Colombians?

Well. This is an awkward post, here on the blog, after almost an year.


Surprisingly, the Discord server was quite the success, now hosting more than 1000 users! And a very good environment where I can talk with people and offer live support, while also giving players a way to report bugs faster and give their input on features under development.

But I can't let a year pass without a blog post so here we are.

So I want to address the above comment made HERE and explain, once again, why I added the civilizations that I added so far.
And why I might also add Colombians. Maybe.


Both the Swedish and Italians were two civilizations already heavily featured in the game's files, the original game released back in 2005, that is. Both civilizations have all kinds of unfinished and unused assets, ranging from building models to textures, flags and even units. In the case of the Italians, the Italian Explorer and Architect models used in the mod were already in the game, fully functional but just unused.

Both civilizations however had less colonial influence compared to other civs in the game (but still had some) which is probably one of the reasons why they were cut. But since we still got Germans and Russians, it's safe to say time constraints were also an important factor. It could also be the case that these civs were planned at a time when colonialism might not have been the main theme of the game but that's another topic.
These civilizations would have brought the number of civs in the original game to 10, from the current 8.

And so, when thinking what civs could be "immersively" added into the game, well I had to look no further than Swedish and Italians. Which again, had some colonial adventures to justify their presence in the game.

Now the Americans civ, well, I mean, it's the US of A. Featured several times throughout the game's campaigns and one of the biggest outcomes of colonialism. So, again, it made sense to include them.
And let's be honest, all these 3 civs, they were relatively easy to make because they follow the European civilization style. And easy to make is important for such a noob as myself.

I would of course like to maybe add some more exotic civs, some African civs to go along with the new maps that I added (which will still be reworked) but that would require extensive work on new models which is not really that easy for AoE3 for several reasons. One being destruction animations. If I would add an entirely new building set made from entirely new models, I would prefer if those models were also fully animated for the physics engine.

I know, I know, I'm expecting too much and setting myself up for disappointment. So then, why do it at all? Why add something that doesn't look and feel good enough? Just because? Yes, the strongest argument that can be made here is diversity, but if it's not near perfection then it's not good enough for me.
I don't want to add something that looks too much out of place.


So then what's left? Well, I recently started to consider Colombians as a new possible civilization. Just as the Americans civ, Colombians would represent an important outcome of colonialism in South America, and so it would still fit with the game's theme. A North American civ and a South American civ.

The civ will represent Gran Colombia, led by Simon Bolivar. Now you could say that this whole civ happened too late in the AoE3 timeline, BUT I'd have to point out the fact that the game's timeline goes as far as around 1876, featuring the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the TWC Shadow campaign.
And also, Simon Bolivar is featured in the vanilla Steel campaign where you help him fight the Spanish.

Although other arguments can be made against this civ, and I welcome them, you can see that it would be a pretty reasonable civ to implement in the mod.

Outcome of colonialism, a state that encompassed a large territory and culture, easy to make, "claimed to be one of the most powerful nations on the planet" by an American president, it ticks all the right boxes.

This post has gone for long enough so I will end by saying this: I am still not 100% convinced and although I worked on the civ's homecity and some flags already, I'm not that happy to spend hundreds of hours on making a new civ.
So anyone who plays the mod is invited to offer their opinion and ideas for the new, possible civilization on the mod's Discord server (or here if you want).

Thank you and as always, have a nice day!
Adios.