It is indirectly about the time period.
Classic Imperial Age Roman armies and stuff are not mysterious.
Older lesser known periods are mysterious and therefor fitting for a mythological setting.
Earlier Romans are mysterious and a lot of the early history are mixed with mythology, yes that would work, but people wouldn’t like if Romans don’t look like Romans.
Most things people know about Rome is from a well documented time where we know real names of real people that really existed and we even have statues of them made during their life time and so on.
For Greek we have a lot of Mythology about characters that likely never lived in real life or if they did they where a lot different from what the stories tell.
That’s also the reason why the Chinese campaign is based around mythological characters that lived before 2000 BC.
The game is loosely based on Bronze Age with the big exception of the Norse. Generally a time period where we don’t have a good knowledge about.
Early Middle Ages would work better than Classic Romans in my opinion.
Unfortunately not,
Here is information about this book series:
“Rzeczpospolita” presents the “Mitologie świata” collection devoted to the myths, legends and legends of peoples from around the world. The series, consisting of 25 volumes, illustrated with the greatest works of artists, takes readers on an extraordinary journey through time, accompanied by heroes of superhuman strength, monsters and fantastic animals, world creators, demons and good spirits. The series describes not only the mythologies of the most important civilizations that are considered the pillars of European culture, such as Greece or Rome, but also reaches for ancient beliefs of peoples such as the Phoenicians and the tribes of ancient Siberia. As a result, a colorful, fascinating collection was created about matters that are of fundamental importance in human life.
Each volume presents a rich collection of myths of a given civilization, presents a pantheon of deities, explains how the peoples of the world imagined the rise and end of the world and the afterlife. It is also a journey through sacred places, such as the Sun Pyramid in Teotihuacan, the Newgrange mound in Ireland or Mount Uluru in Australia.
This series was created in 2007 (when I was 7 years old) and it was a bonus to the newspaper. Unfortunately, I did not manage to collect the entire collection (I think I miss 4 out of 24 books).
Thanks to this series, I became fascinated with world mythologies, which is why I was inspired by this series when creating the list of proposed civilizations and variants. I tried to combine the most culturally and architecturally similar civilizations.
I meant using the same architecture, but as the game progresses, you choose gods from one of the two civilizations, e.g.
when playing the Far East, we choose one of the two gods: Chinese or Japanese (Chinese and Japanese have more or less similar architecture). So you could mix two mythologies during the game - 2 ages of Chinese gods then 2 ages of Japanese gods, and many many variants.
I don’t think we should limit our thinking by architecture sets, especially not by the ones from AoE2.
China alone has more variety than Europe. Early Japan is also a lot less Chinese influenced. The Chinese influence grew over time so it would make more sense to make it the other way round.
Also with the gods, China and Japan share a lot of gods, especially in Buddhism.
But that’s generally a problem. A lot of gods of different cultures can be traced back to common roots.
Japan has becoming more popular in the past years in the West, more than it already was 20 years ago, while at the same time Chinese culture becomes more known too.
Korea is a bit smaller (even if it were the reunify) and it might never become as popular in the West as the other two but it has the chance to.
The problem is when it comes to depicting the past relations between Japan and Korea because Japanese claim they had an ancient colony in Korea but Korea doesn’t like this for obvious reasons. Mythological stories have been used in the 20st century to justify the Japanese occupation of Korea.
The modern day Japanese migrated from Korea to Japan but the details are still uncertain. It’s a problematic topic. They already got into problems of depicting Korea in AoE2.
Less of a problem with Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythology because people that live there today are Muslims.
Loosely as in not at all. Every culture in the game is depicted at its height, from Viking Age norsemen to every single Greek unit being based on the armies of Alexander of Macedon.
Roman troops fit in right at home in the anachronistic hodge-podge that is AoM, and they can benefit from the norse system of having military units build buildings, though perhaps it’d be limited to military buildings only. In fact, we almost got Romans instead of Atlanteans for the expansion pack.
It’s a question of taste. I also don’t like the Romans in AoE1. The Expansion civilizations feel to modern next to the mostly Bronze Age based civilizations.
I didn’t like the addition of Atlantians either. Instead of picking one of a dozen interesting civilizations they went for a fantasy/Greek mix with some influences of American cultures.
I don’t like the look of the fully upgraded Greek unit either. I think they had to go so extreme because the graphics of that time. But I like how the weapons change when you do the weapon upgrade independent of the unit upgrades.
But I don’t like it how they are silver/iron in the Age that has Bronze upgrades and Golden in the Age with Iron upgrades. Looks better in AoE1.
I kinda hope that they bring back some AoE1 unit designs in 3D, that be awesome.
