DLC Concept: Sultans of the East
- This topic has 13 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 2 years, 6 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
There has been speculation about the post-Rome DLC and this proposal focuses on improving the Middle East. The “DLC concept” aims to add more to this region during the Middle Ages and make the existing Saracens civ more accurate and narrow in name. Moreover, the Mameluke unit within the Saracen army will be renamed “Mubarizun”. The proposal suggests adding two new civilizations, Egyptians and Georgians. The design of the Egyptian civilization is a cavalry-centered civ with a weak but cheap citizen levy, average cavalry, and weak but cheap and spammable archers and infantry. The new Mameluke unit of the Egyptians has strong conversion resistance and serves as a cavalry unit that overcomes the lack of Hussar when it comes to countering monks. Georgia, in contrast, is a melee-focused civilization with a standard economy. Georgian units are powerful but expensive. The proposal provides unique units for both civilizations and describes bonuses, team bonuses, and missing techs trees for both.
Both of these are rough.
Egyptians’ eco bonuses are very subtle, and difficult to notice in a real match. Heresy is already a castle age tech, and the reason it’s not researched then is mostly because you’re paying 500 (1000) gold to not have your units be converted when you could just not send them at enemy monks.
A medium-cavalry UU with an explicit bonus against monk conversion is kind of redundant. Just give them Hussars. The lack of Faith, Block Printing, and Bombard cannons all hurts the idea here. You’re just making a bonus and UU to cover a weakness most civs don’t have. This is made worse by their otherwise great siege and defenses, meaning bombard cannons and monks will still be made. They’ll just be used against your siege units instead.
The CT requires you to kill 8 wild animals to pay itself off, and it’s so miniscule beyond that that no one would bother. It’s a weird side-quest to throw in, especially for cav archers that lack TR. The lack of LAA and Bracer makes these possibly the worst skirms in the entire game. This makes siege a necessity, and means you’re being driven about mostly by your opponent’s monastery techs. If your enemy goes for monks after archer-pike, and they have redemption, you’re in trouble. Faster training really won’t help for imperial age pikemen missing plate armor, e. skirms missing two armor techs and bracer, and light cav missing hussar.
As for the Georgians, we’re looking at a civ with no economy bonuses, whatsoever, a highly-situational hill bonus, a CT that increases monk healing range from 4 to 6 (?), an SE-less Siege-inf civ, and a civ whose strength is primarily in the distant potential of their units.
I don’t see many really picking these up.
Saracens is a low key racist term that’s the most important change that needs to be made. Just call them Arabs. That’s who and what they are. As far as breaking up the civ, I think the Middle East civs are decently broken up. There’s Turks, berbers, Persian and aforementioned saracens. Pretty good coverage
This is indeed a viable region (using the term loosely) for more civs.
As far as civ design, Egyptians look mostly fine, but probably a little too weak. But I like that they are understated rather than a lot of designs that have wacky bonuses and/or wildly overpowered UUs.
Georgians though just look incredibly weak. They have absolutely nothing going for them until late Imp (where the odd bonuses are basically Hauberk for infantry and cav), besides the very situational hill bonus. Would get absolutely shrekt by even the worst-performing civs. Also don’t think that increasing monk heal range by 2 is worth 800 res in Castle Age (or ever).
Also, you have Plate Mail Armor on your missing techs list, despite it being needed for one of the 3 civ bonuses.
Egyptians can be improved in iterations. I would start again from the ground up with Georgians though (apart from the Monaspa).
I don’t get the Egyptian Castle Age Unique Tech: the cost is 800res, so you would need at least 8 wolves on the map to break even – how is that useful? Not only are there no maps with enough animals to use it (except maybe wolf hill), but you waste your soldiers to scout the edges of the map in the hopes of finding the few ones your loomed vills didn’t kill already.
If it applies to deer – there are very rarely any left after building a castle anyway, and vills would bring in more food. and for boars the trade off is even worse.
so what is it for?
Definitely Saracens could stand to be broken up into several civs, although these suggestions aren’t perfect but idk
I don’t quite get it. Who does “Arabs” exactly represent when Egyptians are a different civ? Egyptians were arabs and arabicized copts after the conquest.
I mean, while I don’t think breaking up Saracens (just rename them Arabs) is really necessary, there are better ways to do it. And the issue is you would need at least 4 new civs to make a decent split.
I think I’m gonna make a thread about this in a couple of days.
Egyptians:
Bonuses:
1. Powerful bonus that allows for lots of flexibility, I like it as long as the tech tree is balanced for it.
2. This is ok, a bit of extra wood savings and farms being destroyed slower isn’t very important.
3. It’s already in castle age and pretty useless, I thought this was a kind of like spammy/flexible civ but this doesn’t help cheap unit spam or anything really aside from knights and your non existent siege UU.
