Headscratchers / Age of Mythology

• What is the Atlantean Titan supposed to be?
  • This huge crystal guy, I don't know. Probably, since we don't actually have a Real Life Atlantean myths collection, we can't pick some kind of flashy monster from that to use as a building-smashing abomination.
  • I saw somewhere that it was supposed to be Typhon from the Classical Mythology (how did an Eldritch Abomination end up like a crystal giant humanoid pawn beats me), but the site could very well be wrong anyway. IIRC the Norse Titan is Ymir or a scaled up troll, right?
  • My Age Of Mythology guide book says his name is Chthonian.
    • I too heard that the Atlantian Titan is supposed to be Typhon. He's humanoid because a dragon-thing would be hard to animate. At least they kept the volcano theme.
    • Correct about the Norse one, I'm just wondering what the Egyptian one is supposed to be. Keeping the theme of progenitor Gods, it would mean Nut, problem with that being that Nut is a cow and not a bird.
    • I thought it was Geb, who is portrayed as a bird occasionally (because he is a goose, I thought they decided to portray him as a falcon to make him more impressive). Then again, it could just be Horus made a titan for the Rule of Cool
    • According to the Age of Empires wiki (which also covers the Age of Mythology thing), the Greek Titan is Cerberus, the Nordic one is Ymir, the Egyptian one really is Horus and the Atlantinean one is Perses.
    • Making matters more confusing, the in-game encyclopedia lists Nut and Geb as examples of Titan equivalents in Egyptian mythology.
• Why isn't this game getting a proper sequel?
  • Because Ensemble got closed. Sad.
  • You might want to check out the first two Empire Earth titles. Similar in style and gameplay.
• When you attack the giant battering ram, it will take a long time to destroy it. Ajax even specifically complains "What will it take to destroy this ram?" while you are attacking it. It makes a certain logical sense, as hitting a giant piece of wood with arrows, spears and swords will take a long time to break it. On the other hand, the logical thing to do would be to just cut the ropes that are being used to hold it up. Or kill the men operating it.
  • The game mechanics wouldn't allow that. Or if they would, there's no race against the clock.
  • Either you have to destroy the ram and simply race against the clock, or you have to cut the ropes/kill the rammers and face a never-ending stream of reinforcements from Gargarensis trying to repair the thing.
• When Chiron makes his heroic sacrifice, he kicks over a pillar, blocking the enemy's path, and charges past the collapsing piller to fight the foes on the other side, trapping himself and ensuring an epic death. But why didn't he stay on the safe side of the callapsed pillar? He is an ARCHER! There's no need for him to charge in and die when he could safely fire arrows aver the collapsed pillar, and he would do more damage that way because the enemies couldn't reach him.
  • The real question is probably how he kicked it over. If a few hundred pounds of force from mythical beasts cannot lever over one in one blow, why is one generally spaced kick from a centaur enough to roll it over? Even Chiron could not calculate that much to find a perfect weak point in the time it takes for him to run from there. And why not fight the fire giants then and there? You probably spent an army's worth of firepower annihilating Gargarenesis's forces to the outside and getting to the rams there, how many giants could it kill off?
    • Mythology is like this, it was his time to be a hero, so he was.
    • Also, it doesn't really take that much to weaken the ram to the point that you summon the reinforcements. It might even be as easy as showing up.
    • But isn't Chiron immortal?
    • Actually, according to myths, he did die when he gave up his immortality and offered it to Prometheus (Chiron was poisoned at that time). Is likely that, yes, he gave up immortality at that point.
  • The boulder was likely so big that he wouldn't have had the time after kicking its weak spot to go back to the other side before it crushed him.
• Isn't Oranos supposed to be dead?
  • Canonic mythology never points out his ultimate fate after castration, although you could say he died. I'm more concerned as to why the sky god is trapped in what amounts to Hell, and why he is working alongside his hated son when he could be on his grandson's side.
    • He's probably working with Kronos just to get out, with both planning to turn on the other once they are out. As for why he's down there Zeus probably just didn't trust grandaddy to not try and take over.
