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Tweet by Sandy Petersen @SandyofCthulhu:

One of the most fun civs for me to work in for Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome were the Palmyrans. They were also pretty obscure. I needed three civilizations to face off against Rome. For Rome's early days, I had the Macedonians (Epirus, for instance). For middle Rome I had Carthage. And for late Rome, I had to kind of go looking for a bad guy. I guess I could have had Huns or Goths, but Goths were already in the game, and Huns were soooo late that Rome was already Christian.

But I knew history, and I knew about the short-lived empire of Palmyra, and it's famous sexy queen Zenobia. How do I know she was sexy? Because historic movies & TV series have taught me that EVERY ancient queen was sexy. It's the rule.

Anyway Palmyra built itself initially on trade from Rome, but then it decided it deserved its own kingdom, and spread out. Though the major part of the Palmyran threat was only 50 years or so, it was a real menace to Rome. How do we know? The Romans said so. And they would know. Palmyra stood a sizable chance of taking down the eastern Roman Empire and actually did seize Egypt. If she could also get Anatolia, she'd control the vast majority of Roman wealth. If Zenobia's plan worked out, she would rule a more powerful nation than Rome and could dictate whatever terms she pleased. Fortunately for Rome, they saw the threat and Aurelian managed to crush Palmyra, capture Zenobia, and save the day.

Zenobia might well have won if she'd gotten more Persian support, or if Rome had been then ruled by someone like Commodus, Michael Ringas, or Elagabalus. Sadly, it was Aurelian, who was competent. Maybe she should have assassinated him. After all, when Aurelian DID die, his widow took over, and didn't do a great job of it. Finally the senate chose an elderly senator for the job. So yeah, bad luck for Zenobia.

Anyway, on to the Palmyran civilization for Rise of Rome!

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Because Carthage and Macedonia were both heavy military civs, I decided to have Palmyra be an interesting economy civ.

I started right out with giving them super-villagers. They had protective armor and worked 20% faster. However, I made their villagers cost 75 food instead of 50. This I felt would make Palmyra really interesting, because it totally changes the early game. So from the get-go you're focused on keeping track of what's going on. You can't just run on automatic.

I say that I gave them 20% extra work speed, and I did, but it wasn't that simple. You see, villagers do more than just gather stuff. They gather stuff. Then they walk to their drop site and dump it off, then they walk back to the gather point, path around their co-workers, and finally start working again. There's delay in all this, and I couldn't really avoid it. So in order to give them the +20% promised, I actually gave them extra, so that needing to walk around wouldn't reduce it too much. I'm told that in fact it ended up being something like 40-45% faster for most tasks, and about 33% faster for woodcutters and fishermen.

But another reason for this is I kept upgrading the work rate for the Palmyrans so they could keep up but left the description the same, still saying they got +20%. I didn't get called on it so ...

Now you start with 200 food in Age of Empires, and I didn't change this. This means that a normal civ can queue up 4 villagers immediately, while you can only do 2 (with 2/3 of a villager's food cost left over). So you need to get your dudes working as fast as possible! This was changed in the Definitive Edition to give Palmyra +75 food so you could dawdle around a little more. Wimps. Or maybe this was smart, because I'm told they actually also nerfed the villager work rate to a flat 25% instead of what I'd done. So the villagers were lazier and you had more food to pay for them. Well, as always, making the game more vanilla DOES make it better balanced. But not necessarily more fun.

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Palmyrans were famously rich, so I had two gold boosts for them. First, when you pay Tribute in Age of Empires, it gets taxed. Not for Palmyra. They get the full amount, which makes them the right guy to send money to. They also get more gold from their trade carts & ships. I think I originally had double the gold, but now it's been nerfed.

I realize both these bonuses are only good if you are playing a team game, but most of our games WERE team games by this time, and we assumed lots of other players were in the same boat. My apologies if we were wrong.

I had added Camels to the game for Rise of Rome, and Palmyra, based out of Syria, was an obvious choice for a camel bonus, so I made theirs 25% faster. They could strike in and out of your town quickly, and the high gold cost of camels wasn't as big a deal for Palmyra. This was their only military bonus - my logic was that they had such an interesting economy, balancing super villagers with regard to cost & work rate, they wouldn't need a lot of other nit picky things to worry about.

It did work though. Palmyrans were probably the most popular civ in Rise of Rome, and I think it's because of their weird economy. Also they were the only civ that specifically had a camel rider bonus. So I feel they were a complete and utter success.

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