For those who aren’t aware, AOE2 is thriving today with a huge player base, fan base, ongoing development and large international tournaments (recent Red Bull Wololo tournament in London, for example). I play this game regularly with friends and love it.
The most insane part of AOE2 is that I was a young teenager when I first played the game and the dominant players then are STILL the dominant players now - 27 years later
At the very top probably not, at least these days. But historically low APM players were often able to overcome that through better decision making and get to the top 4 or so. That’s generally still the case outside of the top 4-8.
Now the meta is quite established and it’s much easier to get better at decision making through practice than becoming physically faster.
It’s very complex though while the factions are mostly symmetrical there are over 30 of them and they all have marginal advantages/disadvantages. Games are more usually than not won through optimally utilizing them. So in tournaments drafting became very important since using the same civilization twice or by opposing players is almost universally disallowed. So to be successful you need to outwit the opponent by picking the right faction(s), be capable of making the optimal strategic decisions and be very fast/good at micro (which is also probably more important than in most other games since arrows are not heatseeking missiles and pathfinding is extra wonky)
Uh, dunno if I'd say that BW is dominated by "the young".
Top 4 at the latest ASL are all born before 1995 - they're all millennials. None of them are from the first generation of BW pros, but they've been in the game for a long time.
I think BW has the collapse of the infrastructure that used to support it as a ongoing televised event to blame for that one. It’s less popular among gen z so there isn’t the up and coming replacement and no one is paying them to do it as a full time job as even the mid-tier pros from its prime era were.
To add to that: it also works fine under Linux (Proton), which I feel is important to mention because many Linux deniers believe that Linux can't run competitive multiplayer games, but AoE2 proves them wrong.
Dota 2 runs natively in Linux, and it's one of the biggest competitive online multiplayer games. It worked in Wine (along with Steam), too, last I tried 10 years ago when I was dual-booting and did not have disk space for two copies.
Don't forget AOE4! It's really a great evolution of AOE2 - more unique playstyles per civ, has about 1/2 the playerbase of AOE2 but still plenty to play online and support its own pro scene (was also in the Wololo tournament).
I wouldn’t call it an evolution. The game might be good in its own right but its different in some very fundamental ways besides the historical setting. Especially on the competitive level.
Wow, that’s actually really interesting. I knew of other empires in this shape (to me the Kushan empire is the most obvious syncretic example) but I didn’t know they were all shaped this way. I suppose I always imagined empire being a bigger thing than kingdom but this definition seems more useful. It seems that other definitions don’t involve resource extraction necessarily but power over multiple nations. Still, it’s a useful frame.
In practice I suppose this must have been the case because you can’t easily impose monocultures especially when information travels slowly.
That makes me curious if military tactics of the time also had regional variation and if the relative strengths of various regions came from their awareness of certain tools being effective. Bringing in a foreign army with its foreign techniques might have been like bringing small pox to a population- they’d have no defense the first time around so if you’re fast you get them all.
Yes, the idea of empire as being something bigger than a kingdom is a popular misunderstanding.
However, Rome (and Byzantium) were actually very good at integrating conquered populations into their culture.
Very early in the empire, a law made all conquered people officially Roman, with all the benefits and protections it entailed.
After 2-3 generations, there was not much difference between a Roman from Gaul and a Roman from Rome: they spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods, had the same education, and viewed themselves as Roman. And critically, the Romans from Rome didn't see their compatriots from elsewhere as different.
The Senate was composed entirely of men, but apart from that it was a DEI dream. Some of the emperors were dark-skinned, originating from current Syria: we only know because of their genealogy, their portraits, but otherwise no one cared enough to mention their skin colour, especially in a negative way.
To such an extent that, for most of their existence, Rome and Byzantium did not actually fit the definition of empire.
> Very early in the empire, a law made all conquered people officially Roman
Wouldn't call this "early" in the empire. Caracalla [1] did this in 212AD by granting Roman citizenship to free noncitizens, well after the beginning of the empire in 27BC. W Roman Empire fell in the late 470s so about half of the empire's lifetime had severe legal stratification between citizens, free noncitizens (peregrini) and slaves.
The Roman Republic notably granted citizenship status to most of the socii during the Social War in the early first century BC. Even discounting one-off mass citizenship grants, Roman citizenship was much easier to obtain than pretty much every other Mediterranean polity (in large part by dint of it being even possible in the first place).
Fair. I believe the Empire only ended with Byzantium, and as far as I know the edict was never repealed, but I do differentiate between Rome and Byzantium elsewhere, so I see the point.
> That makes me curious if military tactics of the time also had regional variation and if the relative strengths of various regions came from their awareness of certain tools being effective. Bringing in a foreign army with its foreign techniques might have been like bringing small pox to a population- they’d have no defense the first time around so if you’re fast you get them all.
I highly recommend...the author's blog for very in depth articles about this subject including
I think Rise of Nations (an amazing spiritual successor to the original AoE games) fits their definition of empire a lot better. You create multiple cities in your “empire”. The ones at the core naturally grow larger and prosperous, while peripheral ones generally have specific uses like training a military or mining resources. You can also capture cities from neighboring civilizations.
Well, sure, and there's also a 200 population limit per player (in Age of Empires 2, at least). And no day-night cycle or seasons. These are clearly intentional choices to capture the vibes of economic and military conflict while massively compacting the scale of true historical conflict.
Not really. The author mentions "the game is to be understood as an abstraction" as a potential caveat, and then immediately dismisses it with "but I don’t think it goes for Age of Empires."
I don't really get this. It's not like what the author has to say is contingent on displaying it as a failure of Age of Empires. And it really is just over-interpreting the game. No, converting a unit with a priest is not some sort of cultural genocide, this is a game simplified enough so that it can run on a Pentium. How can there be cultural genocide when the simulation is too crude to even include any hint of culture?
Yeah, the article is mostly legitimately interesting facts about historical empires. Framing it around alleged shortcomings of the Age of Empires video games is unnecessary and obtuse.
And yet it's not rare to find people explaining that the roman empire, the roman armies or the roman cities were "all the same". Yet these persons seem to know that in real life population is not limited to 200 or that there is day-night cycles.
The article talks about it, and makes the point that people who created AOE may have been biased by the same misconception that is also visible more generally. And it is an interesting thing to raise.
edit: in fact, it is illustrated by the ridiculous recent Elon Musk fit about "the odyssey" cast, itself fueled by the misconceptions that "having black guys in a roman army is woke because everyone knows the romans are not black".
Yes but Musk is really astonishingly ignorant. I realise he didn't have a classical education but he's the kind of person who would complain about Othello casting a black man as the main character.
I was talking about the past when the british empire still existed.
New york is also diverse but if you look at demographic data from historically not that long ago and are racialising then it really wasn't. Those shifts are recent.
>edit: in fact, it is illustrated by the ridiculous recent Elon Musk fit about "the odyssey" cast, itself fueled by the misconceptions that "having black guys in a roman army is woke because everyone knows the romans are not black".
What roman army are you talking about ?
Also yeah the vast vast majority of the romans were not black just like how in some african kingdoms later one could see a very rare arab trader or slaver but they were for the vast vast majority black.
There are reports of black legionaries in Romain Britain as late as the reign of Septimus Severus (himself not very white if you look at portraits).
Black people in the Roman empire isn't that far fetched when you consider Rome had a huge presence in Africa and the Trans-Saharan slave trade was thriving at the time. Rome also had contacts with Merowe (Kush) through Egypt and other client kingdoms in North Africa. It's not a stretch to imagine a small but steady stream of black slaves (possibly manumitted later), mercenaries and merchants trickling into the empire and spreading throughout, especially when one considers that the military was one of the very few social advancement possibilities if you weren't already from an aristocratic or at least land-owning family (Rome would give veterans a money payout equal to all of their 20+ years' service arrears plus a bonus and Roman citizenship at the end of service, allowing one to retire in relative comfort).
So they wouldn't be as frequent as in the US, but they definitely wouldn't be an oddity either.
Equating North Africans who genetically, culturally more interlinked with other Mediterranean people with Sub-Saharan Africans is not exactly right. After all before the Indo-European invasion Europe was almost exclusively settled by middle eastern immigrants (and largely remained so in Southern Europe genetically).
> It's not a stretch to imagine
It’s not a stretch to imagine a lot of things but there is no evidence that was true to any significant degree (besides the demand for slaves in Roman Egypt was likely substantial enough to absorb most of the demand)
>Equating North Africans who genetically, culturally more interlinked with other Mediterranean people with Sub-Saharan Africans is not exactly right. After all before the Indo-European invasion Europe was almost exclusively settled by middle eastern immigrants (and largely remained so in Southern Europe genetically).
