The Khmer people represent the Khmer Empire, an Antiquity Age civilization in Civilization VII.
The Khmer's civilization ability is Ksekam Chamnon, which allows their 
Districts on Rivers to keep the natural yield of the tile they are on. Their associated 
Wonder is the Angkor Wat, and their unique components are as follows:
Unique Units: Yuthahathi (military), Vaishya (civilian)- Unique Improvement: Baray
- Unique Civics: Mousong, Amnach, Chakravarti
- Traditions: Pithi Chrat, Varna, Kambu-Mera
Intro[]
Like the monsoon rains, the Khmer give life to the land, and like the monsoon floods, they conquer what they will. The great mandala of Kambuja, the Khmer Empire, whirls with divine grace, and its power flows like water, a sanctuary against the burning sun. Stand on elephant-back, and let the waters rise. They will not touch you.
Tips and hints[]
Build your Urban Districts on Floodplains whenever possible, but make sure you build a Baray. These Unique Improvements make Settlements immune to Floods, even in future Ages.
Strategy[]
The Khmer are the antiquity ages premier civilisation of choice for playing around specialists, and whose focus is heavily around building a foundation for future age civs to exploit, primarily by having a stacked capital full of specialists, and a massive reduction to specialist upkeep via their traditions. As a consequence however, they are rather unfocused when chasing legacy paths, so decide early which legacy paths you will prioritise, assisted by your leader choice.
Civ Ability - Ksekam Chamnon[]
The core benefit driving the Khmer empire. The Khmer's unique capstone civic provides them with +50% Growth rate in the capital, but -5 happiness in all other cities. To play around this effectively, keep the number of cities in your empire low, get Angkor Wat in the Capital, and the rest of your settlements should be Urban Centres, building districts in high adjacency spots where they exist, or instead building them alongside Warehouse buildings on food-rich river tiles. This allows you to funnel a large sum of food to your capital, despite not having food-focused specialties, and it also allows you to contribute Codex slots, science and culture to your empire in small amounts (just enough to help you get Angkor Wat and Currency to start running lots of specialists!).
Your highest priority settles should be areas with Flood Plains tiles to exploit extra food from your unique building (more on that later), followed by other featureless river tiles, then vegetated/rough river tiles, and finally navigable river tiles (because a greater level of the tech tree needs to be researched before you can exploit this bonus on navigable rivers a large amount).
Unique Unit - Yuthahathi[]
Extra combat strength makes the Yuthahathi a force to be reckoned with, however the Khmer's lack of settlement cap increase makes them more of a defensive unit. They move slower than regular cavalry, however Khmer unique civics can give them +1 movement, bringing them back up to scratch. Being a Cavalry unit awkwardly moves them away from the scientific branch of the tech tree and has them progressing the military/happiness path, a path you have few incentives to go down. These units are entirely optional if you feel safe, but if it looks like war is going to get declared on you, the beeline to the Wheel is worth it - You also get to pick up Villas as another filler building to place on river tiles if any of those are leftover, and anybody who decides to try and attack you may find they've bitten off more than they can chew.
Unique Merchant - Vaishya[]
While this unit is a replacement for merchants, you should think of it as a mid-era supplement to scouts - There are often hostile areas of the map (lots of hostile independents too far away to disperse, or civs that just don't like you) and scouts often have to give up exploring these areas or die. Merchant units have open borders with everyone and can't be attacked, meaning that while they have low vision, they can be used to reach those areas that your scouts can't reach. Unimpeded by rivers or wet terrain, Vaishyas are much more like scouts than normal merchants, and knowing that you get 1 for free at code of laws can help you feel less bad about focusing your production for inward development rather than for exploring the map. You can build more to get faster exploration too - just remember to use them before the era ends to squeeze out those Silk Roads legacy points! And of course, if a settlement has lots of good resources that will help you out immensely, there is nothing lost by using them just for making trade routes quickly.
