Aldandil

Nice map. I'm guessing the buildings at the back are the Akropolis and Propylaia? If seasonal changes that effect the game are implemented in the future, it would be awesome if the rivers on Mediterranean maps could be set to dry up, and the water on Egyptian maps could be set to flood. Both would have significant impacts on boat travel.

According to this http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/sea.htm there were several different Sea Peoples, of whom the Peleset (possibly Mycenaeans who became the Philistines) were only one. Of course there were many "Celtic" peoples, and many Iberian peoples. If research can make a good case for grouping these guys together on cultural or historical grounds (other than that they all went about raiding during the same centuries) then they could hang together as one "civilization." Conversely, if the current consensus among archaeologists and historians turns out to be that the majority of Sea Peoples belonged to the Mycenaean material culture, then it may turn out to be infeasible to make them more than a Mycenaean sub-faction. It's also possible that some Sea Peoples were affiliated culturally or historically with each other an/or the Mycenaeans, and others weren't, so that any potential use of them might have to leave some out. There also may be the possibility that some of the Sea Peoples could be used as mercenaries by other civs. Apparently Ramesses II employed some Shardana, for instance. All in all, good suggestion. If these guys were so significant historically, ignoring them entirely wouldn't seem right.

I would call them Canaanites and depicted in late Bronze Age designs, but I've been convinced that they should be in. And Chris, if you are planning on researching the Nubians you might as well see if there is enough information to make a Bronze Age civ for them. I kind of doubt there's much about Kerma, but you never know.

Wonderful sources! This is certainly a warship. Some of those Egyptian ships are very similar to the Phoenician designs, but some are rather different IMHO. According to one of your links, Pharaoh Sahure commissioned Phoenician/Canaanite shipbuilders to build his navy.That boat excavated from the Old Kingdom was 142 feet (43.3 meters) according to this textbook. These two only bring up 403 Forbidden errors for me. It looks like it covers the whole Aegean Bronze Age.Thanks for posting these! I'm not sure but this appears to refer to Middle Helladic depictions. In any case, contemporary Levantine and Anatolian designs evidently exist and it should be possible to track them down as well.

Oh duh, you just said that. Egyptian texts do discuss ships with cabins, decks, and masts, which strongly implies wooden ships instead of reed boats, and they had several words for different types of ship. But whether they were of Phoenician or Egyptian make I don't know. At the very least, reed boats of any size could not have transported huge stone blocks and obelisks down the river, and 14 actual wooden ships up to 75 feet long were also buried in 1st Dynasty Abydos. During the 1st Dynasty, the Levantine coast had a settlement of some kind (Megiddo), and the city of Ebla was near the later site of Ugarit but further inland, maybe 150 km from the coast (the map I'm looking at is small). I'm sure Asians and Egyptians were trading back then. But it's also possible the boats were a native development.

I can imagine both Myenaeans and Egyptians having decent navies. And the early Philistines had Aegean cultural affinities and manufactured Mycenaean pottery, so they could have been Greeks, or included some Greeks.

The Greeks certainly interacted with the Indians, so I'm guessing the Romans did too. Adding them to the game would be nice.

I think your source is just using the Greek term Phoenician for the later Phoenicians' ancestors in the bronze age: the people of Ugarit and so on, who seem to me to be linguistically, culturally, and religiously related or ancestral to the later "Phoenicians." They had writing before the Greeks did. Maybe somewhere it is recorded what they called themselves, at least during the Iron Age? Though I suppose they may have had only names for "person of XYZ city" instead of a pan-ethnos name. But that brings up the question what the factions should be called. The well-known names (Egyptians, Hittites, Phoenicians) are often different from what they called themselves. Hellenes isn't such an obscure faction name, but would an introductory paragraph that clearly identifies who they are be enough to explain factions with names like Tawy, Mitanni, and Nasili? The Hittites hired or levied Ugaritic ships, maybe for their army, but I didn't know the Egyptians hired Phoenician ships. This book has very little military information. Canaanites/Phoenicians/Ugarites seem to have been the naval civilization of the time, even if they weren't as big a powerhouse until later. I wish I knew more about this stuff. Hopefully I'll continue to learn on these forums!

Nice to see the Celts getting more screenshot love. Please keep it coming! SMST: You still have my name typo'd. Also, what is EE please? Another RTS game?

Huh, my archaeology textbook book doesn't agree, it refers to people in the Levant before 1000 B.C. as Canaanites. Some of them must be ancestors of the Phoenicians, though, so it may just be a matter of different sources using the term "Phoenicians" differently. In any case, somebody from there should be their ancestors, and therefore potentially useable even before 1000 B.C. And you're right that without mercenaries and elephants, the gameplay will be different. The question is whether they had a significant navy. I agree with making the Mesopotamians a single civ with sub-factions.

Looks to me like one of the Mediterranean bare ground textures. Cool structure, by the way. You made the sticky-outy-part from towers, right? It makes me think of building walls across chunks of land, or between an opponent and a good resource area, just to stymie them. Has that ever been a viable strategy in RTS?

