Yeah, I’ll try to get this done in one message.
Can only speak for myself but there are two primary things. Tangut bait and switch/khitan frankenstein’s monster, and the Town Center Podcast about two weeks ago.
The Tanguts. the early screenshots showed a white castle with stupa thingies around the permiter, and a catapult camel thing, a camel-pult if you will.
These are unmistakably Tangut. The castle was based on Kara Khoto, a massive tangut fortification (the aforementioned stupas and a dead ringer, and the white walls match very nicely) and the camel-pult is based on the tangut boxi jun. historical records don’t give the clearest idea how these worked in practice, but it was a camel and a catapult. This isn’t oh we were theorizing along the wrong directions. These are unambiguously Tangut.
Secondly the Khitans and the Tanguts have no business whatsoever being umbrella’d. Khitans were para-mongolic, tanguts were tibeto-burman. This is not like tibetans and tanguts being umbrella’d, or khitans and mongols. this is like slavs and cumans bieng umbrella’d cause they were kinda close to each other.
Considering the castle and camelpult, It’d be like seeing the samurai and the (now) japanese castle in a screenshot, and then learning actually those were given to filipino civ, cause japan and the phillipines are both in the ocean west of china so they’ll be umbrella’d.
Also the campaign changes listed the tanguts would have their civ changed. But the patch notes today said that’s not happening until some later update maybe due to techical reasons. Since Forgotten they’ve been updating civs in scenarios to use new more representative civilizations, but just coincidentally now when we learn there’s no tangut civilization to use, the 50th civ swap is where it got really challenging.
The town center podcast. Cysion was asked point blank by viper if they’d planned a chinese split since DoI, and Cysion told viper the chinese wasn’t being split, but “the Chinese civ as it is it will evolve a bit it will change a bit but it is the Chinese and then there’s 5 civs around that”. But Shu Wei and Wu are three successor states of the Han Dynasty. All Chinese. This is absolutely a chinese split.
Also Cysion said that the reason they needed five civs was to be able to tell the stories they wanted to tell. IDK why you need khitans and Jurchens and tell 3k stories. I don’t think i’d elevate this statement to the high bar of a lie, but it’s hard to make any sense of it.
So Cysion lied to us, and the Tanguts tease was extremely mis-leading. If it was just that tho, I’d call this dis-appointing, not a dlc so bad it makes V&V look like the conquerors.
Very obvious tangut stuff is now part of the khitan civ. Which is just super wrong and weird.
3K is by far the earliest stuff in the aoe2 timeline and was also very short lived. Yeah goths but visigothic and ostrogothic kingdoms. yeah celts but also scots. Yeah Huns but they could also umbrella for other steppe civs of the western migration. Like Avars for example. Yeah Romans…but RoR was a confused idea to begin with and i think the devs felt pressure to add some content for aoe2. At least they lasted until nearly 500ad.
3K was from 190ad to 280ad. we get three civs for 3 han dynasty sucessor states that lasted 90 years, 200 years before the aoe2 timeframe is generally accepted to have started.
Also aoe2, while they’re called civilizations, they’re all actually etho-cultural groups. If for example you thought Romans were a bad inclusion imagine instead the devs added three roman empire provinces as civs, but only the three shortest lived ones. that’s about where we’re at.
But THEN these 3k civs have “hero” units. Basically for a bunch of resources you can train a hero, you can only have one, but it gives massive stat boost auras to nearby units. If these were chronicles civs that’d be fine. I’d still not appreciate the lying and obvious intentional mis-direction, but ok, this weird thing is in the game mode that is best for the timeframe and mechanics it wants to explore. but no. they’re “regular” civs.
TLDR they lied about what the dlc was about and tried to make something for everything and it ended up being for no one.