The AoM story is based around the Trojan wars so adding some more Bronze Age unit designs would be cool.
Also it would be better to ad Trojans instead of Romans because Romans trace back their roots to Troy, at last mythologically with Aeneas. So you could even have the origin story of Rome in the game without adding Romans while being true to their mythology.
I do love Romans though and I think it’s sad that we don’t have nice looking Legionaries in any AoE game.
AoE1 Legions have round shields and don’t have formations.
AoE2 Legionaries are very late design and editor/scenario only.
AoM destroyers are siege units and have the wrong weapons plus AoM only allows for small numbers of units so they can’t look cool.
AoE3 to modern.
That’s why I hope for an Iron Age - Late Antiquity game for AoE5, if we ever get this.
AoM2 can cover the Bronze Age, the AoE3DE engine is still modern enough to cover the early Modern times and AoE4 will replace AoE2 for the Middle Ages. Perfect.
Of course Legionaries need to be able to build Palisades, Towers and Barracks.
This was a late change AFAIK, originally it was intended for Heavy units to get bronze textures and for Champion units to get the iron textures, it’s why cinematic models for the Hoplite feature the iron armor. I would’ve also preferred it if they had stuck to that way of doing it.
They would’ve been a bit of a strange civ, as they shared much of their pantheon with the other Mesopotamian cultures. A broader Mesopotamian civ would’ve been more logical for a game about Mythology rather than History.
Hoplites without the Champion Infantry but with Iron Armory upgrades look the best.
But by now the game just looks to dated, especially next to AoE3DE.
Babylonians, Assyrians and Summerians basically have the same religion.
Anatolian cultures like Hittites and especially the ones of west Anatolia are too different.
The question is how to add Troy. They could be designed like an Anatolian civilisation with Anatolian religion or as the Greek/Roman interpretation with Greek gods and mythology.
Maybe a hybrid could work. Or they could be seen as the Phrygians.
I think Trojans would be a more interesting fictional civilisation than Atlantians.
Well yes and no. The more east you go the more you find adopted gods from Mesopotamia. But at the same time, Anatolian religion was disparate and not unified into a single corpus the same way Greek mythology was, so you simply don’t have a unified pantheon for the entire region, and we simply don’t really know much about the Luwian mythology of Western Anatolia.
Which is why I would prefer the broad strokes approach of simply having a Mesopotamian pantheon, as it gives the developers more gods and monsters to work with. Plus, the Luwians were under Hittite control, and the Hittites did worship many Mesopotamian gods.
Anatolia was a mix and changed a lot over time. It would be hard to represent them in a good way.
Mesopotamia is much easier and straight forward.
But what civilisations is better to represent Troy, Greek or Mesopotamian?
Because I think an AoM2 should use the Trojan War as a base for the story again. Even the Greeks already connected half of their Mythology to the Trojan War and the Trojan War can be connected with other Eastern Civilisations.
There are a lot of cities or civilisations that trace their roots back to Troy including Britain.
I think Mesopotamian. As far as I know they had more ties to Mesopotamia than to Mycenean Greece, in both trade and culture, as well as architecture and military technology.
Ultimately as a Campaign civilization what would matter more is the art style and their human units, as the developers can choose to give them gods, technologies, and myth units from anywhere in the game.
There are two reasons why I think Greek mythology would fir.
they historic city of Troy was heavily influenced my the Mycenaean Greeks while being at the edge of the Hittite Empire.
they were described as a Greek like civilisation in the Iliad.
But they were much more diverse, for example they even had Ethiopian allies. It’s fascinating that they already knew that there was a country south of Egypt, with black skinned people.
Even in the Icelandic Prose Edda the Norse gods where traced back to Troy. Which is kinda crazy if you think about it.
Troy would be a better playable “fantasy” civilisation than Atlantis in my eyes.
Not an accurate source, the Illiad that ended up being written down was written down 400 to 500 years after the events, and is full of supernatural elements, anachronisms, and cultural biases. The whole story is full of Hellenistic elements that didn’t exist during the Mycenean period.
The idea that Troy had a Greek-like civilization is just be Hellenic bias on the part of the Greeks, who painted them as being equal to their own people in order to conform to the Hellenic notion that only Greek culture was civilized, and therefore surely this powerful city must have been Greek. In fact, we know nothing of Luwian culture outside of the names and nature of their gods (we don’t even have stories of their gods) and what we can gather from Hittite writings.
Seriously, Celtic and Hindu mythologies are the biggest ones, along with Greek mythology.
They are the basis for all Fantasy works, for example, and the most documented and preserved mythologies in the world.
Since we cannot have Persians, because Chinese already took their 2 most recognizable unit names (Cataphract and Immortal), at least give us Indians and Celts.