I made a followup "God Pack" for this build, adding NINURTA and 6 other Minor Gods plus balance changes and more! So if you just can't get enough of Sumeria, go check it out: th-cam.com/video/ZgGSuUGBwx4/w-d-xo.html
Sadly “ideas designer” ain’t a position in any games studio. Would need to be doing something else also for the team. -from someone that likes designing extra stuff for games
@@mercerholt8299Unfortunately, your Polynesian idea is from a disorganized group of people, more scattered than the Celtic nations, and you can't bring up only Maui and his hook forever.
@royasturias1784 True sad, but true that said, I wouldn't mind them bringing back the Chinese if done well. I know a lot of people seem to hate them, but I think it could be fun if done right.
Hey man amazing work really cool to see what other folks are thinking about for the Sumerians! My main thoughts: - love the history deep dives super cool to learn new things! - really interesting town center focus - Not fully understanding the drop off system. Seems like TCs are the main drop off but you can also drop off at your hero like the Norse ox cart? - most civs have 6-7ish human units and 2 siege units. This civ currently has 8 human units, 3 of which are chariots. For the sake of gameplay readability and flavor, I disagree with this decision. - There are quite a few “overcomplicated” mechanics, at least from what I can tell from reading the design. Stuff like buff auras and drop off bonuses seem to be overly ubiquitous with this faction and it’s hard to keep track. Maybe if it was in game it’d feel different. Ultimately, the thing we differ on most is whether to adhere to pop mythology or “historical” mythology. I myself am a firm believer that AOM should be about pop mythology. Existing civs are all based on pop mythology, so having a “fully accurate” civ would stand out like a sore thumb. But as a design concept it’s fun to imagine a more true to history kind of design. Overall it’s amazing the amount of work you put into this great job!
Hey, thanks so much for the kind words man! I would love to discuss some of these points more, particularly the difference between pop mythology and authentic mythology, but I'm not really sure you want to read an essay in the TH-cam comments hehehe Would you be open to talking more over discord or email or something? I'm a big fan of your work and would be delighted to talk further, seeing as you're one of the very few people who are in a similar niche to mine.
Yeah he really seems to have mistaken Age of Mythology for Age of Empires. Even like having the units have authentic Sumerian names. No. This is a computer game, in English, for an English-speaking audience. There are no Sumerians around today who are going to be playing this. There's a reason most units in AoM have generic names like 'Axeman' or 'Spearman.'
Holy hell. 12k views and 230 comments in less than 3 days. This video's success is completely unprecedented on my channel. Thank you all so much for taking the time to watch it! I will be trying to respond to as many comments as I can, apologies if I do not get to yours.
I certainly plan on doing so! Though I do not think I will be calling them the Celts, instead subdividing the umbrella into a substantial number of individual Cultures
@@robbylava my man what can you expect? Video's such a masterpiece. Speaking of requests! I trust nobody to make a video on the Aztecs or Chinese as I do you. I wish there would also be an Indian Civ but that might be.. a controversial move by AOM sadly
@BlueBedouin thank you so much for saying so my friend! Legitimately means a ton to hear it. I absolutely plan on doing both of those, probably as some of the highest priority AOM videos on my channel for the foreseeable future, and maybe there's a way I could tackle India as well. Though I personally wouldn't want to do so without some robust cultural consultancy from someone who really knows their stuff
I watched your video on theorycrafting for different cultures, & while I think a lot of your ideas are good, I have some ideas of my *own* I wanted to share with you; I'm following a lot of the same rules you did, but I've actually placed an *additional* rule on myself that I have to follow; that being that the cultures have to exist *within* the space spanned by the cultures of the original extended edition & the Chinese DLC *together* . That means *no* Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Polynesian, native American, Aztec, Incan, or any of those *other* cultures (as cool as they'd all be) You may notice some occasional blanks in some of the ones who's mythologies I'm not quite as familiar with; if you are, feel free to fill them in. The Celts: Military unit mechanics: Celtic military units would be on the cheaper end to train & would train fairly quick, but they'd be *heavily* skewed towards infantry units; not having access to cavalry units until the Heroic Age, & not having *any* siege weapons at all, fully relying on myth units for that purpose. However, waiting until the Heroic Age to get cavalry units will be worth it because they'll be able to occasionally use a *charge* ability that knocks infantry units a short ways away & stuns them for a short period, making it easier for your infantry units to overwhelm & defeat them; & an upgrade you'd be able to access in the Mythic Age would allow them to use that ability a bit more frequently. Another Mythic Age technology that the Celts could research is "Fae Blood"; a technology that makes all human units moderately more effective against enemy human units, & *slightly* effective against myth units (still not as effective as heroes). Building mechanics: Celts wouldn't build temples; instead, they'd send druids to worship at *forests* to gain favor; simultaneously causing that forest to *act* like a temple, allowing you to train myth units & research technologies that *improve* them there, similarly to how the Atlanteans can train Dryads & research technology to improve them at the Hesperides tree; the catch is that the druids would *only* be able to worship at *untouched* forests, there can't be *one* felled tree stump in it. This would force the Celts to *strategize* their woodcutting, figuring out which forests they were willing to harvest, & which they wanted to leave standing for the purpose of training & improving myth units. Gods, Heroes, & Myth units: Major Gods: _, _, _. Minor gods: _, _, _, _, _, _, _, _, _, _. (this's mostly because I don't know which Celtic gods were *universally* worshipped, if any). Myth units: Leprechauns, Goblins, Pixies, Spriggans, Barghests, Cat Sith, Baobhan Sith. Why do I want this culture?: A culture that forced players to be *strategic* about gathering a certain resource instead of just trying to harvest *everything* as fast as possible would give them a unique challenge to tackle, which I think would be *really* cool; as for why I want a *generic* Celt civilization instead of the Gaels *specifically* is because a generic Celt civilization would be able to cover a *lot* more ground, which's why I wanted all the gods the Celt civilization worshipped to be gods that were *universally* worshipped. However, the Gaels could still exist as a *flavor* of the Celt civilization, which'd be distinguished from the other flavors by the language the units spoke, & which gods they worshipped as their major & minor gods; with the *other* flavors being well known ones like the Britons (most of Britain), & the Gauls (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Southern & Western Germany), as well as *lesser known/well represented ones like the Gallaecians (Northwestern Iberia (the peninsula Spain & Portugal make up)), & the Celtiberians (Northeastern Iberia). In a multiplayer skirmish, or a skirmish against the AI, you'd pick this flavor *before* you started the match; & in a campaign where you played as them, that flavor would be decided by whatever Celtic area the scenario you were currently playing took place in.
Literally never heard of this channel before, but this is what I have always wanted in an AOE Content channel. Subbed, can't wait to see more of your content!!!
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dearie me. This was an absolute epic of a video, and very enjoyable to watch. Well done, Robby! Thanks for taking the time to make such a behemoth. The pictures in particular are fantastic. I know you didn't make them, but you've done an excellent job picking them out. Especially the round picture with all three major gods - it'd fit right into the game. And more Age of Mythology builds? Yes please!
My goodness goodness goodness me, thank you so much for the kind words my friend! It means a ton to hear, especially coming from you who's been watching the channel so long. Very glad you enjoyed the pictures so much! It's a lot easier for me to source them for age of mythology hehehe More AOM definitely to come!
To answer the question at the end of the video : YES. Of course I would love to see more of this ! I am quite unknowledgeable (dunno if its a word, I am french) in fertile crescent culture, and I love to learn about them this way and seeing how you adapt pieces of mythos into gameplay :) Great work, thank you Robby !
@tabletoptales7679 awesome! As mentioned at the beginning, TTRPGs are very much an interest of mine, so if you ever want to talk about them further I'd love to do so!
I really like all the ideas here, but have some opinions/suggestions that I feel would improve smoothness of gameplay, especially for people new to the civ: 1) Offerings/favour mechanic Problems with the current design: - The current design is prone to "accident" scenarios. Imagine this: you want to build a ziggurat between your wood line and gold mine, so the workers at either one can both drop off at the ziggurat, but you want the gold miners to exchange for favour while the lumberjacks actually gather wood. With the toggle setup, you could accidentally convert the wood into favour when you only want the gold to be converted. - A different way to avoid accidents would be to toggle the "drop off for favour" for each resource individually for each Ziggurat/Ensi, but this would just add a lot of annoying micro for little benefit in comparison to the market-style approach. As you mention at the end in your "tabled ideas", a solution to this is by exchanging resources for favour directly, like a market: - Using the market-style favour acquisition, there is possibility for more fun twists. Much like resources traded at a market, it could have a dynamic exchange rate that makes exchanging the same resource over and over yield less favour, but if you stop offering a certain resource, over time it will gradually increase how much favour it is worth, as if the gods are assigning more value to the resources that you are less willing to offer. It could achieve the different conversion rates you mentioned by having different starting values, so gold starts off being worth more favour and wood worth less, and food starts at the neutral base line. - I think the market-style is also better for making the player feel like they are "making an offering", as they have to make the deliberate decision to press the button that exchanges a resource for favour, unlike the current design, where it just happens passively if toggled on. 2) Building/Unit names: Some of the building names should be translated to English. If you look at other civs this is a clear pattern, with the only non-english word used in any regular building name being "Migdol" in Migdol stronghold. I definitely appreciate the effort to respect the Sumerian culture and history by naming everything accurately, but it is clearly inconsistent with the existing civs. I like Ziggurat and Egal, but IMO the rough translations you provided would be better names for the other buildings. Tibira -> Crafter, Ugnim -> Encampment, Naggaru -> Carpenter. Military units especially are probably fine to keep their accurate/historic names, but economic units like workers (Serfs) and trade caravans (Onager Caravan) would also just fit better in line with the existing civs by using English names.