No, I mean that North African client kingdoms and tribes, or the Roman themselves, would routinely trade in slaves and hire mercenaries or bring in merchants through the trans-Saharan trade routes.
>It’s not a stretch to imagine a lot of things but there is no evidence that was true to any significant degree (besides the demand for slaves in Roman Egypt was likely substantial enough to absorb most of the demand)
There literally is, as pointed out at the top of my comment. You can look it up.
They would be an oddity. That's often why one got reports of them. Because they were incredibly rare
Most of them like septimus severus you mention and the maurorum are north africans and then the historia augusta mentions a single black ethiopian.
And it gets some weird amount of focus seemingly purely due to modern sensibilities in an anti racism drive and to create a sense of belonging.
Same with how a lot of the story around the HMT windrush is wildly stretched or downright myth.
"It's not a stretch" .... "possibly manumitted later"....
Colonial era europe fairly certainly had many times more and outside of a few hotspots...they were still an oddity.
They didn't just go back, didn't get selected out so that they didn't routinely show up in genepool research.
They just aren't there in the demographic data. Fuck this is not that long ago. My great grandparents never saw one in the flesh.
>And it gets some weird amount of focus seemingly purely due to modern sensibilities in an anti racism drive and to create a sense of belonging.
What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it? It's not like people are arguing Rome had the same make up as the US. The thesis is fairly weak ("a small trickle of black people shows up because Rome was diverse and a unified empire that favors large scale population movements") and yet a large contingent of people seem intent on saying "no, not even that". I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.
>They didn't just go back, didn't get selected out so that they didn't routinely show up in genepool research. They just aren't there in the demographic data.
>What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it?
That they don't like it when you twist and manufacture history for idiological purposes.
>and yet a large contingent of people seem intent on saying "no, not even that". I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.
Because typically it is "no, not even that". You get idk how many zeroes behind the decimal marker to describe the percentages and yet they're always massively disporortionally there.
>I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.
Because so much of this extreme overrepresentation and twisting comes from american anti racism push and to give a sense of belonging in a eurocentric vision of history. Either that or engagement ragebait (see queen victoria was a black woman, cleopatra was a black woman type stuff).
Movies about african slaver kingdoms, movies about british royalty, movies about medieval france, movies about greek mythos now, elves described as white as snow.
It becomes impossible to not notice it everywhere.
And then we start seeing it outside of media like i mentioned with the HMS windrush stuff where suddenly the government and BBC starts entirely fabricating history seemingly to justify current migration policy.
I pick this as an example because it's more known in the anglo world and is also much more recent and easily debunked but the same goes for random bits of colonial history for other european nations.
It becomes so wild, pervasive and ever expanding in such a short period of time that you can't even call it out without sounding like a far right conspiracy nut all of a sudden.
Even if you know it's the truth it makes you feel dirty pointing it out, like you're going against the crowd with some easily verifiable stuff. it's a red cloth for some including me.
The winners write history becomes so accutely clear. Except the winners aren't a party in an actual war and nobody reasonable wanted a culture war.
So these skeletons had ancestors from sub saharan africa which could refer to a direct or tiered generational migration of very few individuals.
It's that it's so extremely rare that makes us take note. Hell it's because it was so extremely rare that we can spot a lot of these differences in incomplete dna and skeletons to begin with.
There are also reports of very few chinese emisaries in the roman republic and similar asian showings.
In Britain and italy there were some skeletons that were claimed to be of east asian origin with a more direct link.
I don't think we need this extreme overrepresentation to begin with but why are these people so rare in arthurian fiction, medieval and roman dramas.
I don't suddenly see chinese or arabs in outlaw king or what have you.
I see a much more contemporary makeup slanted towards the american one and then i see "people are arguing Rome had the same make up as the US."
Constantly
That doesn’t mean people were constantly moving around the empire for no particular reason like people are today.
Traveling large distances was expensive and dangerous and fairly rare outside of a few professions. Soldiers being one of them so to an extent that’s feasible
> including importing their slaves
Why would you import someone from Nubia to Western Europe when you have a relatively ample supply of barbarians being trafficked across the border and there is a significant demand for slaves in Egypt and other provinces nearby.
I mean technically you could run into a Black African somewhere in the Roman Empire but outside of exceptional circumstances that would be almost as likely as winning a lottery
More times than I can count, bubba. And if you can't differentiate between a producer making a movie in English because its main audience is English speaking and producing a movie that is either: (1) accurate historically; or (2) true to its original story -- than I can't help you, bud.
You can't help me anyway because you know far less than I do.
You don't know what's historically accurate. You don't understand why there was a black community in Rome. You don't know why there was one in 17th century London. But you still think you know better than me bubba.
The fact that you are telling me (someone you don't know) "...you know far less than I do" and "You don't know what's historically accurate" and all the other "you don't know"s, tells everyone everything they need to know about who they're speaking to.
> The fact that you are telling me (someone you don't know ...
That's rich from a guy who also tell someone they don't know that they are "obsessed with Musk". You are so full of it, and too stupid to even notice everyone here see you for the laughing stock you are.
Check out if my statements were accurate. I realise it's not ego confirming to be told you're wrong but you could really see it as an opportunity to learn.
You said something that is a beginner's mistake (and it is objectively incorrect, your interlocutor even invites you to try to prove otherwise, that's how confident they are you will not be able to do so because it is simply not true). Based on that, your interlocutor just said "I know better than you". Not because they invented it, but because you gave them all the indications that it is true by making beginner's mistakes.
So, no, they don't "have no idea": they saw you struggling with basic elements that people who know this subject have already acquired.
Funnily enough, you genuinely have no idea of what their parents have done, and yet you don't hesitate to do exactly what you pretend is so shameful. You don't make any sense. Honestly, just take one step back and stop being so angry. Just breathe, stop being so emotional and think a little bit. You don't have to apologize or lose face, you can just stop writing answer (stop digging your own hole) and do better next time.
What do you mean "out of context". The initial article is literally explaining that there is a misconception around the diversity of culture during the antiquity. This anecdotal event, that I picked because it was recent (sorry to disappoint you, I don't really care for Musk), was just a concrete example that the exact misconception we are talking about is real and still present today. The fact that the culprit is Musk is just "by chance".
(ps: and the fact that you end up with "and in hollywood, they depicted a roman army that was not entirely Rome-inhabitant-looking, so it is the proof that it's "wokeness" seems to also illustrate that indeed you have assimilated the misconception yourself)
I'm laughing so hard right now. You resoundingly do care about Musk; you're obsessed with him.
Second, who said anything about me alleging that "they depicted a roman army that was no entirely Rome-inhabitant looking"? Those are your words not mine, and if anyone is looking for the king of strawman arguments, we have a winner with you.
Rome was a very ethnically diverse place, including the demographics of its slaves, contrary to America's slaves.
The only thing I said was that they recast the Gladiator as black, not being true to the original MOVIE character. If you didn't understand that, the solution is not to put words in people's mouth. The solution is to work on your reading comprehension.
> I'm laughing so hard right now. You resoundingly do care about Musk; you're obsessed with him.
I love those self-defeating argument, it's still a mystery how people don't realise how stupid they look. You know that I know better than you how much I care about Musk, right? You are trying to convince me that something that I can observe, as a fact, to be totally wrong, is in fact true. You realise that all you do is confess that you are unable to conceive that something that you have made up may not be true.
Ok, ok, let me try. complianceowll, you are a little dog called Popo. You say it's not the case, you say you are not a little dog, but I'm laughing so hard right now, because you resoundingly are a dog, you are named Popo. See, I'm so smart, you cannot hide the truth from me.
Did it work? Did you believe to be a little dog (because you are)? No? Well, guess what, similarly, I still don't believe I'm obsessed with Musk. But I do believe, based on that proof, that your opinions are worth nothing, because they are the result of someone who not only is convinced of something false, but also believe that they can convince someone who see it's not true that it is true. Silly little dog.
I married into a family who basically only plays AOE properties. The parents in their 70s have played since the first version and now play AOE2 3-5 hour games every Sunday after family zoom with their son and his wife. Their two daughters are more devoted to AOM (Mythology) but can play AOE2 very well.
