there are many strategy games with an arabic theme and they are awesome and all
but how come there aren't any games about early arabic history? like the founding of the first caliphates civil wars etc? usually only the crusades are brought up which are cool but i am curious if there is any strategy game for other arabic history
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doesnt sell
No one but literal muslims would find that interesting, hell I would find pre-islamic arab civilization more interesting than that
pre islamic would be cool too
and i think muslims would be offended if a game is made about their history, even if it tried so hard to follow muslim history there will always be sects of islam that disagree
You're gonna get bombed the moment you imply Muhammad or Abu Bakr or whoever could do something non-canon. The whole thing is a Satanic Verses minefield.
Or at least that's what publishers believe in the era of games with disclaimers about "multicultural teams of various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identitites".
Also doesn't sell.
i mean, most european history games tend to avoid any holy figures like the saints and jesus himself
i am sure a muslim history game can do something like that? but i fully get what you mean and i expect it actually
yeah chinese devs too, like sands of salazaar
>i am sure a muslim history game can do something like that?
NTA, but it really wouldn't work there for three reasons:
>Jesus wasn't all that involved (physically) in the spread of early Christianity, and his message was opposed to the then-current thought of his people. They were looking for a Warrior-King who would liberate Israel from Roman rule. Even if you change the circumstances of Rome/Israel, almost nothing actually changes with Jesus.
>Catholics (nowadays) are very tolerant regarding works disparaging the early church, so even if you said every famous Christian figure was a notorious drunkard and womanizer, while you might get a reputation for saying that, you at least don't have to worry about mail bombs.
>Muhammad is virtually inseparable from the rise of the early Caliphates, and his message is explicitly political. Going AltHist around that time runs the risk of changing political conditions in a way that reframes everything Muhammad or the early Caliphate does. Byzantine discrimination against North Africans, Byzantine-Persian wars, Muhammad's expulsion from Mecca, the Islamic refuge in Ethiopia, etc. This is how you get mail bombs.
fine, what about pre islam history? north african history?
> pre islam history
in Arabia? Could actually be kind of kino. If you wanted to take some liberties with timeline you could have three factions of Romans, Persians, and Ethiopians fighting for control along with natives.
would be cool to explore their pre islam mythology to be honest
Pre-islamic arabia can be kinda cool. There was a lot going on down south in Yemen with the Himyarite kingdom and even Mecca itself, but it would be a very obscure setting.
>north african history?
I fricking wish
Closest you'll get is a modded campaign of AoE2 and some Total War mods (i.e. Total War Rome's Bronze Age mod has a Libyan civ)
The satanic verse doesnt matter in the slightest. The big things that would make a ton of muslims pissed off would be:
>depiction of muhammad
Sunni islam is aniconist. Depicting Muhammad as a human in any form is forbidden. To counteract this, they always draw him with a fire covering his head or always under a veil. Shias sometimes depict the face of Muhammad, but also tend to depict him without a face because of how iconic the style became.
>the depiction of the sucession of the caliphs and the first fitna
After the death of Muhammad a sucession crisis began. The followers of Ali (who would then become the shias) said that Muhammad appointed Ali as his divinely inspired sucessor while the traditionalists (sunnis) held that the Caliphs would be elected by the tribes. Ali peacefully conceded earthly power while arguing for his divine guidance, creating kind of a cold war between the Rashidun Caliphs and Aisha (the girl who married Muhammad when she was 6, then an old woman) against Ali. Things really went to shit when the third caliph died and Ali was appointed as the fourth caliph. After that, everything went to shit in a full blown civil war between the sunnis, shias and the kharjites (a dead sect). There is no way to depict this affair without angering either shia or sunni muslims as they hold contradictory views of how these events played out.
>Khalid, the Sword of Islam
Khalid was the main general behing the early muslim conquests. He was responsible for the conquest of Iraq and the Levant, causing the collapse of Sassanid Persia and cutting the Byzantines from Egypt and eventually leading to its conquest as well. However, apparenly he was highly corrupt and didnt respect the tenants of islam at all. If you refuse to give him any kind of flavor regarding his personal life it might be fine, but any attempt in describing his actual behavior will anger muslims as it will either paint him out as immoral or imply that Abu Bakr was wrong.
Japanese devs seem to like fictional arabic themes but they don't make strategy games, more like sRPGs.
Chess is not a strategy game
?
>but how come there aren't any games about early arabic history?
But there is, straight from Syria?
2005 dude
that's completely irrelevant now
Europa Barbarorum 2, a mod for Medieval 2 Total is set in era of the Roman Republic and has two pre-Islamic Arabian factions
The 1st is the Saba, a city-state in Southern Arabia and is mostly focused light infantry, archers and mercenaries. They can recruit levy and elite citizen units, Arabian tribesmen and Ethiopean units.
The 2nd is the Kingdom of Nabatea. Intially a nomadic southern Arabian faction, you can turn them into a settled faction and later become influenced by the Greeks to become a powerful kingdom.
They start off using nomadic units like Horse Archers and Lancers and then can recruit lightly armored Southern Arabian Units as a settled faction and later they can recruit Greek and Greek-inspired units like pic related.
A Total War game about the rise of Muhammad up to the Abbasid Revolution (crusades if you were especially ambitious) would be kino but it's never happening in today's political climate. Maybe in an all-White Christian country of history autists that didn't care about what muzzies think it could happen but that's not what we have
i wish i lived in a different reality sometimes where muslims didnt get mad this easily
I think ill answer the core of your question by saying that videogames are a luxury that is catered towards the biggest and wealthiest consumer markets. And those markets have their own culture and interests.
No market for it. Go look at the stats for which regions are popular among Crusader Kings players. It’s Vikings by far, a little bit of Byzantium and Iberia, and then France/England. The near East is incredibly interesting, but an audience of Americans and Europeans largely doesn’t care.
Depicting Muhammad is a big no-no.
And after Muhammad you only have the first caliphs stomping their war-torn enemies, and then the first civil war and then total Umayyad dominance.
Not a lot of interesting options there.
It's the reason why most Roman-themed strategy games are about the rise of Rome, the Punic wars and Caesar's campaigns, or they are about the Fall of Rome instead. But you don't have strategy games about the time when Trajan was btfoing everybody with little difficulty.
the Mount and Blade games are pretty good approximations of it. the Aserai in Bannerlord look great if you wanna roleplay as them. you get something from like Medieval II otherwise but the most you'll get leans heavily on the crusades rather than the other parts
There was a Total War Attila mod for the concept that would've covered the Byzantine-Sassanid War era too but it got canned a long time ago IIRC