Adding pantheons that most people have never heard of just waters down the game unfortunately.
- What self respecting Greek Mythology aficionado hasn’t heard or the Thracians?
- Better a culture that actually interacted with the other ones already in the game than another failed attempt at entering an East Asian market (looking at you Vietnam from RoR)
- People are demanding every civilization or pantheon under the sun for AoE games. Don’t pretend fans of this franchise even know the word obscure.
A better alternative is to add more Major/Minor gods to existing pantheons.
They are adding the Chinese. Perhaps, they’ll add the Aztecs or some other well known Pantheon.
Starcraft and Warcraft 3 have survived for decades with only a few races. Age of Mythology suits that design well. AoE 2 just has a bunch of copy pasted Civs that most players can’t remember or name.
If you don’t like a pantheon suggestion just ignore it.
The devs will not add some mythology almost no one has ever heard of, no need for negative feedback.
This is just straight up a western superiority complex. Just because you haven’t heard of it in the west doesn’t mean it’s unknown to millions of people. This is like me having never heard of Siegfried, you mentioning him, and then me saying nobody’s heard of him just because I hadn’t heard of him before.
Everything is unheard of, to everyone, until they finally hear of it!
I hadn’t heard of Norse mythology until I played AoM 20 years ago. Same with Egyptian Mythology. That didn’t mean millions of people didn’t know about them.
Yes. Let’s compare the Thracians to the Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian Civilizations in terms of popularity and influence. This isn’t Age of Empires II. This is Age of Mythology where the most powerful Civilizations and Pantheons do battle. The Franks or the Cumans would tremble and hide.
Sure, the Atlanteans are fictitious, but they are intended to be knockoffs of the Romans. How many more Greek inspired Pantheons do we need?
Aren’t the Thracians exactly as West as the Greeks?
Outside of Europe they are certainly a lot less known.
I personally know them and think they are interesting, but I just don’t expect to ever see them in the game.
The reason Thracian mythology is understudied and poorly understood is literally because of western academia having a superiority complex.
Until the mid 20th century it was assumed that Thracian religion was too primitive to be worth studying, and that they copied their gods and myths from the Greeks and Romans. So native Thracian religion was mostly ignored by academia, leaving Thracian mythology largely unstudied.
It wasn’t until the SEVENTIES that studying Thracian archaeology and ethnography was even established in academia.
I’m not suggesting this in the game, but I’m sending this link for people who live outside of Europe to learn the history of the world,because I know that Europeans are much more educated and know the history of the world, people from the West do not even know where the Balkan is, so its normal for them that they never heard about the Thracians who have a lot to do with immigrants from America.Greeting from EX YU countries
Are you being serious right now?
This is definitely not the topic for this kind of chat, guys. 
Don’t worry, I’m not among those who could get offended by what he said. But this is highly inappropriate.
Don’t get me wrong bro i am saying this for a reason.I spent a 10 months in Chicago, I was shocked at how many people know nothing about other civilizations and cultures.I’m talking about people from the U.S./West, it’s common knowledge that Ame…s uneducated and that education is very bad…
If you live in a small country with a lot of neighbouring countries you grow up with a different mindset compared to living in a very large country with little to no neighbouring countries.
For centuries the Chinese thought of themselves as the only developed country and basically the centre of the universe.
Some more educated people were aware of Empires like (Eastern) Rome, Persia or India in general, but for most people there the world seemed like totally centred around China.
But the the Thracians, they suffer from 2 issues:
- There are still a lot of things about them that Science doesn’t know so AoMR would have to fill in a lot of gaps
- Outside of South East Europe very little people know much about Thracians other then that they were neighbours of the ancient Greeks.
If you ask someone for Asia for example, they would be way more likely to know something about Celtic or even Slavic Mythology and culture then Thracian.
That’s why I think AoMR should have some “Minor Civilisation” system similar to AoE3(DE). This way the game could represent a lot more cultures and mythology without having to make a full pantheon every time.
If you think about how much work goes into designing a whole new pantheon and then actually making it an balancing it and then how long people need to play them to get used to them and how long it takes to iron out the balance, I don’t think we will see more then 1 new pantheon a year, 2 at max.
It will take until the end of this decade to have double digit Pantheons in the game, while AoE1 and AoE2 were released with 12 civilisation in 1997/1999 already.
Even AoE3 and AoE4 for over double digit a year after release.
AoE3DE has the widest representation of cultures in the game thanks to Minor civilisations and mercenaries so that would be cool for AoMR too.
It’s more accurate to treat Major Gods as equivalent to a Civilisation than to treat Pantheons as such.
Pantheons are, in terms of AoE balance, collections of multiple different civs with a shared core roster and game mechanics, but with different bonuses and intended playstyles. Similar to how AoE3 has European, Native, Asian, and African civs.
AoM released with 9 Major Gods and Retold with 13, comparable to the 12 launch Civs of AoE2 and the 8 launch Civs of AoE3.
That is kind of my point.
AoM can only represent like 1/3 of the cultures that AoE2 does and even less then AoE3.
Like African Royals added 2 full civilisations and 5 Minor Civilisations on top of a lot of mercenaries from other cultures.
A AoM goes way more into depth for each civilisation so it will take a lot of DLC for the game to even get the most popularly requested pantheons to be represented in the game.
I’m not arguing against the addition of the Thracians I just don’t believe we will see them in the game any time soon or ever.
I do even think some popular candidates like the Slavs or Romans might never end up being added.
Back in topic, I’ve been thinking about Thracians a little bit and I was wondering if they couldn’t serve as an umbrella civ representing Dacians and Illyrians cultures and myths as well.
Dacians are already represented in my concept if you squint, but Illyrians had their own gods, even though there was syncretism with Thracian and later Roman gods.