I have never played an AoE game. In Civ, though, if you’re not at least considering conquering other players' cities and adding them to your country you may be playing the game wrong. Sure, in Civ 6 you can win on science, culture, religion, or economics. Conquest is still one method of winning, and those cities you conquer are not your subjects until they are. Cities along a border can even choose to switch loyalty based on your culture’s influence overriding theirs.
The Master of Orion series includes mechanics for your conquered planets being less productive at first if they are mostly peopled by an alien race. In the WG reboot at least, there’s even a government agency you can build on a planet to get it to assimilate faster. It also supports the idea of low-morale planets rebelling.
My favourite way of playing old Civ 1-3 as a kid was to build a solid circle of units that would gradually expand and move out to fill all the available space.
Eventually you'd own all the land and your units would just be camped along the beachline, enjoying some downtime.
I think annihilation is a property of how we played the game and not of the game itself. I get that the game was designed around it, but there's nothing stopping players in a Free For All from subduing an enemy into slavery instead of wiping them out, some may call this an ally. In fact, it's probably the optimal strategy, annihilating might be a pyrrhic victory, where one player is knocked out, and the 'victor' is left with half an army. The only winner in that situation are the rest of the players who are now better than the two players.
Except NvN games, I except FFA and 2v2v2v2 games to show elements of empires, it's only games with two sides where minmax becomes a viable strategy and damaging the enemy is the same as strengthening yourself.
Civilization (at least 4) also has subjugation as an explicit mechanic where a mostly defeated AI state surrenders as your vassal and has to give you resources, vote for you in UN elections, fight in your wars, etc. but they otherwise continue to act independently.
That's how my friends and I play Civ. We had an issue in the beginning with players getting knocked out in the first day of a game that might go for 5 or more play sessions, so we devised a scheme where a player could be forced into vassalage. They can no longer win outright, they merely exist to support the conqueror. The conqueror gets to overrule any decisions made by the vassal, but there's a bit of a gentleman's agreement that this power should be used sparingly, since it's annoying to be micromanaged, and it slows the game to a crawl. In particularly aggro games, the same vassal might be handed back and forth between two players still in the fight several times, because as a relatively underdeveloped nation, they represent a fair peace settlement.
I think this is unlikely to happen (or at least, be sustained very long) in most games because being a slave to another player doesn't sound very fun. Playing as someone else's vassal (and being deprived of any real chance at victory) would be tedious and probably slightly embarrassing. You'd rather just go out of the game, and if in the process you end up screwing over the player who beat you, all the better.
Two powerful players can decide to cease hostilities in order for each to preserve their own ability to ultimately win the game, but if one player's ability to win has been irreparably compromised, then they will probably just fight to the last man in a way that real civilisations pretty much never do.
I think the victor would allow you to even have a small army, not big enough that you can rebel and be a threat, not small enough that you are useless, defenseless (or bored).
And if the victor dies, you would then be free. Not necessarily game ending. And it might match up with actual history too, how many towns have outlived their tributee empires?
> I will say that I find even in games that do pay some lip-service to the continued existence of subordinated peoples within large empires – I think particularly of Europa Universalis, Stellaris and Imperator – the mechanics and dynamics for managing those populations in a polyethnic, polylinguistic society are often sharply underdeveloped. In many games that don’t simply erase those populations, they are instead represented by a simple malus (e.g. “Non-primary culture, -x% production/stability/manpower/whatever).
I did enjoy that article, especially the main point, but I would take issue with the notion of diversity in the Roman Empire. I have seen this label before, but it is misleading and anachronistic, since the various other groups the Romans conquered were gradually romanised. We might as well say the British or Spanish Empires were diverse... On one level they did have many cultures, but there was also a concerted effort to assimilate those cultures and languages.
> an empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group
By definition, doesn't the later Roman Empire cease being an "empire" as there isn't really a "core" population anymore outside of some vague multi-ethnic military aristocracy.
Sure, Rome had a few lingering privileges and prestige, but little in the way of direct power. And certainly, the post-crisis Empire didn't exist to siphon resources on their behalf. Heck, pretty much as soon as the 3rd century crisis ended Italy itself lost most of its special status and more or less just became yet another province.
And once that was gone, they weren't really replaced by anyone except the imperial bureaucracy and aristocracy itself. So who are the "core" people here, because if "an aristocracy" is enough to count, then who the heck isn't an empire under this definition?
Maybe it's enough that they began as an empire under this definition. Or maybe Devereaux is fine with the stereotypical Empire losing its status as an empire long before losing its territory and power. Or perhaps would have some counterargument at hand if he happened to read this. Who knows.
The Galactic Empire as shown in the movies seems to have a very small core, almost all of the movies are set in its periphery rather than its central core. Tatooine is paying taxes to the Empire and subject to its troops, but doesn't seem at risk of being culturally seen as "Imperial". Alderaan wasn't subservient enough as a culture and is subject to genocide. Endor was certainly never truly imperial.
It's almost harder to define what the core of the Galactic Empire even is. We are told Coruscant is core to the Empire, but the glimpses of it in the Old Republic era certainly implied it was a very diverse place and we aren't really shown Coruscant in the films of the height of the Galactic Empire. To some extent the only truly "core worlds" and "core peoples" that we see in the films are the Star Destroyers and Deathstars, the military demanding taxes from every planet they pass.
The Empire may not be taking full advantage of the military power of a diverse people because of the over-reliance on clones and treating draftees as if they were clones when the clones start to run out, but beyond that it certainly seems to resonate like an Empire in the way this article describes an Empire to me.
Given that each planet seems to have one species, except that humans live everywhere, I always kind of assumed that the Galactic Empire was one with humans at the core.
That is a possible reading, especially given the way the Empire's xenophobia manifests, if you assume all humans are culturally homogeneous in Star Wars, but I think the movies are somewhat clear that humans are culturally diverse. The human cultures in Tatooine seem very different to Alderaan or Naboo, for two somewhat specific notes in the films. The Imperial accent often being more "British" (RP) implies cultural differences with the periphery that at least mirror somewhat, say, the differences between Britain and much of its former Empire.
The Galactic Empire showing a clear citizenship "caste" favoritism of Citizen/Officer Humans, General Humans, Cloned Humans, Aliens, and then Droids, but also working with all of those at the same time in its military efforts (there are a few aliens in the Empire's military, there are a lot of droids) does seem imperial in the way the article suggests, especially because that core of clear "Citizen/Officer Humans" seems so relatively small versus they armies they command of all the other types.
I will leave the following since so far all the commenters seem to have either not read the article at all, or to have at least skipped the following two sections:
>The third, predictable and annoying argument is “stop overthinking it, it is just a game.” Which is – if you will permit me to paraphrase C.S. Lewis – an unserious ‘boy’s philosophy’ unfit for adults. Video games are cultural products, like books or films or any other – and to say that those cultural products have no impact or importance is to argue against the historically obvious, given how frequently we find such things at the roots of important political ideologies, social movements, and wars.
>I bring this up not because I demand utter historical accuracy in my games – I will almost certainly happily play Age of Empires IV despite this. Instead, I bring it up because I find that this overly simplified view – sometimes, depressing, held to be the truth by some – in its errors, reveals some important things about empires, which again, I should note, seem to have been the dominant very-large-scale organization system for humans generally in the historical period.
First it tends to obscure the necessarily diverse nature of empires – as we have just laid out and perhaps more to the point, it obscures the power that empires derive from being diverse....
I read that part and I still don't like the article. I have several hundred hours in AoE2. Maybe I am unique, but it has never even occurred to me to call the collection of people and buildings I control an "empire". I think "it's just a game['s name]" is still a perfectly valid argument.
I would like the article better if it took an approach such as "Age of Empires is a bit of a misnomer, let's explore the actual definition of an empire," rather than its current combative approach.
If you have "several hundred hours", maybe you approached the article a bit too defensively. When I read it, I did not see any "combative approach", it seems even to be tongue-in-cheek (the misnomer is qualified as "amusing silliness", this is not at all what you would expect from someone who is combative).
The article has a good point and is correct. But it gets too far down into the weeds. For example, the paragraph about how priest conversions don't count as empire-building seems like the sort of argument one makes when desperately clutching at straws—a position that's entirely unnecessary given how reasonable the premise of the article is. It's building a straw man for a nonexistent opponent.
The blog's name is "a collection of unmitigated pedantry" and the host is known for playing scores of video games including AOE2 itself. The explicitly avowed purpose of the blog is to talk about pop culture products as a gentle way to introduce the general public to deeper historical knowledge and concepts.
