EU 4 : Are australian tribes supposed to be so boring ?

[Restless Native]

Wrong. Who says history has to repeat itself ? Because it happened this way does not mean it could not have happened differently. There were some pretty powerful countries in Africa, in south america. They missed their calling but it does not mean they could not have become as strong as lots of European nations if the situation had not evolved otherwise.

No. I’m not wrong.

I’m not saying history has to repeat itself. But it’s constrained by the reality at the time. I’m saying that in 1444 start these were Stone Age tribes in Australia. You don’t go from Stone Age to renaissance in 100 years. Modernising as these tribes in the games time frame would not be possible and therefore should not be possible.
First you need to develop things like farming, irrigation, alphabet, bronze working, animal husbandry, the wheel for Christ’s sake. Long before you’re even close to catching up. Let alone things like organised religion and government, educational etc. This game isn’t everyone starts equal because everyone wasn’t equal.

 

[Rashie]

Frankly, it's one of those cases where they shouldn't be proper tags at game start to begin with.

EU4 have always had difficulties with portraying places were people lived, but weren't organized so directly into bigger political polities. It struggles enough to portray the difference between a nation state and the feudalism that were common in Europe in the 1400s even.

 

[Blindbohemian]

Wrong. Who says history has to repeat itself ? Because it happened this way does not mean it could not have happened differently. There were some pretty powerful countries in Africa, in south america. They missed their calling but it does not mean they could not have become as strong as lots of European nations if the situation had not evolved otherwise.

[...]

And what i am advocating is not to make tribes as powertfull as nations,at start, far from it, but some measure of clarity regarding the possibilities to develop them. I dont want them to be mere ornements or there is no use in having created them.

I think there's a bit of inadvertent silliness here which kind of exposes why your position isn't worth the time you spent typing it out.

The different groups added in Leviathan (and at other points in time) are not at all the same.

Indigenous Australians, Polynesians in the tropical Pacific, and Māori were totally distinct civilisations with very different structures which each have different relationships to EUIV mechanics. You can't paint them with one brush, and the fact that you are rather demonstrates you don't have the understanding to speak to the subject.

There is no possible way that the various polities of Indigenous Australians, assuming (as EUIV does) that the history of the world proceeds as it actually did until 1444, could have had any other outcome by 1821 than either ongoing isolation or subjugation by an outside power. There is no plausible series of events that could have occurred to produce any other outcome. They could not have become "leaders of Oceania". In 1444 they didn't even have a conception of Oceania. They didn't even have a conception of Australia. They didn't have even the barest beginning of an understanding of seagoing vessels, centralised governance, logistics, complex-society-scale land use and resource management, population control, monopoly on the use of force, specialisation of labour, institutionalised structures of influence and responsibility or projection of power. They didn't have a population density—they didn't have a population base—that would enable the centralisation and projection of power.

A few of those things could have been developed in 400-ish years, but not many, not all at once, and not starting from the position that Indigenous Australians were in in 1444. So here is a measure of clarity regarding the possibilities to develop them: there were none. Starting in 2,500 BCE, sure. Starting in 1444? It's a mathematical impossibility. They are mere ornaments in EUIV, and there was no use in having created them. Once Indigenous Australians are in the game literally every province with any human occupants whatsoever can be justified as a tag, because even the Inuit of Eiriksfjord are no less advanced and state-like than the Indigenous Australian nations we are representing as tags.

The Polynesian societies are comparable (as are the nomadic tags in the Americas and Siberia, and probably a few in Africa), in particular the tags on the various atolls of east and central Polynesia: Tonga, Fiji, Samoa. While they had a stronger tradition of centralisation and institutionalised structures of power, monopolies on force and projection of authority, they simple didn't have the population or the capability to grow, support or control a population that could have achieved anything meaningful on the EUIV scale in the EUIV time frame. I am less opposed to their inclusion—it stretches credulity but I have to admit it is plausible, if Paradox had bothered to account for the particular naval tradition of Polynesian peoples—that Fijian war parties might sail their waka to Samoa and Tonga and establish a maritime power dynamic between the three. It wouldn't last, and EUIV isn't capable of modelling the reasons why, but it's plausible.

Of the contentious additions the only ones I don't think are completely absurd are the Māori iwi which occupy Aotearoa/New Zealand. They had the political culture of the other Polynesian polities and the scale of population necessary to actually do things on the EUIV scale. The iwi are the only tags in Oceania for whom the EUIV minimum regiment of 1,000 men isn't completely absurd (it's still pretty absurd, but not completely). Do I think they should be in the game? No. But they're better justified than the other additions. It's totally possible that a powerful Māori leader could have centralised Aotearoa under his rule in the time period (Te Rauparaha very nearly did), just like it's possible that Fiji could've sent war parties to conquer Samoa and Tonga. Because Aotearoa is not so far-flung as those tiny islands such a leader might even have maintained control and been able to then send war parties to Fiji or Rekohu—Māori did, within or shortly after the EUIV period. But even that is a pretty contingent and conjectural string of possibilities, and even if they could achieve all that it wouldn't hold together, for reasons EUIV can't model well. So they just shouldn't be in EUIV.

All of the above tags are better modelled as natives in "terra nullius" provinces. I don't believe there is any reasonable argument to the contrary, and every one I've seen people advance is rooted in either a) ignorance or b) ignorances. Some groups of humans in the world in 1444 just didn't have any possible path to political and military power by 1821. It's just reality.

Now with all that being said some joker is probably going to canter in here and make an argument about game design and options for players and meme runs and world conquests and so on, and that's all fine—I'm exclusively arguing that from an I-like-that-EUIV-makes-an-effort-to-model-historical-forces perspective it makes sense that the various Stone Age-technology tags in EUIV are gimped to the point of borderline unplayability and that I think they should be gimped much further. If that isn't something you like about EUIV or care about then I'm sure you'd like to see them treated differently, and that's great, but I don't care.