Thanks so much for your input! Really glad you enjoyed the build. The favor mechanic is definitely quite the can of worms. I'd be happy to go into that in more detail If you wanted, but just to touch upon the other point: it is true that other civilizations do not use in language names, but this is a perfect example of something I think the game should and could do while minimally interfering with people's play experience. It is a tiny speed bump to brand new players, but hardly any more than something like "toxotes" would be, easily learned after your first time trying a civilization out. Pushing boundaries in design is definitely one of my calling cards though, so I wouldn't fault anyone for implementing it otherwise. But sticking with generic English names when I have such perfect options available otherwise is something I will pretty much never do.
nice! this was really cool, the gameplay dynamic would be interesting and I really like the god powers, the temporary conversion thing in particular is very interesting, it hasn't been tried yet. Kudos!
Great content. One can really see the effort and attention to detail that went into this. A few comments and questions: 1. It is kind of counterintuitive that a civilization that in real life had a lot of food and little wood in your game ends up needing a lot of food and little wood, essentially creating the opposite effect. Any generic player will end up either floating wood and being food starved or still having the forests intact in the late game, making their area more wooded than the enemy's. The historic fun fact of them celebrating the conquest of hardwood would also not be present in any way. 2. Building a Fortress forward or at important locations (choke points, hills and natural entrances to bases) is a very important strategy for pretty much any civ. Since the Sumerians you envisioned can't make any use of that strategy, how are they compensated for that? How do they contest strategic battlefield positions? 3. I believe that for reasons of readability it makes much more sense to increase the amount of population they get (both raw population from houses and pop cap from TCs) instead of lowering the amount needed per unit. Functionally/mathematically it would be the same, but it prevents the fiddly use of fractional population numbers. It also makes it seem like their TCs are special instead of making it seem like their people are lesser in needs. 4. The human army seems to be slow in both mobility and DPS while paradoxically also relying on swarm tactics. Do you have any experience with how such a faction would feel to play in practice in an RTS game? Combined with their inflexibility in Fortress positioning will make it really hard for them to contest the map. And with their higher tier units emphasizing numbers and tankiness it would also make playing against them a slow moving slugfest. What is your vision of how they would feel to play off paper? 5. When designing the major and minor gods, did you imagine how strategies and build orders and gameplay styles would likely differ between them in the game proper? It would be cool to include some of that in your video. In general more attention to the impact of your design ideas on gameplay loops over just on paper stats and flavorful lore could be an interesting design challenge and make your visions more realistic. 6. Does Inanna's Patronage mean that with the War Goddess (who one would think of as aggressive) you are kind of shoehorned to upgrade your first TC into a Fortress as early as possible? 7. How will you be able to know/remember which Lugal in your army comes from the right TC, let alone which Ziggurat (which you can place anywhere on the map) has spawned the Ensi associated with Sirsir? Overall having only two specific units in your whole army, one of which is a raider hero and one of which is a buffer hero, be amphibious is a very fiddly bonus. Same goes for Gula's Ensi. At the very least the three units in question must have a slight but visible differentiation in their unit model and icon. 8. I have no idea how one is supposed to use Ereshkigal's God Power in practice. Maybe because I am imagining it just a bit bigger than a normal gate building? By age 4 it seems very easy for anyone to circumvent, even if placed with walls to its left and right. It sure doesn't seem to compare to the powers of other gods of that age, both among the Sumerians and among canon deities. 9. It seems strange for Ninlil not to be available to Enlil if she ends up being in the game at all (through the DLC). Is there a mythological reason for this? 10. I am very curious about your source for all the artwork. It looks more polished than I would expect from AI (maybe even more polished than the Retold art that the fanbase pushed to be replaced). 11. If you ever want to make your own actual playable project, I really recommend Blizzard RTS games for modding. They are modding friendly and yet allow for powerful changes to the base game. Even WarCraft 3 could essentially be modded to near unrecognizability, with even unit control and UI being different from the base game. Also, mythologies aren't copyrighted. You could make your own versions of the base three AoM cultures, featuring the 2-3x bigger thing and more mythological accuracy. And completely throw out the Atlanteans.
I had two suggestions based on your queries For point number 2, how about: Make it so the ziggurats get a late game upgrade that makes them comparable to fortresses but slightly weaker and they provide an aura to nearby towers that make them more effective. I don't have a mythical reason for this. But from a strategic point of view, I can't see another way of getting around the map control that other civs will have on you. For point 4: I kind of see it like the Abbasids(Aoe4) who have an aura based around a singular House Of Wisdom. While having the aura effects of the Byzantine faction.
Thank you so much! Such an extensive comment, I absolutely love to see it. Unfortunately I just do not have time to respond to all of these points in full, much though I would like to and profoundly appreciate your input and attention to detail, so I'm just going to answer the last point because I think it's extremely important: I lived on Warcraft 3 in high school, it was actually one of my main introductions to theorycrafting as a hobby. I completely agree it is an incredibly powerful platform for creating designs, but it is so far beyond my knowledge and free time to do so that I personally prefer to stick with theory for now. Maybe someday we can upgrade in that way though! If you want to go through your other points in more detail I would genuinely love to hear them. Are you on the Discord? If so, ping me there, and let's go through them one by one.
Hey Robby, awesome video! We know you were worried about the length but we all knew the size of this one from the get go, honestly you can stop apologising while recording it :)
Greetings. I have just found you, and this is incredible. Not only would I highly encourage you to eventually complete all of your follow-up ideas, but I would highly like and recommend you to work on other cultures entirely: Celtic; Shinto/Japanese; Hindu; and Aztec are obvious choices off the top of my head. Again, this is incredible: while I have found other projects of this kind, none have been so in-depth and well-researched. Also, they are almost all for the original age of mythology, not Retold. I thank you heartily my friend, and leave you with these suggestions.
Exceptionally kind of you to say! Thanks for the recommendations, all of the above are absolutely on my radar, and I really hope you continue to enjoy the content to come.
@@robbylava There is no problem my friend, this deserves no less. I am glad you are already planning all of these. I thank you heartily, and eagerly await your future work.
If you want the mesopotamian/levantine pantheon to be introduced, I'd prefer doing this under the auspices of Babylon/Akkadians rather than Sumer as Babylon is not only better know, it was also around for longer.
Definitely, not to mention you can get away with much more unit potential variety with Babylonians as a lot of units from the Assyrians can be used (Heavy Cavalry, Siege Towers and Horse Archers) as for historical reference; the Sumerians would have an too similar human unit listing to combining the Egyptian and Atlantean unit lists.
Just make it Mesopotamian, that allows you to pull from the whole region - it's not like the Greek pantheon is specific to a single Greek culture, hell, it includes Macedonian-inspired cavalry units!
@@RowanDrake47 The things is that all of Greek myth comes filtered to use through the Attican tradition since they were the only ones who took care to write things down. No such luck with Mesopotamian religion since we have several traditions to choose from. One example, would you have the goddess of love be called Ishtar or Astarte?
I am very impressed by the level of details and research you have done of the original myths. I feel that you could make some mythology lore videos now.
17:17 Instead of serving as a drop point, we could make conventional drop off points accumilate gold as your villagers drop resources off, which the Ensi can collect. Make it work the same way tax does for Chinese in Age of Empires 4. Additionally we could also have a toggle for collecting favor instead of gold. I also don't think we should be breaking population cost into decimals. The house cap should instead be increased to accommodate a larger population. Other than that, I enjoy many of the ideas you are presenting for a unique approach to a new pantheon that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the others.
Thanks very much, I'm glad you enjoyed! Taxes were not handled in that way in Sumeria, not only was gold not typically the currency but it was actually usually food by which taxes were paid, and these things were usually brought directly to the ziggurat (And by extension the Ensi) since that was where excess stores for the city were typically held. I see what you mean about wanting to utilize existing mechanics, but I just don't think it fits the grounding nearly as well as I would like. Also, fractional population is actually precedented! Civilizations in Age of Empires 2 have it, particularly the new Georgians with their imperial age UT. Appreciate your feedback my friend, just wanted to explain why I stand behind these decisions.
