post-0 AD idea: mythology

[Lion.Kanzen]

I can Help with that, living in Mesoamerican Zone. my Country have Mayan past. if you Implement a kind "Battle of Gods". even History Channel Latinomerica do a Documental About Mesoamerican Mythology.

This about Coatlicue:

also known as Teteoinan (also transcribed Teteo Inan), "The Mother of Gods" (Classical Nahuatl: Cōhuātlīcue [koːwaːˈt͡ɬiːkʷe], Tēteô īnnān), is the Aztec goddess who gave birth to the moon, stars, and Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and war. She is also known as Toci (Tocî, "our grandmother") and Cihuacoatl (Cihuācōhuātl, "the lady of the serpent"), the patron of women who die in childbirth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJiZf7yaVeQ

[idanwin]

I'd forgotten how much I loved this idea!

[oshron]

We can Share Units. i think all mod can Support each to others. even with Idawin can think in Giant Baal as Cheat for Bronze Mod(Aristeia).

We have Already Egyptian Units for New Kingdom.

sounds interesting. i'll have to look at yours and compare with mine

We could break that 3-gods standard, Oshron, and just make a shared god-worshiping tree for them, then for those who don't have as many major gods could have more minor gods. I'd like to see Ares as a fourth Greek major god, too. Then instead of good/neutral/evil, it would be more like air/sea/dark/fierce units.

I am fond, too, of other cultures besides these mainstream AoM cultures, I'd personally love to see some mesoamerican gods/entities.

A personal comment: I don't like that stereotype of "good-neutral-evil", mostly because i think Zeus is sometimes much more evil than Hades, Prometheus fate's just an example.

Godstorm is supposed to be a spirtual successor to AOM, hence the good-neutral-evil setup even though almost all of the gods presented are most certainly not like that. i mean, all of the Greek gods--and i mean almost literally ALL OF THEM--are pricks anyway. the designation of good-neutral-evil is partly for campaigns and scenarios, giving a designated stereotypical good, neutral, and evil subfaction within each civilization. when you get right down to it, though, those definitions are left up to one's own opinion and someone who consistently plays as Hades, for instance, will definitely see him as the good guy in-context with Zeus, Poseidon, and whoever else being the bad guys (and as a note, in the original AOM campaign, the major god of the bad guy was "neutral" Poseidon, not "evil" Hades)

I can Help with that, living in Mesoamerican Zone. my Country have Mayan past. if you Implement a kind "Battle of Gods". even History Channel Latinomerica do a Documental About Mesoamerican Mythology.

one thing i plan to do is pretty much completely revise the Aztec pantheon when it gets to that (i just felt like posting about the Hindu revisions because we've started covering them in my World Religions class and it gave me some ideas). for instance, Quetzalcoatl will get his legitimate treatment as a culture hero rather than as a monster; if he's still a major god, he may have a special thing where he doesn't require sacrifices to get favor for the player (rather than having a bonus that makes sacrificing easier) as well as being the designated "good" major god (iirc, i had him as "evil" before)

[oshron]

A brilliant idea just occurred to me. I mentioned in my previous post (from eight months ago ) that almost all of the Greek gods were pricks. In fact, I read recently that there were three in particular who weren’t: Hestia, Hermes, and Hades (though even then, it’s more to the effect of them not getting as pissed off as easily as the others ). In fact, iirc, the individual Olympians were so petty that they could get angry at mortals for worshipping a different god instead of them!

Anyway, here’s the main idea. The Greeks in Godstorm have a unique trait where, when they choose a particular Minor God to worship in order to advance to the next Phase, they (metaphorically) lose favor with the other two gods from that Phase (even if they didn’t get the option to worship one of them in the first place since it’s always a two-god option) and get a negative addition to the benefits given by the other two gods for not doing so (for instance, if you choose to worship Artemis to advance, then you get all the stuff Artemis will give you, but Hephaestus would take away some of your weapons and armor strength and Apollo would weaken your healers as a result). The trade-off, however, is that Greek myth units are slightly stronger to make up for it in addition to whatever benefits they may have gained during the course of a game already (for instance, taking a Relic that would improve them in some way). I think this accurately represents the pettiness of the Greek gods and makes the Greeks more unique.

