- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by gorfian_robot
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- 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.
by angmarsbane
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- 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.
by FuckButtons
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- 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.
- 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 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.)
by mordymoop
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- Does this mean the Galactic Empire and the Imperium of Man are also not empires?
by MostlyStable
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- 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 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.
- 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.
by cgyvbunji
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- 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.
by calvinmorrison
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- Age Of Mythology: we dont need empires
by AlienRobot
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- Extremely interesting article. I didn't know empire had that meaning, thanks.
- 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.
by try_it_nogaf
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- Pretty sure there are campaign missions that answer the article's definition of empire, but lets ignore those.
by nvme0n1p1
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- 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.
- A contrived and ahistorical definition of empire invented to support a particular modern worldview about supposedly oppressed peoples
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