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I do like that they kept Poseidon as the shittiest of the Olympians. Which makes sense when you consider that the Greeks were a sea-faring people, and sailing at the time was treacherous as anything.
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Feb 27, 2018 19:09
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VanSandman posted:I do like that they kept Poseidon as the shittiest of the Olympians. Which makes sense when you consider that the Greeks were a sea-faring people, and sailing at the time was treacherous as anything. Funny thing, sea gods in almost every mythology are portrayed as capricious, temperamental assholes. 
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Feb 27, 2018 19:16
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Radio Free Kobold posted:Yeah, but the other cyclops are dumb enough to be fooled by Odysseus shouting "I am nobody! Nobody is here!", and then when they get their eye gouged out they say "Nobody did this!" and go around trying to find Nobody and exact revenge.
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Feb 27, 2018 20:14
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VanSandman posted:I do like that they kept Poseidon as the shittiest of the Olympians. Which makes sense when you consider that the Greeks were a sea-faring people, and sailing at the time was treacherous as anything. Are there any non-lovely Olympians? Athena maybe? I mean Zeus is the dude who transforms into a swan and rapes women. I guess Hades is also kind of less lovely, he's just kind of a dick and not as actively dysfunctional and terrible as most of the others.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:30
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Randarkman posted:Are there any non-lovely Olympians? Athena maybe? I mean Zeus is the dude who transforms into a swan and rapes women. I guess Hades is also kind of less lovely, he's just kind of a dick and not as actively dysfunctional and terrible as most of the others. Athena helps burn a man's kingdom to the ground for daring to tell her she wasn't the prettiest. Does the poor bastards working the forge ever sick anyone over? I don't think I recall any horrible stories about the goddess of the hearth either (hestia?)
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Feb 27, 2018 21:33
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FoolyCharged posted:Athena helps burn a man's kingdom to the ground for daring to tell her she wasn't the prettiest.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:33
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Randarkman posted:Are there any non-lovely Olympians? Athena maybe? I mean Zeus is the dude who transforms into a swan and rapes women. I guess Hades is also kind of less lovely, he's just kind of a dick and not as actively dysfunctional and terrible as most of the others. Hephaestus and Hestia come to mind.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:36
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FoolyCharged posted:Athena helps burn a man's kingdom to the ground for daring to tell her she wasn't the prettiest. Working the forge? You mean Hephaestus? I'm pretty sure he tries to rape Athena in the myth about the founding of Athens or some other city.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:36
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Randarkman posted:I mean Zeus is the dude who transforms into a swan and rapes women. Zeus rapey tricks also included transforming into a bull, a satyr, an eagle and golden rain. He also raped men and her own sister, you see, good ol'Zeus was open to all kinds of non consensual relationships.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:42
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Is there any pantheon that had worse gods than the Greeks'? Because, just goddamn.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:54
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Randarkman posted:Working the forge? You mean Hephaestus? I'm pretty sure he tries to rape Athena in the myth about the founding of Athens or some other city. Welp.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:57
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Randarkman posted:Is there any pantheon that had worse gods than the Greeks'? Because, just goddamn. Probably but very few pantheons a) were for literate societies that wrote their myths down and b) had those records survive to the present day That's part of why Greek and Norse pantheons are the ones that come up so often. They just have the best records of the thousands of dead religions.
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Feb 27, 2018 22:12
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Randarkman posted:Working the forge? You mean Hephaestus? I'm pretty sure he tries to rape Athena in the myth about the founding of Athens or some other city. Yep! That story doesn’t actually make much sense with anything else we know about Hephaestus, but it WAS a story about him. However, we have a much bigger and worse case of him being horrible: Harmonia’s Necklace (included as a relic in this game and I think I commented on it in mission 22). After Aphrodite gave birth to Ares’s daughter Harmonia, Hephaestus decides to pull a Hera by taking vengeance on the child and any random passerby. So he made Harmonia a cursed necklace that ruined the lives of everyone who came in contact with it. This caused like 5 myths worth of terrible stuff. Harmonia and her husband Cadmus were cursed into incurring the anger of the gods and turned into snakes, a descendant was Semele who got the necklace and then Hera showed up and tricked her into asking Zeus to show his final form, and Jocasta was also a victim of it and ended up accidentally marrying her son Oedipus, etc. The necklace is a minor detail that’s left out of many tellings of all these stories, but it’s supposed to be in them. Hephaestus caused all of those terrible things to happen to totally random mortals because he was mad at his wife. God logic. Hestia was pretty swell though.
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Feb 27, 2018 22:22
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Cythereal posted:Hephaestus and Hestia come to mind.
