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Hello there everyone!

Welp, I decided that, after basically overheating my motherboard (my brain, if you must) with too much programming, I took a few months off from it. Now though, I think that I'm ready start start warming up with my brand new laptop and get cranking again! But it is all really irrelevant, so I'll get to the meat of this post:

Put simply, as I've discovered more and more recently, I have a true passion for history. I don't know if anyone else here feels this way, but if so, I would really like to talk with you. Anyways, I'm thinking of making a game that is actually historically accurate, but obviously with personal modifications. For example, if we look at the Mongol Empire, it could be a Risk game of sorts, but instead, you get an empire, a few players together, and you dive into what would be probably around an hour game (to try and keep it brief) to see who can conquer the most land. I really like this game concept, but as with any good thing, there come a few problems.

First, historical accuracy. Yes, the Mongol Empire surely did exist and thrive in Eurasia, but what empire would be possibly able to compete? For this reason, I was thinking perhaps that I would make up empires to use, but again, that violates the whole "historical accuracy" aspect of it. I would perhaps need help with this, and any would be appreciated.

Also, I'd have no idea where to start with the actual development of the game. This would be my biggest project yet, and oh how I'd love to see it through to the end. But that is, after all, what this community is for, so I'm sure if a major problem or question arises, someone here will have a pretty good idea of what to do.

And as a side note, the layout of this game, I'm thinking, would be sort of like that of Command and Conquer, which I'm sure most (if not all) of you are familiar with.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very much appreciated, and if anyone just wants to chat about history (if it's your thing as much as it is for me, hahaha), then you can add me on Skype - ShinySloth - and I'll be more than happy to talk!

Thanks everyone,
~Kevin

I love history! Documentaries and general reading of history gives me a lot of inspiration. Just a couple of days ago I watched "The Dark Ages" on Netflix streaming and got really inspired to make a dreary, plague-infested, low-fantasy RPG where the world has regressed, and there are aging signs of more advanced civilizations and that fact that better times were behind them. The latter part of that was taken almost directly from the documentary, as people in Europe around the 8th to 9th century had broken down aqueducts and massive crumbling stadiums of the Romans around them while they were merely toiling in their gardens trying to survive. The narration mused at whether these people thought about these decaying signs of a greater civilization all around them, and the gloom it must have projected, as though mankind's time was winding down.

As for your game idea, the game company Koei is famous for making historical strategy games, such as Nobunaga's Ambition. How they managed to handle true-to-history settings was that they worked on a smaller scale. Obviously it would be hard to create an opponent for the Mongols in their prime, since they basically advanced unopposed. For example, in Koei's game Nobunaga's Ambition, they chose feudal Japan and its reunification as its setting. There were many factions warring for territory and resources, which gave ample opportunity for strategic choices and events to occur.

The on thing I can ask is if you ever become a history teacher please for the love of God teach the right history. If you ever want an eye opener open up a middle School History book in the US and read through it. WOW is it off. Not sure if other countries are the same but our Public Shcool History books are more Fiction than Lord of the Rings! muhaha

Some funny ones but not the worst. Trying to find the site I seen years ago where it reported the craziest ones. Like Stars are tiny rocks floating in space that reflect the sun.

Fearon’s Biology, a high school science book, has quite an impressive collection of myths-presented-as-science, from describing the first life on earth not as microscopic bacteria, but as “tiny green specks,”[5] to promulgating the false belief that all organisms can move on their own. Most outrageous of all, however, is the book’s lesson about “a biologist named Frankenstein.” According to Fearon’s Biology, “Frankenstein pieced together the parts of dead bodies. Finally he brought a creature to life. But Frankenstein’s creation was an eight-foot monster. Eventually the monster destroyed the biologist.”[6] It is left to the readers to discover on their own that Frankenstein is the eponymous character of Mary Shelley’s novel, and that there is no real biology to speak of in that work of fiction. But all of these ideas — tiny specks, mad scientists — are part of the popular imagination, errors that go back so far that they’ve become traditional.

