Civ "Pers" -> "Achae"

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I propose we change the "Persians" in the game to "Achaemenids" to differentiate from other Persian empires (one of the likely civs for 'Empires Besieged' would be the Sasanians, another Persian empire). This would entail a lot of changes under the hood, but mainly to just XML files and some jsons, file name changes, etc. I could take care of the pull request for it. Just trying to gauge from the group if anyone would have any objections. 

 

This is in the Development forum due to it requiring a large Pull Request to change it (again, a PR I'm willing to personally take responsibility for). 

[Deicide4u]

I voted for, but does this mean the game is pivoting away from including "Civilizations" to including "Empires"?

For example, we had Hellenic civilization before, but it was split into nation-states and later Greek "empires". 

Edited Saturday at 09:43 by Deicide4u

[Thalatta]

Well, since there's Han and Mauryans and not just Chinese and Indians, it seems to me this has been the path the game has been taking for a while, whenever possible (for Britons, Germans and Iberians is a bit more complicated but maybe at some point enough information will be gathered to instead have at least a couple of representative tribes from each). Sasanians and Parthians, also Persian empires, for sure will make an appearance at some point in the base game, so a change from Persians to Achaemenids seems a necessity.

[Genava55]

I don't think this is a problem to have various designs, and I believe the proposal of @wowgetoffyourcellphone is justified. We need to have a flexible concept, sometimes we'll want to represent a people or a civilization from a specific period, sometimes a nation, sometimes an empire, and sometimes a dynasty. We just need to be clear about it and explain it well in the civ's design.

Edit: And it’s really good to finally start thinking about what comes next. I felt like this 'Empires Besieged' expansion was constantly being put off until tomorrow, and that people were refusing to give it any thought. It’s clear that not thinking about it creates problems for the expansion’s design, and that we really need to lay the groundwork now, despite the lack of leadership. 

Edited Saturday at 10:39 by Genava55

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

13 hours ago, Genava55 said:

Edit: And it’s really good to finally start thinking about what comes next. I felt like this 'Empires Besieged' expansion was constantly being put off until tomorrow, and that people were refusing to give it any thought. It’s clear that not thinking about it creates problems for the expansion’s design, and that we really need to lay the groundwork now, despite the lack of leadership. 

@Stan` and I have actually started a repo for Empires Besieged here: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/empires_besieged. 

The last change was 11 months ago, but I'm working on things in DE (Guptas and Sasanians; a big thank you to @Duileoga and @Lopess) which will directly translate to EB at some point in the future.

So, whether EB becomes it's own "game" or an "era" or an "expansion" or a "release" is up for debate. I personally advocate for a "0 A.D. Eras" concept, where players can swap between eras (Empires Ascendant, Empires Besieged, Masters of Bronze, Millennium AD) and only play those civs, or choose to play with all civs available at once. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

The gigantic pull request:

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8881

[Genava55]

On 19/04/2026 at 2:23 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

@Stan` and I have actually started a repo for Empires Besieged here: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/empires_besieged. 

I know, I saw it. And it is really a great idea you had.

On 19/04/2026 at 2:23 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

So, whether EB becomes it's own "game" or an "era" or an "expansion" or a "release" is up for debate. I personally advocate for a "0 A.D. Eras" concept, where players can swap between eras (Empires Ascendant, Empires Besieged, Masters of Bronze, Millennium AD) and only play those civs, or choose to play with all civs available at once. 

The idea is good. You are pointing out the issue about the Persians, but we could have the same issue with other civs no? Romans and Germans notably.

[Stan`]

For germans, I was wondering if we could explore the inverse of what the game used to do with with the "hellenes" faction. That is choosing a civ being Cimbri and others and phase 1 is specific with maybe some bonii techs and phase2 and 3 (and 4 for de) are common for civs that eventually unified.

[Genava55]

2 hours ago, Stan` said:

For germans, I was wondering if we could explore the inverse of what the game used to do with with the "hellenes" faction. That is choosing a civ being Cimbri and others and phase 1 is specific with maybe some bonii techs and phase2 and 3 (and 4 for de) are common for civs that eventually unified.

