Oh my god. Okay, so one funny thing about Age of Empires is that units not affiliated with any team belong to Mother Nature - or Gaia - on the game files. The color to that team is brown. For exemple, these capybaras the settlers can kill for food.
There's some wild animals that you can control, in-game, usually as result of treasure loot. These animals have little collars on them so you can tell what team they belong to.
Like this jaguar.
But when they're guarding treasures or are otherwise just wild animals, they still have the collars on. So you see these wild wolves who were already born in nature with brown little collars on them.
Better yet, sometimes treasures will be guarded by humans, who, to remain neutral units unafiliated with any in-game team, must also be color-coded brown. So yeah, these cowboys here belong to Mother Nature.
Everything in this game must be color-coded as belonging to a team, and the best part of that was in this cutscene where Morgan, upon arriving at the Americas, tells his men to "beware of any predators that might lurk in these woods. Be them animal or human."
Upon which the camera pans to a jaguar wearing a red collar to indicate that it is an Enemy.
Edit, March 27, 2026: project has been abandoned but I still like Age of Empires!
This is by no means the master post, but I gotta put my work somewhere. I’ve been going off the rails over the computer video game, Age of Empires III.
At first it was just character fanart, and now I’m neck-deep in historical fiction. I’ve researched more than I ever thought possible, and I am living the LIF
Let’s start at the beginning. First, OP dared me to draw pony versions of the characters after two play through streams. I had no idea of the plot, only a general vibe of the gameplay, and Hard Times’ opinions on the game.
These are still not the final designs, but I still love them.
MARCH 8, 2024
To start off, I’ve got sketches for the two Native siblings, Kánien and Nonahkee from Act II: Ice. Actually, my first round of fanart was for Act II, since it’s OP’s favorite.
Just a few minutes later, I slapped together Act II’s villain, Warwick. I wasn’t even aware the name of the game’s running antagonists was the Circle of Ossus, so the bone theme was entirely unintentional.
Last, and most difficult, was the corresponding main character for the story arc John (Aloysius) Black (< this is not his actual middle name). I thoroughly enjoyed making this pony set, and am surprised at how well John’s design still holds up after looking it over multiple times.
I’m pretty tired from my week, but when we return—AGE OF EMPIRES MEMEPOSTING
It was only a matter of time until I made fanart of Age of Empires 3. Decided to start by drawing the entire family tree of the game's protagonists.
Every named character - except for Phillip (he was only mentioned in the game's guide) - is playable in the game. You start with Morgan in mid-1500s and work your way generation after generation of the Black family until mid-1800s.
My favorite characters are definitely John and Chayton. John has one of the best lore and is in the Act with the best cast of characters, and Chayton is unhinged and a baddass.
Below the cut is my thought process for the drawing. Also, if anyone wants to see my Age of Empires posts, the tag on my blog is "aoeposting".
Starting with Morgan. According to the wiki and the game's guide, he had four children. Two we don't know the name of, John's father Phillip and John's uncle Stuart.
I assume, since Morgan is 200 years old by the time John is born, that neither Stuart nor Phillip were Elizabet's children. He probably had them way later, after getting married to a British woman. But since it's canon he and Lizzie had a situationship, I'm assuming those two unnamed kids are hers, and she took them and raised them as pirates.
I doubt Lizzie ever married Morgan. Though now I don't know what's funnier, them getting married or Morgan the Knight inventing friends with benefits in the 1500s and having children out of wedlock with a pirate.
Well, we don't have time to unpack all that.
So Morgan's British Wife is very posh, to explain why Stuart stands out so much when next to his woodsman nephew John. Both John's father and mother were inspired by the Settlers' design in-game.
I made John's mother be half-Mohawk, because a friend of mine pointed out John and Ká:nien are implied to have grown up together, as well as John having some beadwork in his coat.
I drew Nonahkee's new design, just gave her her old design's braids.
I made Nathaniel's wife white, blonde, and very similar to Amelia, because despite Amelia being half-Mohawk, she looks white, looks nothing like her dad, and is even asked at some point in the game if it's true her family is mixed.
For her husband, I looked up pictures of Lakota men from that time period, as well as some of the in-game Lakota exclusive units. He was particularly inspired on the Club Warrior.
And finally we get to Chayton, who is white, Mohawk and Lakota, with Brits and Scots in his family history. I did say this game was about a long string of biracial people.
He rides off into the sunset at the end of his story. We don't know if he had any children.
I should mention that the reason I am liveblogging this game in particular was because I played it a lot as a kid. Like, obsessively. This lil RTS was one of my first signs of autistic special interest, probably.
I only had Age of Empires 3, I didn't have the first or even the second one (which is everyone's actual favorite due to the story being more historical, with real historical characters rather than fictional ones). But I played the Campaign a LOT, I got to know the characters from every act and play with them like they were my little polly pockets. Like my blorbos before that word existed.
So that's why I'm liveblogging it specifically. I'm more mature know and have enough knowledge of history to know all the ways this game is hilariously innacurate, and all the ways it's actually inspired by real life.
Obviously it glosses over a lot of things. There's no mention of things like slavery, all the resource-gathering work is done by the Settlers, which are racially diverse, and that's pretty much the only black people you see in the game.
It doesn't show any actual colonization - which is very ugly. The ugly things never happen in the game. My friend said it's a good thing, or else it would ruin it for black people just trying to play an RTS game. But I don't know if pretending it never existed is any better or more respectful either. You know, I guess it goes by the individual.
And obviously, the fact it's a Real Time Strategy game means the mechanics are fucking ridiculous when in the context of a linear story, like having to found a town every level when the story is just "defeat these enemies and get to a place".
But there's cool things too, like for exemple the grand majority of main characters being Native as of Act II and forward, and you can see their culture received a way greater level of research and awareness than even the European characters. The entire family that protagonizes the game's Campaign is a long string of biracial guys save only from the first one, who is Scottish. And the storylines still take care to be fun as a video game but sensitive, as much as it can in how simple the game is, to the parts of history portrayed. It has a very strong positive Native agenda.
I know baby me latched onto that game because she didn't know many native characters beyond Disney's Pocahontas. And come to think of it, adult me still doesn't know that many either. :/
As a kid, I thought that if I learned English I would understand what the units in this game said when you move them around. But for some reason, despite them speaking English most of the time, most of these are still utter gibberish to me.
I don't know why the little Settlers are saying things like "ewol", "fosta" and "pockaster" when I make them do things, it's like they're speaking Simlish.
This is extremely funny because every other language other than English seems to actually have been researched and spoken correctly - as I mentioned before with Morgan's Scottish Gaelic voicelines.
In fact, when I played Challenge or Multiplayer mode as a kid, I used to main the Portuguese because their characters were the only ones I could understand perfectly. What gives?
