Yamato in AOE2

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
21

An interesting fact is that the mounted archery of the early medieval samurai we are familiar with was actually inspired by the Emishi horsemen. It was the Emishi who were first good at archery on horseback, and yamato warriors started defeating Emishi only after they adopted this tactic too.

It makes sense that Ashitaka is good at mounted archery in the Ghibli movie. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Not a big fan of Emishi civ, but if you consider that the Emishi civ could also represent Ainu people, they had fought against Mongols.

1 Like
22

How about Ainu for AoE2 and Yamato and Jomon for Chronicles?

23

I hope you mean Celts as a stand-in for Gauls and not Celts in general.

24

If the Celts didn’t exist and would be suggested to be added the way they are now I’d be against it because they don’t fit into AoE2 with their ancient looking unique unit.

A civ like the Irish or Scottish would make a lot more sense, wouldn’t it.

And as I said, if they were added now. I don’t want to move any existing civ to Chronicles.

25

I hate Celts’ current design and how protective people are of it, so I agree it shouldn’t be a civ.

26

Splitting the Celts into Scots and Irish indeed. The Scots would notably rely on pikemen, I don’t know when they started using their massive claymores but that would give them shock infantry too.

The Welsh are already counted as Britons and Bretons would probably we counted as part of the Franks.

27

Partially, not mostly. The OP is actually requesting an RoR campaign, and a new AoE2 civ with no campaign, similar to Romans. I brought up disabling hand cannons only because you think it’s a problem that Japanese are based on the later part of the AoE2 time period. But I don’t think Emishi should be a campaign-only civ, and I hope AoE2 never has such a thing (although I find the Chronicles civs uncomfortably close).

For sure? I think Huns were one of the best additions to AoE2 – a fun, distinctive civ design with one of the best and most memorable official campaigns. It’s true they were only relevant at the very start of the time period, but I think there are lots of potential civs that are less suitable.

Antelope Archer unique unit, please!

28

The Welsh are already counted as Britons

Cornish too :wink:

29

Unique tech : Corn Wall : palisades cost food instead of wood, build and repair themselves automatically :upside_down_face:

2 Likes
30

For the AoE2 timeline, both Emishi and Ainu are viable names, although I personally find Emishi a bit cooler.

For a timeline earlier than AoE2, having Yamato and Jomon exist together might be weird. The ethnicity of Yamato is considered to be the offspring of the union of the Yayoi and the Jomon, which means that the Jomon is not an ethnic group other than the Yamato but one of the ancestors of Yamato. Having Emishi is the answer if you want a rival of Yamato in the game.

Even if the Emishi were a civilization, the UU could not be Antelope Archer given the accuracy, but

Having an Emishi Antelope Archer in the scenario editor would definitely cool! Maybe add a wolf-riding lancer girl and a hand cannoneer lady also! We don’t even need an Emishi civ for having them, except that Ghibli’s legal department stop us. 11

1 Like
31

Yamato people are >95% Yayoi and <5% Yomon.

It’s similar to having Minoans and Greeks in AoE1. Minoans lived in what now is Greece before the ancestors of the Greeks came and conquered them.

In the end it doesn’t really matter if they are called Yayoi and Yomon or Yamato and Emishi.

Yamato and Yomon are probably the more recognisable names though.

I did this for fun:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=jomon,emishi

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=jomon,emishi,ezo

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=yamato,yayoi

Obviously not very objective. The names Yamato and Yayoi are mostly used in different contexts probably.

Ezo is likely most searched in other contexts too. Ezo is also just 3 letters which makes it generally a more common word.

1 Like
32

Agreed

But even trivially renaming them to Gaels would be fine.

33

For the Japanese, their understanding is simply that both Yayoi and Jomon are their ancestors. Proportion is not something they cared about in their understanding of this. Absolutely you could argue any trivial and obscure study of archaeology or biology, but that would be increasingly off the point for this topic. When you ask who the Yamato Kingship fought against, the Japanese will answer you Emishi (or less likely Kumaso or Hayato, who were other two smaller tribes in the south), not Jomon, so I said if you want a civ could be introduced with Yamato in Chronicles maybe, the best answer will be Emishi, that’s it.

