Perhaps, but suppose you’re making a campaign involving Dravidians, but you don’t have access to the Dravidians civ. As a stand-in, would you prefer to a civ called Indians, a civ called Gurjaras, or a civ called Babur? My point is that broader civs are more useful for campaign and scenario design, and that is the only place where what a civ represents is relevant.
Emphasis on meant – it means something broader now.
My guess (but it is just a guess) is that the original developers thought calling “Germans” sounds too modern.
This is interesting – I’ve seen lots of people state with great confidence “having a civ called Vikings is like having a civ called Plumbers” or similar such nonsense.
first of all the historians referenced are all from the 20th or 21st century, so they are not the ones referred to by “[their] conception of the Vikings’ origins was inaccurate”.
secondly, that full quote you are referring to looks like this:
why are you quoting something that is un-referenced? that’s pretty bad form.
thirdly, what’s the point? your argument makes absolutely no sense whatsover. Let me unpack this:
you claim “the british didn’t know where the vikings came from, therefore we should not call them vikings but norse instead”.
People other than British were raided by the Vikings (who might have had a better idea where they came from)
We know more than the medieval British.
surely if the british didn’t know where they came from, that speaks for calling them something vague like “Vikings”, instead of something more specific like “Norse”
what? “generic mass of people”, what are you talking about?
The examples are “In 875 Danes and Norsemen were competing” and “Frank Stenton distinguishes between the “Danish kingdom of York” and the “Norse kingdom of York””, “antagonism between Danes and Norsemen”
clearly these writers do not consider the Danes Norse.
What even is the point in talking to you if you don’t even read the replies.
you are directly contradicting, without evidence, the evidence I have shown you, of actual historians not considering the Danes Norse, but using “Norse” explicitly to exclude the Danes.
How do you expect an honest conversation to occur when the conversation can be summed up as:
me: here is evidence of historians distinguishing Norse and Danes
you: “all three countries has[sic] always been known as the Norse”
i did see that and intentionally left it in the screenshot. Unfortunately the source for that is behind a paywall, so i couldn’t check what they mean by “dominant”.
However these claims need not be in contradiction: at the time the Islamization of Egypt was still far from complete:
Islam only became the faith of the majority of Egyptians, some time in the 13th or 14th century, with Arabic becoming the main language.
I can’t find any good sources on the ethnic, linguistic and religious make-up of Egypt during Saladin’s conquest and reign, so I don’t want to have a big discussion which will based on mutual speculation.
Calling them all “Arabs” in the game seems like a pointless narrowing though, considering how well “Saracens” not only encompasses all these different people groups, but also reflects their reputation and interaction with their neighbours a lot better.
Of course it can, by using umbrella terms like “Saracens”, “Vikings”, “Huns” etc
“If kurds where Added, it would”, how do you make grammatical errors in 4 consecutive words?
but yes, if Kurds were added, they probably couldn’t represent Saladin’s rule in his later years. However a purely Arabic civ couldn’t either. That’s why it’s good that these civs aren’t split, and we have a convenient (arguably custom made) umbrella civ in the form of the Saracens.
yeah, that’s probably a good guess. I guess we should be glad we didn’t end up with Spanish being called “Iberians” 11?
they don’t. first of all, civs in aoe2 don’t need to represent political entities (although some do, it’s a mess), but secondly Bohemians are clearly also part of the HRE. So are some Franks, Burgundians, and Italians.
Personally I never understood why so many people are against a Saracen split, especially if they’re fine with more Euro civs.
Umbrellas and lack of variety are also what causes stuff like Pachacuti being a mirror match from beginning to end, so I disagree about umbrellas being a strength.
I think it depends on the campaign setting. yes, for some campaigns like Pachacuti it’s suboptimal, but for others it’s great.
eg some people were advocating a Japanese split, but how do you then do a historical battle like Noryang point, where a united Japanese army attacked Korea?
in general, umbrellas are better for large-scale conflicts, splits better for smaller scale
completely agreed. I think it’s fine when there is some overlap of civs. This isn’t an argument for renaming Saracens though.
I also agree with this, but I don’t think the conclusion should be to add lots of African civs.
From a multiplayer perspective the healthiest thing would be to remove at least 10 civs. Historicity and representation aren’t the main factors in multiplayer
From a singleplayer perspective I wouldn’t mind some more African civs, however the game is euro-centric in its very design:
-the unit designs are largely european
-the concept of a “Dark age” (although historically wonky anyway) and “Feudal age” are both clearly european. Even Castle age is called “knight age” in some translations iirc.
-Lots of techs and buildings are essentially european
Non-european civs struggle way more to fit in that rather rigid framework. in the end aoe2 is a product of its age. I don’t quite see what adding more non-european civs achieves. These civs will always be misrepresented
I’m all for a cosmetic DLC, but what I mean goes deeper than visuals:
e.g “men at arms”, “hussar”, “knight” are clearly european concepts.
scorpion and onager are both Roman siege weapons
the same goes for lots of techs. “plate armor” etc…nobody in the tropics is going to wear full plate armor, you get boiled alive.
