i like your self criticism, but you should not only speak, but also act
>India
>Tiny
You gotta be screwing with me.
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This thread turned into people thinking that India in AOE2 is too big and it should be split.
Calm down.
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About the size of India, if you were to put it on top of Europe, the modern country would range from Galicia (in Spain, not Ukraine) to Moldova and from the UK to the Sahara. Itās 6x the surface of mainland France (bigger than medieval France, who consistantly was one of the most powerful kingdoms). To be pedantic, medieval India would notably expand further west, including Pakistan (itself 1,5x France) and Bangladesh (smaller but still 2x the size of Bohemia).
Iād say there is enough room for 4 civs on the subcontinent.
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Writing wasnāt very relevant to warfare during the gameās time period; it was mostly used for war treaties, which most soldiers couldnāt read, or to train siege engineers, whose usefulness varied greatly depending on the situation. Even the wheel wasnāt that important.
Gunpowder, although in smaller quantities, was obtained early on by many peoples of the Americas and Africa, precisely through Europeans or Muslims.
Slings were used until World War I (to throw grenades)! And you seem to have never heard of how a stone could cause head trauma by crushing an iron helmet with a soldierās head inside; handling a sling, like other weapons, is an art.
Every ranged soldier in Age of Empires 2 has infinite ammunition; I donāt see Gbetoās point. But while Iām at it, Iāll share an excerpt from an article about African throwing knives just to show how terrifying they could be.
From Patrick McNaughton, āThe Throwing Knife in African Historyā available on JSTOR.
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AoE2 and the United Netherlands and Spanish Netherlands? nope. This is way too late in timeframe.
During the Romans there were Frisians, Batavians, Cananefati, Saxons. And Belgium had other tribes.
In the early medieval times the Frankish Middle Kingdom was owner of the Netherlands, mostly the central area. The North was free those were the Frisian tribes and their Chieftains, the āFrisian Freedomā existed during this time. During this time the Frisians existed as traders and vikings. Hence theyāre also known as the Frisian Vikings.
The Danes also took over the Netherlands in the early medieval times for about 80 years if i remember correctly.
Before the Hanseatic there formed counties and duchies. Holland and Zeeland in the west. Utrecht was the local Vatican ruled by a prince bishop and the canons of the church. In the south there were the Brabants, a belgian people. In the east the Gelder which are more connected with germany. And in the north the Frisians and some trading cities like Groningen, Zwolle and Kampen. Some aligned more with the Danes because of closer ties with the Hanseatic league. Thus the north was more oriented on Scandinavia and Germany.
Then the Burgundians arrived in Belgium and slowly took over. And expanded their influence to the south (Brabant), Zeeland and Holland. These factions can be described as our current civilization Burgundians.
In the center continued the Prince-Bishopry of Utrecht, it had a civil revolution backed by the Holy Roman Empire and granted the city its cityrights. It also colonized the northeast and tried to conquer the north. And had wars with Gelder in the east/southeast. Meanwhile the Frisians fought off invasions from Munster and Saxony.
As of today Utrecht still has a castle of the Teutonic Order. Gelder is different, together with regions more to the north they have a more Saxon culture. Hence i think Saxon would be a good sub-civilizations to add. Because theyāre also in Germany.
For the Netherlands i would say Saxons and Frisians are options to represent them more. Because we already have Burgundy, Vikings and Teutons.
But we also have Franks and they cover us too. Because we were invaded by the Franks. And the unique unit is throwing axemen which were also used here by the local nobility throughout the dutch Netherlands.
Maybe for Germany there could be added the Palatinate, Saxons.
For southern germany, swiss and austrai there could be added a combined civ that is based on Bavarian culture.
For the north of Germany we have the vikings and my earlier adding the Frisians. And for Mecklenburg-for-Pommern the former west slavic area we already have the Poles.
Dravidians is a huge umbrella and should be split, it can even introduce a new regional raiding unit to off set the mobility issue.
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Iām not a fan of adding more European civs, especially not every other DLC. The stuff Iād be fine are a Celts split (because I donāt like the current civ representing both Picts/Gauls and Scots), a Romanian/Wallachian civ, maybe a Basque civ and, at best, one or two HRE civs.
But first Iād like more American and African DLCs.
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Ah, ok. I have not played V&V (I donāt like that style of scenario) so I didnāt know that. I think I would have picked Celts personally, as this may be one case where Woad Raiders are actually sort of appropriate, but I can see that itās not clear cut which is the best choice.
