What's with all the "please add X civ" topics

yeah i know, I am pretty happy with how it is. Probably also worth adding that parts of Germany are represented by the Franks. Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse) had his capital in modern day Germany, there is still an area of Germany called Franconia etc.

The only thing i might be in favour of is an offical mod which fixes some of the names.
Britons → English
Mayans → Maya

or maybe a mod which gives each civ the name they used for themselves, although i think this could be quite confusing

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Yeah maybe… But leave this to the devs please. There was only one tibetan civ proposal which was meant as serious for implementation.
And this was from a Chinese player. Don’t want to say more.

I think it has something philosophical to post civ concepts for civs that are very unlikely to be implemented. I mean, even if you know it’s not realistic, doesn’t mean you should completely neglect the existance of it.

Like global warming. Even if it’s very unlikely that people in the oil industry will just give up their benefice, there is no reason to just deny the reality of it.
And at some point we need to talk about compensation for these powerful people and firms but even perspectives for all the people working in (in-)directly associated working fields. But the complete neglection of the sheer existance of that threat makes it basically impossible to even start that kind of discussion.
We can’t change global politics, but we don’t have to let it have influence on our life. We can talk about everything we want, that’s the freedom of speech.

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I think devs are trying to keep this game alive and attract more new players by adding more civs. The game is hence not stale. Please suggest alternative way to keep ongoing development if you do not want more civs.

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BTW for all people who are intersted in civ proposals:
Ther is the [Hub] Thread that tries to collect all these proposals on a single page.

Unfortunately I got burned out at one point also because of various toxic discussions which I don’t even understand why they emerged.
And afterwads the new load of proposals were too much at one time for me to handle.
Cause, yeah I went through every single thread before I put them in the hub.

I actually thought that the people making their proposals would be motivated to put them into the hub on their own, which would make it easier for everybody.
I don’t even know if all the new people who make new civ proposals even know this Hub exists :D.

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Arguing for civs like Polynesians or Mississippians will always be contentious, but you’re creating a bit of a straw man by suggesting that that’s what people mostly suggest.

The most heavily supported additions such as the Somalis or the Jurchen were much more powerful than the medieval English for example, who have been in the game for over 20 years now. Many of the biggest medieval empires are not taught about in Western schools, or even universities.

So your argument that we already have all the big hitters in the game whilst people are just arguing for trivial additions is not true. In fact, many of the greatest empire-building peoples of the years 400-1600 AD aren’t in the game, whilst certain less important civs are included just because they’re part of pop-history and/or are European.

The last DLC addressed that to some extent, but even within India some of the greatest medieval empires are left unrepresented. No-one however, is arguing South Asian “city-states” as you put it. That’s just not true.

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Saying that “all the important civs people have heard of have been added” is such an absurdly eurocentric worldview.

There’s literally hundreds of millions of malay speakers but apparently that’s not notable enough. Are people even aware that India is basically the size of western Europe?

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You still miss my point. Malaysia/Indonesia are a power today, but what about the time period of the game? Maybe not so much. I doubt they are recognized for their history much outside their native southeast Asian region.

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Either that or Ruthenians, which is an even more neutral term.

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The malay civ represent important thalassocratic empires of South East Asia like Srivijaya and Majapahit. So there are more than enough reasons to have them in the game.
Even more than classic civs like the huns, for example.

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You are very close, I’m just going to hold a mirror up for you to make the final stretch of thought.

Sidenote: civ suggestions / concepts are not demands for that particular civ to be added. It’s just fun theorycrafting.

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This. Kievan Rus, ideally. Or Muscovites respectively.

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48!

I think this will be the bottleneck eventually, even more than “running out of important civs.” But I’m still pretty confident in my longstanding estimate that we’re at least a dozen and up to 2 dozen civs out from that in terms of design space.

