Age of Empires/Headscratchers


 * Basically the entire China campaign in AOEIII. Let's see...
 * Ming Dynasty using the flag of Qing Dynasty
 * Zheng He's fleet discovered America. Yes, some do claim it in Real Life, but going to America through Africa and Atlantic Ocean is pushing it quite a bit.
 * After the aforementioned discoveries, the evil eunuch allied with the native Americans and tried to build his own empire. Communication problems aside, the idea of an eunuch building an Empire is just over the top.
 * You got that wrong. The bad guy was an evil prince. No one was identified as an eunuch, but if there was one it was probably the Zheng-He expy main character, Admiral Jinhai.
 * At the end of the campaign, Zheng's men somehow managed to erase their existence on America. Technical problems, like how exactly is it possible, aside, why would they do so? I know the Chinese are not into the colony business, but... why?
 * The Chinese didn't want to accidentally tip the balance of things in Latin America. And can you imagine what will happen if the Europeans reaching the New World finds Chinese Artifacts? History in that timeline will be proven that if one just keeps going east, you will find China. Look on the bright side, at least spices can be cultivated...
 * Also, the Montezuma campaign in AOEII, which ends with the Aztecs driving the Spanish away and rebuilding their civilisation. Yeah, that's not how it happened.
 * The campaigns all end well for the people you're playing as, they are supposed to be alternate histories.
 * Actually, this troper always thought the ending implied they were wiped out anyway.
 * Yup, pretty much it says: Yes, we pushed out the Spaniards this time.... but what will we do when they'll come back again?
 * It's not the only campaign that ends with the player winning a battle that was lost in real history. The other two are William Wallace winning the Battle of Falkirk and Frederic Barbarossa taking Jerusalem.
 * In the second game hitting a building with swords causes it to light on fire. The third game suffers from a glitch in which units may be trapped in limbo underwater or off the edge of the map for the entire game with no feasible way to use them against opponents.
 * Maybe the sword created friction against the side of the building, creating sparks and igniting the wood?
 * Stop questioning! WOLOLOLOLO WOLOLOLOLO
 * All the Far East civilizations in AOEIII need to build particular building to advance to the next age. No big deal, but the idea that the Confucius academy produce siege engines makes no sense.
 * It's an abstraction of your civilization gaining the general level of knowledge and organised scholarship needed to sustain a complex siege works industry.
 * In the second game, archers upgrades to crossbowmen. However, what about all those civilizations that never had crossbows in the first place? and why Spanish have no access to crossbows at all?
 * On the second one: For balancing issues. The Spanish main feature is that they are extremely weak in the early ages but insanely powerful in the latter ones.
 * In-Wiki one regarding Age of Empires II: on the main page there's a Shown Their Work, fine... then on the YMMV page, we get a lovely, overly long Critical Research Failure entry with lots of people bitching about the various details that, considering the above mentioned Shown Their Work entry, are in comparison quite forgettable when you consider the insane amount of work it would take to pay attention to every single detail. And yet, the tropers there talk as though the programmers or whoever was behind it were genuinely ignorant of the whole thing. Can't you just make up your mind?
 * Because those are all different tropers, they don't always agree with each other.
 * In the first game, most of the units have a distinct Greek-Roman style, but how this works with other people like Assyrian or Shang?