How I created the Mayans for Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors. First off, I created them basically so the new building set for the Aztecs would be useful with more than a single civ. I didn't want the Mayans to have gunpowder or horses, so they needed some way to make themselves useful.

The Aztecs were already going to be the warrior tough-guy civ, so the Mayans needed to be a economic civ.

First off I created the Eagle Warrior to be the horse-substitute for both Mayans & Aztecs. This is a fast unit with a distinctive look (so you can tell it's not the same as other infantry). It's not as fast as cavalry, though so people with horses can still think they're cool. On the other hand, the eagle warrior isn't cavalry, so it gets infantry upgrades & isn't weak against pikes.

Eagle Warriors didn't have as much hit points as cavalry (since they're infantry) so I gave them a slight bonus against cavalry to help them compete one-on-one. They're a solid unit, which can be the backbone of your battle plan, but also which you can ignore if you have a better plan.

To replace the mounted Scout from other civs, I gave both Aztecs & Mayans a starting Eagle Warrior, which also had the side benefit of making them a little scary in the early age.
1/ But the Eagle Warrior, cool as it was, was shared between Aztec & Mayan so didn't make them distinctive. Because the Aztecs were so famous for their awesome infantry, I decided to boost the eagle warriors a bit for Mayans, and gave the Mayans a special tech which almost doubles the eagle's hit points. Ouch. The Aztec eagle warriors can still compete, because of the Aztec infantry edge (faster training & higher attack). So Aztec vs. Mayan eagles is almost a wash, but the Mayan eagles last a LOT longer against the Europeans.

Now that was taken care of, I decided to focus on archers for the Mayan main weapon. I had their archers be cheaper in the various ages AND their unique unit - the Plumed Archer - was one of the most interesting archers in the game. It was really hard to kill, for an archer, but had a weak attack. This made it able to kill things that are vulnerable to archers while it could last a long time against counter-archers.

I also chose to make Mayan skirmishers NOT be cheaper - so they were comparatively worse than their archers. The intent here was that they had good archers & eagle runners, and shouldn't rely on skirms. I hate civs that can do "everything" and didn't want the Mayans to be one of these.

Also I knew someone would complain about the fact that Mayans get access to crossbowmen. Tough. We're not going to make another whole new unit with identical stats to the European crossbow just for some kind of fake historical verisimilitude. Remember - our whole team was less than a 10th the size of Age 2. We had to pick and choose our battles.

Below are plumed archers from the Definitive edition which I think look cool except for their comically long and impossible feathers (can't think of a single bird besides Ostriches with plumes that big).
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What's the absolute worst job in digital gaming? Well I've been out of that business since 2012, but unless things have changed a lot, it's "playtester". I know teenagers all think being a tester is a dream job. Get paid to sit around all day playing games?! Woot!

Well, it's not like that. And here are five reasons why you don't want to be a tester. (At the end I give two reasons why you might actually WANT to be a tester.)

Reason One - you get the least respect in the company. You are the lowest tier of the organization. You're not part of any team, but just an adjunct, glued onto the team for specific purposes. You're not an artist, coder, designer, or producer, and everyone secretly knows anyone could do your job, so you're viewed skill-wise as about on a par with a day laborer.
1/ Reason Two - in any kind of company stress, it's the playtesters who get fired first. You don't want to fire designers, programmers, or artists, obviously. But playtesters? Hell, in a pinch you can get the designers, programmers, and artists to playtest FOR you. And in fact, they're doubtless doing it already. They'll just need to up their game during these tough times. So as a tester you have zero job security.

Reason Three - the work is deadly dull. You're not getting to play the awesome AAA games the company is known for. I mean you are, kind of, but you're playing the buggiest, most broken version of it. And the tasks you're set are like, "Play a real game, but near the end you need to get 100,000 arrows in the air at once so we can see if it crashes the game" This is a real task they were set to do on Age of Empires 2. Even better, we found that it only crashes the game about 7% of the time, so they had to get 100,000 arrows in the air after a half hour of play only to find it didn't reproduce the bug 14 times out of 15 and they had to try again.

The art is crappy pre-release art. The adventures aren't finished. The civilizations and units aren't balanced. The game is literally the worst it's ever going to be, and that's what you're playing. And when the game FINALLY starts to get good, it is finished, and you're moved onto another terrible buggy game.
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Here's why dinosaurs would be a real problem for us today if they got loose. Note that the following facts are not what was emphasized in the Jurassic Park movies. Dinosaurs have a completely different ecology from large mammals.
Mammals in general, particularly large mammals, are what we call K strategists. They breed quite slowly but have intensive parental care and live a long time. Take a hippo for example - it only has 1 baby at a time, usually every other year. But imagine trying to get to that hippo calf to eat it!! Once it grows up, that hippo lives 40-50 years. We think of this as the "normal" situation, because it's what we are too - we are in a sense the ultimate K strategist in nature.
1/ Now those of you with some ecology training will be remembering the existence of r-strategists. These focus on having lots of babies, like houseflies, possums, or dandelions. Many r-strategists (like houseflies or possums) also have extremely short lifespans. The idea behind an r-strategist is that it has SO MANY BABIES that some of them are sure to survive.

