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

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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The game will stay balanced as long as the civ designs are good, irrespective of the number of civilizations. The idea of resisting civ additions has been around ever since the time when there were only 18 civilizations. But yet many of the 24 new civlizations added to the game made it much more interesting. As long as the civs created are good from a gameplay perspective, they’re a good addition.

If you never had anything other than European history in your history lessons, it just reflects a bad school education system from where you studied. And adding more civs in the game from adjacent regions doesn’t dilute anything if the individual civ designs remain good. Franks-Burgundians, Italians-Byzantines they all co-exist and are in a good spot.

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The funny thing is, The African Kingdoms came out not long after I had learned about African kingdoms in school, so I was prepared. It was an American history course, so the only reason we learned about it was so we understood the various people groups that ended up financially supporting the Spanish colonists in some way. Still, the fact that the two coincided was funny. The very next year, I was supposed to learn about Southeast Asia around the time Rise of the Rajas came out, but sadly, that part of the course was canceled. However, I had already known a bit about Southeast Asia due to my own personal research, so the expansion was quite personal to me. The Khmer are still my favorite civilization currently in the game (though the Georgians will replace them if they’re ever added).

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Yes, referring to the English as ‘Britons’ in a medieval context is pretty weird. I wonder why ES chose that name. Maybe they thought ‘English’ sounded too modern or boring.

Wales, yes, and Cornwall; for Scotland it depends whether you count the Picts as Britons (which, e.g. Bede did not), plus Scotland was invaded by the Scots (from Ireland). The extent to which the Britons in what became England actually moved or were assimilated into/merged with Anglo-Saxon culture is quite unclear.

I don’t think it’s a problem, and I think officially changing established civ names would probably cause problems (especially for returning players). I don’t think a consistent naming convention is possible or desirable. On the other hand, I gather it’s easy to mod the names of things, and I’d be interested to see, e.g. a mod that tries to use period-appropriate endonyms for everyone.

I’ve always assumed this one is specifically because ‘Hungarians’ would be quite similar to Huns.

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yes, this is something I’ve suggested before as well. would be really cool to see

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I don’t know much history but if the Georgians had great cavalry or archers I hope they get added soon.

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It’s sad that a lot of people think the game is some kind of history simulator, these people experience the game on a superficial level and will continuously will ask for new civs even though we’ve had 12 new ones since release. Such people have no patience to leave some content for the future, nothing can justify this rate of releases as we’ve already passed the point where any average player can remember all the features of each civ and how to play them. They would rather change the game to their will instead of actually learning how to play the game and appreciate it’s vast depth. These players refuse to accept that adding even more civs directly hurts multiplayer since being aware of most aspects in a strategy game is key for proper decisionmaking and it removes the chance to expand in the future in a healthy manner. These will usually always be casual noobs since any proper player will be too busy understanding the existing content.

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I do agree with you when you say that this game shouldn’t become a history simulator and that new civs shouldn’t just be added for the sake of it, rather there should be a gameplay reason for it (especially it’s supported by historical reasons). I also think at some point the game could become bloated with new units and mechanics, so we must keep balance between the influx of new content and the actual gameplay.
However, I don’t understand why you complain about the desire of a large part of the players for new civs. They are part of the community as much as anyone and some of them put a lot of thought on the new suggested civs and I find it unfair that you call them “casual noobs”, which by the way, what is your problem with them? Not every player can be a e-sport pro or someone like T90 or Spirit of the Law.
I think we should try to be a bit more respectful towards other players, even if we don’t respect their opinions. I usually find many threads with balancing suggestions or civ proposals that in my opinion are very bad ideas, but I will never go and tell them that they “are noobs and want to hurt the game”.
Besides, why are you also saying this to them? After all, the devs are the ones who decide how this game will change, not random forum users.

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This is related to the similarly silly assumption that everything important is about the past is already known, as if major (and often disruptive) revelations from archaeology and related disciplines aren’t continuously incoming. (This is especially true of Mesoamerican archaeology, where huge cities are known but not yet excavated). But yeah, the incurious attitude of “If I don’t already know about them, they can’t have been important” is lazy and tiresome.

