Sundiata

Wow... Thank you sooooo much! That's incredibly useful, and can replace my written attempts for alpha 24... It will also help with recordings a lot! I would love to see the diacritics for the unit list as well. I was planning on doing this in the following months, but because I don't speak ancient Egyptian (and am not too familiar with diacritics), it's a bit of a pain... We'd especially need words/phrases and their phonetics for the following list for recordings. Anything from Late Egyptian to the Napatan Dialect is ok. Unless you're one of those 5 people in the world that understands some Meroitic, then that would be pretty cool too English What is it? My lord? I will walk I will go out against I will build I will work land I will gather together I will herd I will fish I will attack! I will repair I will hunt I will heal I will march! I will retreat! Battle cry I will garrison Unless the list has been updated? @wowgetoffyourcellphone Something like this: Archery Range: Pr Pdt (house of the bow) Cavalry Stable: Ih Ssmt (horse stable) Elephant Stable: Ih Abu (elephants stable) or probably more appropriate Meroitic: Ih Abore Siege Workshop: Pr iwn n ms (house of the movable tower)

Uhu, I know what fear of spiders is , but like you, I don't fear all of them. I especially dislike the huge fury ones that can kill you But I like jumping spiders a lot! They're supercute! They have legit mating dances! Luckily we have a lot of lizards (agama's and gecko's) over here which deal with spiders rather efficiently The lizards in turn attract a lot of snakes, which is less than ideal The snakes worry me more than the spiders, lol =WARNING= Graphic contents =WARNING=

Nice! Indeed: I'm cool with the direction you're taking I don't know about the others?

@Alexandermb, or, indeed, when reducing the height of the colonnade and keeping the side-door(s):

@Alexandermb Nice... Seen as the CC is a generic government centre, you have some artistic liberty and don't need to follow the exact facade, as long as it's convincingly Byzantinian. I'd suggest a more symmetrical approach: Moved the centre piece up a tad, making room for a central arched Byzantine dorrway. Brick corners on both sides. equal number of pillars on each side, removed the side doorway.

Huh... Interesting... I could have sworn grasses caused lag. Guess not, never mind me In that case, a lot of maps need to make much more use of grasses (that screenshot is pretty) , maybe some new types as well (shorter and longer grasses).

Lots of grasses, which are preferable for a realistic looking map, also cause lots of lag. Related?

I'm not an expert on China (not by a long shot), but what's wrong with the ji (dagger-axe with spear)?

The Kushites will be included in the main game in the upcoming release, very soon The first mod to introduce them as a playable faction was Delenda Est, and a second mod, Vox Populi also allows them to be played. You can also check out the latest version of the Kushites in the development version of the vanilla game.

@Alexandermb This is the Great Palace of Constantinople (bird's eye view): I'd suggest using the sea front facade as the Byzantine CC:

Ok, so I believe the Palatium Magnaura Senat was originally built before our timeframe, though I wouldn't know which parts are old and which ones less old... It will also easily be confused with a church. The "Port Monumental Du Grand Palais", to the right of the Senate dates to 532 AD... But it also looks churchy (and is basically just a glorified front door). I thought the first 3 images would be the obvious choice for a CC. They're all distinctly Byzantine, clearly administrative/palatial/governmental, and difficult to mistake for anything else but a CC. They're even reminiscent of the Roman CC in the vanilla game. They offer both continuity and uniqueness.

@Alexandermb I think the main issue with your byzantine CC is that it's only a very small part of that particular palace and seems to be some kind of forum, public meeting place, but doesn't have the feel of an administrative/government centre. It think with some polishing it would be great as a special building though. Byzantine Forum with some economy techs or something... Here are some more appropriate palatial structures from Constantinople as inspiration. These have a much more awe-inspiring feel, that the Byzantine CC should really have (also from the right time period): Some other stuff:

3000 year old horse grave discovered in Sudan, by archaeologists from Leiden So... my mom sent me a link... Turned out to be gold... lol! @Lion.Kanzen, . So a horse grave was very recently excavated in Tombos, in Northern Sudan. Tombos was originally a New Kingdom Egyptian administrative centre in Kush when it was an integrated province of Egypt. At least ten small pyramids were built for Egyptian noblemen. Later, Tombos became an important city/town of Napatan period Kush. So what's so special about the horse burial? Well, it's one of the most well preserved horses ever excavated in Nubia, and it dates to 949 BC... The oldest horse burial ever found in Kush, predating Piye's horse burials by more than 150 years! This period, c.950 BC was about 100 years after the collapse of the New Kingdom, but more than 100 years before the first attested ruler of the Napatan Dynasty, a period known as the "Nubian Dark Ages". Not much is known about this period. The horse was well cared for, and died at the ripe old age of 12 to 15 years. It was buried underneath the offering chapel of a repurposed pyramid of a New Kingdom nobleman. The bit that was found with it, together with the signs of stress in the ribs and spine suggest it was a chariot puling horse. The bit was made from iron... IRON! This 10th century BC iron bit is the oldest piece of iron ever found in Kush and one of the oldest in (Sub-Saharan) Africa, and may begin to reshape our understanding of the spread of Iron working on the continent. That's the actual horse... Schematic, showing a faience scarab for the horse. The bit, one of the oldest pieces of iron ever found in Africa (at least 949 BC) https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2018/04/discovery-3000-year-old-horse-grave https://www.livescience.com/62419-ancient-horse-burial-tombos.html

