What are cool unused historical empires to make fantasy versions of in games?

There is a saying in swedish called "polsk riksdag"; it literally translates to "polish parliament" and refers to a group that constantly argues and is completely unable to reach a consensus.

It's an interesting setup for political stuff I can tell you that.

>A Baltic country that doesn't care bout 'MUH JESUS' so much

Friendly reminder that Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the majority of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by land area before unification) were the last European nation to convert to Christianity.

He gets a bonus on his home continent and a bonus to building national parks.

Romania led by Vlad Tepes.
Zulu led by Shaka whatshisname.
Ukraine led by Olga of Kiev.

>Russia in Europe and not in Asia
Disgusting

The important part of Russia is European.

>Ukraine led by Olga of Kiev
It wasn't Ukraine which isn't a real country. That was Kievan Rus.

>literal who rulers
why? what for?

>mali

Yes... reverse jews. Friendly rich folk that crash the entire elven and orcish economy by just giving away way too much gold to the needy.

But it did stuck pretty hard.

They've always been an empire with feet in both worlds, they literally began their Nation's history by throwing off the Yoke of the Golden Horde.
The best part is that he was like, 'Oh shit dog, i'm sorry!' and tried to buy it all back with Goods on the trap back from his Hajj.
My favorite period of their history was when the whole of the country was in essence a fucking army for Napoleon; they were trying to cross the river Seine and a bunch of polish Uhlans rushed ahead to try and get the enemy across the river first, they were swept away by the current and as they were sucked under were heard to cheer, "Viva la Revolution, Viva Poland, Viva Napoleon!"

What happened to them? Did they all drown or were they fished out or killed while they were in the river?

I strongly advice against doing 1:1 fantasy counterparts of real world empires no matter how obscure.

Why not just make a *fantasy* empire? Seriously.

Holy roman empire led by Frederic barbarossa

>they literally began their Nation's history by throwing off the Yoke of the Golden Horde
I guess Spain is Africa/Middle East then?

Economically, yes

>foot in both worlds
Partly, yeah.

It's easier to count the used ones. I mean, even fucking Rome isn't used that often. And when was the last time you saw Alexander's empire, Achaemenid Persia, Assyria, Carthage, Byzantine Empire, Turkey or anything post-medieval at all? And this is pretty much a list of THE most important and famous empires in history.

Rhodesia

Make a community of some kinda fantasy race that makes a nice territory even when its surrounded by orc clans or something and it far surpasses it technologically and socially.

>conflating anything that can be tangentially inferred to be any kind of nationalist bent with the purest waifu ever made

F
Please see me after class

You sound like a really tiresome person to be acquainted with.

China.

What are you talking about? Rat people are super common in fiction

The Mongol Horde's actual territory/administrative side
>Pretty much total religious freedom
>Fairly decentralized rule
>Local population is recruited to actually *run* things.
>The conquering warlords are fairly relaxed with their subjects and can be seen acting like dorky tourists with foreign cultures when they aren't committing brutality.
>The horrible "bringer of the end times" is a bit of a family man and scholar.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire
>Less an actual Nation and more the personal property and domains of a family
>At any one moment the barbaric horseman you're dealing with could reveal his lastname is Von (Something or Another)
>The 'public face' of the family is more or less their 'summer empire' so to speak
>"Oh yes, you met our Centaur cousins. A bit rough and tumble, I'll admit, but they're an absolute thrill at parties!"
>You seem to find these people in every single fucking kingdom
>They typically offer other family members' hands in marriage as rewards for completing great quests.

Sicilian Mafia Families as a kingdom
>Aristocrats used to have a fairly tight hold on all aspects of a relatively 'insignificant' country
>Hold the concept of a 'Vendetta' close to heart
>"Duels are for idiots and brutes, if a man wrongs you, do everything possible to *destroy* him in spirit and soul."
>Suddenly find their holdings in danger due to a powermad tyrant conquering their nation.
>Have to put aside decades of vendetta to free their country
>Place blood purity and filial piety as paramount importance.

Abassids, Umayyads, Timurids, Mughals, any of the Indochinese Nations, Manipur, the HRE, Novgorod, a lot of the Knightly Orders, Burgundy, Ethiopia.

And if those aren't good enough for you, just pick a region, pick a date, and figure something out from there.

>They typically offer other family members' hands in marriage as rewards for completing great quests.
I like this idea, where they keep marrying off their rivals to get them out of the way by creating problems for heroes to solve that necessitate such a reward.

Well, here's a list of all the civilizations I have acquired mods for in Civilization V.

