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

And I have to add that the Wololo tournament was insane and even a spectacle for people who have barely played the game.

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.

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).

... 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_.

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.

> 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-...

The author addresses that.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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...

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.

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.

> is now an empire

wonder ful point

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.