Indeed, the city often had large weapons/tool foundries in its residential districts, with people walking down the streets usually… veering slightly away from them, as they tended to radiate uncomfortable levels of heat and smell of metalworking. To the south, mining and quarry complexes dot the landscape, extracting silver and stone for construction and military purposes. Outside the city, there are few suburbs, but for miles to the north, naught but farms filled with grain and vegetables can be seen growing along the Barcino River. The city features several open-aired marketplaces, operating below high-flying, wolf-depicting banners of the Nicomedian Empire. They notice, too, that signs on the streets are often written in several different tongues. As the group heads through the city, they are greeted with sights of tall, opulent government buildings, grand cathedrals and temples, rows upon rows of thin, single family homes or apartment constructs. The City of Nicomedia is nothing short of immense, a sprawling metropolis of five million people and growing. I did not well understand its purpose but what I did understand is that the Jian lacks that piece, or at least, every single Jian that I’ve seen so far lacks it.Īs the Second Great War of Gratia has drawn to a close, tens of thousands of men and women in uniform return to the capital city of their Empire, finally coming home to be with loved ones. I also told them that both the sword in the image and the Dandao shared something particular: both of them have a piece of soft metal attached at the base of the blade right atop of the guard, a characteristic shared with Japanese swords, a piece of metal that is called in Japanese “Habaki”. I explained them why it resembled one to me and what were the similarities between the sword shown in the image and the Dandao and what were the differences between the first two and the Jian sword: both the Dandao and the sword in the image are clearly single edged blades while the Jian has both edges fully sharpened, also the image shows that the Chinese sword () has the tip stuck in the ground and that it might mean that the length of it could be much longer of what everyone believed it to actually be (the Dandao is waaay longer than a Jian). But even after discussing about that armour I kept on talking about the sword and told them that to my eyes the blade resembled more of a Dandao rather than a Jian. I told them that he resembled that Chinese infantry unit and that in one AOE3 art a Qiang Spearman was depicted holding with both hands a Guandao-ish spear. He told me that that armour could be the one used by the new Chinese heavy, and I agreed. One of them showed me some images of a Chinese armour that looked alarmingly similar to the one used by one of AOE3’s Chinese infantry unit called Qiang Pikeman. They weren’t that interested and so they kept on talking about the Chinese heavy. Even though we all agreed about the fact that the sword shown on the teaser image could potentially be a Chinese Jian sword I also told them that I was speculating about the fact that the sword might be something else but a Jian.
So, yesterday I was discussing with a couple of friends of mine about the next three new heavies and how I was so hyped for the Chinese one.