Bret Devereaux

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.