Indeed, you should write about what you wish especially considering the authors usual material. Even so, I didn't have the relationship between distinctively modern ideas of diversity (in a positive light) and traditional empires within a critique of "Age of Empires", a real time strategy game! on my bingo card. These are the sorts of ideas for better or worse that only an "intellectual" will come up with.
Videogames rely on gameplay more than storytelling or teaching history. It's not a novel or encyclopedia entry. It's not unserious to expect a videogame to be fun over having a deep exploration over the possible interpretations of one word in its title.
Plus, some films are like Casablanca. Some are like History of the World Part 1. Additionally, if someone relies on media like Age of Empires, The Empire Strikes Back, or the novel Empire by Gore Vidal to gain an understanding of what an empire is, just because the word empire is in the title of these works, there are bigger issues at hand...
But the author, and it is quoted in the comment you answer to, say, explicitly "I bring this up not because I demand utter historical accuracy in my games".
The author, basically, says: I know games are not realistic, but the way AOE illustrates a misconception gives me an opportunity to talk about this misconception because too many people are still seriously believing it.
Of course, movies and games can take all the liberties they want, the author does not care about that. What the author raises is the fact that too many people still have an incorrect idea of what is an empire, and that this idea is a bit ridiculous when you look at the fact.
And it has current real consequences. For example, there are political parties that rely on such misconceptions to sell their fake news (edit: as illustrated below with someone commenting that the correct description of "empire" is the result of the author being "woke").
I take the authors point about empires being necessarily cosmopolitan, but it’s not as though it’s a new phenomenon that people have a myopic view about what empire is or how they should operate. (Eg, Russification) Its always been true that empires use various means of social engineering to reduce differences in populations to engender a more uniform polity over various time scales (because it’s beneficial to the entity to do so, eg: Spanish and Italian are both just bad latin) It’s also often true that ethnic cleansing does take place. (If empire was just about getting the already existing social structures to work for you, america would look very different). It’s not true that empires are purely extractive on the periphery, otherwise they would only ever be loose confederations with a tax system and a hegemonic central power. Which is sometimes true, but is not what most empires do. Even saying that empire is just about reifying one polity over another doesn’t hold together all that well on closer inspection. It doesn’t explain why, for example, the Roman Empire shifted from being culturally italic and centered in Rome to being centered in Constantinople and culturally Greek. How could the periphery take over the center if it’s a purely extractive enterprise by one group over its periphery?
I guess the point I’m making, is that empires are very complicated, and trying to reduce them to being solely a thing imposed by one group onto a periphery in order to extract resources is almost as reductive as to say they only exist through colonization and genocide.
While it’s reasonable to say that people get their view of the world through media, I think it’s fine that media can contain simplifications of reality. Otherwise I would have to play Europa Universalis, which is boring.
> I have absolutely had well-meaning people quite confidently inform me that Roman military strength was a consequence of their cultural and ethnic cohesiveness.
... Wait, how? I mean, I think popular culture _does_ generally gloss over the Italy-is-not-Roman dynamic, but movies and so on often depict auxiliaries. And certainly anyone who looked at the history would struggle to come to this conclusion.
Maybe those people literally _are_ basing their knowledge of Rome on Age of Empires!
(The Civ games eventually kind of figured this dynamic out; there are independent small nations which you can subjugate, though the subjugation is often fairly... whitewashed, and may consist solely of sending them a bunch of embassies.)
Italy was Roman though. Or rather by making Italy Roman (to such an extent that other Italians would be willing to fight a war just for the right to be treated as other Romans) was basically what enabled their success by giving them a huge pool of manpower (and most importantly of people who had a vested interest in the success of the Roman state). Other ancient states like Athens were inherently exclusionary which put a hard limit on their power projection capacity since they depended on fickle allied or subjugated states to fight their wars.
It's not that deep. It's obvious that AoE marketed itself as an RTS game and not some kind of 4X game with complex diplomacy/subjugation mechanics. Competitive RTS games are at their best when each faction maintains some unique characteristics (as opposed to assimilating opposing faction tech), otherwise, you lose balance and/or strategy. At the end of the day, good gameplay should be prioritized over flavor.
ETA: To add, as a young nerd I did appreciate the history section of the game.
It's not a great argument because the game takes place pre-empire, and the end of the game is intended to be when one player, the winner, is now an empire. This is evidenced by the final age in the game being called the Imperial Age. Most empires in history fought their neighbors in more or less the same manner as exhibited in the game before they became big and strong enough to be an actual empire.
I guess you could make an argument that the game doesn't transition into the most powerful player beginning to behave like an empire in the imperial age as you keep steamrolling your opponents until the end of the game, but it's a weaker argument and it's not clear why you would want to change the entire game's mechanics right before the game ends.
Am I misremembering things? I played a lot of AOE2 in college and in multiplayer games one of my gotos was to attack someone quickly and force them into an alliance where they sent me resources, and then continued to demand resources so they could never grow big enough to remove the alliance and attack, then coordinate through them to attack other people. Seemed like a pretty good approximation of empires to me at the time.
It's a good point, you can do that, but it doesn't contradict what I said. You start the game with about 3 villagers (give or take a couple depending on the civ chosen), one scout, and a town center. So clearly you don't start as an empire, a shack with no military has not ever been an empire. So the game is about becoming an empire. And I already said that once you become powerful enough to be considered an empire, the game does not transition into that player being able to behave like an empire, you just keep mowing down your enemies. So you can say the game doesn't represent empires well, but you can't say it tried and failed at it, because the game is primarily about before becoming an empire. Most games end in the castle age, and some end in the feudal age with just a few archers. This is even more clear when you look at competitive aoe because the games almost always end way before anyone becomes powerful enough to begin looking anything like an empire. The spirit of the game is really about pre-empire. But you're right the game has a bunch of mechanics that simulate empire especially later in the game with trade carts and trade ships so yeah, the later in the game you play the more valid the point is that the game poorly captures empires, but the heart of the game is about becoming one not being one.
A funny quip to be sure. But one could be counter-pedantic and say the title never promises empires. It promises to take place in a time period where empires exist.
I had a similar thought, that a game in AoE could really represent a localised skirmish involving people from different empires, rather than an actual simulation of the development of those empires. Which also fits more with the scale of the map.
But the article also says that if you understand what an empire is, then there are empires all the time, and basically all time periods after prehistory would fit the bill.
The article hardly mentions "oppressed peoples" at all. Much of the focus is on the benefits gained to the empire by the diversity therein, with brief forays into the historical and geographical layout of different parts of the early/mid Roman empire.
For those who aren’t aware, AOE2 is thriving today with a huge player base, fan base, ongoing development and large international tournaments (recent Red Bull Wololo tournament in London, for example). I play this game regularly with friends and love it.
The most insane part of AOE2 is that I was a young teenager when I first played the game and the dominant players then are STILL the dominant players now - 27 years later
That's....not true.
Maybe a few pros have been playing for 20+ years, but most of the top players (by championship wins) are young.
Hera, Lierrey, Vinchester, Lewis...are in their 20s. And even the previous #1 Viper isn't that old.
The parent is exaggerating, but ACCM is 36 and top 8, DauT is 40 and is something like top 16, Nicov is 34 and top 8.
Viper was one of the top players even back then
I'm also in my 30s. You could've played this game at 12 and still been playing it without turning 40
How is this possible when StarCraft tournaments are dominated by the young?
Is it lower APM and therefore less RSI? A more niche market?
At the very top probably not, at least these days. But historically low APM players were often able to overcome that through better decision making and get to the top 4 or so. That’s generally still the case outside of the top 4-8.
Now the meta is quite established and it’s much easier to get better at decision making through practice than becoming physically faster.
It’s very complex though while the factions are mostly symmetrical there are over 30 of them and they all have marginal advantages/disadvantages. Games are more usually than not won through optimally utilizing them. So in tournaments drafting became very important since using the same civilization twice or by opposing players is almost universally disallowed. So to be successful you need to outwit the opponent by picking the right faction(s), be capable of making the optimal strategic decisions and be very fast/good at micro (which is also probably more important than in most other games since arrows are not heatseeking missiles and pathfinding is extra wonky)
Uh, dunno if I'd say that BW is dominated by "the young".
Top 4 at the latest ASL are all born before 1995 - they're all millennials. None of them are from the first generation of BW pros, but they've been in the game for a long time.
I think BW has the collapse of the infrastructure that used to support it as a ongoing televised event to blame for that one. It’s less popular among gen z so there isn’t the up and coming replacement and no one is paying them to do it as a full time job as even the mid-tier pros from its prime era were.