Unique Infrastructure - Baray[]
Building on Flood Plains and Navigable Rivers tiles can be hazardous. Enter the Baray! All settlements with a Baray are immune to flood damage for the rest of the game, and additionally you get extra food (both from the Baray itself and from any flood plains tiles you either have a district on, or are working) to funnel growth to your capital. This Where exactly you should build your Baray in each settlement depends on your long term plans - is that settlement going to be a strong spot for a city next era? Place it inside a Vegetated tile that you want to work for the production. Is the settlement going to be a future farming town? Build it on a farm tile to maximise the food transferred to your other cities.
Note that Barays can be built on all Flat tiles, not just tiles with rivers.
Associated Wonder - Angkor Wat[]
Angkor Wat ties the package together. Angkor Wat is effectively having an extra settlement in the Antiquity era for the purposes of placing specialists, and it means that any wonder you build next to districts to boost their specialist yields, you're building it next to 2 cities worth of that district (for the current era at least) as well as getting progress towards culture legacy. Other high priority wonders you want to build are all the attribute-point granting wonders, Great Stele, Gate of all Nations and Pyramid of the Sun, though you should build any wonder you can to exploit this double dipping on specialist numbers.
Civics and Traditions[]
The Khmers unique traditions are a mixed bag, with 1 situational, 1 mediocre and 1 very strong tradition. +4 combat strength on Flood plains tiles can be nice as a defensive benefit, unfortunately this is a bit too specific to plan around. +1 Gold from specialists is a mediocre tradition that can be used to push progress for Enlightenment in the next era, though it's not particularly notable. +100% Food and Happiness towards specialists, however, is an extremely powerful benefit, which only gets stronger as the game progresses and specialists start appearing everywhere.
Your Second unique civic buffs Yuthahathi movement speed, bringing them up to par with normal cavalry, though again this is more of a side benefit, the Angkor Wat is the main attraction, Your 3rd unique civic is a mixed bag - +50% Growth in the capital BUT -5 happiness in every other city shoe horns you into playing around just 1 city with a lot of urban centres, unless you're happy to accept the risk of potentially dealing with the happiness crisis at the end of the era. unless your Capital is the only city. Finishing this civic gives you a choice of either an Economic or Expansionist attribute point - Pick whichever you prefer, though Expansionist attribute points have greater synergy with Khmer gameplay. The only Mastery civic on offer here gives the Palace +3 Codex slots. Unless you are playing a leader who rewards you for grabbing civic masteries, this might as well be wasted culture, since having just 2 urban centres will give you enough codex slots to complete science legacy, and often you will want more than this to push your initial yields up.
Recommended Leaders[]
Expansionist leaders are typically the highest synergy to play around Khmers unique benefits with, since Farmers markets can funnel 3/4.5 food (rather than the normal 2/3) to the Khmers capital for every specialised town you own. In particular:
- Pachacuti takes all of the Khmers excess food and gets some extra production for it as well, excellent for building wonders for a Culture Legacy.
- Augustuses cheaper purchasing of buildings in towns, as well as being able to buy monuments and Amphitheatres in any town, helps him funnel that food earlier and squeeze more culture out of towns, or even take advantage of more specialized town categories other than just Urban Centres.
- Ashoka, world renouncers absurd happiness buffs allow him to just ignore the happiness downsides of making more cities, and make lots of large cities.
- Confucius stacks more specialist and city growth buffs for your capital.
- Ibn Battuta lets you access the Abbasid civilisation in the exploration era without needing 3 camels in your territory, to take advantage of your traditions later with the best Specialist civilisation.
Aside from these, any Militaristic leader that has combat bonuses to cavalry units has the potential to take your unique Cavalry units towards a Military legacy, though you will need to look for settlement cap buffs (such as from suzeraining a military independent peoples) as the Khmer lack any settlement cap buffs of their own.
