Yes! It's time to get more Variant Civilizations done right

First of all, very exciting we are finally getting some new civilizations, variant or not. Are we thinking that this year’s DLC will be variants only or variants alongside some additional full-fledged empires? Regardless, I think this time around variants will hopefully be done much much better, considering they mentioned directly in the blog that they’ve taken “feedback into account.”

My only real critique with AOE4 as a whole is the variant civs, everything else is impeccably crafted. IMO the Ayyubids were the only variant that actually worked, having been an actual empire and fighting force and also still operating within the confines of the AOE conventions. They had enough unique units and mechanics to feel fresh while still using the Abbasid House of Learning as a framework. Truly felt like a polished, fun variant of an existing civ, one of my favorite civs overall. As for the other three… oof. Shotgun Jeanne was a-historical and extremely overturned, Order of the Dragon kinda looked goofy with those giant villagers walking around and felt boring to play, and the China variant was straight up off in terms of thematic choice and gameplay implementation.

If anyone with ties to the dev team is actually reading this, I just have a few requests:
-Please make the variants historically based and not just “historically inspired.”
-Don’t add variants to any civilizations twice while others have not gotten any.
-Choose popular nations and peoples that are actually requested (the forums alone show very clearly the groups people want to see).
-Take the previous criticism in mind and tweak or refine the existing variants to be better and more like the new ones (IE. change Jeanne to a support or buffing character, scale down the size of the Order of the Dragon, tweak gameplay of Zhu Xi).

Appreciate all the hard work and looking forward to more AOE4 in 2025.

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