And I have to add that the Wololo tournament was insane and even a spectacle for people who have barely played the game.
there go the next 4h21m of my day. Couldn't be more excited!
From which year?
To add to that: it also works fine under Linux (Proton), which I feel is important to mention because many Linux deniers believe that Linux can't run competitive multiplayer games, but AoE2 proves them wrong.
Dota 2 runs natively in Linux, and it's one of the biggest competitive online multiplayer games. It worked in Wine (along with Steam), too, last I tried 10 years ago when I was dual-booting and did not have disk space for two copies.
Also just found out that they released Definitive Edition for macOS earlier this year: https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-ii-definiti...
Don't forget AOE4! It's really a great evolution of AOE2 - more unique playstyles per civ, has about 1/2 the playerbase of AOE2 but still plenty to play online and support its own pro scene (was also in the Wololo tournament).
I wouldn’t call it an evolution. The game might be good in its own right but its different in some very fundamental ways besides the historical setting. Especially on the competitive level.
... Huh. Hadn't realised there was a modern version, but it looks like it was re-released. I remember playing this _over a quarter of a century ago_.
Wow, that’s actually really interesting. I knew of other empires in this shape (to me the Kushan empire is the most obvious syncretic example) but I didn’t know they were all shaped this way. I suppose I always imagined empire being a bigger thing than kingdom but this definition seems more useful. It seems that other definitions don’t involve resource extraction necessarily but power over multiple nations. Still, it’s a useful frame.
In practice I suppose this must have been the case because you can’t easily impose monocultures especially when information travels slowly.
That makes me curious if military tactics of the time also had regional variation and if the relative strengths of various regions came from their awareness of certain tools being effective. Bringing in a foreign army with its foreign techniques might have been like bringing small pox to a population- they’d have no defense the first time around so if you’re fast you get them all.
Altogether an enjoyable read. Thanks.
Yes, the idea of empire as being something bigger than a kingdom is a popular misunderstanding.
However, Rome (and Byzantium) were actually very good at integrating conquered populations into their culture.
Very early in the empire, a law made all conquered people officially Roman, with all the benefits and protections it entailed.
After 2-3 generations, there was not much difference between a Roman from Gaul and a Roman from Rome: they spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods, had the same education, and viewed themselves as Roman. And critically, the Romans from Rome didn't see their compatriots from elsewhere as different.
The Senate was composed entirely of men, but apart from that it was a DEI dream. Some of the emperors were dark-skinned, originating from current Syria: we only know because of their genealogy, their portraits, but otherwise no one cared enough to mention their skin colour, especially in a negative way.
To such an extent that, for most of their existence, Rome and Byzantium did not actually fit the definition of empire.
> Very early in the empire, a law made all conquered people officially Roman
Wouldn't call this "early" in the empire. Caracalla [1] did this in 212AD by granting Roman citizenship to free noncitizens, well after the beginning of the empire in 27BC. W Roman Empire fell in the late 470s so about half of the empire's lifetime had severe legal stratification between citizens, free noncitizens (peregrini) and slaves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutio_Antoniniana
The Roman Republic notably granted citizenship status to most of the socii during the Social War in the early first century BC. Even discounting one-off mass citizenship grants, Roman citizenship was much easier to obtain than pretty much every other Mediterranean polity (in large part by dint of it being even possible in the first place).
Fair. I believe the Empire only ended with Byzantium, and as far as I know the edict was never repealed, but I do differentiate between Rome and Byzantium elsewhere, so I see the point.
> That makes me curious if military tactics of the time also had regional variation and if the relative strengths of various regions came from their awareness of certain tools being effective. Bringing in a foreign army with its foreign techniques might have been like bringing small pox to a population- they’d have no defense the first time around so if you’re fast you get them all.
I highly recommend...the author's blog for very in depth articles about this subject including
- this one on mounted warrior cultures and how they often dominated https://acoup.blog/2020/02/28/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... - this long series on why the legion ended up dominating the phalanx https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-...
Thank you for the links. Much appreciated!
I think Rise of Nations (an amazing spiritual successor to the original AoE games) fits their definition of empire a lot better. You create multiple cities in your “empire”. The ones at the core naturally grow larger and prosperous, while peripheral ones generally have specific uses like training a military or mining resources. You can also capture cities from neighboring civilizations.
this guy is a huge dork. I love it. I read to the end and was treated to his analysis on BSG main batteries.
https://acoup.blog/2019/11/29/collections-where-does-my-main...
Well, sure, and there's also a 200 population limit per player (in Age of Empires 2, at least). And no day-night cycle or seasons. These are clearly intentional choices to capture the vibes of economic and military conflict while massively compacting the scale of true historical conflict.
The author addresses that.
Not really. The author mentions "the game is to be understood as an abstraction" as a potential caveat, and then immediately dismisses it with "but I don’t think it goes for Age of Empires."
I don't really get this. It's not like what the author has to say is contingent on displaying it as a failure of Age of Empires. And it really is just over-interpreting the game. No, converting a unit with a priest is not some sort of cultural genocide, this is a game simplified enough so that it can run on a Pentium. How can there be cultural genocide when the simulation is too crude to even include any hint of culture?
Yeah, the article is mostly legitimately interesting facts about historical empires. Framing it around alleged shortcomings of the Age of Empires video games is unnecessary and obtuse.
Odd take and deeply dismissive. The author addresses your point already.
The author addressed it and dismissed it. I think their dismissal is mistaken, so there’s no bonus points for addressing it.
I disagree, and also I'm not here to award points for anything.
And yet it's not rare to find people explaining that the roman empire, the roman armies or the roman cities were "all the same". Yet these persons seem to know that in real life population is not limited to 200 or that there is day-night cycles.
The article talks about it, and makes the point that people who created AOE may have been biased by the same misconception that is also visible more generally. And it is an interesting thing to raise.
edit: in fact, it is illustrated by the ridiculous recent Elon Musk fit about "the odyssey" cast, itself fueled by the misconceptions that "having black guys in a roman army is woke because everyone knows the romans are not black".
Yes but Musk is really astonishingly ignorant. I realise he didn't have a classical education but he's the kind of person who would complain about Othello casting a black man as the main character.
Sure, but it is just an example, he is not the only one thinking this misconceptions is "historical".
I'm agreeing with you. Rome was the centre of the empire so had every type of person just as London had as the centre of the British empire.
And I suppose New York as a major centre of the American empire. Multicultural cities are the rule rather than the exception.
>Rome was the centre of the empire so had every type of person just as London had as the centre of the British empire.
And yet the kind of diversity you're probably expecting was incredibly rare in both. There's enough demographic data to know that.
That's such a bizarre statement. Diversity was rare in London? Have you ever been there (I lived there for years).
London is quite possibly the most diverse city in the world.
Edit: I thought perhaps New York might be more diverse, so I hedged but it turns out Toronto is! I would not have guessed.
I was talking about the past when the british empire still existed.
New york is also diverse but if you look at demographic data from historically not that long ago and are racialising then it really wasn't. Those shifts are recent.
>edit: in fact, it is illustrated by the ridiculous recent Elon Musk fit about "the odyssey" cast, itself fueled by the misconceptions that "having black guys in a roman army is woke because everyone knows the romans are not black".
What roman army are you talking about ?
Also yeah the vast vast majority of the romans were not black just like how in some african kingdoms later one could see a very rare arab trader or slaver but they were for the vast vast majority black.
There are reports of black legionaries in Romain Britain as late as the reign of Septimus Severus (himself not very white if you look at portraits).
Black people in the Roman empire isn't that far fetched when you consider Rome had a huge presence in Africa and the Trans-Saharan slave trade was thriving at the time. Rome also had contacts with Merowe (Kush) through Egypt and other client kingdoms in North Africa. It's not a stretch to imagine a small but steady stream of black slaves (possibly manumitted later), mercenaries and merchants trickling into the empire and spreading throughout, especially when one considers that the military was one of the very few social advancement possibilities if you weren't already from an aristocratic or at least land-owning family (Rome would give veterans a money payout equal to all of their 20+ years' service arrears plus a bonus and Roman citizenship at the end of service, allowing one to retire in relative comfort).
So they wouldn't be as frequent as in the US, but they definitely wouldn't be an oddity either.
Equating North Africans who genetically, culturally more interlinked with other Mediterranean people with Sub-Saharan Africans is not exactly right. After all before the Indo-European invasion Europe was almost exclusively settled by middle eastern immigrants (and largely remained so in Southern Europe genetically).
