I think it might be interesting if there was a civ representing Arabs from before the rise of Islam. They’d mainly represent the Ghassanids and Lakhmids. Trouble is, I’m not sure what I’d call them. In Islam, barbarians, specifically from pre-Islamic Arabia, are called “jahils,” so maybe we can call the civ that, but it’s also a bit unnecessarily derogatory.
Another issue is lack of information about Ghassanid and Lakhmid troops. Some guy on the Total War forum modded the Ghassanids and Lakhmids to have supposedly more accurate troops, but the issue is that he seems to be completely making the names up, or at least the names are super obscure and there’s no information about them on Google. Maybe someone from the Middle East who’s more knowledgeable can help with that.
The first record of the word “Saracens” is in 290 AD when Diocletian fought some of them to pacify eastern provinces. So you pretty much got it when palmyrans and aoe1 ends and aoe2 begins quite conveniently.
Saracens could be used as an umbrella for all these tribes: lakhmids, ghassanids, tanukhids etc. And the current Saracens civ should be split anyway, it’s too wide basically like having a civ called Muslims.
Umayyads could be Syrians, rashiduns could be Arabs, Abbassids could be Iraqi (?) and Fatimids could be Egyptians if you dislike dynastic names. Having Saracens to represent every middle Eastern Islamic faction from 600 to 1600 is very simplistic and I’m surprised it doesn’t come up as often as other split proposals.
Yeah there are Turks, Berbers and Persians but they’re meant to represent unrelated ethnic groups that eventually became Muslim but not the same thing.
Honestly, a civ pre-islamic arabs is veery low in the priorities list. It could be fine as the 100th civ or so (I hope we never get even close to that number).
It’s more like a civ called “Arabs”. That’s what the civ is meant to represent and you kind of acknowledge it with you split proposals.
It’s because it does a fantastic job as an umbrella. It takes the most common and representative elements of the medieval arab world and sum it up into a working civ.
Could they be split? Yes, they could, but we would need at least 5 civs for a barely decent split… That’s a lot of civs. Let’s better work under the assumption that we’re not getting many more new civs and let’s demand the inclusion of those prioritary civilizations not still represented in the game, like Georgians, Jurchen, etc…
I didn’t talk about priorities indeed because, specifically for the pagan Arabic civ, I know nobody cares for late antiquity lol (not even the Devs probably, Romans was more a marketing move I guess).
Mamelukes are silly units but I don’t hate them. One civ representing all the islamic Arab, levantine world and beyond could just have something more than one UU I think. It’s kinda sad whenever you face a Muslim faction in a campaign to fight only Mamelukes or camel archers, war elephants only because of lack of a better option than Persians for those places… (I had to make Saracens train haras aka urumi, fursan aka shrivamsha and ghulams in my own custom campaign to not fall asleep for the lack of variety that a Muslim campaign implies).
It’s not that you need to add 5 civs in one shot but idk starting with Arabs, levantines and Egyptians or Andalusians (here we’re more in Berber territory) would be ok I guess for a DLC.
Not the highest priority but if you ask me not the lowest either. Also we didn’t get a Muslim dlc yet (only Hindustanis but not as a theme) but it could be a good idea for that one day.
Not a technical one, no. But there’s gonna be a point where the majority of the playerbase will say STOP.
I’ve always been a great fan of adding more and more civs. Now I’m feeling like I’d enjoy some more, and that’s it. Perhaps after the next 2 or 3 new DLCs I could be one of those asking for no more civs. And surely I won’t be the only one changing its mind.
Once we reach that point, it would be a pitty to left Georgians out of the game because for whatever reason some people believed we needed to split Slavs and add 8 american civs.
The Saracens don’t just cover the Arab Muslims but also Arabs who aren’t Muslim including pre-Islamic Arabia because the Saracens refers to the Arab ethnicity.
Personally I don’t have anything against a sarracen split, but I would personally prefer a Berber or Persian split (mainly to justify architecture sets more inspired by those specific regions’ architecture) or further Indian splits.
And for completely new civs, I’d sooner want more African or American civs.