But dinosaurs followed a pattern which is not so widespread today. They had LOTS of babies, but also had some parental care. For instance, they have found the skeleton of an oviraptor guarding a nest of 24 eggs. Now, an oviraptor is in between the size of a modern coyote or wolf. Assuming (as is likely) that like most egg-layers, oviraptors had 1 clutch yearly, this means that an oviraptor had up to 24 kids a year. Compare to a coyote or wolf, which typically has 4-7 pups in a year. The oviraptor is reproducing four times faster.
Even worse, this applies to larger dinosaurs. They have found the skeleton of an adult gorgosaur (a type of tyrannosaur) with 7 half-grown gorgosaurs. Assuming this was a family group of a mom with kids, this means that a gorgosaur had at LEAST 7 kids at a time, and probably more, since it's likely not all the babies survived to half-grown. This is an elephant-sized predator hatching 7+ eggs at a whack. We don't know how long Gorgosaurs waited between egg clutches but I doubt it was over 2 years. Compare to an elephant, which has 1 baby every 2 years at most.

We know from fossils that Pachyrhinosaurus (2-4 tons) laid eggs yearly, and my guess is many dinosaurs followed this pattern.
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In early 2006 I was in charge of creating The Warchiefs, an expansion to Age of Empires 3. In Age 3, native sites were on the map, and you could ally with one by building a trade post. But the native town itself couldn’t be harmed.

The native towns produced unique units that were often helpful.

What I wanted to do was make full-blown playable native civs. 🧵 I chose three, which I felt would have different play styles. Iroquois, Sioux, & Aztec. The testers loved them. We moved right along. And then suits from Microsoft got involved.

A special “strike team” was sent to talk to us. They were ostensibly about localization but in reality their job was to make products worse so they wouldn’t offend anyone.

Before they laid into us, they showed us an example of their work. It was some MS business software.

They showed the first cover art for the software. It was a stylized sketch of a woman in a business dress. Classy & understated. The strike team said, “We can’t show a woman because it will offend some cultures.”

The replacement art showed stick figures at desks working. The strike team said, “This was unusable too, because showing a human figure offends some cultures.”

The final art was really stylized line drawings of computers at desks, empty and lifeless.

After showing this shipwreck of design, literally ruining the cover of this software product, the strike team preened themselves on their multicultural wisdom.

We were aghast. If that is the BEST example of their work they could find what the heck did they have planned for us?! 🧵

How to get your dream project - corporate politicking.

After my successes with Rise of Rome and The Conquerors, I was a shoe-in to do the expansion for Age of Empires 3. But I had a problem. The natural assumption everyone had was that this expansion would be Asian civs. I did not want to do Asian civs because it was stupid - 1600s Japan, India, China & Korea were emphatically not in colonizing moods. And believe it or not, I do care a little about historical verisimilitude. (Mainly because I think it makes the game more fun, but still...)

So what I wanted to do was to turn some of the Native Americans into playable civs. Why? I think Indians are awesome and I wanted to see them as more than the minor allies they were presented as in the original game.

But how could I do this? MicroSoft expected Asians. The suits in charge at Ensemble expected Asians. The other leads on the project expected Asians. And the rest of the non-lead team members expected Asians.

Here's how I went about it. (Oh yeah, if you thought the Warchiefs was dumb then you're a bad person with bad opinions. So there. But you may still find something useful in my tale.)
1/ First, I had to convince MYSELF that the Natives would be cool. I wanted to give them a new and interesting ability and make them undeniably cool. I worked on this for a while, coming up with the Firepit idea (which lets the Indian villagers dance for special powers) and the Warchief unit, which is way different from the European Scouts because the Warchief can "convert" wild animals on the map to his team which is super-fun. I also decided the three civs would be the Sioux, the Aztecs, and the Iroquois, which would be interestingly different. Later on they changed the name of the Sioux to the Lakota but I want you to know that I actually PHONED the Seven Council Fires and was told in person by native representatives that Sioux was a perfectly good term for them. Though of course Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota also worked. I stuck with Sioux as being more inclusive. (I assume the name was eventually changed because of white men activists, not natives, because it was white Seattle natives who thought it should be Lakota back in the day.)

The Aztecs wouldn't have gunpowder or horses, the Sioux would be heavily cavalry-based, and the Iroquois would be kind of a "high tech" Native civ. Anyway I was an easy sell, because I'd been thinking about this for a while.

Second, I took all the other leads (consisting of the producer, the lead programmer & the lead artist) out to a long business lunch and we hammered out all the details. Basically I proselyted how cool the natives would be, and how much neater a horde of screaming charging Sioux would be than a stand of Mughal archers. And by the end of that (3 hour) lunch I had them all convinced. I'd answered their arguments, presented ideas they liked, and got them on my side.
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The first real fight between Shermans and Panthers was at Arracourt, September 1944. It’s not widely known. It was an attempt by Hitler to keep Devers’ 6th Army Group, which had landed in southern France, from linking to Bradley’s 12th Army Group. 1/11 The German goal was to keep the two US Army Groups apart as long as possible so their troops trapped in France could escape. Patton’s Third Army was the target.

At the same time, Montgomery had launched Market Garden - the ill-fated airborne landings in Belgium & Holland. 2/11