@@robbylava Don't worry, but I got an idea for favor generation that aligns much with yours. I like the Ziggurat being a drop-off point, but when you use it as such, you convert the resources into favor and since this pantheon don't use wood as much, it would be ideal to set up your first ziggurat as a drop off point next to a treeline. In later stages of the game you could set up ziggurats around farms, as that resource becomes plentiful. The only problem with this idea, is that the Ensi is not a part of the process, but I think that's a fair trade off for the sake of game design. With that said, you are also right about fractional population existing in Age of Empires 2, with the Karambits only taking up half a space, but I think it can be avoided in this game, as all population space is dictated by the cap on your houses and the total settlements you can acquire, and to me it is much cleaner to display. ore interesting idea for favor which would suit them much better than my previous idea.
@qwerty222999 so a quick question, how does this idea you're proposing differ from mine? I might be dumb, but it sounds almost identical to what I proposed in this video: ziggurat and Ensi our drop points that can convert dropped resources into favor as a toggleable effect.
@@robbylava, I agree that fractional population isn't necessarily a problem, but I also think that having more population space is easier to reason around for players than the fractional population.
Sumerian was a bit of a blind spot in my mythology knowledge, as I thought it was just Babylonian. This video has really given me inspiration to look more into their culture.
Well done Robbie, this is a fantastic build - designing for AOM must be much harder than aoe2 but I love that you leaned into it. I will probably never pick up Retold (too deep into aoe2), but this was a delight to listen to
Really cool proposal. Would be more then happy if you do something like that for Slavs as AoM faction. Also can share some ideas how they can work, what gods line-up and non myth and myth units they could potentially have.
Very kind of you to offer! I definitely intend on doing the slavs at some point, so when I do I'd love to hear some feedback from you to help improve the design!
Prolly the expansion 2 is going to be about Japanese pantheon. In the editor there are hints of Japanese terrain when you want to edit some grass and cliffs actually.
I really want a Mesoamerican pantheon. Polynesian would be neat too as a sort of nomadic naval civilization whose fishing ships can build new docks and repair.
Excellent so far, I haven't finished but I'm going to be "that nerd" and push back on some of the points in the historical intro. It's not clear that the Sumerian cities were the first. There are several large settlements in what is now Ukraine dating back to the the 5th millenium BC. These are often called "megasites" as if they don't qualify as urban, but there are recent challenges to this view that deserve attention. Among these challengers: the archaeologist Bisserka Gaydarska, and the anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow. There are also challengers to the notion that urbanization, agriculture, leisure time, top-down authority, and cultural development come together as a package. There are many sites around the world that challenge this narrative, but the most obvious one I can point to is the cultures of the North American Pacific Northwest coast (civ idea btw!). Abundant marine resources combined with trade networks led to a flourishing of complex culture and authority networks, without the development of extensive agriculture or urbanization. Evidence points to limited cultivation of crops, and access to grain crops through trade, but they didn't pursue large-scale agriculture; it seems they chose not to. On the other hand, there are examples of cities in Mesoamerica and China (I think) that seemed to be supported by agriculture, but lack the kinds of architectural differences and concentrations of material wealth that would indicate centralized authority. I'm not criticizing your assessment and what I wrote above may be erroneous; I'm not an archaeologist or anything of the sort. I'm just fascinated with the complexities of human history and stoked that there are always new discoveries that challenge our conception of the past. Anyway I appreciate this video and the effort that went into it. I'm looking forward to watching the rest.
You are completely right, and I do not contest what you say on any count! I just have to simplify very often when I'm doing these videos, both for time and because I very often forget the nuances of things when I am recording.
Would be nice to have some way to represent some pantheons as not playable civs, but something minor. Age3 players will probably understand what I'm talking about.
Awesome build, looking forward to others like it. Definitely brings new and exciting things to the table. Although Enkis bonus for early tech upgrades and cheaper cost is like Gaias. Also a cavalry that does bonus damage against infantry seems odd since the majority of infantry counter cavalry. Seduce seems a bit strong haha, like a traitor god power but in archaic age.
Really glad you enjoyed! In retrospect I would definitely agree that seduce feels a bit cracked. My plan to fix it would be to have it make the unit fight for you but prevent you from being able to control it, which will mean that you can't just run it away from its friends and kill it when it's isolated
I agree these would work the best both because the civ is geographically close to the orignal four and because I don't think we've seen many representations of their mythology before.
I love this! One suggestion is to maybe limit Enlil’s god power so that it cannot be applied to titans. Maybe it won’t make that much of a difference. I would love to see a DLC Video!
Thanks so much for saying so my friend! You make a decent point about the Titans... I didn't think of that at all. I will keep it in mind for sure! Maybe someday if we get to test this we can see whether it would be busted hehehe
The art of Banda Arali, one of the unique techs of Ereshkigal looks like a old Magic The Gathering Art. I don't know which of than, but I have this feeling.
Very well spotted! It's called Demonic Hordes, and I believe it was originally printed way back in Alpha. I have a couple other MTG references in the art that I chose, curious to see how many commenters find the rest!
You know, With Inanna, you reminded me how both Aphrodite and Athena have their origin in Mesopotamia, and thus are linked to the Sumerians. Inanna is Ishtar who is Attart who is Aphrodite. Same with Athena and Anat. It's fascinating how much gods "Travel"
A mesopotamian expansion with Sunerians and Babylonians would be great. I would love to see a theorycraft of a Yoruban or Polynesian style civ with its vast and varied mythologies.
Very detailed and cool culture concept! How do Village Centers factor in into the Sumerians' design, given their heavy emphasis on TC-focused infrastructure? Would they be generic, have the same resource-drop off bonus as TCs, or be unavailable altogether?
An excellent question! To be honest, I started working on this design before I knew that VC's were going to be a thing, and I largely neglected discussing them in this build. I think that they would probably still be available and probably wouldn't be changed, meaning that this Culture would if nothing else have some other drop points available and wouldn't be as boned if they had fewer settlement options on a given map. Do you see any potential missing pieces to that or solutions that could fit better with the rest of the design I've presented? Great point! Thanks for taking the time to watch.
@@robbylava I agree that it would be okay for the Sumerians to have access to generic Village Centers. They cost the same amount as a Town Center, so they wouldn't be a cost-effective workaround for the Sumerian's intended gameplay except in some niche situations. Back to actual Town Centers, you said that a Sumerian player would have to think strategically about which TC should research each age up, to benefit from the minor god TC aura. I just want to confirm, can one TC benefit from multiple god auras, if that TC researched multiple age ups? If a TC can only benefit from a single god aura for aging up, then a Sumerian player's age advancements would be tied to expansion and significantly affected by the number and location of settlements.
Oh wow, this was a pretty good build. Like really, you mentioned the salting (which happens chiefly due to how mineral rich the rivers of the Tigris and Euphraties are) the beer and everything. I will just say that the resource drop off mechanic is kind of iffy, I think it probably needs to be examined further. Maybe crunch the numbers better. They would definately need some nice guard towers though, maybe a high tier or they can build guard towers an age early. Another suggestion is to give them an eco/market building in the form of a "Inn" or "drinking hall" A unique building that you can build in age 3 and maybe upgrade in age 4 to make it bigger so maybe tavern to drinking hall What it does is basically giving you eco bonus upgrades maybe some of them a type of beer or drinking related upgrade to help your human units and peasants fight harder, better, faster, stronger HA! Or the building can act like a Portuguese Feitora, you can build one per TC you have and over time it gives you a small trickle of gold and food i.e. Sumerians loved beer and exporing it. Finally yes, some more AoM content would be nice, since Assyria and Babylon would have rather robust and interesting military, especially the former and not to mention the architecture. Spoilers give the Assyrians a library building unique and to the Babylonians a Temple archive for some cool techs. Since we agree on the Atlanteans can you try just because to see what the Romans would be like as a civ since the community just writes if off as "greek knockoff" and just stop the brainstorming altogether. Still have to contact you but IRL stuff is just crazy. Apologies and I have to get to that. Cheers Robby!
Thanks so much for the wonderful review! I'm so glad you liked it. Agree with you that the resource drop off thing needs further explaining. I'm quite confident it can work, and in my plans DLC follow-up video I hope to elaborate on that further. The tavern building is legitimately a stroke of genius. It comes up so much in Sumerian mythology and similar that I'd be a fool not to include it! Thank you so much for that. No rush or worry is whatsoever on getting in touch, take all the time you need! And in the meantime, I hope you continue to enjoy the content.
Rather than having units cost less pop. How about giving a bonus to population size? It can be a bit confusing to have fractional pop units. It has about the same effect. With some slight edge cases, that might not even be of a deterrent for the theme. So rather than removing 10% of a unit pop cost, you add support limit to your TC and housing. Which also would fit thematically I think as the first city builders.
Not a bad idea! I could see that working. I'm probably going to stick with the fractional one for now though, specifically because AOE2 already has set precedent for that being a thing with stuff like the Georgians imperial UT.
We will likely get a Mesopotamian Civ instead of separate Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. The same with the Aztecs, many people confuse and think that the Aztecs are equivalent to Norse or Greek, but they were just one faction of a wider culture, the Nahuas, or the regional: "Mesoamericans," which would include Toltecs, Olmecs, Tlaxcalans, Mexica, etc... So Aztecs would be more akin to Peloponnesian or Spartans. This allows them to pick from a wider pool of myths, gods, eras, buildings, warriors, and peoples.