To me, the name just means āpeople from Britainā. I appreciate that itās not often used for the medieval English. I had always assumed that they chose it because the civ also includes the Welsh. The civ was called āBritishā in some pre-release versions, but I assume they changed that because it sounds too modern.
Lots of people on this forum complain about āumbrella civsā, but to me this is one of the strengths of AoE2ās design. Granularity of civs only matters in a scenario/campaign, where one can usually use one of the existing civs, adapting if necessary. That would be harder if civs were more granular (as in AoE4, for example).
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How wide the umbrella is, is the main factor. The Slavs were much too broad. Indians, even worse. Teutons and Italians are fine.
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the problem with āteutonsā is that it is a bad name to cover the āgermansā, like āvikingsā for ānorseā and āsaracensā for āarabsā
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Or Byzantines for the Eastern Romans. Once you know āTeutonā was used in medieval latin to say āGermanā, Regnum Teutonicum = Kingdom of Germany and Teutonic Knights = German Knights, itās actually quite a bit better than āVikingsā who meant the raiders only.
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I think Teutons is a fairly bad name. in English, nobody would call medieval Germans āTeutonsā. āTeutonicā gets used as an adjective occasionally, but āTeutonsā simply isnāt a commonly used noun.
Teutonic knights were specifically of the Teutonic order. I am doubtful if a German knight who wasnāt of the Teutonic order would have called himself Teutonic. eg. the knights Templar also had āKommendeā all over Germany.
In opposition to that, āVikingsā is the standard name in English for the raider cultures in the middle ages, coming from Fenno-Scandia and Denmark. āNorseā and āVikingsā are not synonymous, as āNorseā does not include Danish Vikings.
EDIT: oh and there were also Finnish/Estonian vikings, who are also not Norse
Saracen(s) is simply a roman/medieval exonym for Arabs, which later included all muslims. Itās an exonym just like āBohemiansā, āChineseā, āJapaneseā, or āGeorgiansā. I canāt really think of another word that would be fitting. āArabsā is too narrow, āMuslimā too wide.
Byzantium is also fine. That is what Eastern Rome/Byzantium is generally known as today. They called themselves Romans, which isnāt helpful at all.
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Arabs is the name they should have, as the civ design is hyper focused on them.
The fact Saracen was used as a by-word for all Muslims makes things confusing when we have multiple Islamic civs in the game, some from locations very close by.
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i see where you are coming from, but what civ should Saladin be in his campaign/the saracens in the other crusade missions?
Making Saladin himself a Kurd would be fine, because he and his dynasty were Kurdish. However he was Sultan of Egypt as such most of his soldiers were Arabs and Egyptians. āSaracensā is a neat term for them, unless we want to split Saracens into Kurds, Arabs, Egyptians, Sudanese etc. (which iād strongly oppose)
This is a douchy from way out of the AOE2 timeframe.
And in general the depicted picture is like from somewhere in the 17th-18th century. Canāt tell exactly, but itās weridly chosen.
Idk why the TO chose that picture instead of something that fits better into the aoe2 timeframe.
I wouldnāt be against a Teuton split, but it should somehow fit in aoe2 - there are a lot of possible splits, depending on the time you chose. And much more interesting times than these later stages way after the 30-years War.
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are you aware of how many people you pissed off with that? 11
Saladin and his entire dynasty is labeled āKurdishā. With the entire aristocracy, and military command speaking kurdish, not arabic. Calling Saladin Arab is just wrong.
His empire also included lots of Persians and Turks, so just calling them āArabsā would be a pointless simplification, when āSaracensā is such a fitting term.
wikipedia lists several examples of historians distinguishing between norse and danish
either way, norse definitely doesnāt include the other areas of the baltic (finnland, estonia), who were also part of viking culture.
I donāt think there is need for an alternative. āVikingsā is perfect, everyone knows exactly who is meant by vikings: āsea-faring people from northern europeā.
I donāt know why this person claims this with such confidence when the etymology of āvikingā is unknown.
from wikipedia:
The etymology of the word Viking has been much debated by academics, with many origin theories being proposed. One theory suggests that the wordās origin is from the Old English wicing āsettlementā and the Old Frisian wizing, attested almost 300 years prior. Another less popular theory is that vĆking came from the feminine vĆk ācreekā, āinletā, āsmall bayā. The Old Norse word vĆkingr does not appear in written sources until the 12th century, apart from a few runestones.
So itās pretty clear that the vikings didnāt call themselves or their raiders āVikingsā.