The word “Ezo” is used in Japanese more often to refer to the place than the people (although it can also refer to the people in different contexts). For a long time, Ezo was the name of the island now called Hokkaido before 1869.

34

Yamato+Emishi makes more sense for AoE2.
Yamato+Jomon for Chronicles, right?

But AoE2 already has the Japanese.
You can rename the Japanese to Yamato for a scenario.
You can rename the Jomon to Emishi for a scenario and vice versa.
I personally don’t mind either name but I think Jomon fits better into Chronicles and Emishi into AoE2.

Sicilians are descendants of the Vikings, Italians are descendants of the Romans, Spanish are descendants of the Goths.

Yayoi, Jomon, Yamato, Emishi, Ainu and Japanese could all be in the game.
Yayoi and Jomon have to be Chornicles.
Emishi Ainu and Japanese have to be AoE2.
Yamato could be both like the Romans.

35

You’re missing the point.

People don’t consider Yamato had fought Jomon. In other words, people don’t think that Yamato and Jomon are groups from the same era. Even, people don’t even think that we know of any battles that took place during the Jomon period. They’re thought like a prehistoric culture, so it’s weird to have a civilization named after them in the game, just like you wouldn’t want a Neanderthal civilization, right?

The Yayoi are considered to be contemporaries of the late Jomon, and they formed the Yamato later on (regardless of proportion). And then, the Emishi are considered to be contemporaries of Yamato, possibly another descendants of the Jomon, and clearly the Yamato and the Emishi had been at war. That’s it.

The Yamato Kingship is from the 4th to the 7th century, which is actually more suitable for the early period of AoE2 than AoE1, so the Japanese of AoE2 actually includes Yamato in its entirety. The reason we had Yamato in AoE1 was really just because we knew so little about Japan from 1000 BC to 3nd century AD. If I were designing that AoE1 civ, I would have Wa (a decent representation of Japan from the 1st to the 3rd century, including Wa kingdoms and Yamatai Kingom) instead of Yamato.

If you want Jomon and another Japanese civ for Chronicles, it should be Yayoi, or Wa, but the Jomon civ is still weird.
If you want Yamato and another Japanese civ for Chronicles, it should be Emishi.
If you want another Japanese civ for AoE2, it can be Emishi or Ainu.

A decent approach would be to introduce the Emishi in AoE2 so they could be used in Chronicles when Yamato was introduced in Chronicles. More likely that we will not have a complete Emishi civ, at best having editor units to serve scenarios.

By the way, Chronicles is not necessarily limited to the AoE1 timeline. I personally would prefer that they focus on the various clans during the Sengoku period.

36

Neanderthals are a different species. They are not humans.
That’s a bad comparison.

I guess that would make more sense.
The question is if they should be named Emishi, Ezo or Ainu as a civilisation? In the scenarios they appear in they can always be given the period appropriate name.

Chronicles is limited to the Rome at War timeline which is even shorter then AoE1.
It’s designed to be an Classical Antiquity game mode with all the units and technologies being designed to fit into that time frame.

They hired the Rome at War people to do Chronicles, and they seem to be mostly interested in the Classical Antiquity, with a focus on Rome and it’s surroundings.

But they already said that they are interested in hiring more people to make other Spin-offs with different settings. So if there are talented modders that want to make a Sengoku period Spin-off happen they could try to approach Worlds Edge.

1 Like
37

After Alexander, the next logical steps would be the Diadoches (unless they directly include that in that Chronicles with Macedon, the Lagids and the Seleucids) and the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage.

I’d expand with Gauls Germans and others later but after the Punic Wars it really becomes Rome doing some fly swatting.

38

And they will probably include the Mauryans in Alexander.

39

I really wonder what direction Chronicles will be taking.
If it’s going the obvious way with Alexander next or if they are going somewhere else instead. They will likely want to add Romans relatively soon because that’s what the whole mod was centred around.

But that’s all a different topic.

40

My guess is, they’ll wait to see how the China DLC will do before considering a Three Kingdom chronicles. Before that it’s safer to extend on what’s already there, by doing the Punic Wars after Alexander.