Definitely agree that is more likely, but I would disagree with your comparison between the Aztecs and something like the Spartans or Peloponnesians. Beliefs across Greek city-states and regions do seem to have been substantially more homogeneous in the classical age than mesoamerica probably ever was, though of course we have far fewer sources on the latter to justify it. Just going off what I have learned though, while mesoamerica had tons of through-lines and many shared beliefs, it does seem to have been substantially more disparate than the Olympian worship seen in Greece and its neighbors
That was very well thought out. I hope the devs are taking note. I also wanted to see if you mentioned the only two Sumerian gods I'd heard about before. I knew one named Sin whom I suspect might be Enkil. And of course, there was Ishtar. So, yeah, I learned a lot more about this subject. You and I disagree about the Atlantians, but I will concede that the culture is probably total fiction.
Thank you so much for saying so! Sin, aka Nanna or Zuen, is an extremely important moon God and was without a doubt the most difficult cut I had to make from this build. But I will absolutely be bringing him in for future Babylon / Assyria build that I have planned!
If Greeks can have named heroes each age then I'd really want bigshots like Humbaba, Ziusudra, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. I never liked that only the greeks got that special treatment just because they were the main cast of the campaign. It would be really funny if the OG Dinamic Duo is available under Inanna and then Eresh. Someone already mentioned that you've limited the construction of the fortress type building to 1 by TC, but these sort of games require those to be built in several strategic positions or you lose so you'd have to rework that idea and there's also the counterintuitive food/wood relationship, if you really want to put it to use then you should flip it so that you have to get more wood and lower the food cost, that way you'd reflect their conquest on hardwood.
I do wish that named heroes were more pervasive. I didn't want to steal the Greek gimmick though, and if nothing else they could absolutely still appear in campaigns. I see what you mean about the fortress thing. A lot of other commenters have pointed it out, and I think I have a plan for it that I will talk about whenever I get around to making that DLC video for this build. The food/wood dynamic, however, I think works quite well as is. Even though wood was very valuable, it was more considered a luxury. They were very much able to do good work without it. And if, like I propose, we prioritize food very highly for the civilization, it means that your eco is going to have tons of farms, which is extremely historically accurate and much more appropriate to their actual composition historically then having dozens of lumberjacks
Love it. Why did you not include in the panthon Nanna-Suen the god of the moon and Utu-Shamash the god of the sun? Will they be featured in the primordial civ build?
Glad you enjoyed! Those two were by far and away the hardest cuts I made. My plan is to add them to the Babylonia / Assyria build, and my rationale is that, while these two were both important in Sumeria, they became even more important in these later nations, where they arguably came close to the status of enlil.
Good presentation 👍 I'm not against talk about Atlanteans as not having a fitting place in the game but the previous video I watched of yours you kept mentioning it like it was going out of fashion, I swear I could have made a drinking game based on it😂
Thanks for saying so! Yeah, hating on the Atlanteans is becoming a bit of a sport on the channel here hehehe. Maybe I'll make a counter for it sometime as a recurring joke in videos
My only concern for the base abilities of the Sumerian economy is that 10% increased drop-off resources may not be enough to make up for travel time. Spirit of the Law does a lot of math on this sort of thing, and I recommend either reaching out to him or studying some of his videos on economic bonuses in practice.
Oh I've seen his work extensively I agree it might not be a sufficient trade-off, but given that they also have some alternate drop points as well I'm hoping that it'll still be a pretty substantial boost. Especially given that farming is often if not always going to be clustered around TCs and thus will benefit the most.
I personally want to see civs come to the game that are already alike to existing civs. Sumeria would slot in nicely with Egypt. I'd love to see Celts which would be akin to Norse. I suppose Greeks already have Atlantis but there's huge DLC potential elsewhere. Indians, Africans, Meso civs, etc
10:03 This sounds very similar to Greek mythology, I'm thinking if the Greek "inherited" the idea or if it was a coincidence. 16:11 What happens if that TC is destroyed? What if you rebuild a TC in the same spot? 19:27 I like this system. But I'm still afraid it might be too limiting for collecting resources from faraway locations. The 10% extra resources might not be sufficient to compensate for the extra travel distance. I How do the Sumerians work with Village Centers? 34:10 I guess having more villagers might compensate the distance to drop off stuff too. 54:59 I don't like it. I don't like things that penalise other players in a way they can't counter. If you really want this, I would suggest that the Ziggurat that researches it becomes visible to enemies and if it is destroyed, the effect stops, or something like that. 1:34:12 It seems a bit strong, can't you build a bunch of gates to block powers everywhere? Maybe the gates could be imune to damage from god powers instead. 1:40:36 I like the hero ship, it would be interesting if all cultures had one of those.
I addressed some of these concerns in my follow up video, particularly the TC being destroyed and how VCs tie into the build, so when you get around to watching that I'd love to hear your thoughts on it too!
I don’t know much about the legality of crowdsourcing mod development, but I would totally throw a few dollars towards this (assuming Sumerians aren’t announced as an expac civ for retold)
Exceptionally kind! I have no idea what the modding landscape will be for AOM, but if it ever looks at all possible I will certainly be trying to put together a team to implement some stuff. In the meantime, I really appreciate you supporting my work through your viewership. Hope you enjoy what's to come!
Sumerians, Incas, Slavs. My top three wishlist for new pantheons in AoM retold. Incas weirdly being the most likely out of all of them since they were in the running for being the new pantheon in the titans expansion, so they likely have 20 year old plans that they can use to flesh things out
I don't know about next, but definitely at some point! Given how much people liked this video, I could see this becoming a mainstay on my channel once I figure out how to streamline the design process And I'm glad you like the campaign idea. Will definitely keep it in mind! You can expect to see it at some point, though maybe not soon
I made a followup "God Pack" for this build, adding NINURTA and 6 other Minor Gods plus balance changes and more! So if you just can't get enough of Sumeria, go check it out:
th-cam.com/video/ZgGSuUGBwx4/w-d-xo.html
Robby, you got to be hired by microsoft, my friend.
Sadly “ideas designer” ain’t a position in any games studio.
Would need to be doing something else also for the team.
-from someone that likes designing extra stuff for games
@raquetdude "content designer" is definitely a position in most studios, they usually work with the programmers
I appreciate the compliment! Seriously, it's very kind of you to say.
I don't know man, they seem like they would sell bad copper of questionable origin
This is my dream pantheon even more than the Aztecs.
An Aztec faction would be neat honestly I would love to see that or a Polynesian faction.
@ivancarrillo8809 Fair, everyone has different tastes. I just would love to see what crazy abilities the Atec gods and monster would have.
Me too because I had played the mod return of the gods.
@@mercerholt8299Unfortunately, your Polynesian idea is from a disorganized group of people, more scattered than the Celtic nations, and you can't bring up only Maui and his hook forever.
@royasturias1784 True sad, but true that said, I wouldn't mind them bringing back the Chinese if done well. I know a lot of people seem to hate them, but I think it could be fun if done right.
Hey man amazing work really cool to see what other folks are thinking about for the Sumerians!
My main thoughts:
- love the history deep dives super cool to learn new things!
- really interesting town center focus
- Not fully understanding the drop off system. Seems like TCs are the main drop off but you can also drop off at your hero like the Norse ox cart?
- most civs have 6-7ish human units and 2 siege units. This civ currently has 8 human units, 3 of which are chariots. For the sake of gameplay readability and flavor, I disagree with this decision.
- There are quite a few “overcomplicated” mechanics, at least from what I can tell from reading the design. Stuff like buff auras and drop off bonuses seem to be overly ubiquitous with this faction and it’s hard to keep track. Maybe if it was in game it’d feel different.
Ultimately, the thing we differ on most is whether to adhere to pop mythology or “historical” mythology. I myself am a firm believer that AOM should be about pop mythology. Existing civs are all based on pop mythology, so having a “fully accurate” civ would stand out like a sore thumb. But as a design concept it’s fun to imagine a more true to history kind of design.
Overall it’s amazing the amount of work you put into this great job!
Hey, thanks so much for the kind words man!
I would love to discuss some of these points more, particularly the difference between pop mythology and authentic mythology, but I'm not really sure you want to read an essay in the TH-cam comments hehehe
Would you be open to talking more over discord or email or something? I'm a big fan of your work and would be delighted to talk further, seeing as you're one of the very few people who are in a similar niche to mine.
Yeah he really seems to have mistaken Age of Mythology for Age of Empires. Even like having the units have authentic Sumerian names. No. This is a computer game, in English, for an English-speaking audience. There are no Sumerians around today who are going to be playing this. There's a reason most units in AoM have generic names like 'Axeman' or 'Spearman.'
@@TomorrowWeLive Or, say, Toxote, Hypaspist, and Prodromos?
This Civ definitely needs an Ea-Nasir hero unit!
I see him more of a relic. The wrath of Ea Nasir, makes your opponent gather gold slower or something.
Or a relic that makes trade gather more gold
@@mza3764cringe
Cringe dead meme
One of the campaign missions is Ea-Nassir scamming the player.
