Heaven’s Reference Pages

Civilisations

The civilisations in AOE and ROR come in several flavours. Every civ has some bonus, apart from that the technology tree and the period in which the bonuses matter decide how strong civilisations are. Some civs get economic and military bonuses, others only get the military ones. As a consequence there are fast civs and slow civs.

Fast civs have economic bonuses that can be used right from the Stone Age. This group includes Shang (cheap Villagers), Assyria and Yamato (fast Villagers), Minoa (cheap FBs). Some include Phoenicia (gather wood faster and can carry more).

Gold dependent civs are all civs that don't get chariotry and therefore can't get any advanced units once they run out of gold.

Then there's the question of build-up in an RM game. Most civs work well with a berry start and a standard routine of building up after that, Persia and Palmyra require a special approach but can be very strong if they get through their weak start.

DM is entirely different of course, here the military bonuses are more important in the early phases of the game. Cheap units (Yammy, Choson's Priests, Phoenie, Minoa, Macedonia, Rome) only matter when the players run out of their initial supplies.

The remarks about the computer player in single player games (by Peter) refer largely to nomad starts. Remarks for Multi Player are by Phill Phree; remarks for DM by CenturionZ_1, assuming a standard DM - RoR, Iron Age start, Revealed Map and Hill Country Map.

The following table is organised by Tileset, i.e. the graphics the civs get in the game. Therefore, although the Macedonians were Greek and Carthage was a Phoenician colony (and, come to think of it, the Phoenicians weren't Greek either), in the game they have the Roman Tileset.

Egyptian

Babylonian

Greek

Asiatic

Roman
 Assyria
 Egypt
 Sumeria

  Babylonia
 Hittite
 Persia

  Greek
 Minoan
 Phoenicia

  Choson
 Shang
 Yamato

  Carthage
 Macedonia
 Palmyra
 Rome

 Gamespot also provides some good information and hints for the civilisations.


You can find a hoard of links to very good historical information about most civilisations on the sites below:
 Non-western links, a collection of historical information of pines.hsu.edu.
 The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook, by fordham.edu, a great site with any complete texts of historical sources like the Code of Hammurabi, the books by the Greek historians, you name it.

The only bad thing is that some of the links are dead and you can't access everything there but there's enough for a lifetime.


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