really not a fan of the iron pagoda, but yes overall Jurchens are pretty good.
Khitanguts…I loathe the Khitanguts for their frankensteininess and definitely need to be fixed. Beyond that however, i’m not sure how I feel about their design, historical inspirations aside.
However Khitans are a particularly interesting civ amongst the 3K civs IMO.
What’s also really strange about the Khitans is while they are a frankenstein…they almost also seem like an shoddy split.
I can’t recall the topic or the user, but recently I saw a comment where they argued the 3K dlc started off as a traditional dlc, and then got morphed nearly beyond recognition.
The DLC folder structure and unused assets heavily implies this was two combined DLCs, but it did get me thinking.
There are also the Xianwei. Really not sure why we have a 3K civ, that’s pulling stuff from the Tuoba Wei, an ethnically, culturally, politically unrelated state from a few hundred years later.
Why are we adding xianbei stuff to the wei? They were a nomadic tribal confederacy, and while these confederacies are never ethnically homogenous, they were surely a mix of altaic peoples. Turks and Mongols could be reasonable Civs to represent Xianbei, but they also have plenty of historical material to work with. Jurchens less so, and they also have a second Jurchen state at the very very end of the aoe2 timeline to take some inspiration from as well. So of the best fitting civs, the one I think that’d have the most to gain by umbrella’ing the xianbei are the khitans…
wait a minute why do we have half a khitan civ over here in the khitanguts…and another half of a khitan civ over there in the xianwei??? Why not…I dont know…have just one khitan civ…full of just khitan stuff? What possible advantage is there for this?
Then I got to thinking about the Pastures. Sure any steppe people would be pastoral, but are the khitans really more deserving than the mongols or Turks? If I had to think of a singularly deserving civ, if we were only to give pastures to one civ and one civ only, that’d be the tibetans.
Now wouldn’t you know it, by golly gee whiz, the tanguts were related to tibetans. Before we had the full list of civs, I did theorize that the Tangut Castle and Camel Catapult we saw might actually be part of an umbrella civ that’d also contain Tibetans, Qiang perhaps, so MS could try sidestepping the Tibetans.
Seems to me that, while 3K was absolutely two DLCs combined, I’m no longer convinced the Medieval China DLC was only planned to contain Jurchens and Khitans. Seems like there was at least one more civ planned. but six (or more) civs would be wild for a DLC, especially since the average # of civs per DLC in the DE era was two. So instead the scope was pared down to five to at least match the largest past DLCs, but instead of just scrapping those elements, they just started shoving things wherever they’d fit to get a product done faster.
It really looks like Khitans were split to finish off the wei and just smushed together with Tibetan/Tangut stuff to approximate a complete civ.
Which really just irks me even more.