• Why is the Big Bad Gargarenesis not doing things the easy way and opening all the gates he could get to at once? If he can find the great gates in Atlantis, Erebus, Niflheim under the Well Of Urd, and the Egypian city that venerates Osiris, find the forces for gigantic battering rams to open those gates, and he can summon an army to take the assumably legendary protections of Atlantis, the fighting spirit of the Norselands, the heavy walls and independantly operating desert forces of multiple impenetrable Egyptian cities, and find his way into the Underworld, albeit with help on some of those, but still without a Trojan Horse kind of plottery, why does he not open all the gates he can? He could probably get the other Titans free, not just Kronos if the gates reseal. Does he simply go one at a time? And why does Kronos bide his time and only send his will forth after his first plot is defeated? Taking a risk that may impact eventual freedom is not always a good idea unless you have many, many, more plans afterward. Did the other pantheons take just enough damage to let him do that but not enough to free himself? Sure, dooming Ioklos is an act that seems big. But, even if destroying Odin's previously ignored earthly center of power would be too hard and get another pantheon on your enemy list, but taking the equally previously ignored Egyptian high god-power relics would probably be easier, particularly because the now-dead Kamos and the now-dead other Egyptian ally would have a large enough presence to siege the previous relic-holding cities and eventually burn them down and take their relics before a secret party could shift the sands to another citadel of power and take the relics with them.
  • Each gate could only be reached through proper timing - he entered Ioklos while the Trojan War was happening. He had to bargain with Set to kill Osiris to get to the Egyptian one. He had to get the hill tribes fighting and rally the giants to do the Norse one. The Atlantean one was, I assume, a last resort through his connections with Poseidon. Not to mention, he actually wanted to be physically present when Kronos got out to receive his reward.
    • As for Kronos biding his time, he's a Titan. He has all the time in the world. Even the opening monologue of Titans says something along the lines of "Even the Gods have forgotten me down here". He watched Atlantis starve for ten years, and then struck at a time when they were godless, seemed to have mostly forgotten the plot of the first game, and would worship anybody.
  • I theorise that, since it is 10 years later, the characters from the first part had enough time to defend the gates properly, making it nearly impossible openreach them without the help of the titans...which the player has to stop before they can create more chaos, so, the only gate that isn't defended is the one in Atlantis.
  • Isn't that what Gargarensis was trying to do? He was trying to open the gates he had access to when he had access to them. If you meant trying to open them all at once, he probably didn't have the resources to do that, or the time to wait until he could. The taking of the Atlantean gate, for instance, rested on the city's greatest commander being somewhere else with his army, and that was only going to happen so long as the Trojan War went on.
  • Another reason could be that opening too many underworld passages could overwhelm even his own forces if they are split. After all, he did tell Kemsyt to bring his army for when they opened the passage, reminding him "you know what kind of creatures hide there". While they are classified as being Gargarensis' units, it's likely that most of the monsters you find in underworld levels are actually hostile to everyone.
• Ignoring the fact that there wouldn't be much of a game if he did this, did anyone else feel like the expansion Titans plot could've been entirely avoided if Arkantos had bothered to stop in once in ten years and tell his son to watch out for history repeating itself? It's obvious from Ajax and Amanra's reactions that they know he's a god and have seen him before, so it's not like he's forbidden from interacting with mortals ever. Why he couldn't stop in and see the son he claims to love so much, especially seeing as how Kastor still believed his father was alive despite all facts pointing to contrary, always bugged me, even back when the game originally came out. Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You only goes so far in this case, and it just kinda makes Arkantos seem like a Jerkass for just letting his son wander around and almost destroy half the known world.
  • Well, he did turn into a Greek God....
  • Maybe Kronos and his servant were preventing him from reaching Kastor?
  • Maybe Zeus told him not to. It seems like the Gods showing up in person is a rarity.
