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.
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.
https://acoup.blog/2019/11/29/collections-where-does-my-main...
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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....
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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.
... 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.)
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.
I'm also in my 30s. You could've played this game at 12 and still been playing it without turning 40
Is it lower APM and therefore less RSI? A more niche market?
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)
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 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-...
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.
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 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".
And I suppose New York as a major centre of the American empire. Multicultural cities are the rule rather than the exception.
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.
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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.
Eventually you'd own all the land and your units would just be camped along the beachline, enjoying some downtime.
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.
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?
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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.
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 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.
I think you may have missed the point.
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.
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...
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").
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wonder ful point
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And yet the kind of diversity you're probably expecting was incredibly rare in both. There's enough demographic data to know that.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
In the Western Mediterranean? Most likely diminishingly few. It’s hard to imagine why would that might not had been the case.
There were black Roman soldiers posted on Hadrian's Wall in the north of England.
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
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.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions!
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.
(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.
"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 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.
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)
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
It looks like there is a huge imbalance between the "ideologically-driven intellectual dishonesty" contributions.
From the same author of the initial article (Bret Devereaux), there are more recent blog posts and even podcasts talks about what the author calls the "chuds", which are members of the public interested in history but who turn out to be ideologically motivated.
These groups have few characteristics that make them different from "normal amateurs": 1. they hate academics and confronting their views outside their bubble, 2. they have shallow knowledge (instead of "small localised deep knowledge" of normal amateurs), 3. they use their historical understanding "politically" (as opposed as someone who just enjoy understanding the past but does not go to the extra step to use it to support a future social ideal), 4. they are aggressive.
These characteristics should be independent of the political alignment: from this alone, there is no reason a right-wing chud has more probability to exist than a left-wing chud. And you easily expect the left-wing chud to have to same characteristics (because the origin of these characteristics is that these individuals first come to history with their ideological conclusions and acquire these characteristics when the reality or facts are contradicting these conclusions).
But what is interesting is that these chuds are overwhelmingly right-wing and pro-"how dare you say there were black Romans".
I'm sure that if you look long enough you may find left-wing and pro-"50% of blacks everywhere", but that is order of magnitude smaller (Devereaux points to Twitter account with huge following).
And I'm sure there are politically-correct mistakes. But it is not clear these mistakes are 100% ideological rather than the normal Gaussian curve (an intellectually honest person may sometimes underestimate, and may sometimes overestimate: the existence of overestimation examples does not mean it is the result of a problem). Or, even more interestingly, that these mistakes are due to the presence of right-wing chuds muddying the water (if you see a group that you know is unreliable defending some conclusions, you will be biased being more critical towards these conclusions, or you may "over correct" by swing of the pendulum).
So, I think it's a bit easy to just conclude: "That they don't like it when you twist and manufacture history for idiological purposes." to the question "What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it?". A lot of people pushing back are not doing that because they don't like twisting and manufacturing history for ideological purposes, they are pushing back because they want to twist and manufacture history for their ideological purposes, and are angry if someone comes with something different (being for ideological purpose, from honest mistake, or even because it is the correct scientific approach).
I would agree with you if there were prominent left-wing chuds. But it's not the case, it looks like the pro-"presence of black romans" may sometimes get it wrong, but are less ideologically dominated than the anti-"presence of black romans".
(and to take back the example that started this specific thread: Elon Musk does not complain about The Odyssey because of respect for history. One of his prominent problem with the movie is that "the most beautiful woman" is black, which he judges as impossible historically but apparently, there are texts of this area praising the beauty of women that appear to be African. Musk's reaction is purely ideological: he does not know history, he does not care about it, he just saw something that was not particularly a-historical and concluded it was because he has a problem with "wokeness" and see it everywhere)
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.
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.