I got a second idea at the same time as well. Remember my mention of Hestia, Hermes, and Hades earlier? I’m thinking that I’ll completely revise the in-game Greek pantheon so that those three are the initial gods that you can pick after selecting your Major God, and they don’t take anything away from you (as something of an early-game courtesy) to represent their not being as vindictive as the rest, as well as reflecting their comparative importance or power to the other gods presented. This means that Hades would no longer be the “designated villain” of the Greek Major Gods. Who will take his place? Why, Hera, of course! Arguably the pissiest of all the Greek gods (well, except maybe for her husband ) but she definitely would be the typical villain as far as Zeus—the “designated hero” of the Greek gods—is concerned. She was merciless towards any of Zeus’ children that weren’t her own (and even some that were her own; Hephaestus still hasn’t recovered from her throwing him off Olympus the day he was born!) and is always ultimately the villain in vaguely accurate renditions of the tales of Hercules (Disney notwithstanding)

In summation:

• The Greek gods being jerks is represented by aspects of the Greek civ being slightly worsened by choosing to worship a particular god
• Greek myth units are slightly stronger than comparable ones from other civs to make up for the above
• The Town Phase Minor Gods are revised to Hades, Hermes, and Hestia and WILL NOT subtract from civ elements
• Hera is now the “evil” Greek Major God in the good-neutral-evil setup

EDIT: a small amendment--Demeter and Hephaestus were also among the less vindictive Olympians

Edited November 14, 2013 by oshron

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

Perhaps you could consider Athena to be a slightly reasonable goddess. She is, after all, the goddess of wisdom.

[oshron]

Perhaps you could consider Athena to be a slightly reasonable goddess. She is, after all, the goddess of wisdom.

she also turned a woman into Medusa because she was raped in her temple. it wasn't the poor woman's fault at all: Poseidon chased her into the temple where she pleaded for Athena's help, was ignored, and then Athena got mad when she was violated in the temple despite the fact that she had refused to shelter her in the first place. she COULD have stopped it, but didn't, and then punished the VICTIM.

it's not nearly as bad as Hera or Zeus or some others, but that's still just plain mean, to say the least

[oshron]

i came up with another idea last night. it would kinda cut back on each civ's uniqueness, but i think it would allow for a (slightly) more accurate portrayal of what their respective religions were like. simply put, favor generation is redone such that all (or almost all) methods are available to each civilization, but only count for a certain percentage of their favor generation capabilities depending on how much that practice was undertaken by that civilization in history or how important it was, with respective unique methods as they've already been described being the most productive.

this is very much incomplete, but here's what i have so far:

1. expansion: basically the Atlanteans' favor generation method from AOM, you gain favor by building an empire in the name of your god; the actual buildings used would probably vary from civ to civ, but these would be fully-functional buildings that just have the double-purpose of pleasing the Major Gods of a given civilization
2. fighting: basically the Norse's favor generation method from AOM, you gain favor by having your units fight the enemy (hunting counts as well) because combat pleases the gods for one reason or another
3. garrison: you place units in a special building, which would be different for each civ, and they generate favor; this is based on the Greek favor generation method that was devised, using a theater in example which honors the gods
4. mass: every unit you create generates favor, just at a very slow rate, so it would be beneficial to try and reach your population limit; it's based on the Christians' method that i devised, admittedly a bit of a cop-out
5. meditation: you have a special unit that generates favor by being stationary/being commanded to enter a trance, allowing them to communicate with the gods and coax favor out of them
6. monuments: basically the Egyptians' favor generation method from AOM, you build statues and the like to honor the gods, which would of course be unique to each civilization and probably add some of their own benefits
7. offering: similar to the market functions, the player "sells" other resources for favor, and this would largely replace sacrificing for civs that didn't practice sacrifice (or didn't do it very often)
8. prayer: basically the Greeks' favor generation method from AOM, you send people to the temple or another building (depending on civ) to pray around it, essentially gathering favor like they would any other resource
9. sacrifice: you sacrifice people or animals using a special altar building to generate favor very quickly at the cost of your own units

there are probably some others that could/would apply, but those are what i have for now

[Radagast.]