  • I think he only is allowed to appear as a last resort. Obviously in the past 10 years nothing of serious import was going in, just Atlantis rebuilding. Then there's Cronos' line "even the gods are absent-minded", implying a degree of complacency during that time. Arkantos, like Athena in the previous campaign, only appears when a plot to overthrow the gods becomes clear. As for Ajax and Arkantos' reactions, I assumed that they hadn't seem him since his death. The developers don't overtly mention this because they keep the dialogue very concise and minimalist. Besides, nobody (not even the bowing foot soldiers) in this game ever appears overly surprised when gods appear in their presence. I guess it's just a normal (if irregular) occurrence in a universe where mythical creatures walk around alongside humans.
    • Gods in this case require belief to show up as anything other than a dream or another nebulous form. Atlantis was literally and practically godless and abandoned to the point it showed on their sub-civ banner for that mission. Even with however much belief Kastor is tossing his way, it's still just one person aiming for something that is no longer true (Kastor thinks his father is still alive, human, and there, when in actuality Arkantos is a Greek god.), so it's nearly null and void. With almost no belief at all, and relative inexperience (The other gods are ancient, he's only been one for 10 years and was a mortal tl start with) and lack of domain (God of Titan-Slaying doesn't quite have anything to do with dreams, whereas Athena, goddess of Knowledge, has at least the brain-connection connotation, and even then when she appeared in dreams it had to do with war or fighting both times, her other domain of War.), Arkantos can't even send his son a dream, only channel power and hope he'll get the gist of what he's trying to tell him. The Egyptian cities are designed with lots of temples and larger ones literally coated in monuments, and Osiris is one of the few gods in campaign to manifest. The relic-cities were likely coated in pure belief sediment, and one short little interpantheon request offscreen, Arkantos can show up. Most of Greece had been blown up, with even Mount Olympus being attacked, to the point it's literally mentioned that weakening the Greeks gave the Titans more power, the Norselands were reeling from Thor's relatively recent power risk, Reginleif's fall-from-grace issue and who knows what else going on with Valkyries, Ehrenjar (Some soldier specifically commented on them), and Loki, and Odin's tower going deconstruct, not to mention they're just far out. That alone explains why he failed to show up at either point. Gaia was actively using her power on the segment of Ioklos were Arkantos appeared, he was probably just piggybacking on Gaia's energy and hoping no-one noticed but those he was talking to. When Gaia shoved Kronos back into Tartarus and manifestspammed her power all over the island with her summoning trees and appearing in person, Arkantos rode along after Kronos' last vestige of will in the posessed Krios was removed. Athena showed up in dreams both times, except for that one time on the shore of an indefinite location to raise Arkantos to godhood and that only, and it's unclear how active she was during the Trojan War other than her possible-in-char announcements of heroes being knocked unconscious.
• Am I the only one that thinks that ES dropped the ball when they added the Atlanteans as a new civilization in the expansion? Atlantis had been already covered enough in the first game campaign, and very well at that, with the Greeks; and when you look at the x-pack Atlanteans it really looks like they were struggling to come up with something that wasn't just a repeat of the Greeks, using second-rate Greek gods and mythical creatures, not to mention their odd choices for human units (hypaspists were just another name for hoplites and murmillos were a type of Roman gladiators!) or that boring way to collect favor (possessing town centers? Seriously?). It's not like the world lacks rich ancient cultures and mythologies (Roman, Arthurian, Celtic, Slavic, Mesopotamian, Yoruba, Chinese, Japanese, Altaic, Hindu, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, Pacific and others) that could have been adapted into the game to produced a distinct and awesome fourth civilization.
  • Seconded. The thought of playing as the Chinese and unleashing dragons, terra-cotta soldiers and ancient rocket launcher-men on puny Westerners make this troper cry tears at What Could Have Been.
  • What I don't get is how the ruined Atlantean army is so incredibly specialized. You'd think having to scrounge an existence for a decade would make them all good at multitasking.
  • The original game's mythologies consisted of The Theme Park Version of a mythology that people would be vaguely familiar with; note that Thor is not dissimilar to the Marvel Comics version (and I can't help but wonder if that's the only reason he's a major god in the first place, though I'm not that familiar with Norse mythology). The only mythology you listed that might qualify is Indian, which might offend modern Hindus, though a case can be made for Mesopotamian.