I'm not surprised you say that, and it doubtless applies to the Minoans and Cycladics, and those obscure Caucasians and Central Asians, too. It's looking to me like limiting it to the Late Bronze Age, like I had suggested, won't provide enough useable factions. Would 1500-500 B.C. be too huge a spread? That would be the same time period as 0 A.D.'s eventual goal, but probably with half as many factions. Current ideas: Civs that probably have enough info to make factions: Assyrians (c. ?-1100 B.C.?) Babylonians/Kassites (or whatever they're called) (c. 1550-1150 B.C.?) Neo-Babylonians/Chaldeans (c. 900-600 B.C.?) Akkadians (c. 2200-? B.C.) New Kingdom Egypt/Tawy (c. 1550-1070 B.C.) Hittites/Nasili (c. 1700-1200 B.C.) Phoenicians/Canaanites/Ugarit (from c. 1500 B.C.) Civilizations that may or may not be useable: (brainstorming) Medes (c. 800-? B.C.?) Elamites (c. 2000-1100 B.C.?) Mycenaean Greeks (c. 1675-1100 B.C.) Kush (the Nubians who conquered Late Period Egypt) (c. 800 B.C. - 500 A.D.?) Hurrian Kingdom/Mitanni (c. 1650-1350 B.C.?) Luwians/Luwili Cilicians Hebrews Kerma? (probably not enough info) (c. 2500-1500 B.C.?) Oxus Civilization? (too obscure? not enough info?) Not practical: Minoans and Cyclades Indus Valley/Harappans obscure Caucasian and Central Asian civs Etruscans Urnfield Varna (probably other non-Roman Italians) (probably Kerma)

Also, you have bushes growing directly out of the water. I didn't notice those before. The green textures underwater make me think of sea grass, though. Was that the intent?

OK, I get it now. I was just confused. Yeah, apparently the Scythians show up around 500 B.C. Those obscure steppe cultures may be related to them, but like you said they're obscure, which (unfortunately?) may mean that most folks won't be interested in playing them, and/or that there won't be much information on them. I mean, the giant prehistory textbook I'm skimming discusses the prehistory and ancient history of every place on earth, except central Asia. I'm just throwing ideas out there... I don't know much about the Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, let alone the rest of Asia. The lack of highly naval civilizations is not something that had occured to me. The Minoan or Cycladic civs probably had ships, but I don't know if there is much or even any information about their military abilities, on land or at sea. Phoenicians are an early iron age civilization, coming in around 1100 B.C. or something. So if the lack of a highly naval civ is a big drawback, maybe focusing on or including that time period would be a better idea. Does anyone know much about Ugarit? Maybe they had significant naval capabilities.

Pureon, those look great!

Wait... huh? It looks like we're discussing two different and unrelated subjects here. Weren't the Scythians an iron age culture? You're right that if any of those steppe cultures even have enough info to make a civ, they may end up too similar to the later Scythians in gameplay. I don't understand what you said about "ages" or Pyrogenesis: Empire... isn't that the later colonial period mod/total conversion that's being planned? I'm making suggestions for the proposed ancient mod/total conversion. I think that it would be best to pick civs/factions that flourished between about 2000 and 1000 B.C., during what's often called the Late Bronze Age in the east Mediterranean region. Scythians, Persians, and Etruscans don't fit into that time period. It looks like Napata and the Meroitic civilization wouldn't fit either.

If you were using bronze-age Italians, they wouldn't be 5th century Etruscans. They'd be bronze age Terramarans, or some other actual bronze age culture. Recognizably, verifiably Etruscan people don't show up in the archaeological or historical records until the iron age. Another option for a faction could be one of the bronze age or early iron age cultures of the Caucasus or Pontic Steppe, pre-500 B.C. I just saw some mention of them on Wikipedia, supposedly there were several of them -- Maykop, Yamna, Trans-Caucasian, Novititorovka, Andronovo, Afanasievo, etc. There was also the Oxus civilization. And if Kerma isn't a usable civ, maybe the later Kush could be used, though I don't know if they're iron age or bronze age. In any case, I think that a tighter chronological focus would be a good thing. If you include everything from the Middle or even Early Bronze Age up to the early Iron Age, then the aesthetics and flavor will kind of be all over the place. 0 A.D. already covers the Iron Age, and the Carthaginians already cover the Phoenicians. Likewise, there are already Persians in the original game.

Off-topic, but my Canon scanner software has been broken from the moment it was purchased.

Were Etruscans that similar to the Greeks in military matters? Because they weren't culturally the same.

Is localization of the website overview and/or open source page still ongoing, or is that also on hiatus?

But even a lousy animation is better than none.

The item in the middle is an intact temple, but the toppled columns are ruins. Keep up the good work!

Nice! They look good.

Yeah... I don't know nearly enough about modeling to understand what you just said. Sorry.

That's quite an interesting idea, though I think that using the same model with different textures and then keying the fauna to the biome would work better visually. Lions and tigers both lived in Turkey, Pakistan, India, and Iran in ancient times, so the maps located in those places would ideally have both. Also, keying fauna to the biome instead of the civilization allows players to travel their army far afield from their civ's homeland.