Egyptian Language - Can't this be shared with the BronzeMod too?

http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12743&p=210143

Interesting and terrific research. The faction count might be possible. Especially as we now have other Fantasy mods which at least share a bunch of units like the Minotaur.

http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12743&p=204120

Your last ideas to differentiate the favour look well-thought. I would just never implement the cruel things of those myself. The remind me of books I read. And I think I should some day read more of those books.

Just don't give up on that one. And good you have the database around. Now some sketches/conceptual images to each entity. And the (blender)artist would probably just model it for fun and blenderguru's competitions.

Edited May 2, 2014 by Hephaestion

[oshron]

it may be cruel (by modern standards) but it's a fact. and besides, an actual brutal human sacrifice wouldn't be shown: the units are just sent to the altar and disappear, giving you favor in exchange

[FueledByOCHD]

Yea well I would do research having many ways would be to clustered. From what I remember there where close to 2000 different ways to gain "the favor of gods" in Egypt different sects thought different things did and followed same gods

[oshron]

Yea well I would do research having many ways would be to clustered. From what I remember there where close to 2000 different ways to gain "the favor of gods" in Egypt different sects thought different things did and followed same gods

that's what's called an acceptable break from reality. it would be way too much work to include all two thousand ways the Ancient Egyptians honored their gods. i WILL have to look into more specific means by which the Egyptians worshipped their gods, but for now their primary placeholder will be building monuments

[Radagast.]

Okay. I agree on your points.

I think building monuments is a good compromise. I like it a lot. This [your listing] is already quite mature in my opinion.

[FueledByOCHD]

Monuments where the main sects way of gaining favor oh and sacrificing prisoners was up there to this usely done at monuments

[Lion.Kanzen]

http://aom.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=st&fn=19&tn=29300&st=5

Here is a mod based in Natives civilization ( precolombian empires)

[oshron]

been over a year now, so i don't remember if i mentioned this before: i think i've worked out how the "worship" system for this idea would function. instead of there being civilizations with three Major Gods to each like in AOM, i've decided that choosing your Major God and subsequent Minor Gods will be handled like technologies: in order to advance out of the Village Phase, you need to build a Temple and then select one of the Major Gods available to you, and repeat the process for the other Phases as well--selecting one would be a prerequisite for advancement rather than exactly HOW you advance, and this would also enable certain other aspects of gameplay, namely certain units (mainly myth units but in some cases mortal soldiers and heroes) as well as buildings and some other techs. in particular, to emulate AOM a bit, selecting a given Major God will enable the Minor Gods that were assigned to them otherwise.

i've also decided that not every civ will have the good-neutral-evil dynamic anymore. most of them still will, but some will just have a good-evil dynamic, namely for the monotheistic civs.

[oshron]

i came up with an idea for internal justification as to how heroes and certain myth units can continually reappear. i believe i mentioned the Percy Jackson series earlier in the thread? i'll refresh everyone's memory: in that series (which is alot more truthful to the myths than it may look like on the surface) the continued presence of certain singular, unique beings and monsters such as the Minotaur and the Nemean Lion--which were killed in the original myths--reappearing is that they don't actually die, they crumble into dust when they're killed and are briefly set to Tartarus until they're reincarnated in new versions of their old bodies, retaining their memories but also leaving behind some spoils (when Percy kills the Nemean Lion in one book, for example, it leaves behind a modernized version of its pelt as a lion-skin jacket)