    • Thir is absolutely a big deal in original Norse myths and religion. (Part of it was political - the Icelanders made a big thing out of Thor being their main god to show they were a free people who rejected the old-world monarchic cult of Odin.)
  • I think they probably had the story in mind going in, and probably did the Atlantis thing to make a good campaign. Barring that, though the Atlanteans do exactly what an Expansion pack is supposed to - they EXPANDED on the Atlanteans of the original.
  • It looks like that wish is finally coming true...
  • There's also the fact that, in these games, the civilizations are important as well, is not just a matter of Pantheon: I'm sure the Aztecs have a rich mythology and all, but putting that aside, we have a mesoamerican civilization with a rather low technological level compared to the others. They'll lack horses and cavalry, for example, unless you want to see them with longswords and chainmail like in Ageof Empires II.
    • It's meant to be the Bronze Age. Norse culture shouldn't even exist yet. So throwing in anachronistic treatment of other cultures (Aztecs, for instance, shouldn't exist either) shouldn't be a problem.
• In the second game why is Kastor so torn up about accidentally helping the Titans get free? Has he forgotten that for most of the game he's been worshipping the Titans? Did he never stop to think that it's a bit hard to worship deities locked away? He should be cheering them on.
  • Before that he didn't know he was being bullshitted by a possessed old guy into helping stupidly powerful jerks out of detention. He was fine worshipping them until they started kicking the crap out of everything in sight.
  • Honestly I do not understand why Kastor, or for that matter any of the other Atlanteans, are upset about the release of the Titans to begin with; if anything they should be overjoyed by this. In Fall Of The Trident their homeland was destroyed by an Olympian God, and they were all evacuated. Ten years later they live in a frigid wilderness because the Norse, Greeks, and Egyptians are for some reason unwilling to resettle or in any other way aid the refugees (the Norse even regularly raid and attack the Atlanteans). When hope seems lost, the Titan Oranos leads them to an island off the coast of Galicia where they can resettle ... and Greeks immediately attack them with neither warning nor (as far as the Atlanteans know) provocation. In response to this act of naked aggression on the part of Sikyos, Kastor attacks and kills General Melagius and besieges the city. By this point the Egyptians and Norse send soldiers to join this war on the side of the aggressor, which Kastor is absolutely justified in seeing as betrayal against his people. So when Kastor learns that the Gods who rescued his people have broken free, and that they are (from what we can see) rampaging across only the lands of Atlantis's enemies (enemies who left the Atlanteans to die in the snow and who lated sided against Atlantis in war), Kastor should be happy about this. Sure those Titan Rampages are killing lots of civilians, but that was never a problem before (countless villagers get killed in this game, and Arkantos even participated in the sack of Troy). So it seems like the Titans are evil only because the plot says they are.
  • Well, is not like that the Olympian God destroyed Atlantis just because "Greek Gods are Jerks", more like "An island whose inhabitants are getting away to safety vs Kronos walking the earth again and destroying everything in sight" thing. The Greek attack is justified when you consider that 1. The last time the Greek had to deal with Titans only bad things came out of it and 2. General Melagius is a warmongering, pompous jerk who'd probably done the same to trespassing Norsemen or Egyptians as far as we know. Plus Kastor was pretty much a sucker for trusting Krios and attacking the Greeks without even trying to send diplomats to explain matters. Finally, in case you haven't noticed, the Titans are rampaging in the "enemy land" because they're closer to where they appeared, I presume that after flattening Greece, Egypt and the Norselands they'll have turned their attention to the rest of the world AND Atlantis, where Kronos was supposed to emerge. Finally, but this is merely IMHO, if you're happy because you've just seen a colossal mindless monster free to rampage around there's something wrong with you.
• After the antepenultimate mission of the original campaign, the heroes think they have defeated Gargarensis and saved the world... so why do Ajax and especially Amanra come back with Arkantos to Atlantis?