Civilopedia entry[]
The Khmer (Cambodian) Empire was a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom centered within the Mekong River, around the Tonle Sap lake. Its forte was control of land, especially rice-producing land, and it extended its influence across mainland Southeast Asia. Khmer exchanged texts and spouses with similar polities elsewhere on the continent, although the Himalayas and its Southeast Asian spur limited access to China. The Champa empire, in present-day southern Vietnam, also presented a buffer zone between the Khmer and Vietnam. Its historical influence extends today beyond Cambodia into Thailand, southern Vietnam, and Laos.
The first major settlements in Southeast Asia (excluding Vietnam) were city-states centered around a divine king. Academics have debated the extent of India’s influence on this region – were they copies of Indian states, Southeast Asian states observing Indian customs, or entirely indigenous polities taking inspiration from India while going their own way?
The adoption of an Indian model of statecraft might seem strange but it was politically expediency – local animist beliefs (of spirits of this or that mountain or river) were often tied to old lineage systems. A powerful usurper might use a foreign ideology as a new basis for power, often with a claim to (Hindu) divinity. The narratives surrounding these divine kingdoms were often fusions of local and global folklore – a common origin myth (Khmer included) involved the marriage of a Brahman king to a naga (water dragon), thus uniting foreign/male power to local/common axes, laying the groundwork for a divine monarchy.
What is a god-king? The name conjures images of Oz, the Great and Terrible. However, the truth is more complicated. Hinduism teaches that everyone contains a little divinity – but some have more than others. Kings had barami – righteous, charismatic power – and were the kind of people everyone loved. For these people, things always seem to just work out, but they also behave in a way that attracts these qualities. However, a king is not a monk and divine reserve brought about divine puissance – the power to conquer and destroy.
This king was the cakkavatti, the lord of the universe and the quintessential divine king. Additionally, an astrological layout of a city was a claim to this power. O. W. Wolters describes these Indic kingdoms as the “Galactic Polity,” a political system that is a little like a fractal. The capital is built to look like the heavens and the lesser cities are built to look like the capital. This divine organization means that divine power can manifest on earth. In turn, lesser cities far flung from Angkor look like mini-Angkors, with their own mini-kings. These city satellites circle the center and mini-satellites encircle them, just as the Earth circles the Sun, and the Moon circles the Earth.
Unless the Earth were to break free.
Jayavarman II was the god-king who broke free. At the time, Khmer was a satellite of the Shailendra Dynasty of Java, but in 802 CE Jayavarman crowned himself king of Kambuja (Cambodia) and initiated a campaign of expansion. Jayavarman’s conquests extended across mainland Southeast Asia and established a permanent Khmer presence that has lasted to the present (occasional Siamese dominion notwithstanding).
This was not always an easy road. Yasovarman, who was a few kings down the line, established the first settlement at what would eventually become known as Angkor. This name is misleading as Angkor Wat means “city of temples,” and it certainly wasn’t the actual name of the place; his city was called Yasodharapura.
Cambodia relied on the Mekong River. The river is a hydrological marvel; the monsoons that smash into the Himalayas (“place of snows”) drop a phenomenal amount of water at an extreme pace, which feeds the great rivers of India as well as those to its east. This Mekong pulse surges downstream where it hits a very flat part of Cambodia (where Phnom Penh is today) and backfills the great lake at Tonle Sap. This model was used by the Cambodians to fill their great reservoirs, the barays, thus solving a problem endemic to the arid region: how to get an additional rice crop when the land dries.
Angkor sits at the edge of Tonle Sap Lake, and its baray reservoir is visible from space. The great temple complexes, built by Yasovarman and his successors, also sit there. In these temples, one can see evidence of a religious change; Angkor Wat is Hindu, but later temples were Mahayana Buddhist and are currently Theravada Buddhist. These religions are related. Both versions of Buddhism are an outgrowth of Hinduism, and all three respect the Hindu gods. In Cambodia, Hinduism was a cult of the monarch as divinity on earth, with Brahmans as attendants. Mahayana Buddhism was similar but had an emphasis on philosophy coming from India. Theravada Buddhism focuses on universal literacy and mobilization of the populace. Chinese traveler Zhou Daguan remarked on the variety of religious life in Angkor – Brahmans attended to the king, Buddhists the common folk, and everywhere there were mediums of the animist spirits of place.
