How I created Macedonia for Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome. Macedonia wasn’t as famous a Roman foe as Carthage, but they were the real deal back in the day. They were famous foes of Rome back around 300 BC. Basically they understood that Rome was going to become an empire unless they were stopped, and the Macedonians (in the empire of Epirus) thought they were the team to do it. The big showdown in these wars was between the newly-created Roman legions and the updated Alexandran phalanx. I didn’t feel a need to give the Macedonians a big economic bonus, which I now think was kind of an error. In my defense, I didn’t regularize ALWAYS giving an economic bonus till Age 2. I learned over time, like everyone else. For instance, in my game Hyperspace, every civ gets an economic bonus, a victory point bonus, and a couple of unique bonuses. But the economic bonus is always there. Alas. Macedonia didn’t get one. I was younger then. Their most striking bonus was that they take 4x as long for priests to convert. This is counter-balanced by them not having a Temple or any priests at all. I did this partly because no one cared about the Macedonian religion by this time. (No one is converting to worship Zeus by 300 BC). But it’s also because one of the main defenses against hoplites in Age of Empires is priests, and I didn’t want people to rely on priests when stopping Macedon. 1/3

The only other thing I did for hoplites was +2 pierce armor. This is better than it seems, because the OTHER antidote to hoplites is ranged units, and now they are far less able to do so. But hoplites who resist priests & arrows are pretty great all by themselves. I of course needed something to back them up, so since hoplites are slow-moving, I thought Siege units would be ideal. I gave them siege at only 50% cost, but I only let them have Stone Throwers and Ballistas (I did let them have the Helepolis upgrade). So they have really cheap siege, but also generally terrible siege. This whole thing was designed to force the classic hoplite vs. swordsman clash so Roman battles against Macedonia would look cool. I’m told that later on MicroSoft nerfed both the siege & hoplite bonuses. This might have been justified – after all MicroSoft saw thousands more playthroughs of the game. But I never heard that Macedonia was dominating anything. This made the Macedonians an aggressive but slow civ. Their hoplites & siege plod into your town kind of unstoppably. However, Macedon has a pretty terrible have economy, so you can outspend them and win. I felt this made them an interesting, slightly challenging, civ, but rewarding if you like wiping out enemy towns. 2/3