there were no medieval empires or even kingdoms in north america, hence they warrant no representation in aoe2.
splitting hairs
I agree with that in principle, I just don’t see any design space left for good civs. how would Scots and irish play? what role do they fill, that isn’t already filled by multiple other civs?
As someone, who has bought the original cd back in 1999, I say - let them change stuff. It’s mostly for the better. If I wanted nostalgia, there is always HD.
you are entitled to your opinion, but others have different opinions. I think it’s immoral to change a game this drastically without the consent of its players.
So true. Mississippians, various Puebloan civilizations, the Caddo of Texas (which as a state name had its name derive from a Caddo greeting) there were tribes of Florida and all of these even interacted and fought Aztecs at times.
I think people erasure (which VEEEEERRRY likely is not your intent) is a dangerous idea especially if they had an empire or engaged in civilization building in ways not even nomadic Huns did
none of those were empires or kingdoms. none of these built huge cities, had large power structures, had huge armies.
what makes aoe2? imo it’s battles and city building.
We have no records of major battles in pre colombian north america.
the biggest settlement in north america was Cahokia with an estimated 15k people.
It’s all off by at least an order of magnitude.
the biggest pueblo “city” had a whopping 1000 people in it.
exactly. the keyword here is “tribe”.
I am not in anyway trying to erase these people. you bringing that up is fucking insulting. of course people existed there, about 100 million of them lived in the Americas before European arrivals.
My point is that they didn not aggregate into kingdoms or empires of significant size anywhere in north america.
literally no empire ever formed in north america, ever (unless you want to count the USA)
to add to this:
let’s pick the “Mississipian culture”, as it’s probably the best known and biggest one.
We know next to nothing about them. We don’t know what they called themselves, we don’t know the names of any of their cities (“Cahokia” is the name of a tribe that lived in the area centuries after Cahokia was abandonded), we don’t know the name of a single member of that culture.
Even the concerns about the “empire-ness” of that civ aside, there is just no way anyone could make a coherent civ about them. There is no material available for a campaign, AI leader names, unique techs, unique unit, unit language.
Afaik we don’t know a single word from their language.
^We don’t know much more about Huns than we do Mississippians, and the old devs still thought it appropriate to add them.
This for example
And even though I know Huns are one of the less popular ones out of the civs added by Ensemble, a lot of your arguments are the same Ensemble called out when justifying adding Aztecs and Mayas.
We knew enough of the Caddo language to name Texas after one of their words for hello!
We knew enough about Missippians to name as state after them. Not a great state so Im told (though the drive is faster than most) but one nonetheless Americans will recognize the name and be intrigued for sure. It would sell well… if we could work our way towards it up the Mexican lands or down through the northlands who battled Vikings
Slight correction: It was the word for “friends” or “allies” (very wholesome).
It’s highly possible there was no single name for civilization as a whole because it was composed of speakers of at least five different language families (Caddoan, Siouan, Muskogean, Iroquoian, Algonquian + isolates). More of a continuum of cultures living similar lifestyles than a single “nation”. It’d have fit along the broad umbrella civs of AoK, but probably not among the new civs that go for single ethnicities, sometimes even during a single period (3K civs covering only the 3K period, Viking Sagas civs covering only the Viking Era). I think the broadest possible they’d go now is by language families, but it’s fairly possible they’d just pick single tribes/nations descended from the Mississippians.
Eh, semantics. Europeans chose to translate the titles of ruling fellas there as chieftains and their states as chiefdoms, but petty kings of Ireland ruled over similar quantities of people while still getting the status of “king” and their chiefdoms being called kingdoms.
So similar to Winchester during the Anglo-Saxon period and bigger than Kraków throughout most of the Polish Middle Ages.
Fun fact, the Bulgarian term for their own people is Bulgars, and the Bulgars are proto-Bulgars. I think this is the case in Slavic languages overall.
So having the civ represent Bulgarians and Bulgars is fine, I think. They’re a continuum, even if they’re from different language branches.
It’s similar to my idea of making Azeris and Turcomans into one civ, even if they were at some point opposing each other.
They were also strongly influenced by nearby Bengal, culturally. My idea was that in in case of the last Bayinnaung scenario, it could be done so eastern and central portions of Rakhine state are Burmese, while the western portion is Bengali. Makes more sense than Vietnamese and Malay, which are wildly inaccurate.
Yeah Basquese should have their own civ, appearing in two scenarios.
Any Italians in this scenario should be Romans. I would say that the first two scenarios in Gothic lands should have Romans, while the latter scenarios featuring Asturias and other independent Iberian states should be Spanish.
No, nothing of the sort. Three Kingdoms shouldn’t be there to begin with.
If they’re ever reworked into something more sensible, this scenario would still be proper Han Chinese, so nothing would be changed.
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On the question of Mississipians, there is one video I’m aware of by Robbie where he went into depth on what is known about them and what campaigns could be done.
His experimental civ design notwithstanding.
Huns are a weird addition, I agree. But consider their impact on so many of the other civs I understand their addition. Baically all medieval states in Europe were hugely affected by the Huns.
Tikal is estimated at 100k inhabitants, Chichen Itza also at 50k. Tenochtitlan was the largest city in pre-colombian America, at about 200k. Those are actual cities.
Nothing the Mississipians built comes even close
The Mississipians didn’t call themselves Mississipians. The culture is named after the river where their ruins were discovered.
Which is my point. We know next to nothing about them, there is no way a campaign about them could be anything but pure fiction.
exactly, which disqualifies them as an aoe2 civ (like it should for Tupi). there was no overarching power structure, it’s a foreign umbrella for mostly unrelated and unconnected people.
I think the only case like that from aok is maybe celts.
yet nobody would want petty kings of Ireland as civs.
dumb and pointless civs splits.
Yeah, civs for individual chiefdoms don’t make sense IMHO, but I’m open towards larger nations like the Haudenosaunee or linguistic groupings such as Iroquoians (these are not synonyms BTW – Iroquoian is a language group, to which the Iroquois language spoken by the Haudenosaunee belongs)
I know that you don’t like tribal civs, but others do 
You can have an irish civi with petty king names as leader names,just saying.
of coure you could. we could also have a civ made up of penguins or Jedi. Nothing is stopping the devs from implementing more bad ideas.
Except petty kings were real (and so are penguins, but that’s another topic).
real or not isn’t the point, and I think you realise this, as you point out penguins are real.
the point is that it goes against the idea of what makes aoe2 civs. who wants petty kings fighting each other, who wants local chiefs fighting each other, who wants civil war factions fighting each other.
AI player names ≠ civilizations
If the 3K “civs” were just player names people wouldn’t have as much problem with them (they’d still be in the wrong time period given they predate even Huns and Goths).
fair enough, having them as AI player names would be fine
however proper civs should also have AI player names that aren’t petty kings (even less so penguins 
)
I can’t believe Mumble Happy Feet and Pingu aren’t appropriate AI player names