Who claims that a faction in a (historical inspired) game represents anything other than that…what it is? It is not supposed to represent people and nations of today. People who find such correlations and enjoy the game …well ok… but if they are dissapointed by the history represented…this sounds borderline nationalistic.
I wouldn’t mind if they picked the moorish caliphate. And it wouldn’t represent Spain as in the western european country of the modern era. Even Castille is not representing it. I am greek, should i advocate for the Ottomans to be removed from games?? I play EU 4 and i enjoy playing as the ottomans, naughty me.
All nations in a historical inspired video game only need to represent themselves…as the polities of their time that existed. And this is relevant to the ones that are culturally/nationally connected with the modern day…and the ones that are not.
Same thing to Chinese civ. They depicted the Mongol Yuan Dynasty as Chinese and implemented it to dynasty system… I wonder whom they are reaching to get all this inaccurate historical data.
Are you sure? Chola is recorded as longest ruling dynasties in the world not the second largest. The British Empire is the largest then follows the Mongol Empire as 2nd. 3rd Russia.
I am not certain, no. But from what I was looking at, it appeared that based on population, the Chola Empire was second to the Ming Dynasty.
They don’t gvie a damn (oh wow damn is not censored anymore 
) in 3DE about ‘authentic representations’. That’s why every other civ is still full of fakery, and even still the natives.
And they are authentically representing the Delhi Sultanate so where’s the problem?
Timeline and extent I guess. Delhi Sultanate’s rule was mostly concentrated around Northern parts of India. For merely 5 years they managed to rule till South but then Vijayanagara empire was formed after which the Sultanate disintegrated. Compared to the English or the Chinese the timeline is much shorter. Even most of the architecture bar the mosque is not even the original architecture of the Sultanate at all. So I found it very weird.
As an Empire, Delhi Sultanat is fine. But as a civilization, its not. For eg, its ruling elite was Persian influenced Turko-Afghans but its general population was mostly Hindu, with Rajputs and Gujjars serving in large numbers in the imperial military. Probably as foot soldiers as opposed to the Turko-Afghan horsemen but still there nonetheless.
Also, what would be the Temple, a Mandir or a Mosque?
In the initial and middle part, the language issue, what would they speak ? Prakrit or Farsi?
Problem with AOE is that it tries to represent “Empires” but creates civilizations instead. Greeks, Egyptians, Parthians were all civilizations in the sense of ethnicity. It continued in MEdeival when Britons, Teutons, Franks were ethnicities living in a particular area. So it worked there but in India, where its not possible as Empires don’t mean civilizations.
Like in the Genghis Khan campaign, the entirety of the campaign was just tumens conquering regions. Despite Genghis using many foot soldiers of other nations, he still mostly relied on Mongolian horsemen. As they relied more and more on Chinese and Central Asians, they quickly crumbled.
But in Indian faction, its hard to represent Delhi Sultanate as its not mostly conquering blitzkrieg like Genghis. Its a slow slog of 300 years of Persian speaking turco-afghans using hindu armies, foreign elite troops and slowly increasing indian muslim base to conquer other indians (with some foreign interventions from time to time). So, we can’t use Genghis logic here because we have to represent a civiliation not an army.
Either they create a diversity in terms of buildings or sub-factions, or they just let it remain a mishmash
The game doesnt need to satisfy your personal wishes.
Really good points here. You underlined the inconsistency of AoE IV when it comes to civilisations design, especially in regard to civilisations outside of Europe. In most of the world, political entities were made up of a huge sedentary disarmed population dominated by a tiny foreign elite: Arab-Andalusians dominated by Berbers, Han Chinese dominated by Jürchen, Mongols & co, Egyptians and Syrians under Turkic Mamluk domination, etc. This scheme was well theorized by medieval historian Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah.
It also happened in Europe, most West European nations being initially made of local Latino-Celtic populations dominated by a Germanic elite until they merged, giving birth to that “feudal” civilisation which would weirdly escape that foreign elite domination system, though Anglo-Saxon England went under Norman-French domination for centuries (but Anglo-Saxons were precisely not really feudal).
However in most of the aforementioned examples, elites and populations at least shared the same religion, and often a close ethnicity. This wasn’t the case of Muslim-controlled India, which thus is even harder to design (the temple issue demonstrates it well), though I’m all for its inclusion as a civ in the game.
Dude is it really hard to understand that Delhi sultanate was chose for its interaction with Mongols?
You cannot say that ‘Indians’ are Hindu and the Muslims are Turkic Afghans .
There is no ‘India’ in AoE2 timeline . Each people group in the continent had their own distinct Identity kind of like in Europe and none of them Identified themselves as ‘Indian’ especially those in South India . Even if it did , that identity would be nominal and for the most part irrelevant . Hence you can’t represent India with one civ without being biased to a single region which is unfortunatly what was done in AoE2(Rajputs) and AoE3(Mughals)
As for religion , Yes , India is Majority ‘Hindu’(Hinduism and it’s various forms) but there are several significant minorities of other religions across the continent . India is a melting pot of religions and was quite tolerant to all religions due to no one religion being an overwhelming majority like it was often the case in Middle East and Europe . The rich history of India is quite underrated even in our own continent . Hence dividing India by religion is an insult .
The Turks and many other Invaders adopted many native customs and Elephants .
Ég:- Timur fought Delhi War Elephants during his invasion and Sack of Delhi .
The civilisations in AoE2 represent Empires and not nations . The developers strayed away from that design choice for the Expansions and I guess they aren’t repeating that mistake in AoE4 .
[In my opinion , If more civs in the Indian subcontinent are to be added down the line , it’d be best to add more 2 or 3 civs (8 would be nice but it’s impractical) representing the Deccan and Cholas .]
I’ve seen similar comments on the forum critisizing the classification of Yuan as a Chinese dynasty . These issues are for the most part , caused by viewing history through the lens of religions and modern nations which is a shame .
[TL;DR : Delhi Sultanate doesn’t mean to represent India . Indian Continent is too diverse to be represented by a single Civ .]
Sultanate of Delhi is not trying to represent India in the game, it is representing the Sultanete of Delhi and nothing more. I dont understand why people assumed that there has to be a faction representating all of India in the game. There are other locations in the world that are not going to have any faction and there is no such drama as with The delhi Sultanate.
Making india as the name for the Delhi sultanate would be very historically incorrect, first of all the Delhi sultanate has a mosque, and most of india is Hindi so a mosque obviously doesn’t make sense.
Second of all, different kingdoms of modern day india had different armies, and it wouldn’t makes sense to have some units the Delhi sultanate had represent all of india,
And last of all, there’s always room for another civ of the Indian subcontinent, probably not on release because there will only be 8 civs to start with, but at some point I could possibly see a South Indian civ or maybe a Bengali civ as an expansion
There are simply way better and Native Empires to represent than the current one
Hindu*
Sorry I was thinking of the language, my bad
The Delhi sultanate was a sultanate with Otomans influence , they were in war with the Islamic parts , soo its ok .
The Aoe2 Indians civs take place years after the Delhi sultans …
I have to check it , but I remembered reading something like that
they had nothing to do with ottomans.
I think he ment the Middle East, Delhi had influence from the Middle East because they traded with the Europeans and that trade passed the middleEast, due to this trade traders that passed the Middle East got converted to Islam, then when those traders returned to their homes in Delhi they further spread the religion
Judging from his and some other comments , they pretty much don’t .
They only care about religion and correlating modern classifications with historical entities(which is done for convenience but should never be taken seriously)