Only one I strongly think should be changed is “Mayans,” because it’s just incorrect (and people aren’t going to fail to recognize the civ without the improper “n”). Beyond that, yeah, you can make an argument to change other civ names, but I don’t think it’s essential.

Would be cool. A little tricky for some civs though, like Mayas or Italians who would have probably identified with their city-states rather than a concept of national identity that came centuries later. Or umbrella civs like Saracens, Celts, or Slavs, where you might have to narrow it down to a more specific nation/kingdom/ethnicity. Could be done though. On a related note, I’ve thought about doing a mod that changes unit/building names to native words for Aztecs and Mayas, but definitely not a priority.

True, but most discourse on this forum (strangely) plays out as if this were otherwise.

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yeah, the incurious attitude of “If I don’t already know about them, they can’t have been important” is lazy and tiresome

I agree, and I’d like to add that it’s also staggeringly arrogant.

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New civs will have to get added eventually to keep the game alive and in terms of remembering civ specific stuff, people have been complaining about there being too many civs for at least a decade, and its never impacted the game negatively and these people are a minority

Maybe I can get if you think 4 civs each year is too much, but we probably need two each year to keep the game alive, andnew DLCs also help to keep the community active

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You are absolutely correct on the point that it becomes significantly harder to balance the more civs there are. In fact, it becomes exponentially harder. That’s because you need to consider the interaction with a new civ with every single civ that already exists.

This is really bad in 4v4 team games. If there were 8 civs and you added a new civ, this is 8 new interactions. If there are 43 civs and you add a new civ, there are 162409534560 possible new interactions that come with that civ. Lastly, if you introduce a new civ to 43 civs in a 3v3 setting, that is 115511760 new combinations. Obviously, you don’t deal with it this way because it is literally impossible. But it shows what the problem is.

Now, that being said, you should consider how arrogant and euro-centric you are being. You understand very little about history, but want to present some weird historical argument.

I think that there is a single factor we should consider if we to determine how important a civilization was. That is, how many people’s lives did it affect. If we consider all human life as being worth the same (which I think is a good moral principle), then this is the only thing that really matters. There are two angles to this, however. First, how many people’s lives did it affect during the age of the civ, and second, what legacy did it have and how many people did that affect. Since this is a historical game, we should give way more priority to the first than the second.

Now that the metric is set, it is easy to see that half of the European civs don’t matter, and there are tons of civs which are missing. Europe had less than 20% of the world population historically. Something ultra relevant to Europe might have been inconsequential to the rest of the world. China needs to split into multiple civs, India still needs more civs, and many of the european civs need to go.

But you don’t care about any of this. You only care about what is cool. So, be up front. Say “I don’t care about historical accuracy or whatever, I only want the cool civs around” and we can continue to ignore you.

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No this is a solid argument.
Seriously.
Most people want to play cool civilisations and not the ones that technically controlled more land/people/wealth over a longer period of time.

Historical importance is subjective anyway and not a good metric to decide on what civilisations to add.

Variety and reconcilability are more important arguments.

But we also have to remember that this forum (or Reddit) is not the entire fanbase.
People that don’t know English will be less likely to post here even if the forum has a translation feature.

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Never said it wasn’t. I just wanted OP to be clear about what his issue is, and not couch it in other issues he actually doesn’t understand, or care about.

The reason for that is, “cool” is subjective. I don’t find mongols cool. They were a barbaric group of people who committed so many atrocities that if they existed now, there would be international sanctions against them, similar to Russia.

So, what you are saying there is “make this thing I like and remove things I dislike”, without any further explanation. I don’t care about that, and can totally ignore it.

It isn’t all subjective, if you can agree on the metrics. As I pointed out, if you set a fixed metric for measuring this, you can go from there to figure out what civs were historically significant.

Historical importance is actually a pretty decent metric from a business standpoint. I have seen a resurgence in Indian players with the DoI DLC. There are an insane number of chinese and vietnamese players who play the game. From a business perspective, it is arguably the best idea to make more civs for Third World countries who are still growing. These countries are looking for representation and have a growing middle class who can afford the game. If Microsoft wants to sell more copies and more DLCs, those markets are completely unsaturated.