@@matthiasvancauteren3107 Yes, but make it as subtle as possible. I don't want that mission to be known as "the meme mission"
Awesome.
The answer to all of the "do you want to see..." questions in this video is yes, we want to see it all.
For that reason, those big-eyed statues are the most relatable thing in this video.
Thanks very much for saying so my friend, I read you loud and clear!
Holy hell. 12k views and 230 comments in less than 3 days.
This video's success is completely unprecedented on my channel. Thank you all so much for taking the time to watch it! I will be trying to respond to as many comments as I can, apologies if I do not get to yours.
Can you do about the Celts for age of mythology
I certainly plan on doing so! Though I do not think I will be calling them the Celts, instead subdividing the umbrella into a substantial number of individual Cultures
@@robbylava my man what can you expect? Video's such a masterpiece. Speaking of requests! I trust nobody to make a video on the Aztecs or Chinese as I do you. I wish there would also be an Indian Civ but that might be.. a controversial move by AOM sadly
@BlueBedouin thank you so much for saying so my friend! Legitimately means a ton to hear it.
I absolutely plan on doing both of those, probably as some of the highest priority AOM videos on my channel for the foreseeable future, and maybe there's a way I could tackle India as well. Though I personally wouldn't want to do so without some robust cultural consultancy from someone who really knows their stuff
I watched your video on theorycrafting for different cultures, & while I think a lot of your ideas are good, I have some ideas of my *own* I wanted to share with you; I'm following a lot of the same rules you did, but I've actually placed an *additional* rule on myself that I have to follow; that being that the cultures have to exist *within* the space spanned by the cultures of the original extended edition & the Chinese DLC *together* . That means *no* Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Polynesian, native American, Aztec, Incan, or any of those *other* cultures (as cool as they'd all be) You may notice some occasional blanks in some of the ones who's mythologies I'm not quite as familiar with; if you are, feel free to fill them in.
The Celts: Military unit mechanics: Celtic military units would be on the cheaper end to train & would train fairly quick, but they'd be *heavily* skewed towards infantry units; not having access to cavalry units until the Heroic Age, & not having *any* siege weapons at all, fully relying on myth units for that purpose. However, waiting until the Heroic Age to get cavalry units will be worth it because they'll be able to occasionally use a *charge* ability that knocks infantry units a short ways away & stuns them for a short period, making it easier for your infantry units to overwhelm & defeat them; & an upgrade you'd be able to access in the Mythic Age would allow them to use that ability a bit more frequently. Another Mythic Age technology that the Celts could research is "Fae Blood"; a technology that makes all human units moderately more effective against enemy human units, & *slightly* effective against myth units (still not as effective as heroes).
Building mechanics: Celts wouldn't build temples; instead, they'd send druids to worship at *forests* to gain favor; simultaneously causing that forest to *act* like a temple, allowing you to train myth units & research technologies that *improve* them there, similarly to how the Atlanteans can train Dryads & research technology to improve them at the Hesperides tree; the catch is that the druids would *only* be able to worship at *untouched* forests, there can't be *one* felled tree stump in it. This would force the Celts to *strategize* their woodcutting, figuring out which forests they were willing to harvest, & which they wanted to leave standing for the purpose of training & improving myth units.
Gods, Heroes, & Myth units: Major Gods: _, _, _.
Minor gods: _, _, _, _, _, _, _, _, _, _. (this's mostly because I don't know which Celtic gods were *universally* worshipped, if any).
Myth units: Leprechauns, Goblins, Pixies, Spriggans, Barghests, Cat Sith, Baobhan Sith.
Why do I want this culture?: A culture that forced players to be *strategic* about gathering a certain resource instead of just trying to harvest *everything* as fast as possible would give them a unique challenge to tackle, which I think would be *really* cool; as for why I want a *generic* Celt civilization instead of the Gaels *specifically* is because a generic Celt civilization would be able to cover a *lot* more ground, which's why I wanted all the gods the Celt civilization worshipped to be gods that were *universally* worshipped. However, the Gaels could still exist as a *flavor* of the Celt civilization, which'd be distinguished from the other flavors by the language the units spoke, & which gods they worshipped as their major & minor gods; with the *other* flavors being well known ones like the Britons (most of Britain), & the Gauls (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Southern & Western Germany), as well as *lesser known/well represented ones like the Gallaecians (Northwestern Iberia (the peninsula Spain & Portugal make up)), & the Celtiberians (Northeastern Iberia). In a multiplayer skirmish, or a skirmish against the AI, you'd pick this flavor *before* you started the match; & in a campaign where you played as them, that flavor would be decided by whatever Celtic area the scenario you were currently playing took place in.
This is a masterpiece - we are used to great quality but I am particularly amazed by this build.
What a compliment! Thank you so much for saying so my friend
Literally never heard of this channel before, but this is what I have always wanted in an AOE Content channel. Subbed, can't wait to see more of your content!!!
What a compliment! Thank you so much for saying so my friend, can't wait to hear what you think of what's to come!
What an incredible, meticulously crafted project. Thank you for sharing this and your dedication and love of the myths, cultures, and the game.
My absolute pleasure! Thank you so much for taking the time to watch and share your thoughts, my friend
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dearie me. This was an absolute epic of a video, and very enjoyable to watch. Well done, Robby! Thanks for taking the time to make such a behemoth.
The pictures in particular are fantastic. I know you didn't make them, but you've done an excellent job picking them out. Especially the round picture with all three major gods - it'd fit right into the game.
And more Age of Mythology builds? Yes please!
My goodness goodness goodness me, thank you so much for the kind words my friend! It means a ton to hear, especially coming from you who's been watching the channel so long.
Very glad you enjoyed the pictures so much! It's a lot easier for me to source them for age of mythology hehehe
More AOM definitely to come!
To answer the question at the end of the video : YES. Of course I would love to see more of this ! I am quite unknowledgeable (dunno if its a word, I am french) in fertile crescent culture, and I love to learn about them this way and seeing how you adapt pieces of mythos into gameplay :) Great work, thank you Robby !
Wonderful! Thank you so much for saying so, I will be doing so at some point in the future! Thank you very much for the feedback
dude you put so much thought into this. I'd love to see the sumerians become a team! You have my vote!
Thank you so much for saying so my friend! Really appreciate the kind words.
Can't help but notice your username, are you a tabletop RPG fan?
@@robbylava I am, I have about 8 years of being a DM for 5e! Also got into warhammer recently.
@tabletoptales7679 awesome! As mentioned at the beginning, TTRPGs are very much an interest of mine, so if you ever want to talk about them further I'd love to do so!
@@robbylava 😁
I really like all the ideas here, but have some opinions/suggestions that I feel would improve smoothness of gameplay, especially for people new to the civ:
1) Offerings/favour mechanic
Problems with the current design:
- The current design is prone to "accident" scenarios. Imagine this: you want to build a ziggurat between your wood line and gold mine, so the workers at either one can both drop off at the ziggurat, but you want the gold miners to exchange for favour while the lumberjacks actually gather wood. With the toggle setup, you could accidentally convert the wood into favour when you only want the gold to be converted.
- A different way to avoid accidents would be to toggle the "drop off for favour" for each resource individually for each Ziggurat/Ensi, but this would just add a lot of annoying micro for little benefit in comparison to the market-style approach.
As you mention at the end in your "tabled ideas", a solution to this is by exchanging resources for favour directly, like a market:
- Using the market-style favour acquisition, there is possibility for more fun twists. Much like resources traded at a market, it could have a dynamic exchange rate that makes exchanging the same resource over and over yield less favour, but if you stop offering a certain resource, over time it will gradually increase how much favour it is worth, as if the gods are assigning more value to the resources that you are less willing to offer.
It could achieve the different conversion rates you mentioned by having different starting values, so gold starts off being worth more favour and wood worth less, and food starts at the neutral base line.
- I think the market-style is also better for making the player feel like they are "making an offering", as they have to make the deliberate decision to press the button that exchanges a resource for favour, unlike the current design, where it just happens passively if toggled on.
2) Building/Unit names:
Some of the building names should be translated to English. If you look at other civs this is a clear pattern, with the only non-english word used in any regular building name being "Migdol" in Migdol stronghold. I definitely appreciate the effort to respect the Sumerian culture and history by naming everything accurately, but it is clearly inconsistent with the existing civs.
I like Ziggurat and Egal, but IMO the rough translations you provided would be better names for the other buildings.
Tibira -> Crafter, Ugnim -> Encampment, Naggaru -> Carpenter.
Military units especially are probably fine to keep their accurate/historic names, but economic units like workers (Serfs) and trade caravans (Onager Caravan) would also just fit better in line with the existing civs by using English names.
Thanks so much for your input! Really glad you enjoyed the build.
The favor mechanic is definitely quite the can of worms. I'd be happy to go into that in more detail If you wanted, but just to touch upon the other point: it is true that other civilizations do not use in language names, but this is a perfect example of something I think the game should and could do while minimally interfering with people's play experience. It is a tiny speed bump to brand new players, but hardly any more than something like "toxotes" would be, easily learned after your first time trying a civilization out.
