Sorry for my bad English but:
First, the Vietnamese campaign, is terribly historically wrong. The Trinh lords and Nguyen lords ruled Northern and Southern of Vietnam respectively AT THE ENDING OF THE LATER LE DYNASTY, not before it rose up.
Second, so far there has been no article or archaeological evidence supports the idea of Vietnamese being an archery civ. Even the Vietnamese unique unit, Rattan archer, sounds really unfamiliar to a Vietnamese like me. The word “rattan” is not a Vietnamese word, and it doesn’t even exist on Wikipedia by Vietnamese. Vietnamese history does claim that archers of Dat Viet (medival name of Vietnam) were outperformed by the Mongols. According to Vietnamese history, Dai Viet army had well organized cavalry and infantry, and a powerful naval strength with unique strategy. At the ending of Tran dynasty, hand cannons had been used, and at the end of 15th century, besides of regular sword, spear, musket was a prime weapon of the army. The only period when Vietnamese were good at arrows is Âu Lạc period (257-207 BC), and they were crossbow experts, not bows.
Third, I don’t really understand why Vietnamese reveals enemy starting positions.
Fourth, Vietnamese economy is a agriculture-based (still partly true now), so having no economic bonus about farming is quite not accurate.
So, I’m thinking it would be more precise to change Vietnamese into a civ that uses light cav and inf, and a kind of light warship (link attached below) which is described as “fast as wind” and had “2 machine crossbows”, or “two cannons” (Wikipedia - Vietnamese). Vietnamese strategy has been considering mobility as a major priority for thousands years, so why not?
Ofc everything is English but the Vietnamese translation for Rattan is mây. Rattan is a palm material that can be used to make bows, thus Rattan archers. I’m not in the mood to check anything else so I’ll leave someone else to do that
According to the wiki the reveal bonus is from Vietnamese hiring peasants as spies. Anyway I don’t think they will radically change the civ because of balance, but at least in DE they gave them the right architecture. Also Vietnamese navy isn’t that bad, but yeah, they did mention the guns and the navy in the campaign, it’s meh they only get bombard cannons.
Anyway AOE2 is full of innacuracies for balance, like Spanish having no crossbows and american civs getting siege engines. And for campaign accuracy I feel like the lattest campaign only contain minor errors (like the Vietnamese boats/gun being mentionned, while they had campaignscompletely different for narration’s sake, like Aztecs and William Wallace winning in-game while they lost irl)
Hey, I understand your frustrations hahaha! The game representation of amerindians human sacrifice is risible as well. But don’t be mad about this. Take in mind that this is only a game, and it does not pretend to create a trustworthy representation of historical events, but rather take some inspiration on those events to model its creativity. So, of course, there will be many innacuracies, and that is fairly reasonable if you take in account that this is a game with 35 different civilizations depicts and a lot of creativity freedom. I know that many civs have arrived on this decade, but all and all it’s a game from 1999, a time when non eurocentric hystoric conceptions were even less popular than today, and this feeling of how civs are pictured remained on these newer civs. Even if that was the intention, imagine gathering accurate historic details back in the day, on rudimentar internet times.
So, take it easy! And also thanks a lot for sharing some knowledge!!
Ah yes. Actually I don’t think this would make them change the civ, but at least I hope that they’ll correct historical names and events. They did change architecture, so I really hope I would see Bamboo archer someday
Given that the civ is not very “historically accurate”, just give them free stone mining upgrade. Nobody has this bonus, and it would be useful for them to fastcastle and mass rattans.