I proposed something similar with coalitions:

Personnally I would prefer something enabling the possibility to have unique units, techs and buildings through the tribes chosen. 

Coalitions are how historically the "barbarians" and the small nations were able to defeat massive empires. 

[Emacz]

39 minutes ago, Genava55 said:

I proposed something similar with coalitions:

Personnally I would prefer something enabling the possibility to have unique units, techs and buildings through the tribes chosen. 

Coalitions are how historically the "barbarians" and the small nations were able to defeat massive empires. 

thanks to you we have celtic coalition buildings in CWA  and if you give us some more ideas (Ill ready your post) we could include more!

 

Edited 4 hours ago by Emacz

[Thalatta]

2 hours ago, Genava55 said:

I proposed something similar with coalitions

So, when talking about Germans, the idea seems to be to control a coalition, and one chooses which tribes join it, unlocking different units, buildings, techs, heroes, whatever. I like this, since it would save a lot of headaches regarding what tribes to ignore from them, not to end with lots of civs that look similar (same with Britons and Iberians). I would add that maybe for these factions the “starting tribe” could be selected beforehand (or as a free pop-up choice at the very beginning), not to start with some unspecified tribe. If one in particular is needed for some campaign, this initial selection would be locked, and their name set accordingly (if that’s possible). Regarding the Greeks, it seems a bit more problematic because they are quite fleshed out already (since we know way more details about them), whole leagues would be too heterogeneous. If the problem to solve is that certain scenarios need to consider city-states that are not included in the game, then there could be a generic Greek template for them (I guess the original one is still around).

Maybe a bit unrelated but somehow connected on how to prepare certain things for the future: some time ago I’ve read about the “Grand Vision” (adding lots of epochs and factions to the game), which has the issue of how to deal with factions that didn’t exist in certain epochs. Some have mentioned they don’t want to have civilizations separated into eras, others that don’t want Mycenaean Greece vs Byzantine Late Empire. I think a solution is to have a faction epoch graph that would make factions available if they had come into existence by the starting epoch chosen. It doesn’t make sense to start at 400 B.C. with the Seleucids, one would have to choose the Macedonians (or maybe the Persians, that’s why it’s not a tree but a directed acyclic graph), and at the appropriate epoch, given the choice to stay Macedonian or switch to Seleucids or Ptolemies. If Macedonians are chosen, later on there’s the Roman conquest, so one would need to switch to them. If alternative history could be an option, one could choose to stay Macedonian (this doesn’t mean everything goes, Ptolemies in 400 B.C. is not alternative history, but nonsense), but then one would need to make up the characteristics of this faction from a parallel universe. Anyway, although the switch could be done between scenarios, doing it in the middle of a scenario would show that the game can handle these historical changes seamlessly with a gameplay feature. This could be a solution regarding what I mentioned in https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/143241-thoughts-on-the-spartans/?do=findComment&comment=750127 about trying to be historically accurate with techs: "Persians and Seleucids would have almost completely different techs, since one completely preceded the other chronologically".

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

7 hours ago, Genava55 said:

The idea is good. You are pointing out the issue about the Persians, but we could have the same issue with other civs no? Romans and Germans notably.

Yep, I agree. We can cross that road when we get to it.  

 

6 hours ago, Stan` said:

For germans, I was wondering if we could explore the inverse of what the game used to do with with the "hellenes" faction. That is choosing a civ being Cimbri and others and phase 1 is specific with maybe some bonii techs and phase2 and 3 (and 4 for de) are common for civs that eventually unified.

Imagine AOMR's minor god choice mechanic, but with Germanics choosing the tribes to add to their confederation in each subsequent phase. This could be specific to the Germanics or we can extend it to any civ where it makes sense. 

[Thalatta]

31 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Imagine AOMR's minor god choice mechanic, but with Germanics choosing the tribes to add to their confederation in each subsequent phase. This could be specific to the Germanics or we can extend it to any civ where it makes sense.

Extended to wherever it makes sense would save headaches. Regarding tribal confederations, it would be nice if the choice tree corresponds to probable historical alliances, usually driven by geographical proximity or customs, resulting in a less heterogeneous and more specialised confederation.