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Feb 27, 2018 23:55
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Cythereal posted:Funny thing, sea gods in almost every mythology are portrayed as capricious, temperamental assholes. One notable exception being Njörðr, who was a pretty swell dude, possibly because the vikings were much better seafarers and relied heavily on boats and fishing for transport and simple survival, respectively.
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Feb 28, 2018 00:01
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I wish we had been able to see more of the Son of Osiris unit. It sounds pretty cool and it's such an interesting concept with it's powerful attacks, healing but inability to recover health itself.
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Feb 28, 2018 04:33
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Monocled Falcon posted:I wish we had been able to see more of the Son of Osiris unit. It sounds pretty cool and it's such an interesting concept with it's powerful attacks, healing but inability to recover health itself. Never, ever, ever make one when playing against Zeus, tho.
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Feb 28, 2018 04:37
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my dad posted:Never, ever, ever make one when playing against Zeus, tho. Everyone does this once.
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Feb 28, 2018 05:24
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I remember Son of Osiris helped me out in a weird bug I had while doing a skirmish map against an AI, way way back. I attacked its base, and then one of the caravans kind of... swam away a little ways into the ocean. Like it was completely underwater in what should have been impassable terrain, since my guys couldn't get to it, I dunno how it got there, but none of my archers and other ranged units could hit it- the projectiles just vanished when they hit the water... until the SoO stepped up, and  got em.I mean of course I don't think I needed to actually kill the thing, I could've just left it, but I was very aggravated that it DARED to defy me and deny my complete eradication of their entire civilization.
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Feb 28, 2018 05:45
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Munin posted:And even with Persephone he ended up being far nicer than most of the other Greek gods would be in that kind of situation. Hades did get the permission of Persephone's father, Zeus, before he abducted her. He just decided to come out of a chasm in the earth to drag her to the Underworld instead of telling her that her father had agreed to let him marry her.
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Feb 28, 2018 06:39
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Hades is a big goon, lives in the basement, bad with women, hoarder.
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Feb 28, 2018 07:21
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OwlFancier posted:Hades is a big goon, lives in the basement, bad with women, hoarder. He has a dog instead of a cat though
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Feb 28, 2018 07:24
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cheetah7071 posted:He has a dog instead of a cat though Which just goes to show he really is both the nicest and the most reasonable god.
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Feb 28, 2018 07:27
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Melth posted:Which just goes to show he really is both the nicest and the most reasonable god. He really is, on both counts. Seriously read the myth of Orpheus- despite all the tragedy and angst of the whole situation, it's clear that Hades is both deeply in love with his wife, and doing his best to help a dude with a bad situation.
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Feb 28, 2018 08:07
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White Coke posted:Hades did get the permission of Persephone's father, Zeus, before he abducted her. He just decided to come out of a chasm in the earth to drag her to the Underworld instead of telling her that her father had agreed to let him marry her. To be fair, that was kinda just how Greeks did things. I love the Dresden Files' interpretation of that myth, though. According to Hades, Demeter was just an extremely overbearing and overprotective mother in law who couldn't bear to see her little girl grow up and leave home.
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Feb 28, 2018 14:08
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CommissarMega posted:He really is, on both counts. Seriously read the myth of Orpheus- despite all the tragedy and angst of the whole situation, it's clear that Hades is both deeply in love with his wife, and doing his best to help a dude with a bad situation. I love the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that there's an alternate interpretation where Hades was toying with Orpheus all along and was never intending to allow him to escape with Eurydice. I don't buy it, because it's a much nicer...or, well, less awful? story the other way, but that's out there.
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Mar 1, 2018 03:47
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Oh wow, I must have fundamentally misunderstood something about Zeus' blessing cause I recall trying to distract the main forces like an idiot before having Arkantos fight the statue because I didn't realize how broken he was and feared he might die. The Poseidon statue regenrares health at an incredible rate too I think so I thought he needed the backup. I love how the gate starts spewing out massive amounts of enemy reinforcements at the end. I also remember having to deal with Polyphemus, who is one hell of a cyclops unit and plowed through my army. I think he was mentioned in a previous video but he is the single strongest Greek myth unit (and probably overall Greek unit) in the game. HannibalBarca posted:I love the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that there's an alternate interpretation where Hades was toying with Orpheus all along and was never intending to allow him to escape with Eurydice. I don't buy it, because it's a much nicer...or, well, less awful? story the other way, but that's out there.
