Vibe Check: Three Kingdoms

[Quasibrodo]

@Leow1938982

define “Huns survived long into the medieval era”…

No, we all know the real problem with 3K and the Huns : we were kids when the Huns released, so we didn’t care. We were adults happy to jump on the next artificial controversy when 3K released

@Quasibrodo

I’ve seen lots of arguments from 3K defenders. Huns have actually been cropping up again and again as good cases AGAINST 3K. IDK about you but if I time traveled back some three weeks ago and said to myself “Hey, the devs are gonna screw up and add three antiquity polities to aoe2, and the Huns are the best example of why that’s dumb” I would have found that counter-intuitive. So let’s dive in.

Argument 1) Huns were a short lived polity that may or may not last into the aoe2 timeframe (depending on if you cut off at 400ad or 500ad).

The Hunnic Empire was a short lived polity lasting from approximately 370AD - 470AD. The ethno-cultural group, Huns, can (likely) trace their roots back to about 220BC as the xiongnu. Furthermore because aoe2 civilizations are ethno-cultural groups, not polities, similar peoples of similar origin, ancestry, and culture, can be represented under the same civ even if the name isn’t technically inclusive.

As an aside imagine playing a game as “Proto mongolic peoples who migrated to the western steppe during the migration period” vs “Italo and Siculo-Normans”. Huns vs Sicilians just sounds a lot better.

So when you treat aoe2 civs how they were intended, the similar Pannonian Avars, another proto-mongolic people originating from the eastern steppe, who migrated west to the pannonian basin during the migration period would very naturally be represented by the Huns.

So we see that Huns don’t actually last from 370-470. Instead we have a civ who lasts from 370-820 and can trace their roots back to 220BC.

This is 100% impossible to do with Wu, Wei, and Shu, because they’re political entities. They can only represent those political entities. And those political entities only lasted about 100 years.

The real problem with 3K is that they don’t belong in aoe2 and Huns, for the historically literate, demonstrate why.