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I mean I would generally ignore anyone that want’s to remove any civilisation from the game, period.
And just “I want this because it’s cool” is also not an argument and not going to convince anyone.
You gotta explain why and how it is cool.
“I want Japan because they are cool” is less useful then “I want Japan because Ninjas are cool”. That might still make little sense for a historical game but maybe your game just gotta have Ninjas because a lot of people like them. (And yes AoE2 actually has Ninjas, just only in the Scenario Editor.)

Only if historically significance lines up with emerging markets.
If China bans AoE, then all suddenly all historical significance of that region doesn’t correlate with a market anymore.
Or if some markets like the USA don’t have any civilisation that can represent them in the Middle Ages.

I generally don’t like arguing with historical significance.
Something that is historically significant will more or less automatically find a large group of people that care about it.

I’m not here to argue against more Chinese or Indian civilisations.
China is pretty cool and it’s maybe better to use something like Romance of the Three Kingdoms (technically to early for AoE2) as an argument for a China DLC then using some numbers about population, wealth, controlled land area, amount or cultural goods produced etc.

What new cool and unique gameplay aspects could a new civilisation offer? That is the important question.

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Tang Dynasty, with so many interesting characters (Tang Taizong, Wu Zetian, Yang Guifei, An Lushan, etc) would be the best fit for the Chinese theme DLC along with the powers on their borders, Khitans, Jurchens and Tibetans. Also a nice storyline for a Korean campaign. I would argue we could even do two Chinese campaigns given the scale. A Tang one and a Song Dynasty one.

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Philosophical take:

A metric is necessarily cultural, as the necessary language to describe it is cultural.
So there isn’t any possible way to find a metric for that’s acceptable for all cultures that evalueates cultures.

The only metrics that ever emerged and will emerge that try to evalueate cultures will be motivated by an attempt to lift certain cultures above others.

Conclusion: We shouldn’t evalueate cultures at all. (except for our own culture ofc, that’s fine)

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There are a lot of variables to consider, most certainly. I am just saying that this is a factor to consider. We agree on the rest.

I completely disagree with this. This is the anything can be everything, so nothing means anything take. I will actually argue the complete opposite, it is not only fine, but also important to evaluate cultures. That is important for wellfare of people. However, you should have a good understanding of cultures and the people within those cultures. Don’t do what the colonialists did when they destroyed entire cultures based on extremely poor understanding of all of them.

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I don’t want to go too deep into detail. But this proposition is exactly why the “arabian spring” failed.
Because people tried to aplly “western cultural standards” to other cultures they didn’t fit.

PLEASE LEAVE OTHER CULTURES ALONE. They have to figure out their own way.

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I don’t understand this argument at all. My history lessons never covered East Asia, I barely heard about the Mongols in class when the conquest of Bagdad was mentioned (and my teacher didn’t give enough context for me to understand the historical significance of this event at the time), I’m not even sure I heard about the Persians or medieval Celts, or that the Goths were mentioned as anything more than one Germanic people among many others on a migration map. I started playing AoE2 when I was a kid in middle school and I’ve learnt tons of stuff through the game about civilisations and events my teachers didn’t care or have time to cover in my lessons. And even decades, after I’ve read countless books and magazines, watched videos, etc. I still learn stuff thanks to this game. I love the RotR dlc because I was taught a lot of things about South East Asia through it (some of whom kids from the other side of the world probably learnt at an age younger than when I first started playing the game). So really, I don’t understand why anyone would want this game I’ve learnt so much from suddenly start to only teach things you and I already know.
Though when I see you talk about medieval Malays, I think the game didn’t teach you anything and you’re the kind of person who think when they didn’t know anything about a subject it means there’s nothing to know…

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Or also general. It’s often the less people know, the more they think to know.
And as most of us aren’t professional histaorians, especially not of other cultures than our own, most of us who at least tried to get a bit more information feel actually less “knowledgable” in that field.

I also don’t understand where this culture of “claiming to have expertise” comes from. In my opinion it’s nothing wrong about saying that you don’t know enough about something to give a statement. It’s actually a clever way to get out of discussions you’re not comfortable in.
And if someone says stuff in response like: “That’s general knowledge! How can you miss that?”
You can respond with: “Well, I decide for myself what’s important to me and worth my time.”