Sundiata

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...

@Rolf Dew, have you tried using Atlas though, because that's completely bugged on my end. Very frustrating to use... @however has used Atlas on a macbook pro (13 inch, 2017 model, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB) I can't delete anything, so everything needs to be done in one go some of my saved versions just disappeared after hours of work I can play some map-versions I made in Atlas, but can't actually find them in Atlas later ?!? I can't type anything in entities/actor search without every letter doubling itself. I have to copy paste the word I'm searching from a text-editor (every freakin' time) Random and repeated crashes, even though the game itself runs like a charm adjusting water height on a large map causes crashes

I can't, My 7 year old mac at the time was falling apart and I couldn't open A21 for some reason... A22 is way faster (and way better looking) than A20 though, that's for sure (but the new mac certainly helped that as well).

For some reason, macs run this game quite smoothly... Runs like a doozy on mine as well.

Yes

Sexy! But not so accurate... Warrior Queens of Kush, euhm, looked a little different Royal ladies: Lordgood's masterpiece: This one is kind of sexy and accurate, although she's more of Warrior Princess Try to give all the heroes a uraeus (rearing cobra) in the portraits if possible

You have nice books @Tomcelmare I love Minoans...

That's why it's an interesting discussion Agreed, random mass murder doesn't equate to genocide... The Roman massacres I've been referring to aren't random killings though. Nope, because those places were part of a larger demographic/cultural/ethnic/religious whole, which weren't ever targeted in their entirety e.g. wiping out the Belgians, Germans or Japanese was never on anybody's agenda. Wiping out the Atuatuci after they rejected Roman authority was part of the agenda. It wasn't an accident, and it targeted the tribe in its entirety. As I said, it's about what you're targeting. Carthage, the city was destroyed, but Carthaginians as a people and a culture were targeted in their entirety as well, making it genocide... The same goes for Corinth. A random massacre during a random siege doesn't equate to genocide, unless the entirety of a people, culture, history traditions or religion are embedded in that city (or town). It depends on the political reality on the ground, and the scope of the target. If all the Germans were rounded up in Dresden, and then Dresden was bombed, for example, that would constitute genocide. Since that wasn't the case, it's not... In the case of the Atuatuci, the Lusitanians, the Carthaginians, and the annihilation of Corinth, we see 4 unequivocal cases of genocide, committed by Rome. And those are just the clearly documented ones.

Ok, so let me just remark that the silliness of discussing "genocide" in the ancient world is not lost on me... The term came into existence in 1944... We're just testing wether or not the word can be applied to the actions of the Romans, e.g., in a modern international court of law, would the Romans be tried under The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as defined by the United Nations General Assembly, as: Article 3 defines the crimes that can be punished under the convention: Under the only internationally accepted definition of genocide, the actions of the Romans, in many instances, WITHOUT QUESTION, amount to genocide... That's completely besides the question and somewhat inappropriate... Hitlers actions in Auschwitz and other sites were repugnant "even" according to German standards... The fact that Galba wasn't even punished just rubs salt in the wound. Poor Galba... Poor Consul Galba... They even promoted this clown.... smh... .... The Atuatuci ceased to exist as a people, as a deliberate attempt by Caesar to eradicate their opposition to Rome, and send a clear message to other tribes. Step 1: march your Roman legions into sovereign non-Roman territory. (a territory known to despise Romans) Step 2: terrorize the people into submission Step 3: defeat a last desperate attempt of a free people to maintain their freedom Step 4: Sell the entire tribe, old men, women and children (non-combatants) into slavery as punishment for their resistance to Rome Step 5: congratulate yourself on this "not-genocide" I can just imagine Julius scratching his head after the whole affair: "Did we just "accidentally" annihilate an entire tribe? Again? Oops.... Luckily the term genocide doesn't get coined until 1944, so I think we're good". That's not the question, unless you're trying to argue that the Romans accidentally drove entire tribes into extinction... I'm not receptive to that kind of rhetoric... If you march tens of thousands of trained fighters into a sovereign territory that doesn't belong to you, then kill all the resisting enemy combatants, and subsequently sell off their women children and elderly as slaves, while demolishing their strongholds and burning their fields, and inviting other, more friendly tribes to inhabit the area, effectively erasing the the original ethnic, cultural, tribal or even linguistic character of the region, you're committing genocide... Not just any old genocide, no, we're talking textbook genocide here. Dude, it's not hard to say... "but were they targeted because of their tribe (genocide) or because they opposed the Romans?" ... Rhetorics... The TRIBES resisted Rome, so those entire TRIBES were targeted and disappeared off the face of the earth, as a result of mass-murder, mass enslavement and deportation (let's not forget rape) and the destruction of their property and livelihood... The fact that other tribes were left intact, even patronised, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that these were targeted extermination campaigns... Whether they decided to exterminate them when they first set off on campaign, or whether they only decided to exterminate them after having subjugated them already is irrelevant. The point is that there was a deliberate effort to erase from Gaul, any people (tribe) that resisted Rome. Caesar was not innocent, he confessed to many of his crimes in a rather braggadocious manner in his De Bello Gallico, which would definitely get him convicted on innumerable counts of genocide under The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as defined by the United Nations General Assembly. On another note, the examples discussed here are only some of the more clearly documented events. The majority of genocides in the ancient world would not have even entered the records, simply because the whole point of genocide is to erase a people...

Servius Sulpicius Galba's massacre of the Lusitani in 150 BC is a pretty blatant example of a Roman committed genocide... 10.000 dead, 20.000 sold into slavery.... Murdering the living daylights out of the Atuatuci after they rejected Roman domination and counterattacked in a last desperate gasp for freedom, and then selling 53.000 survivors in to slavery is another compelling example... lol, actually it does... The wholesale destruction of a community, with intent, is the definition of genocide... Nobody "accidentally" sells an entire town or city into slavery... That's also a part of genocide... Completely not taking into account that "Gaul" is a Roman invention, that says next to nothing about the actual cultural and political nature of the tribes and states existing in Gaul... Celts have a shared culture and language, to a degree, sure, but identified themselves primarily by tribe. Caesar and everybody else knew these tribes, their political disposition, and knew what the results of marching legions into their homelands would be. They specifically targeted some of these tribes for wholesale destruction. Through murder, enslavement and deportation, as well deforestation, burning of settlements and farms. Textbook examples of genocide...

I barely understand what's going on here... But I like it! I love how the dof comes into its own now..

@Alexandermb Daaayum... Good luck... Please stay away from American bombs though... Things can always get worse (look at Syria), so be careful what you wish for... How come Maduro is so entrenched??? The army supports him, I guess, but isn't the army part of the people, or are there other divisions I'm not seeing, because even a socialist can see the guy is messing up the otherwise beautiful country...