Nanman DLC announced.

[BrenZo]

sorry if i'm necroposting but aside from the tigers, does anyone else have a problem with the nanman look in general? i was really hoping for more authentic SEA/chinese minority elements but they honestly just look like.. ridiculous savages with rocks on sticks

also i feel like the battle maps are too jungle-y for yunnan but correct me if i'm wrong

[zoner16]

It's a more general problem with the way the Nanman are portrayed across Asian media. The popular "rocks on sticks" savage motif was popularized by legends and the Romance novel due to a combination of Han chauvinism and the appeal of "noble savage" exoticism. It was rather culturally useful to portray the barbarians kowtowing to the wise and enlightened model of Han virtue, Zhuge Liang**, as a bunch of superstitious and backwards cave dwellers. Additionally, the understanding of the term "Nanman" had changed quite a bit between the Han dynasty and the Yuan dynasty (when the Romance was written), and their story had partially merged with Vietnamese legends about Ba Trieu (probably where the elephants came from) as well as other folklore.

Obviously, this is still on CA for sticking to this portrayal when they should have known better. They did put effort into making them somewhat believable for a level of development that might've existed several hundred to a thousand years prior. However, by the time of the Three Kingdoms, that was no longer the case. The kingdoms of the Xinanyi that lived in the region before surrendering to Han were advanced bronzeworkers, quite organized, and were even culturally heterogeneous, having been mixing with Han and migrants from Tibet and Central Asia for some time. They were known as excellent shots who would later excel in mountain warfare as part of the army of Shu. They had the tallies of vassal kings and were allowed to collect their own taxes. None of this is reflected in game.

[Mhaedros]

Honestly I think CA were stuck between a rock and a hard place when deciding the design and playstyle of the Nanman. If they had gone with the historically more accurate version rather than "cavemen with sticks", the people who were expecting something new and different would be complaining because "it's just a reskin of the Han factions" (already one of the biggest complaints about 3k is the lack of diversity between factions; the Nanman quite drastically added this requested diversity). With the route they did go down, we're not complaining about it being unrealistic..

Not saying either crowd here is wrong or right, but I think they wisely chose the option that would target a common complaint and at the same time look "right" to the people familiar with the story, but not necessarily the historical accuracy of the Romance etc.