> It's not a stretch to imagine
It’s not a stretch to imagine a lot of things but there is no evidence that was true to any significant degree (besides the demand for slaves in Roman Egypt was likely substantial enough to absorb most of the demand)
>Equating North Africans who genetically, culturally more interlinked with other Mediterranean people with Sub-Saharan Africans is not exactly right. After all before the Indo-European invasion Europe was almost exclusively settled by middle eastern immigrants (and largely remained so in Southern Europe genetically).
No, I mean that North African client kingdoms and tribes, or the Roman themselves, would routinely trade in slaves and hire mercenaries or bring in merchants through the trans-Saharan trade routes.
>It’s not a stretch to imagine a lot of things but there is no evidence that was true to any significant degree (besides the demand for slaves in Roman Egypt was likely substantial enough to absorb most of the demand)
There literally is, as pointed out at the top of my comment. You can look it up.
They would be an oddity. That's often why one got reports of them. Because they were incredibly rare
Most of them like septimus severus you mention and the maurorum are north africans and then the historia augusta mentions a single black ethiopian. And it gets some weird amount of focus seemingly purely due to modern sensibilities in an anti racism drive and to create a sense of belonging. Same with how a lot of the story around the HMT windrush is wildly stretched or downright myth.
"It's not a stretch" .... "possibly manumitted later"....
Colonial era europe fairly certainly had many times more and outside of a few hotspots...they were still an oddity. They didn't just go back, didn't get selected out so that they didn't routinely show up in genepool research. They just aren't there in the demographic data. Fuck this is not that long ago. My great grandparents never saw one in the flesh.
>And it gets some weird amount of focus seemingly purely due to modern sensibilities in an anti racism drive and to create a sense of belonging.
What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it? It's not like people are arguing Rome had the same make up as the US. The thesis is fairly weak ("a small trickle of black people shows up because Rome was diverse and a unified empire that favors large scale population movements") and yet a large contingent of people seem intent on saying "no, not even that". I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.
>They didn't just go back, didn't get selected out so that they didn't routinely show up in genepool research. They just aren't there in the demographic data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnfBYO53jhg
(Africans in Anglo-Saxon England)
>What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it?
That they don't like it when you twist and manufacture history for idiological purposes.
>and yet a large contingent of people seem intent on saying "no, not even that". I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.
Because typically it is "no, not even that". You get idk how many zeroes behind the decimal marker to describe the percentages and yet they're always massively disporortionally there.
>I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.
Because so much of this extreme overrepresentation and twisting comes from american anti racism push and to give a sense of belonging in a eurocentric vision of history. Either that or engagement ragebait (see queen victoria was a black woman, cleopatra was a black woman type stuff). Movies about african slaver kingdoms, movies about british royalty, movies about medieval france, movies about greek mythos now, elves described as white as snow. It becomes impossible to not notice it everywhere.
And then we start seeing it outside of media like i mentioned with the HMS windrush stuff where suddenly the government and BBC starts entirely fabricating history seemingly to justify current migration policy. I pick this as an example because it's more known in the anglo world and is also much more recent and easily debunked but the same goes for random bits of colonial history for other european nations. It becomes so wild, pervasive and ever expanding in such a short period of time that you can't even call it out without sounding like a far right conspiracy nut all of a sudden. Even if you know it's the truth it makes you feel dirty pointing it out, like you're going against the crowd with some easily verifiable stuff. it's a red cloth for some including me.
The winners write history becomes so accutely clear. Except the winners aren't a party in an actual war and nobody reasonable wanted a culture war.
>>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnfBYO53jhg (Africans in Anglo-Saxon England)
So these skeletons had ancestors from sub saharan africa which could refer to a direct or tiered generational migration of very few individuals. It's that it's so extremely rare that makes us take note. Hell it's because it was so extremely rare that we can spot a lot of these differences in incomplete dna and skeletons to begin with.
There are also reports of very few chinese emisaries in the roman republic and similar asian showings. In Britain and italy there were some skeletons that were claimed to be of east asian origin with a more direct link.
I don't think we need this extreme overrepresentation to begin with but why are these people so rare in arthurian fiction, medieval and roman dramas. I don't suddenly see chinese or arabs in outlaw king or what have you. I see a much more contemporary makeup slanted towards the american one and then i see "people are arguing Rome had the same make up as the US." Constantly
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Have you ever watched The Gladiator? How many of them were black? They were slaves.
Do you know how many slaves were black in the Roman empire? More than had American accents I assure you.
None of them spoke English either.
> Do you know how many slaves were black in the Roman empire
In the Western Mediterranean? Most likely diminishingly few. It’s hard to imagine why would that might not had been the case.
Because the Roman empire included parts of Africa, including importing their slaves.
There were black Roman soldiers posted on Hadrian's Wall in the north of England.
That doesn’t mean people were constantly moving around the empire for no particular reason like people are today.
Traveling large distances was expensive and dangerous and fairly rare outside of a few professions. Soldiers being one of them so to an extent that’s feasible
> including importing their slaves
Why would you import someone from Nubia to Western Europe when you have a relatively ample supply of barbarians being trafficked across the border and there is a significant demand for slaves in Egypt and other provinces nearby.
I mean technically you could run into a Black African somewhere in the Roman Empire but outside of exceptional circumstances that would be almost as likely as winning a lottery
More times than I can count, bubba. And if you can't differentiate between a producer making a movie in English because its main audience is English speaking and producing a movie that is either: (1) accurate historically; or (2) true to its original story -- than I can't help you, bud.
You can't help me anyway because you know far less than I do.
You don't know what's historically accurate. You don't understand why there was a black community in Rome. You don't know why there was one in 17th century London. But you still think you know better than me bubba.
The fact that you are telling me (someone you don't know) "...you know far less than I do" and "You don't know what's historically accurate" and all the other "you don't know"s, tells everyone everything they need to know about who they're speaking to.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions!
> The fact that you are telling me (someone you don't know ...
That's rich from a guy who also tell someone they don't know that they are "obsessed with Musk". You are so full of it, and too stupid to even notice everyone here see you for the laughing stock you are.
Check out if my statements were accurate. I realise it's not ego confirming to be told you're wrong but you could really see it as an opportunity to learn.
> I realise it's not ego confirming to be told you're wrong but you could really see it as an opportunity to learn.
It is a fact that you have no idea whether you know more than me, but you affirm it with no foundation because you have no integrity.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the elephant telling someone else their ears are big.
Unfortunately, your parents didn't really put that much time into you and it shows.
Stop crying, the situation is simple:
You said something that is a beginner's mistake (and it is objectively incorrect, your interlocutor even invites you to try to prove otherwise, that's how confident they are you will not be able to do so because it is simply not true). Based on that, your interlocutor just said "I know better than you". Not because they invented it, but because you gave them all the indications that it is true by making beginner's mistakes.
So, no, they don't "have no idea": they saw you struggling with basic elements that people who know this subject have already acquired.
Funnily enough, you genuinely have no idea of what their parents have done, and yet you don't hesitate to do exactly what you pretend is so shameful. You don't make any sense. Honestly, just take one step back and stop being so angry. Just breathe, stop being so emotional and think a little bit. You don't have to apologize or lose face, you can just stop writing answer (stop digging your own hole) and do better next time.
What do you mean "out of context". The initial article is literally explaining that there is a misconception around the diversity of culture during the antiquity. This anecdotal event, that I picked because it was recent (sorry to disappoint you, I don't really care for Musk), was just a concrete example that the exact misconception we are talking about is real and still present today. The fact that the culprit is Musk is just "by chance".
(ps: and the fact that you end up with "and in hollywood, they depicted a roman army that was not entirely Rome-inhabitant-looking, so it is the proof that it's "wokeness" seems to also illustrate that indeed you have assimilated the misconception yourself)
> I don't really care for Musk
I'm laughing so hard right now. You resoundingly do care about Musk; you're obsessed with him.
Second, who said anything about me alleging that "they depicted a roman army that was no entirely Rome-inhabitant looking"? Those are your words not mine, and if anyone is looking for the king of strawman arguments, we have a winner with you.
Rome was a very ethnically diverse place, including the demographics of its slaves, contrary to America's slaves.
The only thing I said was that they recast the Gladiator as black, not being true to the original MOVIE character. If you didn't understand that, the solution is not to put words in people's mouth. The solution is to work on your reading comprehension.
> You resoundingly do care about Musk; you're obsessed with him.
"Care for" doesn't mean the same thing about "care about"; "I don't care for" means "I dislike", perhaps with a certain degree of implied contempt.
