The Aztecs are STILL total Trash.

Yes I said trash. Completely and total trash, but not in terms of game play. Not the way you think.

Trash because the Devs really dropped the ball HARD with this one.

The Devs prided themselves on reworking the native civs. The Iroquois became the Haudenosaunee and Sioux because Lakota. The two nations got reworked and even got new audio.

Then we have the Aztec. Who STILL speak the wrong language in game. Who STILL have the wrong nation name, who don’t even have a geographically correct map, and all around are very disappointing.

In game they are STILL called Aztec. This is plain wrong. They are the Mexica. Me-she-ka. There is literally a whole country named after them. Mexico.

The language the Mexica speak is Nahuatl. There are 1.7 MILLION speakers of the various Nahuatl variants still alive today. Whatever they speak in game is most definitely NOT Nahuatl. How we are STILL getting this wrong in 2020 is baffling to me.

The word Aztec has some historical relevance, there WAS a group of people who lived who called themselves Aztec (people of Aztlan), but this migration started at least 500 years BEFORE the timeframe of the game. It’s has nothing to do with AOE 3 whatsoever.

Then we have the in-game map “Mexico.” This was such a disappointment. This map is a user-created map that was just renamed from Arizona to Mexico. Why? In AOE3 time frame, the valley of Mexico was the center of the world, so to speak.

The Devs should have created a map representative of the valley of Mexico. It could have been a map surrounded by cliffs and mountains at the edges with an abundance of gold and defendable chokepoints. The center could have been a boggy hunts filled valley that limits or even prevents use of defensive structures while enabling villager raiding for the only food source and fierce skill based skirmishes in the absence of defensive structures. It would be the ultimate challenge of a player’s micromanaging skills in battle.

Yes you could make the argument we already have the rockies, but don’t do the Mexica dirty like that, give them a proper map! Not a renamed Arizona. That’s just lazy.

I really hope one day we can get a Mexica Nation with audio in Nahuatl. Until then, "This town is destroyed. but Cuauhtemoc will find another lake and another cactus and another snake-eating eagle."

tlazohcāmati thank you 🇲🇽