Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)

https://acoup.blog/2019/11/22/collections-why-are-there-no-empires-in-age-of-empires/

by jkly • 1 day ago

123 85 1 day ago

cgyvbunji2• 1 day ago

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.

m463• 1 day ago

is now an empire

wonder ful point

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA• 1 day ago

Oof

threetonesun• 1 day ago

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.

cgyvbunji2• 1 day ago

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.

n3d1m• 1 day ago

Because "Age of pre-empires" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

tshaddox3• 1 day ago

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.

jerbearito• 1 day ago

The author addresses that.

tshaddox3• 1 day ago

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."

cauch5• 1 day ago

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".

onraglanroad3• 1 day ago

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.

modo_mario3• 15 hours ago

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.

dfxm122• 1 day ago

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.

MostlyStable• 1 day ago

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....

dfxm122• 1 day ago

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...

cauch5• 1 day ago

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").

hatthew2• 1 day ago

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.

cauch5• 1 day ago

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).

jeegsy• 1 day ago

“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.

arjie2• 1 day 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.

cwmma• 1 day ago

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-...

arjie2• 1 day ago

Thank you for the links. Much appreciated!

constantius2• 24 hours 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.

cherryteastain• 23 hours ago

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

fylham• 1 day ago

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.

zengineer• 1 day ago

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

phikappa• 1 day ago

there go the next 4h21m of my day. Couldn't be more excited!

gonzalohm• 19 hours ago

From which year?

spaceman_20202• 1 day ago

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

paulryanrogers• 1 day ago

How is this possible when StarCraft tournaments are dominated by the young?

Is it lower APM and therefore less RSI? A more niche market?

tsycho• 1 day ago

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.

zaptheimpaler• 20 hours ago

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).

wasfgwp4• 11 hours ago

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.

d3Xt3r• 17 hours ago

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.

iCarrot• 16 hours ago

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.

narcraft• 15 hours ago

Also just found out that they released Definitive Edition for macOS earlier this year: https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-ii-definiti...

rsynnott2• 11 hours ago

... 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_.

TZubiri2• 1 day ago

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.

OkayPhysicist• 1 day ago

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.

ndriscoll• 1 day ago

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.

NoboruWataya2• 1 day ago

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.

TZubiri2• 1 day ago

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?

try_it_nogaf• 1 day ago

Pretty sure there are campaign missions that answer the article's definition of empire, but lets ignore those.

AlienRobot• 1 day ago

Extremely interesting article. I didn't know empire had that meaning, thanks.

mordymoop• 1 day ago

Does this mean the Galactic Empire and the Imperium of Man are also not empires?

ricree• 1 day ago

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.

WorldMaker2• 1 day ago

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.

anyonecancode• 1 day ago

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.

ffixf• 1 day ago

A contrived and ahistorical definition of empire invented to support a particular modern worldview about supposedly oppressed peoples

Windchaser• 1 day ago

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.

nvme0n1p1• 1 day ago

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.

NoboruWataya2• 1 day ago

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.

cauch5• 1 day ago

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.

paxys• 1 day ago

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.

calvinmorrison• 1 day ago

Age Of Mythology: we dont need empires

gorfian_robot• 1 day ago

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...

mbo• 1 day ago

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.

angmarsbane• 1 day ago

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.

nephihaha• 24 hours ago

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.

rsynnott2• 11 hours ago

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.)

wasfgwp4• 11 hours ago

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.

cestith• 8 hours ago

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.

animal531• 5 hours ago

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.

FuckButtons• 7 hours ago

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.

Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)

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