Pushing boundaries in design is definitely one of my calling cards though, so I wouldn't fault anyone for implementing it otherwise. But sticking with generic English names when I have such perfect options available otherwise is something I will pretty much never do.
nice! this was really cool, the gameplay dynamic would be interesting and I really like the god powers, the temporary conversion thing in particular is very interesting, it hasn't been tried yet. Kudos!
What a video. Holy hell you lay it all out this is so beautiful and what I've always wanted?!
Heheheh thanks bud!
Great content. One can really see the effort and attention to detail that went into this.
A few comments and questions:
1. It is kind of counterintuitive that a civilization that in real life had a lot of food and little wood in your game ends up needing a lot of food and little wood, essentially creating the opposite effect. Any generic player will end up either floating wood and being food starved or still having the forests intact in the late game, making their area more wooded than the enemy's. The historic fun fact of them celebrating the conquest of hardwood would also not be present in any way.
2. Building a Fortress forward or at important locations (choke points, hills and natural entrances to bases) is a very important strategy for pretty much any civ. Since the Sumerians you envisioned can't make any use of that strategy, how are they compensated for that? How do they contest strategic battlefield positions?
3. I believe that for reasons of readability it makes much more sense to increase the amount of population they get (both raw population from houses and pop cap from TCs) instead of lowering the amount needed per unit. Functionally/mathematically it would be the same, but it prevents the fiddly use of fractional population numbers. It also makes it seem like their TCs are special instead of making it seem like their people are lesser in needs.
4. The human army seems to be slow in both mobility and DPS while paradoxically also relying on swarm tactics. Do you have any experience with how such a faction would feel to play in practice in an RTS game? Combined with their inflexibility in Fortress positioning will make it really hard for them to contest the map. And with their higher tier units emphasizing numbers and tankiness it would also make playing against them a slow moving slugfest. What is your vision of how they would feel to play off paper?
5. When designing the major and minor gods, did you imagine how strategies and build orders and gameplay styles would likely differ between them in the game proper? It would be cool to include some of that in your video. In general more attention to the impact of your design ideas on gameplay loops over just on paper stats and flavorful lore could be an interesting design challenge and make your visions more realistic.
6. Does Inanna's Patronage mean that with the War Goddess (who one would think of as aggressive) you are kind of shoehorned to upgrade your first TC into a Fortress as early as possible?
7. How will you be able to know/remember which Lugal in your army comes from the right TC, let alone which Ziggurat (which you can place anywhere on the map) has spawned the Ensi associated with Sirsir? Overall having only two specific units in your whole army, one of which is a raider hero and one of which is a buffer hero, be amphibious is a very fiddly bonus. Same goes for Gula's Ensi. At the very least the three units in question must have a slight but visible differentiation in their unit model and icon.
8. I have no idea how one is supposed to use Ereshkigal's God Power in practice. Maybe because I am imagining it just a bit bigger than a normal gate building? By age 4 it seems very easy for anyone to circumvent, even if placed with walls to its left and right. It sure doesn't seem to compare to the powers of other gods of that age, both among the Sumerians and among canon deities.
9. It seems strange for Ninlil not to be available to Enlil if she ends up being in the game at all (through the DLC). Is there a mythological reason for this?
10. I am very curious about your source for all the artwork. It looks more polished than I would expect from AI (maybe even more polished than the Retold art that the fanbase pushed to be replaced).
11. If you ever want to make your own actual playable project, I really recommend Blizzard RTS games for modding. They are modding friendly and yet allow for powerful changes to the base game. Even WarCraft 3 could essentially be modded to near unrecognizability, with even unit control and UI being different from the base game. Also, mythologies aren't copyrighted. You could make your own versions of the base three AoM cultures, featuring the 2-3x bigger thing and more mythological accuracy. And completely throw out the Atlanteans.
I had two suggestions based on your queries
For point number 2, how about:
Make it so the ziggurats get a late game upgrade that makes them comparable to fortresses but slightly weaker and they provide an aura to nearby towers that make them more effective. I don't have a mythical reason for this. But from a strategic point of view, I can't see another way of getting around the map control that other civs will have on you.
For point 4:
I kind of see it like the Abbasids(Aoe4) who have an aura based around a singular House Of Wisdom. While having the aura effects of the Byzantine faction.
Thank you so much! Such an extensive comment, I absolutely love to see it.
Unfortunately I just do not have time to respond to all of these points in full, much though I would like to and profoundly appreciate your input and attention to detail, so I'm just going to answer the last point because I think it's extremely important: I lived on Warcraft 3 in high school, it was actually one of my main introductions to theorycrafting as a hobby. I completely agree it is an incredibly powerful platform for creating designs, but it is so far beyond my knowledge and free time to do so that I personally prefer to stick with theory for now. Maybe someday we can upgrade in that way though!
If you want to go through your other points in more detail I would genuinely love to hear them. Are you on the Discord? If so, ping me there, and let's go through them one by one.
Good effort
Keep moving forward
Best wishes and regards
Alright I am so excited about this Concept! Sumeria is an interesting pantheon to add because it shares the near-east area with egypt!
Hey Robby, awesome video! We know you were worried about the length but we all knew the size of this one from the get go, honestly you can stop apologising while recording it :)
Hehehe thanks for saying so my friend! I was trying to play it up for comedy, but I'll curb myself next time
Greetings. I have just found you, and this is incredible. Not only would I highly encourage you to eventually complete all of your follow-up ideas, but I would highly like and recommend you to work on other cultures entirely: Celtic; Shinto/Japanese; Hindu; and Aztec are obvious choices off the top of my head. Again, this is incredible: while I have found other projects of this kind, none have been so in-depth and well-researched. Also, they are almost all for the original age of mythology, not Retold. I thank you heartily my friend, and leave you with these suggestions.
Exceptionally kind of you to say! Thanks for the recommendations, all of the above are absolutely on my radar, and I really hope you continue to enjoy the content to come.
@@robbylava There is no problem my friend, this deserves no less. I am glad you are already planning all of these. I thank you heartily, and eagerly await your future work.
This is a GREAT suggestion; I would love to see it actually happen!
If you want the mesopotamian/levantine pantheon to be introduced, I'd prefer doing this under the auspices of Babylon/Akkadians rather than Sumer as Babylon is not only better know, it was also around for longer.
Definitely, not to mention you can get away with much more unit potential variety with Babylonians as a lot of units from the Assyrians can be used (Heavy Cavalry, Siege Towers and Horse Archers) as for historical reference; the Sumerians would have an too similar human unit listing to combining the Egyptian and Atlantean unit lists.
Just make it Mesopotamian, that allows you to pull from the whole region - it's not like the Greek pantheon is specific to a single Greek culture, hell, it includes Macedonian-inspired cavalry units!
@@RowanDrake47 The things is that all of Greek myth comes filtered to use through the Attican tradition since they were the only ones who took care to write things down. No such luck with Mesopotamian religion since we have several traditions to choose from. One example, would you have the goddess of love be called Ishtar or Astarte?
I'm surprised Pazuzu wasn't utilized somewhere.
" Macedonian inspired" So the greek pantheon includes greek inspired units??? Who would have known??
Amazing work. Very thoroughly envisioned and great presentation. Keep the amazing work. 🎉
Thank you so much for saying so, it means a lot
Well you have me convinced. I'm all in on the subpar copper train now!
I am very impressed by the level of details and research you have done of the original myths. I feel that you could make some mythology lore videos now.
This is such a compliment. Thank you so much for saying so!
Maybe if I get more interest I'll try something like that out at some point.
17:17 Instead of serving as a drop point, we could make conventional drop off points accumilate gold as your villagers drop resources off, which the Ensi can collect. Make it work the same way tax does for Chinese in Age of Empires 4. Additionally we could also have a toggle for collecting favor instead of gold.
I also don't think we should be breaking population cost into decimals. The house cap should instead be increased to accommodate a larger population.
Other than that, I enjoy many of the ideas you are presenting for a unique approach to a new pantheon that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the others.
Thanks very much, I'm glad you enjoyed!
Taxes were not handled in that way in Sumeria, not only was gold not typically the currency but it was actually usually food by which taxes were paid, and these things were usually brought directly to the ziggurat (And by extension the Ensi) since that was where excess stores for the city were typically held.
I see what you mean about wanting to utilize existing mechanics, but I just don't think it fits the grounding nearly as well as I would like.
Also, fractional population is actually precedented! Civilizations in Age of Empires 2 have it, particularly the new Georgians with their imperial age UT.
Appreciate your feedback my friend, just wanted to explain why I stand behind these decisions.
@@robbylava Don't worry, but I got an idea for favor generation that aligns much with yours.
I like the Ziggurat being a drop-off point, but when you use it as such, you convert the resources into favor and since this pantheon don't use wood as much, it would be ideal to set up your first ziggurat as a drop off point next to a treeline.
In later stages of the game you could set up ziggurats around farms, as that resource becomes plentiful.
The only problem with this idea, is that the Ensi is not a part of the process, but I think that's a fair trade off for the sake of game design.