NORTH AMERICA
Haiti, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Blackfoot, Cree, Dene, Inuit, Tlingit, Zapotec, Aninshinaabe, Calusa, Chinookan, Cherokee, Olmex, Sioux, Toltec, Buccaneers

SOUTH AMERICA
Argentina, Chile, Chimu, Caral, Mapuche, Gran Colombia, Nazca, Tupe

EUROPE
Switzerland, Belgium, Prussia, Sardinia-Piedmont, Scotland, Papal States

AFRICA
Benin, Kilwa, Kongo, Mali

ASIA
Australia, Philippines, Vietnam, Samoa, Canon Pirates

ANCIENT WORLD
Garamantes, Hittites, Israel, Dacians, Harappans, Xia, Akkad, Nubia, Minoa, Qin, Sea Peoples, Phoenicians, Sumer, Hyksos, Massagatae

This is above and beyond the standard Civilization V nations.

>Canon Pirates

*Canton Pirates, I mean. Under Ching Shih. D'oh.

Speaking of, I have the Buccaneers under Henry Morgan and the Canton Pirates under Ching Shih; I wish someone would make a Barbary States civ and a few other pirate civs so that I could have a big ol' priate game of Civilization V.

Classical Persia doesn't get enough airtime-- at least, not covered in a way that's distinctly persian. Ditto for the Phoenicians-- people are always talking about them but only rarely actually trying to use them as a direct inspiration.

The Dacians are another one that merits some more use than it sees. Or the Nubians, another kingdom that gave the Romans trouble (and only of the only major empires that the Romans never managed to defeat).

Great ZImbabwe is a another example... but I don't know if we really know enough about it to paint a clear enough picture of the empire that we could base anything fictional on it.

India definitely needs more coverage.

Italian city states is very nearly a cliche IMO. (The politics of the free cities in ASoIaF is an obvious example.)

Ethiopia. Churches carved down into the bedrock, the male relatives of the king kept in a gilded cage setup in a castle on top of a mountain to prevent them trying to seize power, all sorts of fun stuff.

The Sueloise (Greyhawk) were Persian, or, at least, PIE (Proto-Indo-European)

Could be, depending on the level of breeding, they have a "secret" cadet branch of the family that are all Dragons and/or powerful mages and other stereotypical "bad guys", one that a few especially influential family members trot out when they want to make their family rivals "disappear".

Could be the entire family knows about their "evil" kin, but keep them around (and well-funded) because they're politically useful, they never put their "good" family in any serious danger, and they'd lose a great deal of social status/value if it came out that they were breeding with "monster races".

>I don't know anything at all about history.
Seriously, you should have at least heard of at least a third of them, even if you're pathetically ignorant. Really, there's about a third of those who are pretty much the most famous dead person from that country. Gilgamesh isn't even a real person!

Spotted you, Boris

>That was Kievan Rus.
Neither is this a real country, it's an invention of XIXth century nationalist Ukrainian historians that the Soviets shoved down everyone's throats. This country has never been called that at any point in history. The name is simply Rus, or the Rus Land, which is how its people called it.

Switzerland, specifically Canton Bern, is a very interesting example of an extremely small, but an extremely multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire that expanded almost solely by conquest. A fair amount of cantons in today's Switzerland are split off parts of Bern that gradually seceded as the country was growing less oligarchic.

Even today, Switzerland is a country of three (technically four) rather different nations, most of which are also divided internally by religion and culture, which have much less contact with each other than you would think (next to none outside of the big cities). You'd think a country so incredibly heterogeneous is a natural candidate for falling apart, but the people are some of the most unabashedly nationalistic you would find anywhere in the world.

You must be absolutely historically illiterate.

Just like nobody called Byzantine Empire Byzantine Empire. These are conventions you dumbass, they help us historians easier understand what they're talking about.

>they help historians
Fix, I'm not a histiorian.

Rus is a neutral name, Kievan Rus is loaded. Hmm, what should I use as a neutral historian?

>Tumblr noses
Who thought this was a good idea?

Gnomes are already a fantasy staple.

Fuck off gatekeeper

Makes people look like old alcoholics.

>Kievan Rus
>The Rus people living in and around the town of Kiev
>Loaded

The East Indian Trading Company

They lived in and around the town of Novgorod, and even there they weren't natives, as they came from Eastern Sweden. Kiev was merely a seat of power whose importance was constantly waxing and waning. For the most part, the state was not centralised at all, and the duke of Rostov couldn't give a fuck about the Duke of Kiev. Calling it Kievan Rus makes exactly as much sense as calling HRE Magdeburg Germany, i.e. zero.