> I'm laughing so hard right now. You resoundingly do care about Musk; you're obsessed with him.
I love those self-defeating argument, it's still a mystery how people don't realise how stupid they look. You know that I know better than you how much I care about Musk, right? You are trying to convince me that something that I can observe, as a fact, to be totally wrong, is in fact true. You realise that all you do is confess that you are unable to conceive that something that you have made up may not be true.
Ok, ok, let me try. complianceowll, you are a little dog called Popo. You say it's not the case, you say you are not a little dog, but I'm laughing so hard right now, because you resoundingly are a dog, you are named Popo. See, I'm so smart, you cannot hide the truth from me.
Did it work? Did you believe to be a little dog (because you are)? No? Well, guess what, similarly, I still don't believe I'm obsessed with Musk. But I do believe, based on that proof, that your opinions are worth nothing, because they are the result of someone who not only is convinced of something false, but also believe that they can convince someone who see it's not true that it is true. Silly little dog.
I married into a family who basically only plays AOE properties. The parents in their 70s have played since the first version and now play AOE2 3-5 hour games every Sunday after family zoom with their son and his wife. Their two daughters are more devoted to AOM (Mythology) but can play AOE2 very well.
I have never played an AoE game. In Civ, though, if you’re not at least considering conquering other players' cities and adding them to your country you may be playing the game wrong. Sure, in Civ 6 you can win on science, culture, religion, or economics. Conquest is still one method of winning, and those cities you conquer are not your subjects until they are. Cities along a border can even choose to switch loyalty based on your culture’s influence overriding theirs.
The Master of Orion series includes mechanics for your conquered planets being less productive at first if they are mostly peopled by an alien race. In the WG reboot at least, there’s even a government agency you can build on a planet to get it to assimilate faster. It also supports the idea of low-morale planets rebelling.
My favourite way of playing old Civ 1-3 as a kid was to build a solid circle of units that would gradually expand and move out to fill all the available space.
Eventually you'd own all the land and your units would just be camped along the beachline, enjoying some downtime.
I think annihilation is a property of how we played the game and not of the game itself. I get that the game was designed around it, but there's nothing stopping players in a Free For All from subduing an enemy into slavery instead of wiping them out, some may call this an ally. In fact, it's probably the optimal strategy, annihilating might be a pyrrhic victory, where one player is knocked out, and the 'victor' is left with half an army. The only winner in that situation are the rest of the players who are now better than the two players.
Except NvN games, I except FFA and 2v2v2v2 games to show elements of empires, it's only games with two sides where minmax becomes a viable strategy and damaging the enemy is the same as strengthening yourself.
Civilization (at least 4) also has subjugation as an explicit mechanic where a mostly defeated AI state surrenders as your vassal and has to give you resources, vote for you in UN elections, fight in your wars, etc. but they otherwise continue to act independently.
That's how my friends and I play Civ. We had an issue in the beginning with players getting knocked out in the first day of a game that might go for 5 or more play sessions, so we devised a scheme where a player could be forced into vassalage. They can no longer win outright, they merely exist to support the conqueror. The conqueror gets to overrule any decisions made by the vassal, but there's a bit of a gentleman's agreement that this power should be used sparingly, since it's annoying to be micromanaged, and it slows the game to a crawl. In particularly aggro games, the same vassal might be handed back and forth between two players still in the fight several times, because as a relatively underdeveloped nation, they represent a fair peace settlement.
I think this is unlikely to happen (or at least, be sustained very long) in most games because being a slave to another player doesn't sound very fun. Playing as someone else's vassal (and being deprived of any real chance at victory) would be tedious and probably slightly embarrassing. You'd rather just go out of the game, and if in the process you end up screwing over the player who beat you, all the better.
Two powerful players can decide to cease hostilities in order for each to preserve their own ability to ultimately win the game, but if one player's ability to win has been irreparably compromised, then they will probably just fight to the last man in a way that real civilisations pretty much never do.
I think the victor would allow you to even have a small army, not big enough that you can rebel and be a threat, not small enough that you are useless, defenseless (or bored).
And if the victor dies, you would then be free. Not necessarily game ending. And it might match up with actual history too, how many towns have outlived their tributee empires?
Because "Age of pre-empires" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
> I will say that I find even in games that do pay some lip-service to the continued existence of subordinated peoples within large empires – I think particularly of Europa Universalis, Stellaris and Imperator – the mechanics and dynamics for managing those populations in a polyethnic, polylinguistic society are often sharply underdeveloped. In many games that don’t simply erase those populations, they are instead represented by a simple malus (e.g. “Non-primary culture, -x% production/stability/manpower/whatever).
Is this addressed in EU5 with its new population/culture system https://eu5.paradoxwikis.com/Population / https://eu5.paradoxwikis.com/Culture? I have not played it yet.
I did enjoy that article, especially the main point, but I would take issue with the notion of diversity in the Roman Empire. I have seen this label before, but it is misleading and anachronistic, since the various other groups the Romans conquered were gradually romanised. We might as well say the British or Spanish Empires were diverse... On one level they did have many cultures, but there was also a concerted effort to assimilate those cultures and languages.
Does this mean the Galactic Empire and the Imperium of Man are also not empires?
Or even the Roman Empire itself.
> an empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group
By definition, doesn't the later Roman Empire cease being an "empire" as there isn't really a "core" population anymore outside of some vague multi-ethnic military aristocracy.
Sure, Rome had a few lingering privileges and prestige, but little in the way of direct power. And certainly, the post-crisis Empire didn't exist to siphon resources on their behalf. Heck, pretty much as soon as the 3rd century crisis ended Italy itself lost most of its special status and more or less just became yet another province.
And once that was gone, they weren't really replaced by anyone except the imperial bureaucracy and aristocracy itself. So who are the "core" people here, because if "an aristocracy" is enough to count, then who the heck isn't an empire under this definition?
Maybe it's enough that they began as an empire under this definition. Or maybe Devereaux is fine with the stereotypical Empire losing its status as an empire long before losing its territory and power. Or perhaps would have some counterargument at hand if he happened to read this. Who knows.
The Galactic Empire as shown in the movies seems to have a very small core, almost all of the movies are set in its periphery rather than its central core. Tatooine is paying taxes to the Empire and subject to its troops, but doesn't seem at risk of being culturally seen as "Imperial". Alderaan wasn't subservient enough as a culture and is subject to genocide. Endor was certainly never truly imperial.
It's almost harder to define what the core of the Galactic Empire even is. We are told Coruscant is core to the Empire, but the glimpses of it in the Old Republic era certainly implied it was a very diverse place and we aren't really shown Coruscant in the films of the height of the Galactic Empire. To some extent the only truly "core worlds" and "core peoples" that we see in the films are the Star Destroyers and Deathstars, the military demanding taxes from every planet they pass.
The Empire may not be taking full advantage of the military power of a diverse people because of the over-reliance on clones and treating draftees as if they were clones when the clones start to run out, but beyond that it certainly seems to resonate like an Empire in the way this article describes an Empire to me.
Given that each planet seems to have one species, except that humans live everywhere, I always kind of assumed that the Galactic Empire was one with humans at the core.
That is a possible reading, especially given the way the Empire's xenophobia manifests, if you assume all humans are culturally homogeneous in Star Wars, but I think the movies are somewhat clear that humans are culturally diverse. The human cultures in Tatooine seem very different to Alderaan or Naboo, for two somewhat specific notes in the films. The Imperial accent often being more "British" (RP) implies cultural differences with the periphery that at least mirror somewhat, say, the differences between Britain and much of its former Empire.
The Galactic Empire showing a clear citizenship "caste" favoritism of Citizen/Officer Humans, General Humans, Cloned Humans, Aliens, and then Droids, but also working with all of those at the same time in its military efforts (there are a few aliens in the Empire's military, there are a lot of droids) does seem imperial in the way the article suggests, especially because that core of clear "Citizen/Officer Humans" seems so relatively small versus they armies they command of all the other types.
I will leave the following since so far all the commenters seem to have either not read the article at all, or to have at least skipped the following two sections:
>The third, predictable and annoying argument is “stop overthinking it, it is just a game.” Which is – if you will permit me to paraphrase C.S. Lewis – an unserious ‘boy’s philosophy’ unfit for adults. Video games are cultural products, like books or films or any other – and to say that those cultural products have no impact or importance is to argue against the historically obvious, given how frequently we find such things at the roots of important political ideologies, social movements, and wars.