To be fair, even for some of the civ concepts I’ve made, I don’t think all of them need to be added to the game as fully playable civs; I’m not sure how I’d feel about seeing Haudenosaunee vs. Polynesians in the next HC finals. However, I do strongly think they should have some representation in AoE2, even if that manifests only as several units/buildings in the Editor. I think this is the best compromise between adding ∞ new civs and leaving many areas with no credible representation. Devs could release “creator packs” for several regions with less work or worry than they would need for adding full-fledged civs.

I think we’ve fleshed out all the metrics for this by now. The gold standard is for one of the civ’s leaders to have eaten sausage and/or taken a dump in that one Italian city that one time (like Barbarossa probably did). Anything less than that and it’s impossible to be above C-tier on the Historical-Relevance-O-Meter®

Yes

Back to the original question, devs are highly incentivized to create new DLCs to keep the game profitable, and the most time-honored way of doing that is by adding new civs. Devs are going to add/change aspects of the game regardless of the desires of someone who wants it frozen in time. They’re going to be adding civs anyway, whether or not those civs fit the desires or sensibilities of all players (see: Return of Rome). So, might as well advocate for the civs you want before the devs decide to create a “Rise of the Rump States” DLC.

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And there are the people which just claim that they could diminish other cultures and get away with it.
And claim they would be representative for the whole community.

There is a fine line of being courageous, motivated and passionate about something. But it’s totally different thing to herass and diminish other people because of a political agenda. And that way bringing toxicity into a otherwise actually basically unpolitical community. For absolutely no reason, cause the devs have their own mapping of “importance”. They literally don’t care if anybody says it’s important or not here in the forum.

The whole approach of trying to get influence over the devs decision because of that political agenda is in the end even decremental to the own goals. Trying push their beloved civs this way doesn’t work, as devs will stay away from each “conflict region” if they see that controversy in the forums. If you haven’t seen, devs usually add civs in regions.

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IDK, sounds like you are the only one being hurt by any sort of truth with how you respond to people.

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If the new civilization is not sold, how do you want developers to pay for living expenses?

Let me give an example. In the country I live in, unless you are a person who is particularly interested in history, something like Goths, Burgundians, Teutons, Vandals, Magyars, Celts, Berbers, etc. are rarely mentioned in school. The Franks established the predecessors of modern France, Italy, and Germany, and the Angles established the predecessors of modern Britain, so these two are more familiar to people, but most people still only remember a group of people called Germans beat Rome and that’s it. However, people learn about Khitans, Jurchens, Tanguts, etc.

It is something just unfamiliar to you, I guess.

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You know… geometrically speaking… a point only has a spread of 0.

You might not like it, but it’s the truth.

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As I’ve once mentioned on how Magyars got snubbed to Huns back in the Ensemble Studios days, my big problem with certain civs is the pop-culture obsession which is exactly why we got Huns back in AoC.

I disagree with OP on saying no to new civs due to “not being popular enough”, Let’s take Armenians and Tibetans for a small example. how many RTS games let you play them (We’re not counting RTW remastered that allows you to play ancient Armenia and B&W1 that has a Tibetan village)? Zero.

Which is why more non-pop culture civs should be added like the Dynasties of India ones which I bet most western people have never heard of them (ofc not insulting anyone, but it’s not “pop-culture” as OP said).

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I really like the DOI civs actually from the scenarios and all that stuff.

I’m only a bit sad that 2 of the civs are totally OP on Arabia because of the super camels and 2 of them feel… weird. As they lack so many elemental design features, most notably that element of mobility.

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Ofc you come back and you immediately start complaining about the “undeveloped” rest of the world and actinng in a very dumb way and also complain about all these “uncivilized” civilizations but you still advocate to add the shortly relevant and not even that powerful nations of the Balkans just because ““they are relevant to Europe””. There are plenty of African nations richer or more powerful than them but they are still underdeveloped for some reason.

There are three civs that had any real impact in the medieval world at large (Mongols, Chinese and Arabs) and none of them are European. Everyone else is a regional power.

You Europeans arent the center of the medieval world. And you certainly arent relevant enough to have almost half the civs.

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