Kushites will be in Alpha 23. The Kingdom of D'mt and Aksumite empire are indeed both from the wrong time-period (500BC - 1BC). Garamantes are the primary African civ that could still be done, but that won't be easy in terms of reference material, and other factions like Scythians and Thracians are a little more important with regard to the other civs already in-game. That having said, Aksumites would be incredibly cool for Millennium AD. A tremendous amount of people have put a tremendous amount of effort into this and every other alpha update. You can follow the evolution of individual updates/bugfixes/new features etc. here: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/timeline I'm trying to figure out what you're saying here? That Napatan and Meroitic period Kushites were more Greek than Egyptian influenced? That would be incorrect. There is clear Hellenistic influence, but at no point in their history does it become dominant. They liked Mediterranean wine and the Greek language was known by at least some Kushites (for trade and diplomacy), but they remained firmly a Nile Valley Civilization till the very end, with their own unique twists of course. They worshipped "Egyptian" gods, continued using and adapting hieroglyphs, built pylon temples and truncated pyramids. The last temple of Amun was built in the 3d century AD, for example. No temples to Greek gods were ever built. Also the term Aethiopia ("place of burnt faces") in classical Greek literature refers primarily to Kush and not Axum. Only later does the term become more widely applied to areas south of Kush as well, including modern day Ethiopia.

Xiongnu actually built some (permanent) fortifications, but I'm having having difficulty locating pictures or reconstructions of the ruins. If those fortifications used similar construction techniques as the Xiongnu capital city of Tongwancheng or other "cities" like Khermen Tal, they would have been built from rammed earth and wood. Ironically, I think the Han Chinese rammed earth fortifications of Northern China are the closest approximation for Xiongnu fortifications I can think of. I suspect (pretty sure) they heavily influenced each other, and the radical difference in Han Chinese architecture on the steppe and Han Chinese architecture further south, indicates that steppe architecture indeed influenced Han-Chinese on the steppe. In short, Xiongnu should have access to unmovable rammed earth walls and fortress. Remains of Xiongnu fortification/palace at Tongwancheng: Han Chinese rammed earth watchtower in Dunhuang, built against the Xiongnu Something on excavations in Khermen Tal: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1088258.shtml

Or that... Thanks. My Latin is a little rusty, and by rusty I mean nearly non-existant Sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt is pretty much what I remember from high-school... Oh, and the compluvium and impluvium of the Roman domus, which actually seems to be missing in the Roman house models in-game, so I'll add that to my wishlist for alpha 24..

AI banter: The (enemy) AI sends scripted messages during the game: aggressive/arrogant when attacking, Valiant/confident when defending, begging/pleading when near defeat. Could be a nice space for some creativity and humor. Could be (partially) civ-specific/historic. Since it's "just" written sentences (taking only few mb's), we could have hundreds of them. Lot's of variety. Everyone in the community could come up with some Messages along the line of: "By Jupiter, I'll have you flayed for this" (after a successful raid on a Roman AI) "Carthago Delenda Est" (anytime a Roman AI attacks a Carthaginian player) "Vae Victis" (after Gaul AI destroys a Roman CC) "I'm sure we can find a way to settle this little squabble somehow" (when AI is near defeat) "By the gods, have you no mercy?" (when killing AI women) "I will erase from memory, your very existence" (when big AI army attacks) "Your walls will not protect you from the might of Ahura Mazda" (when Persian AI sees your walls) "You're town looks like it needs a remake" (when AI attacks) "Zeus will not abandon us" (when attacking a Hellenic AI) "Just because you do not take an interest in politics, does not mean politics won't take an interest in you" (when you refuse an alliance with Athenian AI) "The only true wisdom, is in knowing you know nothing" (when Athenian AI utterly destroys a player) “Spartan woman are the only ones who give birth to men” (When Sparta AI attacks) “He is richest who is content with the least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.” (random, passive Athenian AI) “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over the self.” (Hellenic AI when defeated) "I shall make Egypt taste the taste of my fingers" (when Kushite AI attacks Ptolemies) "where they make a wasteland, they call it peace." (When Briton AI is defeated by Romans)

Awesome! And pretty! The messed up thing about Kushites is that most archaeological sites have only been partially excavated. Many have never been excavated at all. That also leaves a lot of future surprises for us to look forward to

Brutal...

Seems like yes... Example:

Interesting... And how about the Tollense Valley battle c 1250 BC, in north-east Germany, with "people from across Europe" joining in the fray... Seems rather brutal, in a stone-age kind of way http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle

I'd strongly suggest just keeping it at "Byzantine Empire" or the "Byzantines". Keep the specifics about dynasties and such for the history descriptions/campaigns... This faction is basically going to be the "benchmark civ", that can and should be fully fleshed out, so I personally don't see any issues with concentrating on them next. Should be relatively "easy" with regard to research and refs. I love the double headed eagle, but it seems to be associated with the Palaiologos Dynasty from 1261 to 1453, though it was in use as a decorative motif before that: The Chi Rho symbol is also cool, but not exclusively Byzantine, and seems to have even fallen out of use during the early Byzantine period: What about a mosaic of the head of Justinian I?

Lovely unit-portraits jesus?

Nice...