The eight civilizations are archetypes of things to come

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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I have a little background in history. No degree, but a firm academic grasp. I believe there is more to the civilization-choice than meets the eye. What you’re going to read can appease a lot of you people complaining about poor diversity of civilizations.

I believe they started their civ-choice by gathering a lot of academics in history as well as gamedesigners. They gave them a single task: Find the eight most important civilizations of the era 800-1500 that as a whole represent human culture the best. That is a top-down design that I continuously believe they pulled of very well. I am still amazed by their choices. The reason? I believe a lot of the other civilizations that are not in the game yet can be a spin-off of the existing ones. If you ever played command and conquer - kanes wrath, you know what I mean. They took the original three factions and for each faction, they created additional two factions in the expansion. These were specializing on different aspects. In the end, the game had 9 playable factions. The look of them only changed slightly in comparison to the original, but they were sometimes playing completely different.

What does this have to do with the age-franchise? I’ll tell you: You can spin off a whole lot of different empires from the eight existing ones. Take style and feel of the abbasid dynasty. You can spin-off a lot of factions (i.e. persians, turks) from that, even a few african cultures. You can spin off all kinds of southeast-asian factions from the style of the delhi-sultanate. You could (probably somewhat) spin off spain from the HRE. You can spin-off nomadic tribes from the mongols, you can spin-off slavic-nations from the Rus. This means we might still get a lot of civilizations, designed like in AgeII with some units and technologies, just not with their own art or unit-design but as a spin-off to existing ones. I think this is likely to come and also easy to do. I’m looking forward to it. :slight_smile:

Again: If you think about the goal of having eight civilizations that are most representative, I keep on being amazed by the choices they made. But to see this clearly takes some insight in the genealogy of history. I implore you to take a closer look! :slight_smile:

What they are missing are the byzantines and vikings for their uniqueness. I believe this will come in the expansion. I’m not so sure about the native americans though… But thinking about it: It could be a “challengers” expansion, by the looks of it. The “could be”-empires…

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I believe they started their civ-choice by gathering a lot of academics in history as well as gamedesigners.

What brings you to that belief?

Would this not be a viable alternative thesis:

So far we have:

  • England
  • China
  • France

and under the wing of the Holy Roman Empire we have a combination of

  • Germany
  • Italy
  • Spain
  • about half of Europe

Which covers about 6 of the top 10 countries with the largest revenue in the gaming market (China being #1).
What future DLCs might bring I don’t know.

I’m not saying it is like that. I just find it a little surprising that you would assume they aimed for historical relevance instead of potential game sales. Maybe a bit of both?

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I’m fine if native American civs are never added (and I say this as being from a country where I would feel represented by them).

It always felt contrived to me in previous AoE games to see Aztecs, Mayans, etc. with armored late infantry units, siege, etc. Those civs couldn’t compete in military tech to the Europeans as history clearly demonstrated so going full imperial with trebuchets and swordsmen feels wrong and too removed from actual history. It’s at most a “what if” of sorts.

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I can’t talk a lot about game sales as I don’t understand that area very well. I remember in an interview for aoe2 they said the expansion had to have Korea in it because the market was big. That gave developers some headaches because Koreans were no people that “conquered” anything.

Judging by that sales quota idea, we don’t have Japan or Korea. Instead we have a campaign for the Mongol Empire that smacked China. I also wonder why the Vikings weren’t included, given that the topic is so prevalent in todays media. I suppose that’s their posterchild for the expansion.

Starts at 3:40 Real Reason Why Koreans Are In AOE2 - YouTube

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nvm
Didn’t see the netire post !!

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We’re probably going to see all of the MesoAmericans from the AoE2 in Aoe4 through DLC by next year.

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Imo, by what I saw on beta and now with the 2 last civs uncovered on printscreen, the terrain and units looks darker than before. Good, they are listening to us.

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