With that said, you are also right about fractional population existing in Age of Empires 2, with the Karambits only taking up half a space, but I think it can be avoided in this game, as all population space is dictated by the cap on your houses and the total settlements you can acquire, and to me it is much cleaner to display.
ore interesting idea for favor which would suit them much better than my previous idea.
@qwerty222999 so a quick question, how does this idea you're proposing differ from mine? I might be dumb, but it sounds almost identical to what I proposed in this video: ziggurat and Ensi our drop points that can convert dropped resources into favor as a toggleable effect.
@@robbylava, I agree that fractional population isn't necessarily a problem, but I also think that having more population space is easier to reason around for players than the fractional population.
I'm really into the Marduk/Ashur mechanic. Waiting to hear more!
Always like theory crafts and with this one i get to learn more about a topic im not very acquainted with :)
Perfect, couldn't ask for a better response! I really hope you enjoyed
This is awesome you have my vote
I also appreciate the callout Robby!!!! Will add it to the counter!
Heheheh I think it might have to end up being a running theme!
Congratulations! Amazing work
Thanks for saying so! Really Glad you enjoyed
I want that ! Take my money, modder from all !
the sumerians and the canaaites are my dream civs for AOM
AMAZING I PRAY TO GOD YOUR IDEA BECOME A REALITY
Oh yeah, I have what to listen to at work now
Fantastic job, quite agree there is a ton of things that can still be done with AoM. The devs have a golden opportunity.
I'm amazed by your work!
Thanks friend!
1:15:34 "but still an archer"
Throwing axeman: 💀
Sumerian was a bit of a blind spot in my mythology knowledge, as I thought it was just Babylonian. This video has really given me inspiration to look more into their culture.
Sumer is in history textbooks as the first civilization, arising 6kya, before the Bronze Age.
I'm absolutely delighted to hear this. Genuinely could not hope for a better response to this video, thank you so much for saying so.
bro huge work!!!!!
Well done Robbie, this is a fantastic build - designing for AOM must be much harder than aoe2 but I love that you leaned into it. I will probably never pick up Retold (too deep into aoe2), but this was a delight to listen to
Thank you so much for saying so my friend! The fact that you listen through despite not being interested in playing yourself means a lot to me.
Really cool proposal. Would be more then happy if you do something like that for Slavs as AoM faction. Also can share some ideas how they can work, what gods line-up and non myth and myth units they could potentially have.
Very kind of you to offer! I definitely intend on doing the slavs at some point, so when I do I'd love to hear some feedback from you to help improve the design!
Amazing! ⭐
❤
Prolly the expansion 2 is going to be about Japanese pantheon. In the editor there are hints of Japanese terrain when you want to edit some grass and cliffs actually.
I love the sumerian concept robby I'm hoping alot of pantheons find the spot in age of mythology sumerians African Asian mesoamericans
Thanks so much for saying so my friend. Really glad you enjoy it!
I really want a Mesoamerican pantheon. Polynesian would be neat too as a sort of nomadic naval civilization whose fishing ships can build new docks and repair.
Love the concept. Keep it up! Maybe an Igbo pantheon? :)
Thanks man! Underrated culture for sure. I would probably start with the Yoruba in Africa, but the Igbo are a really cool option too
2 HOUR CIV BUILD FROM ROBBY???????? THERE GOES MY AFTERNOON.... LFGGGGGGGGGG
Very cool, maybe a little over complicated but it’s really hard to say without actually playing it
Excellent so far, I haven't finished but I'm going to be "that nerd" and push back on some of the points in the historical intro. It's not clear that the Sumerian cities were the first. There are several large settlements in what is now Ukraine dating back to the the 5th millenium BC. These are often called "megasites" as if they don't qualify as urban, but there are recent challenges to this view that deserve attention. Among these challengers: the archaeologist Bisserka Gaydarska, and the anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow.
There are also challengers to the notion that urbanization, agriculture, leisure time, top-down authority, and cultural development come together as a package. There are many sites around the world that challenge this narrative, but the most obvious one I can point to is the cultures of the North American Pacific Northwest coast (civ idea btw!). Abundant marine resources combined with trade networks led to a flourishing of complex culture and authority networks, without the development of extensive agriculture or urbanization. Evidence points to limited cultivation of crops, and access to grain crops through trade, but they didn't pursue large-scale agriculture; it seems they chose not to.
On the other hand, there are examples of cities in Mesoamerica and China (I think) that seemed to be supported by agriculture, but lack the kinds of architectural differences and concentrations of material wealth that would indicate centralized authority.
I'm not criticizing your assessment and what I wrote above may be erroneous; I'm not an archaeologist or anything of the sort. I'm just fascinated with the complexities of human history and stoked that there are always new discoveries that challenge our conception of the past. Anyway I appreciate this video and the effort that went into it. I'm looking forward to watching the rest.
You are completely right, and I do not contest what you say on any count! I just have to simplify very often when I'm doing these videos, both for time and because I very often forget the nuances of things when I am recording.
Would be nice to have some way to represent some pantheons as not playable civs, but something minor. Age3 players will probably understand what I'm talking about.
Congratulations for your work.
very cool!
Awesome build, looking forward to others like it. Definitely brings new and exciting things to the table. Although Enkis bonus for early tech upgrades and cheaper cost is like Gaias. Also a cavalry that does bonus damage against infantry seems odd since the majority of infantry counter cavalry. Seduce seems a bit strong haha, like a traitor god power but in archaic age.
Really glad you enjoyed!
In retrospect I would definitely agree that seduce feels a bit cracked. My plan to fix it would be to have it make the unit fight for you but prevent you from being able to control it, which will mean that you can't just run it away from its friends and kill it when it's isolated
I agree these would work the best both because the civ is geographically close to the orignal four and because I don't think we've seen many representations of their mythology before.
Great idea !
I love this! One suggestion is to maybe limit Enlil’s god power so that it cannot be applied to titans. Maybe it won’t make that much of a difference. I would love to see a DLC Video!
Thanks so much for saying so my friend!
You make a decent point about the Titans... I didn't think of that at all. I will keep it in mind for sure! Maybe someday if we get to test this we can see whether it would be busted hehehe
The art of Banda Arali, one of the unique techs of Ereshkigal looks like a old Magic The Gathering Art. I don't know which of than, but I have this feeling.
Very well spotted! It's called Demonic Hordes, and I believe it was originally printed way back in Alpha.
I have a couple other MTG references in the art that I chose, curious to see how many commenters find the rest!
@@robbylava Well played, well played indeed 😏
give us the Babylon, give us the Ninurta DLC, give us ALL THE CONTENT
Sir yes sir!
what about the Titan?
Included at the end of the myth unit section
You know, With Inanna, you reminded me how both Aphrodite and Athena have their origin in Mesopotamia, and thus are linked to the Sumerians. Inanna is Ishtar who is Attart who is Aphrodite. Same with Athena and Anat. It's fascinating how much gods "Travel"
amazing video
LETS GOOOOO SUMERIAN TIME
love it
Yes!!!
A mesopotamian expansion with Sunerians and Babylonians would be great. I would love to see a theorycraft of a Yoruban or Polynesian style civ with its vast and varied mythologies.
Absolutely. Both planned for future, even if it might take me a little while to get to them!
Very detailed and cool culture concept! How do Village Centers factor in into the Sumerians' design, given their heavy emphasis on TC-focused infrastructure? Would they be generic, have the same resource-drop off bonus as TCs, or be unavailable altogether?
An excellent question! To be honest, I started working on this design before I knew that VC's were going to be a thing, and I largely neglected discussing them in this build. I think that they would probably still be available and probably wouldn't be changed, meaning that this Culture would if nothing else have some other drop points available and wouldn't be as boned if they had fewer settlement options on a given map.
Do you see any potential missing pieces to that or solutions that could fit better with the rest of the design I've presented?
Great point! Thanks for taking the time to watch.
@@robbylava I agree that it would be okay for the Sumerians to have access to generic Village Centers. They cost the same amount as a Town Center, so they wouldn't be a cost-effective workaround for the Sumerian's intended gameplay except in some niche situations.
Back to actual Town Centers, you said that a Sumerian player would have to think strategically about which TC should research each age up, to benefit from the minor god TC aura. I just want to confirm, can one TC benefit from multiple god auras, if that TC researched multiple age ups? If a TC can only benefit from a single god aura for aging up, then a Sumerian player's age advancements would be tied to expansion and significantly affected by the number and location of settlements.
@pseudonymsam Yes, a given TC CAN have the patronage of multiple gods! So you wouldn't be completely boned if you didn't have expansions
The siege ramp is epic! Should also be Roman!😊
Great pick!
I thought i would hate it, but I kind of love it
We love to hear it
this is really good
Really appreciate you saying so!
Holly shit robby
Oh wow, this was a pretty good build. Like really, you mentioned the salting (which happens chiefly due to how mineral rich the rivers of the Tigris and Euphraties are) the beer and everything. I will just say that the resource drop off mechanic is kind of iffy, I think it probably needs to be examined further. Maybe crunch the numbers better.