It concludes, that in the middle ages āwicingā only meant pirate (regardless of origin), but
The word Viking was introduced into Modern English during the late 18th-century Viking revival, at which point it acquired romanticised heroic overtones of ābarbarian warriorā or noble savage. During the 20th century, the meaning of the term was expanded to refer not only to seaborne raiders from Scandinavia and other places settled by them (like Iceland and the Faroe Islands), but also any member of the culture that produced the raiders during the period from the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries, or more loosely from about 700 to as late as about 1100.
So in English āVikingā is a perfectly fine term for the cultures of Scandinavia (+and surrounding areas) of the middle ages.
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But we have Persians and Turks as other civs, so no itās not working here.
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but the Saladin campaign canāt be for an Arab civ. that would be like having the joan dāarc campaign for the english.
Also it does work: the Persians are largely based on much earlier civs (Sasanian and Samid empire, until about 999), so Saracens also representing Persian people after 1000 isnāt a huge issue. just like Huns and Magyars both represent Hungarians; or how Franks, Burgundians, Teutons and Goths represent Germanic people. etc.
the aoe2 wiki even clearly states that Saracens donāt just represent the Arabs:
They represent the medieval Arabian peoples of the Middle East and Northern Africa and their polities such as the caliphates and emirates, as well as other Muslim peoples and states in and around the region like the Zengids, and the Ayyubid and Mamluk Sultanates.
that map is for languages. Would you also call the USA āEnglishā, simply because they speak the same language. Read the notes:
Notes
For example: āMost of the earliest Viking settlers in Ireland were Norsemen, but c.850 a large Danish Host arrivedā (Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., 2003, pp. 66ā67); āIn 875 Danes and Norsemen were competingā for control of Scotland (Peter Sawyer, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, 1997, p. 90); Frank Stenton distinguishes between the āDanish kingdom of Yorkā and the āNorse kingdom of Yorkā, and refers in the mid-tenth century to āthe antagonism between Danes and Norsemen, which is often ignored by modern writers, but underlies the whole history in this periodā (Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., 1971, pp. 359, 765); Barbara Yorke comments that the Chronicle tends to use the term āDanishā for all Scandinavian forces, but the attackers on Portland in the late eighth century seem to have been āpredominantly Norse adventurers, but some way from their normal raiding grounds in Britainā (Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 1995. p. 108); in 793: āThe hit-and-run raid on Lindisfarne was probably the work of Norse rather than Danish warriors, straying from their accustomed haunts in the Faroes and Orkney down the North Sea coast of Britain in search of easy lootā (N. J. Higham, The Kingdom of Northumberland AD 350ā1100, 1993, p. 173).
lots of actual historians distinguishing between Danish and Norse.
i meant more the āminorā part, Iām not denying that Kurds are Iranian. As I commented further up: Saracens explicitly represent all muslim people of the region.
The in-game history even talks about them as the muslims in general. Referencing the conquest of spain and India.
sure:
you clearly know what you are talking about.
Just to clarify: I am not saying that the Ayubbids Empire are a kuridsh, or a turkish entity. But rather that they are a mix of people, as youād expect from a place like this where different people groups have been move through for millenia.
Accordingly, it makes sense that the devs didnāt create an āArabā civ, but rather āSaracensā to include all these different people groups who had converted to Islam.
Just to drive this point home: in the El Cid campaign, lots of muslim factions are still represented by Saracens, not Berbers (only in one mission did they replace the Saracens by Berbers)
This same article says āThe British conception of the Vikingsā origins was inaccurateā, If we use Roman sources on Barbarians they will also be pretty inaccurate because thereās no fucking way of knowing where the hell a mass of angry people invading comes from, a lot of ancient historians are not very reliable. We couldnāt get what they call themselves between all the sacking and killing.
It is not the same to have generic mass of people from the North (who the hell are they?, donāt know, they come from the north, letās call them norse; they donāt talk about where they are from, letās just kill them), or when the King of Denmark proclaims himself King of England, it is more concrete and they know exactly who the conqueror is.
All three countries has always been known in Europe as the Norse or Nordic.
It also says ādominant contribution of Egyptā later (when the campaign occurs and he conquers Egypt), you only mark what supports your point (that Kurds were his original mercenary army). Big empires had large mixed armies the game canāt represent, it is the same thing with Timur, Babur, Genghis Khan in that the civ is not accurate because they used mixed troops.
If kurds where Added, it would only represent Saladin pre-Egypt, after that it would be a Arab dominated Empire with kurdish Elite. (like Babur campaign where he starts whitah tatars and change to hindustanies)
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