Yom said:
What's the point of having a Falasha civilization? AFAIK, they only numbered around 100,000 when they were still in Ethiopia. If it's supposed to represent a civilization to go with Queen Gudit/Yudit (Judith in English), I'm pretty sure she took over Axum and ruled it without having a separate civilization of her own (i.e. it was more the result of a civil war than being defeated by another civilization).
Simply because I thought it would be interesting. In fact, the Falasha did, in the later Middle Ages, have a semi-autonomous existence. They had their own areas with their own rulers, who paid tribute to the empire, and who spent half their time rebelling and fighting the imperial troops. This was especially so in the fifteenth century. Now you could choose to model that with civil disorder or something, but I thought it might be interesting to have a proper civil war. It's exaggerated, of course, because in this game they will be in a locked war, when in fact there weren't non-stop hostilities in real life.
In fact it's this later, fifteenth-century sort of situation which is more accurately modelled by what I've done here. Yodit's rebellion, although famous in legend, is very obscure, and I understand that most historians now think that, although Ethiopia apparently was invaded by a hostile army led by a queen, it was most probably a pagan one rather than a Jewish one. But the date of this invasion coincides very nicely with when this scenario starts, and I wanted to make an unusual challenge by placing one civ inside the territory of another, at war with it, and with only military units and no settlers or cities. So I thought I'd go with the traditional explanation that this was a Jewish uprising. However, the Falasha in this scenario will be able to build pagan mercenary units if they have access to minor tribes.
It's important to bear in mind that the distinction between "uprising" and "invasion" is not so clear-cut in an African context. Most African empires have been, to some extent, federations of basically distinct societies, as one group or tribe gains dominance and forces all the neighbouring ones to pay tribute. When that dominance breaks down, the subject tribes may rebel - but is that an uprising or an invasion? It depends on how you see it. For example, the rise of Mali over Ghana, or of Songhai over Mali, could both be seen as one civilisation overthrowing another, or as elements within a civilisation taking over the existing system. Similarly, the Ethiopian empire was rather loosely defined, since it involved both areas under the emperor's direct control and client states that paid tribute. The Falasha were somewhere in between these two conditions, especially in the later years when they were less well integrated into Ethiopian society.
That's the thing with scenario creation, I think - you have to balance realism with playability. But then a game like this is always about "what if?"s rather than simply retreading what really happened.
As for the tech trees, of course I can't design a tech tree for one civ without also committing myself to the structure of the tech trees for the other civs, since they must all have the same structure (if the arrows aren't to look wrong). I do in fact have a fair feel for the Falasha tech tree so I am hoping to finalise that soon. None of the Arabian civs will be playable, though, so I don't have to worry about that. They have their own techs, so you can't trade techs with them, but they are just "dummy" techs to ensure that they don't get all their units at the start. Obviously there will be less tech trading than usual in this game - although it should still be an element of the West African group, since there are four civs there that share the same techs.
[EDIT] I forgot to mention - the 100,000 figure refers to the estimated numbers of Ethiopian Jews after their final defeat in 1624. Before this time, it is thought there were about half a million of them.