In 2005, The Weekly Standard reported: “several centuries ago, some ‘very light-skinned’ people were shipwrecked on a tropical island. After ‘many years under the tropical sun,’ this light-skinned population became ‘dark-skinned,’ says Biology: The Study of Life, a high-school textbook published in 1998 by Prentice Hall, an imprint of Pearson Education.”[7

The Virginian Pilot reported that the book Our Virginia: Past and Present, an elementary school textbook used in schools throughout the state, contained some very uncomfortable misinformdation: a passage “claiming that thousands of black soldiers fought for the South during the Civil War.”[3] The error was found by Carol Sheriff, a professor at the College of William and Mary, who then pointed out that blacks weren’t allowed to serve in the Confederate army until the very end of the war. Professor Bruce Levine of the University of Illinois confirms this, saying

“Jefferson Davis barked this would ‘revolt and disgust the whole South.’ All of this stuff is easily documentable. The facts of the matter aren’t really murky.”

One textbook included a map that showed the Earth’s equator running through Florida and Texas, 1,500 miles north of its actual position. Another declared that humans were incapable of hearing sound below 400 hertz; in fact, the human hearing range is approximately 20-20,000 hertz.[2]

Yeah, there is some ridiculous stuff in middle school and earlier text books. I had never heard of the Frankenstein thing lol. That would be almost laughable if it wasn't so sad.

One thing I do know, though, is that history is somewhat taught in kind of a foggy, misleading way. For example, a lot of the bad things the US have done is somewhat sugar-coated until you start to get into high school, and then finally they feel you are ready for the whole truth in college, I guess. In pre-school, they still teach that Thanksgiving was when the Native-Americans gladly accepted the European settlers and taught them to live off the land, and had a huge dinner afterwards. Today, in 2012 that is still being taught. In high school and college they finally tell you that no such thing occurred, and instead there were many wars between the Natives and European settlers, such as Metacom's Rebellion. The few peaceful meetings they had ended with the settlers trying to trick the natives into signing agreements for huge plots of land they could safely inhabit. It turns out that the original American Thanksgiving feast was prompted by a rich harvest in Plymouth, and no Natives were present lol.

Were still using the same brains we had back in the stone age!

Some anthropologists believe our capacity to learn and reason has increased almost exponentially since the stone age. It makes sense to me, because it is hard to imagine that the same brain that was in those heads staying in caves, walking around nearly naked is the same brain that took us to the moon, is running CERN, and invented the microprocessor. I am not sure though lol. Sometimes you see hints of the cave man mindset haha.

The mind blowing thing is to think that between 300ad and 900ad no real innovations were made. 600 years yet in 50 years everything has changed for us. Think about 1962 to 2012 how much has changed. Now think about 300ad to 900ad and how much changed. Nearly nothing.

Just so crazy.

Actually, if you think about the end of the west Roman Empire, things actually got worse for many parts of the world from 300 - 900 A.D. But yeah, inventions and scientific discovery has rapidly started increasing in the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. I don't really know how you can compare the invention of the windmill with the invention of the iPhone, but I have figures saying that humans have advanced their knowledge of the world, science and inventions more in the last 75 years than in the previous 1000 years. I believe that the interconnectedness and communications we have now has really been the cause. Say 200 years ago, when someone created a new medicine in Europe, someone in South Africa may have had the potential to create another, more effective medicine based on that discovery, but he never found out about it because news traveled so slow, and collaboration meant needing to be in the same room. But now all that man in South Africa would need is a computer and an internet connection to learn all about the breakthrough, and can even get in touch with the original creator to bounce ideas. An exchange of ideas that can now take place in an afternoon would have required half a lifetime just 200 years ago!

You're all right, maybe it's true that the learn and reason capacity have increased on humans. But what I think have mostly influenced for the humans to improve so much on science and making more inventions is the population. The population on 300 - 900 ad wasn't the same as on xx and xxi century, when the world would view a genius on year 301 for example, he died and the world needed to wait another 200 years for another genius to born. But now as there're lots of scientists and inventors working together there're so much improvement on science.

That's a possitive side of the world being highly populated, the negative side is the amount of pollution produced.

Yeah, our population (globally) as increased an ungodly amount in the last few centuries. It's really mind-boggling.

And Halls/Jack, as for the false history, trust me, I've experienced this first hand. I shadowed one of my old middle school teachers for an entire day and helped her teach the class about the dynasties in China (around the Qin and Han era) and I was honestly blown away by some of the things they were passing off, especially sugarcoating some of the bloodshed, even domestically. They either danced around those details or straight up lied about them, and I couldn't tell if my teacher even knew that or not (though I hope she did, hahaha)