Mod Idea: North America

You could still keep Native Americans in-game, with your proposed idea of Europeans/North Africans coming in waves, disease could be dealt with early (by-the-by human diseases did indeed exist in the Americas prior to Columbus). The Arians could have already been actively trading with many of the local natives (If you're thinking Louisiana Delta for the Arians the only way they'd have access to good stone would be to trade further upstream), which would include beasts of burden and horses, so by the 12th Century a potent (like Mongolian) horse culture could have developed in the Great Plains and Northern Steppes of America... of course the Western US and Canada would be harsh places to eek out a living, it was dubious with 17th Century Technology. The Furthest west a 'Westerner' Society would logically stop would be Missouri, beyond that harsh weather conditions, and very aggressive natives would have made life incredibly difficult for a society with medieval technology.

At game start, the predominant North American native power would be Cahokia, near modern day Springfield Illinois, with access to knowledge on how to forge steel weapons, and western agriculture they could pose a formidable bulwark against western expansion in the early game, but because of the spread of illnesses, by the mid game they'd be in trouble, and the door to the west would finally be open... to an eastern invasion by the Lakota, Cheyenne, Apache, Comanche, Blackfeet... take your pick.

The American South West would quickly pick up on beasts of burden, preferably sheep. The Pueblo and Navajo stand right at the crossroads of Southern Mexico, and would be on the only viable trade routes from East to West, turning them into potentially wealthy nations (although agriculturally poor ones).

Central Mexico would be heavily balkanized, at 1066 the Aztecs are just in their infancy, and the Maya are in the middle of a civil war, even if they did know about Westerners coming in, they'd be too concerned with their own problems. The Aztecs (because nobody is really sure where the Aztecs came from, and why they left where they did originate) could appear out of the North, Steel Swords in hand and proclaiming the word of god, and that all men should pray to Saint Mark... it'd be an interesting twist... A Native American "Crusades" of sort.

The Pacific Coast is where I'm having trouble visualizing much, it could easily handle Westerner civilizations, but how they get there is a problem.

VenetianPriest said:

I suppose now is a good time to discuss the map. After reviewing some habitat maps of North America, I have a rough idea about boundaries.

In the north, Newfoundland and the Coast of Labrador should be in, but everthing else North should be out. If the game allows permanent terra incognita, the vast majority of Quebec and Ontario would be off limits; only the areas surrounding cities like Quebec City, Ottawa, and Toronto should be habitable. Only hardy stock should live in this area, so I believe the Vikings will end up settling these regions of Canada. I think they will also inhavit Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine.

The southern boundary is a bit harder to define; I don't know that one would consider the tropical rainforests of Central America suitable to settlement by Europeans. The same would go for the Caribbean.

The west is rather difficult; although, I agree a nomadic horsemen culture seems natural. I don't feel CKI represented the steppe of the Ukraine or Russia very well; hopefully we can duplicate CKII's treatment of nomadic cultures in Western America.

It would be wonderful if California would make it into such a mod. It could be a land of legend where milk and honey flow freely. We could even make it a target of a crusade like mission. March as many men and supplies you can over the mountains and dessert to capture it from the natives; just an idea.

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I'm not so sure it would actually need the Caribbean or the Pacific coast... presumably CK2 won't have much in the way of naval combat, so a fun game could be designed already if you only take the north American continent east of the Mississippi.

Medievals would naturally also explore (and settle) the Caribbean, but for the purpose of making a fantasy medieval North America, I think it would be viable to just ignore those regions, and focus on the eastern USA. No Aztecs, no Maya, no Pueblo, no Apache, no Caribbean, just the east coast + Appalachians + Quebec + Mississippi plains. CK is not really a global strategy game, it's more focused on a provinces, castles, etc, and you have more than enough land to model that just using the eastern half of the USA. It's large enough to accomodate a dozen kingdoms, plus native tribes, easily.

Magmaniac said:

I don't think it would make sense to have Chinese settlers. The Chinese for the most part didn't care about anything outside of china and considered everything else as inferior worthless backwaters, they wouldn't even dare colonize something as close as Taiwan. If any colonization came from asia, it would either be some southeast asian maritime power slowly island hopping eastwards, or some northern inuit type of group going across to alaska. Both of which would be interesting to have in game, but not as any real major developed polities.

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Have you ever heard of the Chinese Tresaure Fleets and Zheng He? What if he got caught in a storm and swept into the Pacific, where he got caught in the North Pacific Gyre and landed in NA?