Partial point awarded. Still it's used to disambiguate the state known as Kievan Rus from the many other principalities in the area which also lack historically accurate names

The cuotl of Rise of Legend are inca/azrec inspired

This guy has the right idea.

You want something unique? Fucking make something unique. Basing it on real world cultures too much leaves you with shit > pic related

Witcher

It's really Germany with occasional Polish names.

IIRC, Israel was in Civilization: Call to Power, and their leader was David.

It's a different beast altogether. Fictional states explicitly based on real ones should not be compared with purely fictional ones, even though the latter often end up based at least partly on real world states, as it's extremely hard to completely eschew our frames of reference. They use different sets of tropes and appeal to different audiences. It's really like comparing the Old World to the Mortal Realms. Apples and oranges, really.

I think he meant just Incas, as they are quite different from Aztecs or Mayas. Yes, there are a lot of works where authors just think "oh there were those indian empires in latin america, with pyramids, human sacrifice and obsidian swords, who gives a fuck about their differences", it ends up being mostly Mayan and Aztec-ish. The cuotl have nothing from Incas as far as I know, the name itself sounds Aztec and the gods' names sounds Mayan.

>Developers are Polish
>Setting is just Germany with Polish names

lol ok

>Based on Polish fantasy books

That's what Medieval Poland essentially was.

Wrong. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a massive nation for its day(late middle ages). No such thing as 'Germany' even existed then. German states did not see themselves as part of some greater 'German' whole until centuries later.

Not really.

Does anyone dress like this in the Witcher? The architecture is also decidedly not Polish with all the timber framing, which was a German style and only utilised by Germans in Poland (of whom there was a plenty)

Well, Poland is mostly made of either Eastern Germany with Polish names or Western Ukraine with Polish Names...

Should I remind you how the entirety of East Germany is historical Polish territory colonised by the Saxons? Let's just not go there.

North Sea Empire.

Make sure to include the father of the nation solely responsible for the settings version of the Boer Wars motivated by his own greed.

Assyrians. They enjoyed killing lions in their free time and enslaving/force-ably moving populations.

Pre-Colonization/Romanization Philippines. Tons of different tribes from all fucking over, along with mooselims winding up in the jungle and converting the southern half to Islam, with long-standing tribal grudges clashing against the new religion.

Vietnam, circa the rebellion against ancient China. Shit like dragons-on-fairies.

His home continent is the national park.

>Teddy Roosevelt
>fighting against the scourge known as National Parks
You might want to check whoever's feeding you memes, user.

I'll do what this user did. r8 my mod choices

THE AMERICAS
Cherokee, California, Confederate States, Deseret, Trinidad & Tobago

EUROPE
Bulgaria, Cornwall, Teutonic Order, Wallachia, Ireland, Denmark, Bohemia, Lithuania, SFR Yugoslavia, Thrace, Corsica

AFRICA
Benin, Numidia, Dahomey, Ptolemaic Egypt, Rhodesia

ASIA
Hittites, Umayyad dynasty, Seleucids,

How is California a country?

That could be pretty cool. Have the setting be an Age-of-Mythology/Everworld-esque situation with several different cultures all led by their god/s.

>Germany
>led by Barbarossa
This will never not trigger me

>except for that one time they got Ashoka, India always gets Gandhi

FFS, he wasn't even a head of state.

...

It's not?

>cornwall
Leader: Jethro
Bonus: you play better when you play drunk

Wouldn't call the latter empires, and I am Italian. Tough it is interesting as an idea, because coastal republics were good as much as they didn't finish up in a signoria. If faithful to history, you shouldn't have 100 nobles to decide shit on their own.

>actually in GRRM they don't really do that either, but they give you that impression at first

Not totally empires but interesing:
Mayans
Garamantes

A fantasy setting based off the Brazilian empire would be interesting

>Confederate States
Boring, go for American Union State instead

You acquire gold by asking the NPC's to gibe moni instead of actually doing quests.

They wanted someone new this time.

Did you your duty to the Kaiser today citizen?

Good timeline Germany
>yfw you realize you live in the dark timeline
;_;

No you aquire gold by having slaves and planting and selling coffee

>spain and its clay (yes you too krauts, italians, greeks, dutch and austrians)
>not african araboid negroid
Lol.

I like the P-L stuff

>"European" upper tier with the lower rungs of society being steeped in old slavic/pagan traditions
>vast expanse of land full of dark forests/rivers/endless grassland
>winged hussars

Forgot

>Mordor to the south and the literal 'Empire' to the west

>there was also a Swedish-Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the early 1600s

Would have been W H E W