They would definately need some nice guard towers though, maybe a high tier or they can build guard towers an age early.
Another suggestion is to give them an eco/market building in the form of a "Inn" or "drinking hall"
A unique building that you can build in age 3 and maybe upgrade in age 4 to make it bigger so maybe tavern to drinking hall
What it does is basically giving you eco bonus upgrades maybe some of them a type of beer or drinking related upgrade to help your human units and peasants fight harder, better, faster, stronger HA!
Or the building can act like a Portuguese Feitora, you can build one per TC you have and over time it gives you a small trickle of gold and food i.e. Sumerians loved beer and exporing it.
Finally yes, some more AoM content would be nice, since Assyria and Babylon would have rather robust and interesting military, especially the former and not to mention the architecture. Spoilers give the Assyrians a library building unique and to the Babylonians a Temple archive for some cool techs.
Since we agree on the Atlanteans can you try just because to see what the Romans would be like as a civ since the community just writes if off as "greek knockoff" and just stop the brainstorming altogether.
Still have to contact you but IRL stuff is just crazy. Apologies and I have to get to that.
Cheers Robby!
Thanks so much for the wonderful review! I'm so glad you liked it.
Agree with you that the resource drop off thing needs further explaining. I'm quite confident it can work, and in my plans DLC follow-up video I hope to elaborate on that further.
The tavern building is legitimately a stroke of genius. It comes up so much in Sumerian mythology and similar that I'd be a fool not to include it! Thank you so much for that.
No rush or worry is whatsoever on getting in touch, take all the time you need! And in the meantime, I hope you continue to enjoy the content.
Wow!
Rather than having units cost less pop. How about giving a bonus to population size? It can be a bit confusing to have fractional pop units. It has about the same effect. With some slight edge cases, that might not even be of a deterrent for the theme. So rather than removing 10% of a unit pop cost, you add support limit to your TC and housing. Which also would fit thematically I think as the first city builders.
Not a bad idea! I could see that working. I'm probably going to stick with the fractional one for now though, specifically because AOE2 already has set precedent for that being a thing with stuff like the Georgians imperial UT.
We will likely get a Mesopotamian Civ instead of separate Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. The same with the Aztecs, many people confuse and think that the Aztecs are equivalent to Norse or Greek, but they were just one faction of a wider culture, the Nahuas, or the regional: "Mesoamericans," which would include Toltecs, Olmecs, Tlaxcalans, Mexica, etc... So Aztecs would be more akin to Peloponnesian or Spartans. This allows them to pick from a wider pool of myths, gods, eras, buildings, warriors, and peoples.
Definitely agree that is more likely, but I would disagree with your comparison between the Aztecs and something like the Spartans or Peloponnesians. Beliefs across Greek city-states and regions do seem to have been substantially more homogeneous in the classical age than mesoamerica probably ever was, though of course we have far fewer sources on the latter to justify it. Just going off what I have learned though, while mesoamerica had tons of through-lines and many shared beliefs, it does seem to have been substantially more disparate than the Olympian worship seen in Greece and its neighbors
Yesss please
Sumerians some day
That was very well thought out. I hope the devs are taking note. I also wanted to see if you mentioned the only two Sumerian gods I'd heard about before. I knew one named Sin whom I suspect might be Enkil. And of course, there was Ishtar. So, yeah, I learned a lot more about this subject.
You and I disagree about the Atlantians, but I will concede that the culture is probably total fiction.
Thank you so much for saying so!
Sin, aka Nanna or Zuen, is an extremely important moon God and was without a doubt the most difficult cut I had to make from this build. But I will absolutely be bringing him in for future Babylon / Assyria build that I have planned!
If Greeks can have named heroes each age then I'd really want bigshots like Humbaba, Ziusudra, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. I never liked that only the greeks got that special treatment just because they were the main cast of the campaign.
It would be really funny if the OG Dinamic Duo is available under Inanna and then Eresh.
Someone already mentioned that you've limited the construction of the fortress type building to 1 by TC, but these sort of games require those to be built in several strategic positions or you lose so you'd have to rework that idea and there's also the counterintuitive food/wood relationship, if you really want to put it to use then you should flip it so that you have to get more wood and lower the food cost, that way you'd reflect their conquest on hardwood.
Named heroes is something that Retold should've fixed. It is really not "Retold" but just a remaster, a great one, but still.
I do wish that named heroes were more pervasive. I didn't want to steal the Greek gimmick though, and if nothing else they could absolutely still appear in campaigns.
I see what you mean about the fortress thing. A lot of other commenters have pointed it out, and I think I have a plan for it that I will talk about whenever I get around to making that DLC video for this build.
The food/wood dynamic, however, I think works quite well as is. Even though wood was very valuable, it was more considered a luxury. They were very much able to do good work without it. And if, like I propose, we prioritize food very highly for the civilization, it means that your eco is going to have tons of farms, which is extremely historically accurate and much more appropriate to their actual composition historically then having dozens of lumberjacks
YEEEEEEEEES! PLUG IT TO MY VAINS!
Love it.
Why did you not include in the panthon Nanna-Suen the god of the moon and Utu-Shamash the god of the sun?
Will they be featured in the primordial civ build?
Glad you enjoyed!
Those two were by far and away the hardest cuts I made. My plan is to add them to the Babylonia / Assyria build, and my rationale is that, while these two were both important in Sumeria, they became even more important in these later nations, where they arguably came close to the status of enlil.
Good presentation 👍
I'm not against talk about Atlanteans as not having a fitting place in the game but the previous video I watched of yours you kept mentioning it like it was going out of fashion, I swear I could have made a drinking game based on it😂
Thanks for saying so!
Yeah, hating on the Atlanteans is becoming a bit of a sport on the channel here hehehe. Maybe I'll make a counter for it sometime as a recurring joke in videos
if the sumerians were added a dark spooky-themed archipelago map called "abzu" would be a very nice addition i think
That sounds so cool
My only concern for the base abilities of the Sumerian economy is that 10% increased drop-off resources may not be enough to make up for travel time. Spirit of the Law does a lot of math on this sort of thing, and I recommend either reaching out to him or studying some of his videos on economic bonuses in practice.
Oh I've seen his work extensively
I agree it might not be a sufficient trade-off, but given that they also have some alternate drop points as well I'm hoping that it'll still be a pretty substantial boost. Especially given that farming is often if not always going to be clustered around TCs and thus will benefit the most.
nice work
this would be perfect
Awesome bro
Thanks for saying so mate!
I personally want to see civs come to the game that are already alike to existing civs. Sumeria would slot in nicely with Egypt. I'd love to see Celts which would be akin to Norse. I suppose Greeks already have Atlantis but there's huge DLC potential elsewhere. Indians, Africans, Meso civs, etc
Finns also
awesome
that a lot of passion
Hell yeah brother
10:03
This sounds very similar to Greek mythology, I'm thinking if the Greek "inherited" the idea or if it was a coincidence.
16:11
What happens if that TC is destroyed?
What if you rebuild a TC in the same spot?
19:27
I like this system.
But I'm still afraid it might be too limiting for collecting resources from faraway locations.
The 10% extra resources might not be sufficient to compensate for the extra travel distance.
I
How do the Sumerians work with Village Centers?
34:10
I guess having more villagers might compensate the distance to drop off stuff too.
54:59
I don't like it.
I don't like things that penalise other players in a way they can't counter.
If you really want this, I would suggest that the Ziggurat that researches it becomes visible to enemies and if it is destroyed, the effect stops, or something like that.
1:34:12
It seems a bit strong, can't you build a bunch of gates to block powers everywhere?
Maybe the gates could be imune to damage from god powers instead.
1:40:36
I like the hero ship, it would be interesting if all cultures had one of those.
I addressed some of these concerns in my follow up video, particularly the TC being destroyed and how VCs tie into the build, so when you get around to watching that I'd love to hear your thoughts on it too!
I don’t know much about the legality of crowdsourcing mod development, but I would totally throw a few dollars towards this (assuming Sumerians aren’t announced as an expac civ for retold)
Exceptionally kind!
I have no idea what the modding landscape will be for AOM, but if it ever looks at all possible I will certainly be trying to put together a team to implement some stuff.
In the meantime, I really appreciate you supporting my work through your viewership. Hope you enjoy what's to come!
I so wish for this to be implemented!
Sumerians, Incas, Slavs. My top three wishlist for new pantheons in AoM retold.
Incas weirdly being the most likely out of all of them since they were in the running for being the new pantheon in the titans expansion, so they likely have 20 year old plans that they can use to flesh things out
A British mythology too..
Dragons, griffins, ogres, hob goblins, cu-sith l...
There's loads
Hell yeah, love these AoM Culture featuers. Canaanites next? (PS of course we want campaigns!)
I don't know about next, but definitely at some point! Given how much people liked this video, I could see this becoming a mainstay on my channel once I figure out how to streamline the design process
And I'm glad you like the campaign idea. Will definitely keep it in mind! You can expect to see it at some point, though maybe not soon
On one hand I love the ideas and the videos.
On the other hand I'm sad they aren't real.