Why? They were a cool and flavorful detail!
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Cultural sensitivity, I guess. But it kind of defeats the point of the Vindland Saga map without them.
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I was hoping Skraelings would be given a unique look. But Nope. Gone without a trace, and I don’t know why.
Why keep the map, then?
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I’m hoping they’ll be replaced with a Native American outlaw-type unit with the introduction of something like the Inuit or Haudenosaunee.
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I was expecting them to be replaced by something like that from the start, which is why I was surprised to see them removed entirely instead.
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Just use the Tomahawk Thrower model from AoE3DE or something like that.
Since the exact location of Vinland is still somewhat up for debate as well as how much of North America should be considered Vinland its not an issue to use a unit from a civilisation that lives a little south.
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I think the Club Warrior model would be best.
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True forgot about them.
They would fit perfectly.
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Pathetic, honestly. An utterly pointless removal. I’d hoped we’d moved on from this since AoE3 DE.
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There’s a lot that could have been done to impove upon the skraelings.
I assume they were removed for “cultural sensitivity” towards the natives in the region where “vinland” probably was. But keeping the map, including the name, and have the Skraelings just be missing, also carries cultural and historical implications. Which, in my opinion, are no less discriminatory and derogatory.
It could also just be that they’re waiting to update the model with the release of a new Native American pantheon. We don’t know.
what are these Skraelings and where were they available? I dont remember anything like this being available in campaign
Iirc they were exclusively available as wild units on the Vinlandsaga skirmish map. They’d fight you when you ventured to the mainland for resources and whatnot.
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Correct. Shared a model with the Ulfsark, but there’s a mod for AoM EE to make them look like Native Americans.
They should really bring them back, they can give them a new name of course and new visuals but it’s a core part of the identity of this map.
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Vinlandsaga is a reference to something historical, and Skraelings are a part of it. So giving them a different name would only make sense if it was the proper name of the people in that area. Which, to my knowledge, we still don’t know for sure.
The name could be a more generic one that isn’t that word, since it’s kind of an insult I think. Could be super generic like “Inhabitant” or more specific like “Vinlandian”.
It also refers to Inuit in Greenland too as far as I know.
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It was originally the norse name for the native greenlanders, but the sagas also use it for the inhabitants of vinland. I’d go with the Beothuk, btw, since the one place we know for certain the norse visited is Newfoundland.
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I just noticed that the Cataphract and some other Scenario Editor exclusive units got removed too.
I wish they kept the new units introduced in ToD as Scenario Editor units at last. But I guess they didn’t want to make assets for units they won’t use.
At last we still have Ornlu.
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Yeah, several scenario units were removed. Sucks for map makers. Could’ve at least kept the ones that used existing assets like the Cataphract and the Golden Fleece.