Illyrian and barbarian tribes in Aggressors

[gwgardner]

There was an interesting and enlightening thread on the naming of barbarian and Illyrian tribes in the game, over on the Steam forum.

Captain_Narol asked why barbian tribes had collective faction names, like Germans, or Celtics. Whereas the Ardiaei tribe among the Illyrians, was specifically named. Here was the developer answer:

Hi Captain Narol,
thank you for your interesting question.

You are absolutely right that there are other factions in game with names like "German tribes", "Celtic tribes", etc. All these tribes were scattered over large areas and (at least) partially nomadic. It wouldn’t make sense to name them specific names because they would be too weak to survive in game and there would be too many of them. That is why we came up with the aggregated names like you noticed.

The nomadic nature of these tribes is also taken to the game - these factions start with mobile units (settlers, nomads and warriors) only and if you as a player decide to migrate somewhere else (than the start location is), you are free to go. Of course this migration might be stopped by already established empires like it happened many times in history.

There were several reasons to name the faction Ardiaei:
We wanted to very clearly distinguish between nomadic tribes and already settled factions.
Ardiaei was already different to those nomadic tribes. They were settled in a specific place with cities and had their own king and kingdom. The most famous leader was the king Agron[en.wikipedia.org]. It cannot be said about "Illyrians" in general.
It was also convenient from the balancing point of view. Settled kingdom is for sure more stable and challenging to defeat than nomadic tribes for which it takes many turns to settle down and create some kind of infrastructure. This kingdom created a "buffer" for too fast Roman empire expansion.
I hope that this at least partially explains our decision of having Ardiaei in game as a separate faction.