How is removing "women" part of a "politically correct trend"? Sounds backward to me. If you look at it in that light, then we have removed representation. 

This is a very condescending statement. You’re basically saying you don’t respect the people who play the game. I don’t know who you are, but you’re not who you think you are.    This comment was a response to the guy who said, “Haha, I guess seeing men working in the fields upset you.” We could already see men working in the fields before. In fact, using soldiers for farming is actually a very good strategy in the mid-to-late stages of the game.    And I'm actually amazed at how determined you are to defend this change, even though it adds nothing to the game.    That sounds a lot ChatGPT. Lol are you copy-pasting directly from ChatGPT?    Just like no one says “Lusitano Ezpatari” and simply calls it “jav,” the term “civilian-something” doesn’t really mean anything in practice. People will keep calling them "women". That’s not going to change no matter how brilliant you believe your idea is. That’s why this feels like a meaningless change, it doesn’t add anything to the game except confusion.   I’m obviously not against artistic work, nor could I be. But we all know this wasn’t an artistic or aesthetic change. It looks more like something that came out of someone obsessing over a minor issue and trying to smooth out a “flaw” that wasn’t really there in the first place. It even feels like the late effects of a “politically correct” trend. Visual changes can absolutely affect gameplay and player experience. However, removing the concept of “women” from the game doesn’t strike me as an artistic decision at all.    I guess we’ve finally found some common ground there.

I think that's a bit restrictive no? The only harm to gameplay is the sound queues really, which can be improved upon. Visually, i think they are distinct enough. Despite attacking realism (which I agree with to some extent), you seem to be upset about something unrelated to gameplay, could you elaborate?

No, obviously there has to be a cut-off point somewhere, and there are clearly artistic and aesthetic considerations that come into play. In the (probably) most popular historical RTS franchise in the world, there are “villagers” of both sexes. It’s called Age of Empires — maybe you’ve heard of it.  I don’t know how each civilization historically referred to its non-soldier people. But the term is entirely consistent within the game’s universe. In fact, soldiers aren’t simply called “soldiers” — they’ve been called “Citizen-soldiers” for a long time. So on one side we had “Citizen-soldiers,” and on the other side we had “women.” Does that sound more consistent to you? If you want to put it in those terms, of course not. Maybe that was the case. And maybe now someone is fixing it. But you seem to have a problem with that. What’s ridiculous is pretending those are valid arguments when they’re clearly exaggerations that no reasonable person would take seriously. So if you use ridiculous arguements, thats on you. Citizen-soldiers don’t gather food as quickly as civilians. If a player chooses to use them on farms, that’s a gameplay decision. They’re accepting the trade-off in exchange for having their farms/CC/base better defended. The addition of a male model for what are now civilians responds to the reasons already stated. I’m not sure where you got that definition from, but it’s far from correct. There are artistic and aesthetic decisions that add nothing directly to gameplay, yet they are there precisely because this is a game — and they add aesthetic value. There’s even a mod that replaces trees with pink cubes and metal deposits with yellow rectangles. I invite you to start using it, since apparently having attractive 3D models has no value to the gameplay experience.  Yeah, maybe you are right on this. Maybe there are people who have been working on the Art Team on this game for more than fifteen years or so, making it look better every single day. Improving every single model, adding different variants for the same unit. So yeah

Such a strong argument. You should be a game developer, I'm sure many would love to play your games. Who cares how people call them in the lobby, there's so many players who don't care about the lobby. Or who don't even know that the game has a lobby, for that matter.  Now, this is written in bad faith. It was called "woman", because that's what it looked like. You could argue that original developers should have gone with the standard gendered villager unit, but people wanted to try something different. AoE is a great franchise, but it doesn't need yet another clone. Almost no one used men to gather crops in the fields. Only the AI and some dedicated Sparta player with a lot of Helots. I really struggle with understanding your opposition to this change.