sounds a bit crazy. But still, there might be a justified case for such an exciting civ.
The Jews / Israelites are most famous for their combats in / before the classical period, but doesnt fit into the AOE2 Timescale.
Still, there could be a case for such a civ. There were always living Jews in Palestine, from 2000 BC until today, sometimes they shrank to a mere 1000s population. And most importantly for AOE2: Yes, there has been war, and there has been weapons. At least much more than for the Romans in given time period!
Examples:
Revolt against Heraclius 614: 20.000 Jews were fighting
Samaritarian revolts (they are mixed jews / babylonians)
I guess this would make a great and exciting civ.
Bonusses: Villagers are constantly healing by 5 points per minute (Jews had high health / hygiene standards)
Starting with a free Barrack
Monks do mass conversion (3 at once, but lake +2 s longer. Monotheism really converted a lot in history)
Unique Unit: Lefthanded Stonethrower (mentioned in Judges, Dark Age in Barracks)
Those bonuses attached are already a part of persian/roman histroy too. Romans had the good aquedects and persians invented the iron age. Those civs have done so much in the region of mesopotamia that there’s literally nothing unique to give to the jews - thus its pointless.
Weird how the devs managed to fit the Babylonians, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Sumerians, Hittites and Egyptians despite the Romans and Persians being so overwhelmingly relevant. It’s almost like Ancient Near East has a three millenia long history during which more than two civilizations were active.
By that logic, lets add the stone age as a precursor to the dark age and have the cavemen as a civ.
Aoe2 has alot of bizzare sh*t - weird civ overlaps, javelins outranging bowmen, elephants being useful, all sorts of things. It’s steadily developing into something more substantial, so lets not saddle that momentum with more anachronistic bs.
The Khazars are the most obvious answer here.
Judaism is literally anit conversion. Their whole stick is decent from maternal bloodlines. The jews are literally the only religion afaik that is an actual race. You know what the call self prefessed converts? Gentiles.
I’m not seeijg tech trees or UU just some random history and no real effort on your part to give a non troll idea.
Start free barracks… are you high AF!? No wood sacrifice heres practically a bonus called start with 175w and 0 villager time wasted building a rax! That’s immense! You can literally drush instantly!
Simultaneously it could be a huge noob trap because you start sending soldiers out before you can stabilize an economy.
The rest of you: you should all know better than to converse with non serious people
But seriously I don’t like the subtext of the OPs post AT ALL.
For AoE yes, but for RoR the Hebrews/Israelites would make sense and wouldn’t be in any way anachronistic. I thought that was what we were talking about.
A jewISH civ like the Khazars could work but you guys realize this oddity, months ago thought we needed a serious nun who could convert trees and animals!?
Seems to me that OP wants an aoe civ in aoe2 just cuz RoR shoehorned one stripe of anachronistic bs in. I’m against having rome when we have franks, brits, italians, spain, berber, and byzantines (all rome ever was), and im against anything else like it.
They accepted a lot of jews into their realm but there is no evidence of them adopting their religion besides ONE iberian rabbi who said that despite never being anywhere near Khazaria.
