Argh! *Blood boils anew*
I remember posting in that ages ago, Golden Jarls. It was the 'previous discussion' I was referring to. You're right, Native Americans seem to be flamebait for some reason. And it's not just with AoM, someone proposed an American: Total War game that proposed all these Spanish/English/French/Native American units (colonial period) and it caused a similar backlash.
Don't you love all the double standards that get dredged up? A lot of people mentioned "no written history"... um... ok, that's a huge blanket statement. Many of them had written histories. All of them had histories, whether written or not, and why that should be a prerequisite for a new Age game is beyond me... Huns were illiterate. Goths were illiterate. Many others like Vikings and Celts were only semi-literate and not in the pendantic documentation way where you could really say that had "documented histories." We've seen both of them in Age games. Then people say "CIVILIZATIONS, please". Well, according to the academic definition of a civilization, even the smallest tribes fit. But apparently civilization takes on a subjective "civilizations as in cultures I think are worthy of the title" element in these discussions. Can't argue civilizations = empire because plenty of the Age of Kings/Conquerors civs never had real empires, or only did for short periods of time, or were borderline. You could argue many various NA societies did as well. (The South is obvious, but that is -only- because they still had intact "empires" as the west thought of them at the time Europeans arrived. Not having a huge empire at the moment you happened to step off the boat doesn't mean one was never there. Look up the Mississippi and Ohio River Valley mounds. They're not as visually impressive as Egypt's pyramids, but scholars agree it took massive, empire-size manpower to build. And also evidence around the sites indicate they were hubs of major cities. Similarly Anasazi ruins have the remains of roads running out from them in all directions... implying an empire or serious trading civilization.) The idea that "well, Europeans never fought any major unified Native American civ (except Aztec) so therefore any civ they had was unimportant" is just totally imperialist and arrogant. By that rationale China and Japan should never make it into any pre-WWII game, yet many games would be considerably poorer if they'd been left out.
And then there's that guy in the other thread who claimed to be Cherokee, but said that he felt NA stories aren't as complex, and that there was no written account until after the continent was discovered. Ok, sorry to be blunt here... the guy must be white with like 1/64th Cherokee blood to say something like "the continent wasn't discovered yet." You can't discover a continent that's already been inhabited for 20-60,000 years. (Well, you can discover it for "your people", but that's not the way it's ever stated. It's always implied the Americas didn't exist before Europeans deigned to grace them with their presence. And the way everyone acts like nothing of consequence ever happened in America until the colonial period backs up this observation.)
The fact that you run into this closed-mindedness about NA's implies two things to me,
1) Deep-rooted ignorance in most Westerners about NA's
2) An assumption that the ignorance is a fine basis for drawing blanket statements like "they were too simple", "they were primitive", blah blah, hinting at an assumption that NA's don't matter.
Personally I think the fact that they've been used so little has been to the detriment of strategy games. But I realize that's just opinion.
*rant off*