Benin Warriors (31/03/08)

Fantastic units, I think that these are the most interesting ones that you have done to date. I have a question about the name though, is it pronounced with a hard "i" or a soft "i".

Thanks
 
Back on topic, and shameless plug, I added in Benin as a civ in my mod, replacing the US of A. But only in the alternate biq(I have two versions with different civs in each biq). I'm using all of these units. Thankyou for making them Plotinus.
 
Fantastic work! After watching The Colour of Magic last night I reckon these will work perfectly for Krullian units in the Discworld mod (the Krullians wernt coloured, but the gear is spot on!). I dont surpose there is a horse unit for these in the pipeline too?
 
I was sure black was the un-PC way to put it, as it is now un-PC to ask for black or white coffee. Apologies for any offence caused.
 
At the advice of a wonderful Jamacian lady, I've come to prefer "brown" and "pink." ;)
 
Currently in my mod, I have 3 civs for the African continent.

Maghreb (succession of Carthage, Moors, North Africans)
Egypt
Africa.

Africa is a mix of different Black African countries and units.

As we now have more units available, I'm considering two options:
- I keep one civs, but use several flavour units (benin warrior, Ethiopian spearman), and possibly several flavour at the same time (so you have the possibility to build for instance both Ethiopian and Benin at the same time, and you select which one you prefer)
- I split the African civ in two. What should be the two new "African civ", keeping in mind it's an epic game so it should be a name suitable for the whole game. Plotinus, any advice?
 
I've got 5: Egypt, "Carthage" for the North Africans ("Maghreb" sounds cool, too), "Zululand" for Southern Africa, and then "West Africa" and "East Africa." I put the Nubians & Ethopians in with the latter, and will probably put these Benin dudes in with the former. It's a nice division of the continent: North, South, East and West -- plus a bit of the Ancient Near East!
 
I can't think of a better way of doing it, at that scale, than Mithadan's, to be honest. I think that if you want to split up your "African" civ then the main divisions will be east, west, and southern Africa, so if you can only turn it into two rather than three, you'll have to choose. Personally, if I had to choose just two, I would probably have one for West Africa and one for East Africa and leave the southerners out, but that's just because I know less about the southern civs. Also, I think there are fewer units suitable for southern Africa than for the others now. Even so, lumping all the eastern ones together is not ideal. I might replace East Africa with just Ethiopia, since that's a more major and interesting civ than most of the others around there (controversy!). I think the west African civs are a bit more similar to each other than the eastern ones are to each other so it's probably not so bad to lump them all together. You could use some of the more primitive-looking African units I've done before (the generic "African Archer" and so on) for the earlier units, and then use these Benin ones for later units, perhaps; and then you could use the Ethiopian ones for east Africa, or Ethiopia, or whatever.
 
There's also an argument to be made not to include the Zulu, as what we're really talking about historically is the migration of the Bantu-speaking "Civ" moving southward and eastward, displacing the Pygmies and the San. It was one of the great and cruel ironies of history that, after two thousand years of migration, the "Bantu" lost the race to the tip of southern Africa to the Dutch by an historical hair.

-Oz
 
Well, West Africa, I suppose. If you limited it to Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, you could call it Sahel. But if this is to cover all of history it would be better not to do that, because you'd want to include the areas to the south which today are far more populous - one fifth of all Africans are Nigerians, for example.
 
I refer to "Bantu-speaking peoples" because the ethnographical term for the people AFAIK is still, "Negro" which is otherwise viewed as problematic. Again, these peoples populated most of the sub-Sahel part of the continent, with one contigent eventually becoming Zulu in the early 19th century.

Best,

Oz
 
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