Ben Music said:

Have you ever heard of the Chinese Tresaure Fleets and Zheng He? What if he got caught in a storm and swept into the Pacific, where he got caught in the North Pacific Gyre and landed in NA?

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That was rather late though (1421) in the CK timeframe

But since this is somewaht of a 'fantasy' mod I don't see why you can't have a Chinese realm to on the map.

Veldmaarschalk said:

That was rather late though (1421) in the CK timeframe

But since this is somewaht of a 'fantasy' mod I don't see why you can't have a Chinese realm to on the map.

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I agree the treasure fleets were rather late in the period. But hey we're proposing a medieval society in America!

SO is the main focus of the mod that Native americans formed European-style societies naturally, or that European colonization occured earlier than it did ITTL

Anyway, I'm very interested in this mod and would very much like to contribute the the utmost of my abilities (although RL may sometimes interfere)

Well, I've never been a great writer, but I think this mod is great idea, and I'll just add my two cents. Like was said before, Anglo-Saxons fleeing the Normans, maybe settling in New England or southern Canada is a good idea. Maybe also Baltic pagans made it to NA somehow, in response to the Teutonic order's crusades. Also, if there is sustained contact between Europe and NA in this mod, how will that be modeled?

I made a map with the major river systems and threw in some ideas of how the continent will be laid out, I assume it's not very much like what you were thinking. I can change anything on the map pretty easily so just tell me what to put where. It's just vague areas circled for different groups right now, as it gets more fleshed out I can change locations of things and refine it with more detail, province divisions, names of cities, regions, etc.

http://kupax.com/files/15003_dvp8u/ideas.gif

VenetianPriest said:

From what I understand, one of the most important reasons that Pre-Columbian societies had not advanced on par with European and Asian civilizations was on account of a general lack of animal species suitable for domestication. Agriculture drives human civilizations forward, so as long as agricultural inputs continue to decrease while agricultural outputs continue to increase, human civilizations will prosper both in size and complexity. In the High Middle Ages, Europeans developed such agricultural innovations as the three-field system, heavy plows, and the switch from oxen to horses as beasts of burden. It is this latter innovation where Pre-Columbian civilizations suffered, for they did not have horses or oxen. To my knowledge, the only domesticated beasts of burden in the Americas were the llamas and alpacas of South America.

There may have been other factors I am not considering, but this appears to be a rather obvious one. On an aside, this may explain, at least in part, why other regions of the world did not develop as fast as others; for example, Sub-Saharan Africans only had access one native species suitable as a beast of burden: the donkey.

Thankfully, we don't have to worry about these things as it is a fantasy. Scientists believe there were many other species suitable for domestication in the Americas during the last ice age, but they became extinct. (There is a bit of disagreement about how they died out.) In this world, they simply won't be extinct; the people of North America can have full access to all the species found in Eurasia.

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I've read that another major factor for European advancement compared to the rest of the world was the relative easily accessible near-surface metal ores in Europe compared to many other parts of the world; that is to say that an iron or copper "mine" in Europe around the CK era is basically a ground level hole where the ores are visible at the surface and therefore easily removed without any advanced tools or techniques.

Magmaniac said:

I made a map with the major river systems and threw in some ideas of how the continent will be laid out, I assume it's not very much like what you were thinking. I can change anything on the map pretty easily so just tell me what to put where. It's just vague areas circled for different groups right now, as it gets more fleshed out I can change locations of things and refine it with more detail, province divisions, names of cities, regions, etc.

http://kupax.com/files/15003_dvp8u/ideas.gif

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Nice map! But I think those boundaries are a bit too wide.

If it's to be a medieval scenario, then the European settlers need to behave like medieval people. For one thing, they won't have much in the way of transoceanic trade - so fur hunting is right out as a means of making a living. The Canadian interior and Labrador will remain unsettled, and the great lakes region is not a very inviting place either. Nothing like the early French exploration would happen.

Secondly, since people have only access to not very seaworthy ships, and are not naval-oriented by natural disposition (excpetion: Vikings), settlements along a coast are difficult to maintain for economical and military reasons. Rather than extending their settlements along the coasts, they would bunch together, and try to carve out a territory of their own towards the interior, a fiefdom with as short borders as possible. Think County of Edessa. Coasts with difficult terrain right behind them are downright inhospitable - shallow settlements along the coasts of, say, South Carolina, Florida or Alabama would not be able to defend themselves against the hostile Indians of the swamplands behind the coast. The fertile interior of New York, Delaware, New England or Maryland on the other hand would be a good place where the "core" of a medieval society could develop, there's ample room, the terrain is not too difficult, the soils is fertile, and you can shove out the Indians by pushing up the rivers and linking the settlements.

