"Folk" - I'm more thinking of folklore...
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To me, C2C seems to start with
Australopithecus (note that you have to take *his* ancestor for the closest other still surviving species : chimpanzees + bonobos).
That would make the start roughly 4 000 000 years ago.
Note that out current (for now, fingers crossed) Ice Age -
the
Quarternary Period, with land-based ice all year long, especially in Greenland
- starts "only" 2 580 000 years ago
- it also suspiciously fits the range when we currently think the first Homo appeared !
Which has seen a significant number of interglacial periods : roughly 50 of them (they were more frequent before),
relatively short periods when glaciers receded to stop covering today's Canada, UK, Northern Europe and Northern Siberia, and sea levels rose ~100m thanks to the melted ice.
Impassable glaciers might be fairly easy to simulate, while sea level changes - not so much ?
In any case, with an early 41ky interglacial/glacial cycle, it would be frustrating for the player to see the landscape radically changing, up to every other turn early on ?
EDIT : Not *that* early on if Homo + Oldowan + Quaternary corresponds to C2C's Scrapping / Chopping / Piercing 1/3 up the way of Prehistoric... no idea about the climate before that - though looks like Antartica was *already* frozen even before
Australopithecus, starting around 15 Mya ?
Even
Homo sapiens has seen 3-6 interglacial periods, though he would have been "stuck" in Africa for all but the current one ?
One thing that I forgot to mention is how C2C seems to replicate
very well in gameplay this Out of Africa migration around ~50kya, with the Tribalism tech ?
Then later we *finally* get to our current, particularly stable (fingers crossed) interglacial : the Holocene, 11 700 ya, also not surprisingly, corresponding to first human settlements and the invention of Agriculture in the Near East ! (And C2C's Ancient era.)
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Funny, before even Laenaya posted his comment, I was just thinking how maybe adding a Sub Combat Type "Fantasy" would help with potential complaints of this type ?
I guess one problem is that IRL horse riding actually came *after* Chariotry ?
https://acoup.blog/2022/05/13/colle...chariots-scythed-chariots-and-carroballistae/
the two-wheeled war chariot, which was first developed on the Eurasian Steppe and percolated into Bronze Aged Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Egypt beginning in the 18th century BCE (though it takes a while to finally get all the way through the region) and China in the 13th century BCE
The war chariot as a battlefield weapon practically vanishes in the Near East beginning in the early Iron Age (there’s a transitional period, but by the end of the 7th century BC, it is functionally complete), because cavalry (in particular, horse archers) could do everything chariots could do, but better and with half the horses and half the humans.
(Other kinds of "chariots" saw more or less use up until (and including ?) WW2 ?)
Bronze Age is roughly the 2nd half of C2C's Ancient and Iron Age (Roman conquest ends it) is C2C's first half of Classical, right ?
(Though maybe that's for mounted infantry and (later ?) cavalry, horse
scouts were before or in parallel, since even a small horse barely able to carry a teenager and afraid of battle would work for that?)