A Historian Says the 'Convert' Button in Age of Empires Is Ethnic Cleansing
In Age of Empires, the only way to absorb a rival town is to send a priest to convert its villagers one by one. Historian Bret Devereaux argues that's the closest the series comes to depicting an actual empire — and even that plays out more like ethnic cleansing than government.
Historian Bret Devereaux argues Age of Empires never shows a real empire: players erase rival towns and resettle them with their own people. Rome did the opposite — its subject allies, the socii, made up over half its legions and were never wiped out.
The thread split between defending the design and correcting the historian. One reply called annihilation a genre requirement, not ignorance; another named Rise of Nations a game that actually models core-and-periphery empire. A third said Rome's "diversity" was centuries of forced Romanization.
The empire Age of Empires never shows: subjects, not corpses
Historian Bret Devereaux, who writes the military-history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, starts from a definition: an empire is a state where a core population rules and extracts resources from a periphery made of other peoples it deliberately keeps in place. Latin imperium means command over others, not self-rule. By that definition, he argues, no Age of Empires game has ever put a real empire on screen.
What the games show instead is extermination. A player wipes out a rival town, then repopulates the ground with their own villagers, culture and buildings: total ethnic replacement dressed up as "expansion." Devereaux's blunt comparison is that this behavior describes "fanatically murderous nation-states," closer to Nazi Germany's ambitions than to Rome's. Real empires needed the people they conquered to keep working, farming and fighting for them.
He backs this with Rome's own numbers. The socii, Rome's subordinated Italian allies, made up more than half of its legions for centuries, an empire literally built and defended by people who weren't Romans. Peninsular Italy alone held multiple languages and religions long before Rome ever crossed the Alps, and by the early empire its auxiliary units were staffed by non-citizen provincials, not conquerors. "Diversity," Devereaux writes, "was literally the Roman strength." A Mongol army was built the same way, pairing steppe cavalry with Chinese siege engineers and locally raised infantry.
The one mechanic that comes close to imperial subjugation is the priest, who can convert an enemy villager instead of killing them. Devereaux doesn't let it off easy: replacing a population's religion and loyalty one unit at a time is "ethnic cleansing," he writes, barely an improvement on the massacre it substitutes for — and mechanically it stays marginal, one conversion at a time, on a long cooldown, never the bulk of how territory changes hands. Anticipating the obvious dismissal, that it's just a game, he calls that line an "unserious 'boy's philosophy,'" arguing games are cultural products that shape how players understand real political history, the same way books or films do.
The thread: two defenses of the design, one attack on Devereaux's Rome
The reaction split between people defending Age of Empires' choices as intentional game design and people going after the historian's own history.
The design defense came first, from an early Age of Empires player who says he grew up on the game's history footnotes:
"Competitive RTS games are at their best when each faction maintains some unique characteristics… otherwise, you lose balance and/or strategy. At the end of the day, good gameplay should be prioritized over flavor."
An HN account with 36,000-plus karma, posting since 2008 had a second example handy:
"…there's also a 200 population limit per player… And no day-night cycle or seasons. These are clearly intentional choices to capture the vibes of economic and military conflict while massively compacting the scale of true historical conflict."
Not everyone agreed the genre is stuck this way, according to an HN user with 80,000-plus karma:
"I think Rise of Nations… fits their definition of empire a lot better. You create multiple cities in your 'empire.' The ones at the core naturally grow larger and prosperous, while peripheral ones generally have specific uses like training a military or mining resources. You can also capture cities from neighboring civilizations."
The sharpest reply, though, went after Devereaux's own centerpiece example rather than the games. A reader in the thread:
"I would take issue with the notion of diversity in the Roman Empire… the various other groups the Romans conquered were gradually romanised. We might as well say the British or Spanish Empires were diverse. On one level they did have many cultures, but there was also a concerted effort to assimilate those cultures and languages."
That's a real fault line among historians of Rome, not a gotcha invented for a comment section: whether provincial "diversity" was a durable feature of the empire or a way station on the road to Romanization. Devereaux picked Age of Empires as his example, but the argument underneath it belongs to Roman historiography. The thread just moved it from a seminar room to a comment section about pixelated villagers and priests.
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