anyway, for a bit of artistic flair, i decided that myth units that you can only have a limited number of at a time (the actual number will be determined by "tier" depending on when they're available, with the top-tier only allowing one at a time) turn into different substances when killed, depending on what resources were used to train them. for simplicity, it'll be that each myth unit only costs two resources: one standard (food, wood, stone, or metal) and favor. myth units that cost metal oxidize and crumble into rust, units requiring wood ignite like an enemy in an old video game and burn up into ash, they wither into dust if they cost food, and they erode into sand if they cost stone. heroes, on the other hand, take a cue from AOM by showing their spirits rising into the sky (i guess you could call this the equivalent to the other four for favor). keep in mind that these types of death would be excluded from more unique insta-kill deaths (like being turned to stone by a gorgon, for example)

[oshron]

hey, all. been a while, hasn't it?  more than two whole years!

i just thought i'd pop in and post something in the hopes of getting some constructive comments and other suggestions. though i haven't posted here in a long time, i haven't stopped thinking on this project. the biggest thing i came up with for it is a proper setup of civilizations based around the idea of properly-themed expansion packs. that also means that the roster of playable civs has expanded from twenty to thirty. the idea i came up with is, after the vanilla game, there's one expansion pack loosely connected to each of the original civilizations. i've even almost worked out which civs go to which, i'm just missing a few and thought i'd post about it here in the hopes of getting more ideas for what could be missing. to try to keep things simple, i'll post the original five civs (partly just to remind everyone) and the expansion civs that would correspond to each of them.