Then there's the psychological element. Medieval peasants are not supposed to be adventurous people. They shy from wild, dark forests with strange peoples whose behavior towards arrogant strangers could be right out of a scary nightmare. They will wait for their dukes and princes to conquer these lands from the natives in the name of God, and then follow those lords as they establish new fiefdoms and invite settlers. So unless you make the Indians all disappear from diseases (where's the fun in that??), this would mean, waves of settlements would only follow those big "crusades" against the heathen forest and swamp dwellers. Those campaigns would be big endeavours, not small-scale frontier warfare. Think baltic crusades - they're crusades whose movement you can put on a map with big arrows. As often as not, a crusade may fail, with lots of lords and their knights ending up slaughtered in the wild forests, their skalps and armor ending up as decoration of some supreme iroquis chieftain's main hall.

Lastly, economics again. A medieval economy is an economy without much specialization. Farmers don't produce much in the way of cash crops, rather they produce food, and surpluses are small. Therefore there are few cities. The centers of medieval civilization (in the classical, western European sense) are the courts of the kings, who often or not may be travelling courts, or courts that convene only every now and then, since the appetite of the king's entourage would quickly exhaust the stores of the local towns, if they made their court permanent. The dukes and barons would most of the time be in their own lands. This means that, for a kingdom to expand its power, it needs to expand its territory, more precisely, it needs to expand the size of its arable lands. Conquering "strategic" islands or coastal fortresses is not going to happen, since a territory can only be held permanently if its inhabitants and the garrison can live off that land. No settlement in Florida or on those small, sugar-growing caribbean islands.

I felt so bold as to take your map and paint the areas on the continent that I think would make good areas for medievals at game start:



The "Marshland Indians" area is pretty harsh for medieval settlers, for reasons I outlined. Same with the Great Lakes area. Both could be areas where Indians resist the Europeans.

The light blue area I took to be Vikings of some sort. They could have fun raiding the dark blue Europeans in the east coast area for easy loot, and otherwise make a living fishing and a bit of farming.

Now in the dynamics of the game, the blue east coasters would probably seek to push towards the Great Lakes, towards upstate New York and towards Kentucky across the Cumberland Gap, since those are the areas where fertile land is to be had. They'd also probably fill up Maine and northeastern New England as well, but without so much fuss as big crusades.

The Vikings would push up the St Lawrence river in quest for land, as well as what's southern Ontario nowadays, and would raid the east coast. Going towards Labrador or the Canadian interior to their northwest would not be so inviting, it's cold, densely forested and full of hostile natives. They would clash with the East Coasters in upstate new york eventually.

The purples, which you labeled as Arians (?) could bunch their settlements around the most defensible area, i.e. southern Louisiana, and expand inwards from there. I don't think they would settle the Alabama coast or the Texan coasts, for lack of defensible lands, and for other reasons outlined above. Their expansion dynamics would lead them up the main rivers, towards the fertile lands of Arkansas and eventually Missouri. They could also push a bit towards western Georgia, but AFAIK that was mostly swamps before European settlement? Might not be as inviting as the more open land along the mississippi.

I figured that with hundreds of years of development, the european colonists would have plenty of time to develop into fairly large entities with population enough for some cities, or at least major population centers, spread out over some area. I think the first wave would be sort of a supporting point for other waves, as even if they didn't have friendly relations the newer cultures coming in could look to what those from the earlier waves have done and learn a lot about how to prosper in the new world.

Also, I disagree about the Caribbean, I think some of the settlers from europe would find these places as perfectly adequate. Probably not northern europeans like the Franks, but the moors at least would have some experience with warmer climates. Egyptians from the first wave as well. Especially once the first wave has been well established they would certainly look to take the islands, the natives there are weak compared to most of the mainland natives, the land is fertile, and islands are easy to defend. Plus taking the islands would be good for maritime economies to develop later.

And remember it is a fantasy, we could just have the europeans settle wherever we want and make up reasons as long as VenetianPriest supports it.

I think it makes the most sense to lay things out as we want it to look at the game start in 1066, and then work backwards and fill in the history to explain how it got to that point. I think that would be the best for gaming reasons as opposed to trying to figure out what would have happened "realistically" (which is a ridiculous concept for this anyways). This way we can lay out balance geographically, economically, etc. as we see fit.