>I bring this up not because I demand utter historical accuracy in my games – I will almost certainly happily play Age of Empires IV despite this. Instead, I bring it up because I find that this overly simplified view – sometimes, depressing, held to be the truth by some – in its errors, reveals some important things about empires, which again, I should note, seem to have been the dominant very-large-scale organization system for humans generally in the historical period.
First it tends to obscure the necessarily diverse nature of empires – as we have just laid out and perhaps more to the point, it obscures the power that empires derive from being diverse....
I read that part and I still don't like the article. I have several hundred hours in AoE2. Maybe I am unique, but it has never even occurred to me to call the collection of people and buildings I control an "empire". I think "it's just a game['s name]" is still a perfectly valid argument.
I would like the article better if it took an approach such as "Age of Empires is a bit of a misnomer, let's explore the actual definition of an empire," rather than its current combative approach.
If you have "several hundred hours", maybe you approached the article a bit too defensively. When I read it, I did not see any "combative approach", it seems even to be tongue-in-cheek (the misnomer is qualified as "amusing silliness", this is not at all what you would expect from someone who is combative).
The article has a good point and is correct. But it gets too far down into the weeds. For example, the paragraph about how priest conversions don't count as empire-building seems like the sort of argument one makes when desperately clutching at straws—a position that's entirely unnecessary given how reasonable the premise of the article is. It's building a straw man for a nonexistent opponent.
The blog's name is "a collection of unmitigated pedantry" and the host is known for playing scores of video games including AOE2 itself. The explicitly avowed purpose of the blog is to talk about pop culture products as a gentle way to introduce the general public to deeper historical knowledge and concepts.
I think you may have missed the point.
“stop overthinking it, it is just a game.”
Indeed, you should write about what you wish especially considering the authors usual material. Even so, I didn't have the relationship between distinctively modern ideas of diversity (in a positive light) and traditional empires within a critique of "Age of Empires", a real time strategy game! on my bingo card. These are the sorts of ideas for better or worse that only an "intellectual" will come up with.
Videogames rely on gameplay more than storytelling or teaching history. It's not a novel or encyclopedia entry. It's not unserious to expect a videogame to be fun over having a deep exploration over the possible interpretations of one word in its title.
Plus, some films are like Casablanca. Some are like History of the World Part 1. Additionally, if someone relies on media like Age of Empires, The Empire Strikes Back, or the novel Empire by Gore Vidal to gain an understanding of what an empire is, just because the word empire is in the title of these works, there are bigger issues at hand...
But the author, and it is quoted in the comment you answer to, say, explicitly "I bring this up not because I demand utter historical accuracy in my games".
The author, basically, says: I know games are not realistic, but the way AOE illustrates a misconception gives me an opportunity to talk about this misconception because too many people are still seriously believing it.
Of course, movies and games can take all the liberties they want, the author does not care about that. What the author raises is the fact that too many people still have an incorrect idea of what is an empire, and that this idea is a bit ridiculous when you look at the fact.
And it has current real consequences. For example, there are political parties that rely on such misconceptions to sell their fake news (edit: as illustrated below with someone commenting that the correct description of "empire" is the result of the author being "woke").
I take the authors point about empires being necessarily cosmopolitan, but it’s not as though it’s a new phenomenon that people have a myopic view about what empire is or how they should operate. (Eg, Russification) Its always been true that empires use various means of social engineering to reduce differences in populations to engender a more uniform polity over various time scales (because it’s beneficial to the entity to do so, eg: Spanish and Italian are both just bad latin) It’s also often true that ethnic cleansing does take place. (If empire was just about getting the already existing social structures to work for you, america would look very different). It’s not true that empires are purely extractive on the periphery, otherwise they would only ever be loose confederations with a tax system and a hegemonic central power. Which is sometimes true, but is not what most empires do. Even saying that empire is just about reifying one polity over another doesn’t hold together all that well on closer inspection. It doesn’t explain why, for example, the Roman Empire shifted from being culturally italic and centered in Rome to being centered in Constantinople and culturally Greek. How could the periphery take over the center if it’s a purely extractive enterprise by one group over its periphery?
I guess the point I’m making, is that empires are very complicated, and trying to reduce them to being solely a thing imposed by one group onto a periphery in order to extract resources is almost as reductive as to say they only exist through colonization and genocide.
While it’s reasonable to say that people get their view of the world through media, I think it’s fine that media can contain simplifications of reality. Otherwise I would have to play Europa Universalis, which is boring.
Extremely interesting article. I didn't know empire had that meaning, thanks.
> I have absolutely had well-meaning people quite confidently inform me that Roman military strength was a consequence of their cultural and ethnic cohesiveness.
... Wait, how? I mean, I think popular culture _does_ generally gloss over the Italy-is-not-Roman dynamic, but movies and so on often depict auxiliaries. And certainly anyone who looked at the history would struggle to come to this conclusion.
Maybe those people literally _are_ basing their knowledge of Rome on Age of Empires!
(The Civ games eventually kind of figured this dynamic out; there are independent small nations which you can subjugate, though the subjugation is often fairly... whitewashed, and may consist solely of sending them a bunch of embassies.)
Italy was Roman though. Or rather by making Italy Roman (to such an extent that other Italians would be willing to fight a war just for the right to be treated as other Romans) was basically what enabled their success by giving them a huge pool of manpower (and most importantly of people who had a vested interest in the success of the Roman state). Other ancient states like Athens were inherently exclusionary which put a hard limit on their power projection capacity since they depended on fickle allied or subjugated states to fight their wars.
Age Of Mythology: we dont need empires
It's not that deep. It's obvious that AoE marketed itself as an RTS game and not some kind of 4X game with complex diplomacy/subjugation mechanics. Competitive RTS games are at their best when each faction maintains some unique characteristics (as opposed to assimilating opposing faction tech), otherwise, you lose balance and/or strategy. At the end of the day, good gameplay should be prioritized over flavor.
ETA: To add, as a young nerd I did appreciate the history section of the game.
Speaking for AOE2, the most popular AOE version,
It's not a great argument because the game takes place pre-empire, and the end of the game is intended to be when one player, the winner, is now an empire. This is evidenced by the final age in the game being called the Imperial Age. Most empires in history fought their neighbors in more or less the same manner as exhibited in the game before they became big and strong enough to be an actual empire.
I guess you could make an argument that the game doesn't transition into the most powerful player beginning to behave like an empire in the imperial age as you keep steamrolling your opponents until the end of the game, but it's a weaker argument and it's not clear why you would want to change the entire game's mechanics right before the game ends.
Am I misremembering things? I played a lot of AOE2 in college and in multiplayer games one of my gotos was to attack someone quickly and force them into an alliance where they sent me resources, and then continued to demand resources so they could never grow big enough to remove the alliance and attack, then coordinate through them to attack other people. Seemed like a pretty good approximation of empires to me at the time.
It's a good point, you can do that, but it doesn't contradict what I said. You start the game with about 3 villagers (give or take a couple depending on the civ chosen), one scout, and a town center. So clearly you don't start as an empire, a shack with no military has not ever been an empire. So the game is about becoming an empire. And I already said that once you become powerful enough to be considered an empire, the game does not transition into that player being able to behave like an empire, you just keep mowing down your enemies. So you can say the game doesn't represent empires well, but you can't say it tried and failed at it, because the game is primarily about before becoming an empire. Most games end in the castle age, and some end in the feudal age with just a few archers. This is even more clear when you look at competitive aoe because the games almost always end way before anyone becomes powerful enough to begin looking anything like an empire. The spirit of the game is really about pre-empire. But you're right the game has a bunch of mechanics that simulate empire especially later in the game with trade carts and trade ships so yeah, the later in the game you play the more valid the point is that the game poorly captures empires, but the heart of the game is about becoming one not being one.
> is now an empire
wonder ful point
Oof
Pretty sure there are campaign missions that answer the article's definition of empire, but lets ignore those.
A funny quip to be sure. But one could be counter-pedantic and say the title never promises empires. It promises to take place in a time period where empires exist.
I had a similar thought, that a game in AoE could really represent a localised skirmish involving people from different empires, rather than an actual simulation of the development of those empires. Which also fits more with the scale of the map.
But the article also says that if you understand what an empire is, then there are empires all the time, and basically all time periods after prehistory would fit the bill.
A contrived and ahistorical definition of empire invented to support a particular modern worldview about supposedly oppressed peoples
The article hardly mentions "oppressed peoples" at all. Much of the focus is on the benefits gained to the empire by the diversity therein, with brief forays into the historical and geographical layout of different parts of the early/mid Roman empire.