• Greeks: their expansion's theme is classical/Mediterranean
  • Christians: the idea is essentially the same as before, but i'm changing it to just two Major Gods--God and the Devil, of course--with there being more significant differences between them where their mortal units are much more different from one another and, in place of myth units, God gets various crusader units while Satan doesn't get hero units at all and has all the myth units instead, but they "share" Minor Gods in a new way where i've decided to diversify the various pantheons where some of the more dichotomous civs will have more than three Minor Gods to a phase but still share myth units and God Powers where applicable, so God gets saints and archangels while Satan gets demons as their respective Minor Gods--for balance purposes, Christian crusaders and monsters both fill the roles of heroes and myth units
  • Hittites: this one could go to either this pack or the Mesopotamian one, but i decided to give them to the classical-themed pack because i'm connecting them so heavily to Troy, giving them more of a connection to both the Greeks and Romans
  • Iberians: i can tell i'm still gonna have alot of trouble with this one, but i'll do my darnedest to make them authentic; the advantage now is that i no longer need to give them three Major Gods and that simplifies everything
  • Muslims: like the Christians, i'm whittling them down to just two Majors got representing God and the Devil as perceived in Islam, with God having prophets and Minor Gods and the Devil getting demons/genies/etc.
  • Romans: pretty much the same as before, but now they'll be including a late-game option to incorporate emperor-worship as well, which will allow them to represent either the Republic or the Empire, and their more wide-ranging Minor Gods will be able to be made more specific by selecting one of several mutually-exclusive myth techs based on various cult names of Roman gods
• Egyptians: they get a "mysterious" theme based on conspiracy theories, including one in particular...
  • Aethiopians: some solid ideas for a Sub-Saharan African civ occurred to me recently and i really warmed up to the idea; unfortunately, they're rather generic similar to the Mississippians but my goal is to base them as closely on authentic Ethiopian culture and mythology first, (based partly on "Ethiopia" being a historical name for the entire African continent and i'm using the archaic spelling to emphasize that) then on peoples and cultures most closely associated with the real-world Ethiopian people(s), and then on other African cultures only as filler (except for their myth units, which will come from all over the continent)
  • "Ancient Astronauts": a mostly fictional civ, they'll be something of an amalgamation of OTL cultures subjected to the ancient astronauts pseudohistorical conspiracy theories, though they might be a bit superfluous since that theory will also be acknowledged in other civs, but it's also very tempting to use ancient astronauts and ufology as inspiration for another civ; it would probably include references to lots of public-domain sci-fi, maybe even War of the Worlds by having Martian tripods as siege weapons (or an organic facsimile of them as a myth unit)
  • Aztecs: possibly redone as broader Mesoamericans to incorporate the Mayans as well--i'd already been planning to include references to them anyway by way of myth units
  • Inca: i'd been considering either this or the Iberians for a while, but now that i'm expanding the roster of civs they'll both be included; i've also learned some about the Inca in the past few months so that helps
  • the Egyptian-based pack is still missing one civ!
• Norse: based around cultures which came from far away, especially over the sea, to conquer/colonize new lands
  • Atlanteans: only a possibility right now, i'd rather not include another fictional culture that will just be borrowing from the Greeks again, especially since the obvious choice of basing them on Age of Mythology with the Titans as their gods is already taken by the Cro-Magnons--it would require a good amount of research to find some "authentic" Atlantean gods to use instead, probably based on Atlantean pseudohistories
  • Polynesians: unchanged, nothing else to say
  • Semites: more or less unchanged, but the Hebrew faction will be getting its own set of Minor Gods mostly apart from the rest with one side allowing the player to represent Judaea (the ancestors of modern definitive Jews, and the reason why the religion is specifically called Judaism) by only selecting prophets and no other deities while the other allows representation of the Israelites (those who became the Lost Tribes of Israel) who still worshipped the Hebrew God but also started believing in some more polytheist gods due to intermingling with non-Jews
  • Turuk: a possible addition to this pack, or else they'll go to the Celt-inspired pack; they're a generalized Turkic civ but their main inspiration is the Mongols, also encompassing other steppe nomads
  • the Norse-based pack is still missing 1-2 civs!
• Celts: all the civs for this one are based on stereotypically "savage" and "pagan" cultures which are usually used as antagonists or which have/had demonic connotations in the past
  • Cro-Magnons: they're reassigned from earlier in development but still have the Titans as their gods, though they might be renamed/re-themed as more generalized Antediluvians
  • "Cthulhu Cults": this would be the only uniformly evil civ in the game, based on the Cthulhu mythos by H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and others; since this one is based on published fiction and not actual mythology, after all, i'm more than willing to drop this one if either a more compelling idea comes up or if it turns out that there isn't enough content to make a working in-game pantheon
  • Mississippians: still the generalized Native American representative
  • Slavs: still the eastern European civ
  • Turuk: a possible addition to this pack, or else they'll go to the Norse-inspired pack, meaning that the Celt-inspired pack might be missing one civ!; they're a generalized Turkic civ but their main inspiration is the Mongols, also encompassing other steppe nomads
• Mesopotamians: a strictly geographic theme, all these ones are based out of Asia, and not just the Far East, either
  • Buddhists: one of my more recent ideas, my current thinking is that their Major Gods will represent geographic centers of Buddhism, and they'll incorporate Himalayan culture in general, taking on some aspects originally planned for China; they could also be a "technical pacifist" civ, but then again Buddhist extremism and violence isn't unknown both today and historically, so....
  • Chinese: essentially unchanged, but maybe their Major Gods will be centered around various Chinese religions instead without going into the "good-neutral-evil" dynamics like originally planned; the alternative is that they solely represent Taoism but could still have content from other Chinese religions, particularly Confucianism; EDIT: it could be that the Chinese factions are based on the Three Kingdoms period more as an homage to Romance of the Three Kingdoms than anything else
  • Hindus: more or less unchanged--i'm still deciding what i'll be doing with their Major and Minor God representation, would could be that each Major God only gets their own avatars and some others, or their avatars are omitted as Minor Gods but included as inspiration for either myth units or heroes
  • Japanese: essentially unchanged, but i haven't decided who their Major Gods are beyond Amaterasu
  • Persians: unchanged, they represent Zoroastrianism

any thoughts on all this?

Edited January 5, 2018 by oshron

[Rolf Dew]

@oshron Hi, the council of modder and myself have started a mythology mod, we thought you would be interested in it. 

 

Edited January 22, 2019 by Rolf Dew