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Aug. 31st, 2010 10:00 pmBeen playing Europa Universalis III a bit recently – it’s a historical strategy game covering the Renaissance through to the Napoleonic era. Found a fun little easter egg.
See, one of the things the game has is that you can be assigned ‘missions’ which give you small bonuses if you complete them. Most of them are random, but some countries have predefined missions to encourage them to expand in a historical fashion – the Ottomans get a mission to conquer Constantinople, Portugal gets missions to establish trading posts in west Africa and colonize Brazil, Austria gets missions to be elected Holy Roman Emperor, and so on.
Anyway, I’m playing Milan; doing alright, I’ve conquered most of Italy and Croatia. Other than that, things are proceeding fairly historically – except, for whatever reason, Spain hasn’t unified and is still divided into Castile and Aragon. Castile’s expanding into the Americas as normal, Aragon is sticking to its historical borders, occasionally picking up a province in North Africa. And then, suddenly, they went on a mad expansion spree, suddenly sending half their army to conquer Ethiopia for no apparent reason… and I get a message informing me that they’ve completed a mission.
See, the game map is divided into provinces, and one of the northern Ethiopian provinces is named after the sixteenth century capital of the country. Aragon has conquering that province as one of its missions.
That’s right – there’s a mission to ensure Aragon becomes the ruler of Gondar.
See, one of the things the game has is that you can be assigned ‘missions’ which give you small bonuses if you complete them. Most of them are random, but some countries have predefined missions to encourage them to expand in a historical fashion – the Ottomans get a mission to conquer Constantinople, Portugal gets missions to establish trading posts in west Africa and colonize Brazil, Austria gets missions to be elected Holy Roman Emperor, and so on.
Anyway, I’m playing Milan; doing alright, I’ve conquered most of Italy and Croatia. Other than that, things are proceeding fairly historically – except, for whatever reason, Spain hasn’t unified and is still divided into Castile and Aragon. Castile’s expanding into the Americas as normal, Aragon is sticking to its historical borders, occasionally picking up a province in North Africa. And then, suddenly, they went on a mad expansion spree, suddenly sending half their army to conquer Ethiopia for no apparent reason… and I get a message informing me that they’ve completed a mission.
See, the game map is divided into provinces, and one of the northern Ethiopian provinces is named after the sixteenth century capital of the country. Aragon has conquering that province as one of its missions.
That’s right – there’s a mission to ensure Aragon becomes the ruler of Gondar.
