LogFAQs > #954075618

I might be wrong, but I think the only older Italian states that could be classified as serious world powers were Venice and (if you count it) the Papacy, which wasn't a very large state in its own right but had a huge influence on European politics for a long time. The Republic of Genoa was the only Italian city besides Venice that held territory abroad as far as I know with some Greek islands and part of the Crimean peninsula, which makes them an interesting campaign in something like EUIV because they have multiple avenues of expansion. Tuscany and Milan were wealthy areas but they didn't exert that much influence anywhere else in the world, so you only started to see major Italian powers rise up after the Napoleonic wars through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Sardinia-Piedmont, which was the one to ultimately unify the country.

The book you're reading is The Civilization of the Middle Ages, right? I think that does cover an earlier time-frame than most of the stuff I mentioned so I can see why the French and Italian parts might seem a little less interesting. I think Spain was going through the Reconquista at the time for example, which is probably a little more exciting to read about than Italy being divided between the HRE and Aragon or England and France doing very little except fighting one another for centuries.

As much as I like Civ, it's probably the worst strategy game series I know for serving as a springboard into learning about real-world history because its randomized maps and religion system completely divorce pretty much every country from their actual history and no one plays the scenarios, which are the only campaigns to be based on real events or to really have any kind of context around them at all. EUIV does a good job simulating how scary the Ottoman Empire was for the nearby Christian kingdoms by making them OP as Hell, but in Civ they're a joke and there are no mechanics that deal with the various ethnic and religious differences among people in that nation (a Muslim state that had a majority Orthodox Christian population for a long period of its history,) or its conflicts with Christendom. I don't have any problem with the inclusion of Bulgaria on its own (even if it does seem kind of strange that they're differentiated from other Slavic countries when Poland and Russia aren't given how much more prominent those two countries were,) because I actually really like when games include more esoteric and weird countries. That's probably part of the reason I like Civ V Venice, how it has this status as a glorified City State. In theory, the idea of being able to play as the Papacy in Civ would appeal to me a lot, until I think about it some more and realize the game just isn't designed in such a way as to show off what made that country important and unique - the same goes for the Holy Roman Empire which I've always found interesting just because it was ultimately a really weird country in terms of how it was run.

It sounds like part of the issue with AoEII is that it has so many different scenarios about really specific points in history, but its actual faction pool is comparatively small and limited. If they are still doing updates, then I guess I'd like to see the Russians and the Poles both added, and then maybe the Bohemians to round things out, but then that would make the Slavs start to feel really out of place, and I can see how removing or rebranding them might seem weird now that they're already around. In general, it sounds like a lot of those campaigns could benefit from having new civs added to the game and then replacing the stand-ins that they have there.

I'd say the big difference between reading about Ancient history compared to Medieval is just that there are a lot more surviving sources and accounts from later times, which is both a good and bad thing because it means there's more specificity to read about but there aren't the mysteries that can make ancient history more intriguing - was Troy ever a real city, for instance, and was Socrates a real person? I'm like you at the end of the day, though, in that a lot of what I know comes from video games, lol - I'm probably most interested/knowledgeable on the part of history that fits into EUIV's 1444-1820 time-span.

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