Team Bonus: Situational and decent, not every bonus has to be amazing though.
UU: So this unit is an anti-monk, anti-archer somewhat cheap cavalry unit? Pretty specific niche but the unit has good stats, cost and a role.
Castle age UT: Useless, seriously when would you even train CA as a civ with cheaper crossbows? Nice idea but needs more reward or to need any military units to go hunting rather than JUST CA.
Imperial age UT: Good tech but a slightly higher cost might be needed because of how much you can get out of it.
Tech Tree: Your skirms and crossbows are a bit too bad to use, otherwise it seems fine to me.
Georgians:
Bonuses:
1. Ok so like your first infantry/cavalry upgrades affects the opposite unit, this is pretty good but only in castle/imperial age
2. You’re able to hold a bad position a little better, not a terrible defensive bonus but you don’t really have an archer focus so not amazing.
Team Bonus: This is really strong for a team bonus. Literally the magyar bonus but for a whole team. Also it better not affect boars.
UU: It’s fine, like against Portuguese or Chinese it could win a game because of speed and bonus damage but otherwise a bad unit for anything aside from raiding.
Castle age UT: Don’t teutons already get this? Nor very good either because monks aren’t worthwhile healers.
Imperial age UT: I think history should not effect a tech this much, your champs are gonna die to cav archers anyways, only good on light cav which has more armor as Georgians.
Tech Tree: Wait why do you get steppe lancers? And nobody gets elite lancers anyways. The rest of the tech tree is entirely infantry and monk focused, you have no siege bonus or siege engineers so your infantry siege comp is outclassed by most infantry civs
Overall both civs have potential but are just too weak, especially Georgians, no eco bonus, only military bonus starts being useful in castle age and not any amazing late game options.
I dunno, I always felt like the current Saracen civ represents Egypt better than any other Arab/Muslim faction. Like, the Wonder is from Iraq, and maybe you’d want to apply Zealotry to the early Muslim conquests but everything else feels more Egyptian, especially the cavalry archer and gunpowder elements.
Saracen is a word from the European PoV, and Europeans/Crusaders mainly fucked around in the Holy Land and Egypt, which were both often under the same administration. Plus, it also works in the sense that an outsider would lump together a region as ethnically diverse as the Eastern Mediterranean.
I think I’d rather have a Saracen civ, and then another civ called “Arabs” to rep the Arabian Peninsula proper. Maybe even Himyarites.
Saracens is the composite civilization that makes the most sense (more than Slavs pre-Poles and Bohemians, more than Indians, possibly more than Teutons) and splitting Egyptians off after making a campaign about a ruler of Egypt is absurd.
​
Georgians and Armenians do need a DLC pack for Caucasian civilizations, though.
Saracens kinda do cover most of the Arab Middle East circa crusader era, (and we have other period names, like Teutons for Germans or Franks for French, Bohemia for Czechs and Burgundians for Low Countries), which gives it more of a cultural flavour than splitting a faction up. Not to mention, “Arabs” was not in common parlance until 16th century, so the current name is more than appropriate.
If you are dead set on it though, you could remould current Saracens into Egyptians, add Syrians and then Georgians.
To an Egyptian, being call an Arab IS offensive. It’s also misleading. Lol so you’re proposing to take a term -which isn’t actually racist, and make it into something that IS actually offensive to the people you’re trying to represent. The Saracen Civ name should remain as long as the Civ continues to represent the large swath of peoples and governments that it does.
Possibly you could break the Civ into the multiple political entities that existed. Or call them the X Caliphate, Y Sultanate, or something. But that breaks with the AOE2 tradition of naming civs after their peoples and not their governments.
Same thing goes for the UU, Mamlukes, are a broad class of slaves,soldiers,sultans that represent that unique quirk of Saracen society from the ~900’s to the ~1400’s. Like the Teutonic Knights, Boyars, Janissarys, they had a big impact upon the peoples represented by the Saracens and the name should also remain.
I’m not a fan of your Civs, Should be at least 2 to replace The current Saracens, the is a lot of history and various peoples there and they should have their own Saracen Region unit instead of taking Steppe Lancer & battle elephants.
Georgian idea is a good one though. Maybe a few tweaks to pull them more inline with their historical counterparts. Both MantisAOE & RobbyLAVA have great concepts for them.
You could call the Saracens, Ayyumids or Fatimids. Since the campaign is heavily focused around Saladin.
This could technically open up an Arab Tribes DLC which could be a nomadic horse type Civ with livestock & camel focuses.
It probably abit of stretch to find fitting Civs and history to base campaigns around.
Egyptians are also Arabs. Just because there’s regional diversity within a civ, doesn’t mean it’s not the same people.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