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Mar 1, 2018 10:08
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The one I heard has Hades not wanting to let Eurydice out at all, because what kind of God of the Underworld would he be if people could just walk in or out. However, Persephone wasn't having any of that, and asked Hades to consider what if he was in Orpheus's position, and Persephone was in Eurydice's, which was when Hades had a change of heart, and gave Orpheus the simplest trial he could think of, and that he could legally give. Unfortunately Orpheus was too suspicious at how simple the trial was, and too horny to not want to see Eurydice's tits, so of course he looks behind, fails the test, and has to wait until he dies before he can be reunited once more. With all that being said though, Greek myth is a mess, and it's quite possible all the versions of the myth being discussed here were told somewhere and somewhen in the Hellenic area.
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Mar 1, 2018 10:15
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CommissarMega posted:With all that being said though, Greek myth is a mess, and it's quite possible all the versions of the myth being discussed here were told somewhere and somewhen in the Hellenic area. It's important to remember that organized religion, with codified dogma that is reinforced over its entire geographic area, is much less common historically than you'd think. It didn't really hit the west until Constantine manhandled his bishops into agreeing on a single version of Christianity. So all the various Greek cities told different versions of the myths because in a very real sense Ephesus and Athens didn't have the same religion, they had different religions that shared many common elements. I mentioned Ephesus specifically because it's a pretty noteworthy example of the gods we know being worshiped very differently. There was a very popular earth mother style goddess called Cybele in the non-Greek parts of Turkey, which Ephesians adopted from their neighbors. Except they wanted to worship their own gods instead of foreign ones, so they decided that Cybele, as a female goddess associated with nature, must be Artemis (who is basically nothing at all like an earth mother in the version of the Greek pantheon you usually hear). Artemis-as-Cybele was the main cult in Ephesus even, and produced some very striking religious art, such as this: 
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Mar 1, 2018 10:57
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Is Arkantos now an available god to worship? It'd be an interesting reward for completing the story campaign.
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Mar 4, 2018 04:41
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Glazius posted:Is Arkantos now an available god to worship? It'd be an interesting reward for completing the story campaign. Sadly, no; it would be cool if he were a god for the Atlantis expansion pack civ.
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Mar 4, 2018 05:10
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HannibalBarca posted:Sadly, no; it would be cool if he were a god for the Atlantis expansion pack civ. Due to story reasons that wouldn't make much sense.
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Mar 4, 2018 15:26
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Hunt11 posted:Due to story reasons that wouldn't make much sense. Not that the gods you DO worship make much sense either...
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Mar 15, 2018 17:41
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I'm back! And so is Reginleif! Scenario 1: Close to Home They never stood a chance.
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Apr 15, 2018 17:51
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I'm glad you scheme for the thread, Melth. Looking forward to seeing what you next have in store. I never beat any of the expansions so from here on out it's all new for me.
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Apr 16, 2018 06:00
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Ahaha, yes! Welcome back, Melth. Interesting that Hades is the bad guy in this little scenario, though? Maybe a red herring for the actual campaign, if you were to play it first?
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Apr 16, 2018 09:20
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Not only that, but the scenario specifically cites Erebus as the realm the undead are coming from, despite it happening in Norse lands, as told by Norse characters.
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Apr 16, 2018 21:26
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I wonder if an earlier vision of the AoM campaign placed much greater emphasis on the three sides fighting each other. The game's artwork and advertising shows it a lot, and it's understandably part of the game's appeal, but in practice you spend most of the campaign fighting the same culture you're playing as. Different primary god, but most of the campaign is Greek vs Greek, Egyptian vs Egyptian, and Norse vs Norse. This scenario could be leftover from an earlier iteration of the game's story where the three sides fought each other a lot more.
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Apr 16, 2018 21:32
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Cythereal posted:I wonder if an earlier vision of the AoM campaign placed much greater emphasis on the three sides fighting each other. The game's artwork and advertising shows it a lot, and it's understandably part of the game's appeal, but in practice you spend most of the campaign fighting the same culture you're playing as. Different primary god, but most of the campaign is Greek vs Greek, Egyptian vs Egyptian, and Norse vs Norse. Yeah, that was my thinking about it too. It certainly feels like something that might have been intended to be promotional material for an early, less sophisticated version of the game.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:05
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Melth posted:Yeah, that was my thinking about it too. I was thinking it might have been originally developed as a level in a Norse campaign. Dial down what pops out of those gates and restrict it to the first couple of ages, and you've got a pretty decent second or third campaign level with a hugely powerful hero to keep the training wheels on. Reginleif mentions it's the village she grew up in, so easy to imagine a Norse campaign opening with Reginleif catching Odin's attention in some huge battle and becoming a valkyrie, then returning to protect and lead her people when the Greek and Egyptian gods start poo poo.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:28
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