  • Most Likely, they were on their way home as well. Remember, none of them lives in the Norselands, and according to in-game maps, Atlantis is a large island located off the coast of Spain. In order to get to Greece and Egypt, respectively, they would have to sail that way, through the strait of Gibraltar anyway. So the original idea was possibly to drop Arkantos off at Atlantis, and then continue into the Mediterranean.
• Why does Atlantis look like Mindanao (Southern Philippines)?
  • For that matter, New Atlantis is a comically oversized Basilan island. If I had to guess, they just needed any island shape to represent Atlantis, and whoever was in charge of that bit of art happened to be a Filipino.
• Why did they pick Prometheus as one of the main destructive titans to be fought? He helped Zeus against the titans, he's our maker and he sacrificed himself to give us the fire. He ended up in Tartarus because Zeus suspected he helped Poseidon in one of his multiple schemes against him. He's way more benevolent that anyone on the Greek Pantheon, considered the Protector of Humanity and a creator God, it was too out of character having him as a brainless force of destruction.
  • Rheia is on the same situation. If not for her, the Olympics wouldn't even exist.
  • Evidence in the game, primarily the in-game maps, seem to indicate that the Atlantean Titan—Perses or whatever it was based on—was going to be the Titan that attacked the city and drew its power from the destruction it caused, not Prometheus. That probably covers Prometheus' role in the final campaign, but not why they decided on him in the first place.
  • According to in-game text, Zeus sent Prometheus to Tartarus because he thought Prometheus was involved in the Poseidon/Gargarensis plot...because? Why would the guy who not only fought with Zeus in the Titanomachy, but later saved him from his downfall want to betray him in favor of Kronos?
    • Maybe Prometheus is bitter that Zeus bound him to a rock with an eagle pecking out his regenerating liver every day, which would've lasted for eternity if Hercules hadn't come along?
  • In fact, with the exception of Atlas and Hyperion, the "forbidden" Atlantean pantheon is made up of Titans who were friendly to Olympus in the original mythology. Notable hostile Titans like Iapetos, Koios, Krios, Pallas and Perses are inexplicably nowhere to be seen, unless you identify the Atlantean Titan as Perses.
  • Maybe because the hostile titans are mostly imprisoned into Tartarus with Kronos and the others? For Prometheus, I guess they tought of the Promethean units and decided that a Uber Titan boss who spaws mooks who spawn smaller mooks upon death would have been a better Climax Boss than Perses.
• One of Oceanus' myth technologies is the "Weightless Mace". That's... like... an Oxymoronic Being of weapons. Isn't the whole point of a mace to use a heavy weight to crush the target? It's not a piercing weapon. Wouldn't making your mace weightless just turn your weapon of war into a glorified "tin can on a stick" (if the technology's icon is anything to go by)?
  • Maybe it's something about orichalkos' fantastical properties of being incredibly light when wet making it net lighter to get up/carry around and net heavier/forceful when attacking through some form of complex and probably magic internal sponge thing?
  • Not that there's a point in analysing a mythology game in terms of physics - the real answer is "it works the way Oceanus wants" - but weight and mass aren't the same thing. Hammers still work in space. A weightless mace would retain its inertial properties and remain effective at transferring momentum, it just wouldn't be affected by gravity.
• Ok, just one thing that puzzles me, and it carries over from Age of Empires II as well: regarding Peltast, Turma and, from the previously mentioned franchise, Skirmishers and Genitours: why all these javelin-wielding units have a big bonus against archers? How is a javelin supposed to work better against them than against infantry or cavalry? I kinda miss the logic...
  • Out of universe, because archers should have a cheaper counter than cavalry and siege, and just using other archers would be boring (in fact, this was what happened in the very first Age of Empires, as slingers were introduced in Rise of Rome). In universe, maybe because when faced by a javelineer, an infantryman or a rider's first reaction would be to dodge the projectile, but an archer would try to shoot, and it takes longer to draw, aim and shoot an arrow than a javelin.

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