Yasodharapura was a massive city, carved out of the jungle. While only its stone structures remain, houses along irrigation canals would have stretched into the countryside, supporting a population of around a million people in one city alone. Buildings were temporary. A few teak wood houses and temples existed, but most were thatched structures on stilts with empty plazas for marketplaces. Women took a prominent place in the marketplace. Fish, rice, and tropical fruits composed most of the diet. Meanwhile, Khmer luxury goods included gold, sandalwood, and gems.
War persisted, and royal succession was always contested. Kings would appoint an heir apparent, but other children of the royal harem often believed they had an equal claim. These lesser sons were often appointed as the kings of neighboring lands, so succession conflicts typically took the shape of large regional wars, rather than a quick and bloody palace assassination. Some lesser sons simply sought to break away and provided legitimacy for new dynasties in new eras. The wars with the Cham people of what is now southern Vietnam were the most bitter and sowed seeds of conflict between two of the oldest powers in the region, and Vietnam mobilized its Cham vassals provoking rebellions from Thais (Siamese) to Angkor’s west.
Around 1300, something unexpected happened across the world. The Little Ice Age was a period of climate fluctuation that caused disastrous harvests and starvation. It was soon followed by the Black Death, a result of rodent population booms in Central Asia. In Southeast Asia, the Mekong experienced a drought then a sudden torrent of rain, severely damaging an economy dependent on regular floods.
Socially, the world experienced a general move toward vernacularization. Far-flung parts of the Khmer empire ceased being Khmer and started being Lao or Tai. Within Southeast Asia, this had a social precedent. First, Theravada placed importance on the common folk, on educating each person in the village, rather than the prestige of the ruler. This may have led to a decentering of power and knowledge in the capital and a rise of local forms of rule. In Siam, the ethnic Tai vassals of Sukhothai and Ayutthaya rose to capture Angkor.
Angkor collapsed and Cambodia subsequently became a lesser partner between Vietnam and Siam, occasionally allying with the weaker against the stronger, often being torn apart in the process. The ruins of Angkor were never really abandoned, although the French “discovered” them during their conquest of Indochina. Today, they remain a potent nationalist symbol, gracing both the flags of present-day Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. Indeed, as a sign of Siamese dominance, the Thai kings made a small model of Angkor and placed it in the temple of the Emerald Buddha.
Angkor remains a stunning marker of a city in a tropical climate, of the devotion of people to a vision of the heavens, and of hydraulic engineering. “Living with water” is a defining feature of the empire, a lesson we might learn from today. It was a powerful symbol for those who conquered the area, whether they were Siamese, French… or Maoist.
Cities[]
Trivia[]
- The Khmer civilization's symbol is a prāṅg (ប្រាង្គ), the spire of a wat.
- The Khmer civilization ability Ksekam Chamnon (កសិកម្ម ចមនយន) is a Khmer term meaning "traditional agriculture" or "plentiful harvests."
Soundtrack[]
| Original Track | № | Based on | Credits | Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "The Khmer Empire (Antiquity Age)" | 11 | Robam Tep Apsara | Composed by Geoff Knorr Performed by Wong Pleng Khmer |
8:07 |
Gallery[]
.jpg "Khmer city in-game (Civ7).jpg (4.66 MB)")
.png "Yuthahathi in-game (Civ7).png (801 KB)")
.png "Vaishya in-game (Civ7).png (834 KB)")
.png "Baray in-game (Civ7).png (919 KB)")
.png "Angkor Wat in-game (Civ7).png (3.75 MB)")
.png "Khmer Background (Civ7).png (1,018 KB)")
Videos[]
See also[]
- Khmer in other games
External links[]
| Civilization VII Civilizations [edit] | |
|---|---|
| Antiquity | |
| Exploration | |
| Modern | |
| 1 Requires DLC | |