Ethnicities don’t quite work to represent civs for a large part of the middle ages, that’s the issue with how they decided to make “civs”. Kingdoms were often revolving around having a lord you could trust in the central part of the middle ages, it didn’t matter the ethnicity. The fact that a nation should be made around an homogeneous ethnicity, a territory with very clear borders, same law for everyone and a standing army is a modern notion, it started to took off only in the late middle ages.
For example in the dark ages romano barbarian kingdoms until the end of the Carolingian empire had different laws for different ethnicities living in the same “kingdom”, Burgundi follower their law, Alemans their own one, Visigoths one another, Romans followed the old Roman law etc. That’s also why having an ethnicity without a state make sense in this game, like the case of Romans and Huns after their empires fell. Because the game is essentially ethnocentric.
What ethnicity was the Byzantine empire? Greeks? Anatolian? Macedonian? The point is the question doesn’t make sense. Byzantines were just an abstract political entity kept together by an emperor claiming to be Roman but there was nothing Roman in the ethnical sense about that. For the most part the middle ages were about legitimacy achieved through imperial families in a similar fashion. The Muslims too allowed each country they conquered to keep their ethnical identity because that’s not the preoccupation of big empires. Only later they arabised Egypt etc like someone already mentioned. Even early Germanic tribes were never ethnically homogenous but a mix of many older people forming confederations. Goths and Franks weren’t really ethnic designators so you could argue they wouldn’t qualify as civs for aoe2.
We were outraged by the addition of 3 kingdoms since they were not ethnicities but if we have to be honest maybe assuming that from the start for a “civ” would have worked better in some cases. Sometimes a civ Is only an imperial family like in the case of the Hapsburgs and many others. But given how the game essentially works it is what is, so mutually exclusive ethnicities are civs and not states or dynasties.
Saracens are huge and varied, I would split them without thinking twice, since I don’t think renaming them Arabs does them justice. Apart from usual Celts and Slavs, Turks with that name always bother me… I mean it’s obvious what they’re meant to represent but “Turks" is like so wide… Gokturks? Avars? Khazars? All Turkic and they could all be civs. Maybe Turks could be renamed since it’s confusing/modern (refering Turkey, but then again ottomans are in fact a modern era civ) but again how would you call them without sounding forced? In some cases I wouldn’t necessarily be against dynastic or composite names like splitting Sassanid Persia (maybe not like Saracens but to me it seems Persians cover a lot, basically from 224 AD to 1600+).
I wasn’t expecting a take with this much nuance and thought on this website. Usually it’s just mud-slinging, with nobody willing to admit to any wrong or compromise.
I think part of the issue is that aoe2 never defined what a civ is.
understandable. I think part of the issue is that the devs don’t know what they want to do with the game:
-respect the essence of aoe2. stick to its core concepts and ideas
-make a game, which properly represents African and American civs, which inevitably leads to more asymmetrical civ design.
At the moment they are trying to square a circle by forcing non-european civs into symmetric civ design. This works fairly well for East Asian civs (eg the Japanese had neither knights nor men at arms, but they also had a form of military nobility), but it is almost farcical for American civs (we’ll see if the upcoming DLC proves me wrong)
My solution to this would be:
keep aoe2 mastly as it is, fix the (many) outstanding bugs, happily add more game modes, expand the game in other ways (more players in a single game, better/more varied AI, etc)
create a new game with more asymmetric civ design (basically what aoe4 tried)
Guys, there is no need for this kind of drastic speculations.
One main developer joint the Towncenter podcast last year and basically confirmed that there will be many, many new civs added in the next years, with no limit.
You may like it or not, but it is a must in order to keep aoe2 alive. Why?
Marketing is not so easy as you think. They know better than us. They know one thing: some dudes will pay for cosmetic DLCs, but not the millions needed. He basically confirmed: thats only possible with civ sales.
Hard core fans will say: there are enough civs, dont change the game. Yes. A game with no significant new content is NATURALLY dying over the years, meaning less and less players. You can debate that or be outraged but it is just happening. Of course there will always be a fanbase left. But if the current 25.000 live players go down below 10 000 or even less, tournaments, patches and even keeping the servers running will soon be not worthwhile anymore.
Another factor is making the civ play differently, and Dravidians are much more sea-focused than other civs.
That’s why Bohemians get a pass as they are mostly based on the Hussites, while further splitting the Teutons would be very hard to justify, how would the Bavarians or Brandenburgers feel different than the already heavy teutonic army, while still feeling right for the civ ?
Same for Italians, a bit more flavour would help (say give them a venetian Galleass) but they already portray the northern 2/3 of the peninsula quite well, there wouldn’t be massive difference between the Milanese Florentines Genoese and so on.
Swiss can feel pretty different TT vise as they are infantry and less cavalry focused.If I were to design them they will be more like a meso civi or they could be like puru where your depending on the uus and everything else is terrible.
