Neither Huns nor Cumans are European, they were Asiatic Hordes.
They were culturally and ethnically as far from Europeans, as they could have possibly been.
Specially when you consider the Xiongnu (Huns) were originally from China’s werstern border.
There’s nothing that can prove that the Huns were the same people as the Xiongnu.
And for the Cumans, Rus records suggest they had fair skin and blond hair.
So did several mummies in Western China and Eastern Bactria, but they are still not Europeans.
Blue eyes and blond hair, are produced by low light environment (though some strains of blond hair seem to have been produced by the domestication of wheat, as a camouflage for farmer whose head stood above the stalks).
" The sound of the first Chinese character (匈) in the name has been reconstructed as /qʰoŋ/ in Old Chinese.[72] This sound has a possible similarity to the name “Hun” in European languages. The second character (奴) means slave and it appears to have no parallel in Western terminology. Whether the similarity is evidence of kinship or a mere coincidence is hard to tell. It could lend credence to the theory that the Huns were in fact the descendants of the Northern Xiongnu who migrated westward, or it could lend credence to the theory that the Huns were using a name which they borrowed from the Northern Xiongnu, or it could lend credence to the theory that the Xiongnu made up a part of the Hun confederation."
Language is usually a great indicator of parentage, specially in illiterate (no writting) peoples.
Unrelated languages can have chance coincidences. You cannot judge that two peoples are related simply by one word. Or else by the same token, I can also say that Austronesian is related to Indo-European, since Austronesian pronounced the word two as “dua”, similar to Indo-European languages.
And Indo-Europeans had once spread to Central Asia and Western China as well, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to find such mummies there. Those mummies were certainly not Asiatic.
And I don’t really agree with your claim that blue eyes and blond hair were the result of farming. The Asians and the Native Americans also had a long history of farming, yet they never developed such features. Certain Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers already had blue eyes, such as La Brana and Loschbour. And certain Australo-Melanesian tribesmen also have a tendency to grow blond hair, despite they have never been farmers.
So much history to learn in this thread
They were asiatic.
Definition of European:
adjective
Huns and Cumans came from Asia (not native to Europe) and had no European cultural characteristics.
They were not European, not even Caucasoid.
Uyghur girl, taht is not European, and has blond hair:
Blond Berbers (not European, though they are Caucasoid, but live in high luminosity environment):
Blond hair comes from low luminosity, sexual strategy during starvation period, and wheat farming camouflage.
It did not show up everywhere that experienced these phenomena, but everywhere it did evolve, that place had at least one of the described conditions.
It is obvious that by the year 2000 Microsoft had already planned to abandon AoE 2 and focus on the development of AoE 3 losing a great potential, in my opinion they had to launch several expansions of AoE 2 over the years while the technology was refined to develop AoE 3 in the year 2010 (it is the strategy that Blizzard used with Starcraft).
But returning to the topic, AoE 2: The Conquerors in my perception had 2 main objectives.
Analyzing the civilizations and in my opinion the reason why they were included in The Conqueros:
Koreans: Korea at the beginning of the century was a video game powerhouse being a pioneer in televising the games and even changing the internet broadband for the national comfort of its players, several legends arose in AoE 2 in the first years of the 21st century but later Korea became leaned more for Starcraft for which Blizzard rewarded his loyalty. However, it must be recognized that Korea civ is a good fit for AoE 2.
Spanish: They radically changed the design of the civilization to create a prelude to what would be AoE 3 (gunpowder civilizations), personally I would have liked a Medieval Spain, it was a great waste of potential.
Aztecs: It was also a prelude to AoE 3 civilization, however it gave a bigger perspective of the medieval world and in my opinion an excellent addition to AoE 2.
Mayas: Complement for the Aztecs and also a prelude civilization for AoE 3.
Huns: in my perception the only civilization that was placed in AoE 2 for profit only and not related to the medieval world of AoE 2 with a tech tree mainly fictional. I don’t know what was the reason for placing the Huns in AoE 2 but I suppose it was also influenced by the fashion of those years.
AoE 2 was and is an excellent game that at the time they did not know how to take advantage of it well, let’s hope that history claims the AoE Saga as one of the most popular and influential in the gamer world.
They put the Huns, specifically so people would not look at The Conquerors, as a “Renaissance Pack”.
All the other civs in it, fit the theme of Renaissance and Discovery Age, and they wanted to break the theme.
Does it rlly matter where we’re getting our new civs from? I dont think that it matters if a civ is from asia, europe, africa or america.I think that good stories can be told from everywhere, plus that europe has many more popular stories of battles and heroism than asia or africa. Also u can make a coustume civ in the scenario editor with triggers (exept the languege and wonder) and make a multiplayer scenario with it. I dont say that i wont like civs from outside europe, i say that there is a reason why there are manyh more european civs, it is bc there are many more stories from europe: Constantinopole in 1453, Michael the brave in wallachia, alexander nievsky at the battle on the ice, the restouration of england by william the conqueror, the battles beetween the viking kings of sweden, denmark and norway, the battle of grunwald and many more.
Huns were the worst choice ever.
They should have just went with Magyars.
Renamed huns to magyars would have been so much better.
Back in the old days scenario makers always used huns for hungarian or magyar.
I kind of like the Magyars we have now, better than the Huns, to be honest.
Huns are a better competitive civ, but Magyars have cheap Hussar, a Trash UU and Cav Sniper Archers.
That just trumps “no Houses” in my book.
Its kinda funny listing to sandy saying koreans dont fit because they did not conquer anything but added mayans because they had a buildings set.
Well, they did not want the Aztecs to be alone with the new architecture set. It actually makes sense, though they should have added the Tarascans instead, perhaps, as the Mayan had fallen long ago in Antiquity, even though the culture survived, while teh Tarascans actually did have the strength and metallurgy, to oppose the Aztecs and later the Spanish.
Could have just gone for incas rather than aztecs and maya.
Also sandy says the nomadic peoples seems odd to him but this is the guy who added huns.
No, they specifically wanted Aztecs, to justify having Conquistadores, which is the unit the whole expansion is named after (Conquitador = Conqueror).
Aztecs were an immediate lock-in, if you are going to have Conqs. They could have indeed gone for Incas, over Mayans, but perhaps they just wanted to say geographically and chronoligically closer to the Cortéz expedition, because the fall of Tenochtitlan is still in the 1500s, and closer to the Middle Ages, than the Pizarro expedition.
True.
Cumans and Tatars (Timurids) make much more sense in a MEDIEVAL setting, than Huns. Huns was the worst thing they ever added into the game, but it could have been worse, since they were considering adding the Scythians, which is a full-on AoE1 civ.
I would love to get Scythians in AoE1, though.
The current devs are way better in selecting civis than sandy, at least they fit in the medieval era and bit more realistic.
More balanced too.
Huns was a literal balance nightmare, they dominated the whole game for more than a decade.
In fact, most problematic OP civs, are still AoK and AoC civs, to this day.
How can you balance Goths design without nuking them forever, or making them far too dominant, while keeping their original design?
You cannot. It is flawed design from the start.
Yeah, but it is also far easier to say that now that we have a lot of experience and had plenty of time for a meta to develop. But I agree with you, some of the older civ designs are flawed…though the same could be said for more recent civs, like indians.