 

[Lady Amnell]

Note that my present post is not meant to judge the presence or not of the Aborigines nations in the game, but i would like to respond to some of the things that have been said above.


For starters, calling tehm "Stone Age tribes" is rather crude and diminutive. Anthropologists have now more or less rejected the three age system, as it arises from the idea of linear human progress. However, thechnology doesn't follow a strict order, it is based on pre-requisites.

In the case of Aborigines, they had knowledge of agriculture, for example. Some cultures were sendentary practising agriculture lifestyles. Other cultures made the choice of hunter-gathering. On a continent with little life sustainability and most of all the absence of a trade network to tap on, they were on the sidelines... whereas, other cultures around the world had trade networks allowing the share of technologies feeding eachother between cultures.


In short, i think there are some notions mentioned in the thread that are based on old ideas, and not label them as "Stone Age tribes".

 

[Jihem]

Call whatever you want the conceptual technological gap between the people of Oceania and the rest of the world, the fact is that EU offers for this region a game experience close to the alternate history of a parallel universe. The what if here is much too implausible for the reasons mentioned (contrary to the African or Meso-American situations for example).

Anyway, and Paradox announced it : by the end of life of EU IV, only two regions will be entitled to a serious update. However, there are at least three that clearly deserve it : Scandinavia/Baltic, Middle East and South America. Plus two others that are rather incomplete : India and in a way the eastern Altaic people (notably Uzbeks/Bukhara). This means that the months devoted to the development of Oceania, and the associated features, will prevent Paradox from offering a more or less complete game before switching to EU V. We will therefore have to be satisfied, as usual, with buggy mods and for the most part never translated, and it's not very respectful for the players.

 

[currylambchop]

Call whatever you want the conceptual technological gap between the people of Oceania and the rest of the world, the fact is that EU offers for this region a game experience close to the alternate history of a parallel universe. The what if here is much too implausible for the reasons mentioned (contrary to the African or Meso-American situations for example).

Anyway, and Paradox announced it : by the end of life of EU IV, only two regions will be entitled to a serious update. However, there are at least three that clearly deserve it : Scandinavia/Baltic, Middle East and South America. Plus two others that are rather incomplete : India and in a way the eastern Altaic people (notably Uzbeks/Bukhara). This means that the months devoted to the development of Oceania, and the associated features, will prevent Paradox from offering a more or less complete game before switching to EU V. We will therefore have to be satisfied, as usual, with buggy mods and for the most part never translated, and it's not very respectful for the players.

People would literally complain that oceania is not developed if you replaced Oceania with South America in leviathan

 

[Word_Smith]

People would literally complain that oceania is not developed if you replaced Oceania with South America in leviathan

I don't think so. Over countless dev diaries, I can't say I've seen more than single-digit numbers of people asking for more tags in Oceania. Meanwhile, countless people have been (justifiably, if not sometimes abrasively) asking for more detail to be added to SA.

 

[Beagá]

Undeserved details. Stone age people like in Austrália. Monuments would be simply ridiculous.

 

[Restless Native]

Note that my present post is not meant to judge the presence or not of the Aborigines nations in the game, but i would like to respond to some of the things that have been said above.


For starters, calling tehm "Stone Age tribes" is rather crude and diminutive. Anthropologists have now more or less rejected the three age system, as it arises from the idea of linear human progress. However, thechnology doesn't follow a strict order, it is based on pre-requisites.

In the case of Aborigines, they had knowledge of agriculture, for example. Some cultures were sendentary practising agriculture lifestyles. Other cultures made the choice of hunter-gathering. On a continent with little life sustainability and most of all the absence of a trade network to tap on, they were on the sidelines... whereas, other cultures around the world had trade networks allowing the share of technologies feeding eachother between cultures.


In short, i think there are some notions mentioned in the thread that are based on old ideas, and not label them as "Stone Age tribes".

Pure tripe. “Made the Choice of hunter gatherers”. They made no choice. They were Stone Age and that’s it. they only used tools made of stone and that makes them Stone Age. They had zero technological advances beyond Stone Age and that is based on evidence.
And there was plenty of ‘life sustainability’ on that continent . It isn’t all desert. Not even close.
“Crude and diminutive”. Pure bull. Facts are facts.

 

[Terixis]

IMO the Polynesian tags (including Maori) are perfectly fine additions to the game but having the Aboriginal tribes is just silly. But there's no point talking about it since Tinto isn't going to remove them no matter what.

 

[Jihem]

Anyway, I wonder what is the philosophy behind adding these Oceanic tags : simple marketing? Or the principle "every people from every continent must have a chance in an EU IV game". In which case, I fear, we are moving away from the initial philosophy of EU IV which was based on historical plausibility. But this is not the only case where this principle is violated, I am thinking for example of the possibility of colonizing the interior of African lands for Europeans (impossible to achieve IRL without medical advances that occurred after 1821). A little more rigor in the plausibility would probably have given a different twist to the development of the game, preventing for example the realization of a world conquest and all the bullshit that comes with it. I hope the lesson will be learned for EU V.

 

[Blindbohemian]

For starters, calling tehm "Stone Age tribes" is rather crude and diminutive. Anthropologists have now more or less rejected the three age system, as it arises from the idea of linear human progress. However, thechnology doesn't follow a strict order, it is based on pre-requisites.

In every day conversation people use abstract language and shorthand to communicate easily understood concepts briefly, rather than spending long periods of time and screeds of text to communicate a simple concept in full (and irrelevant) detail. Whatever anthropologists (i.e. specialists in the area who need to communicate in excruciating details) think about the term, “Stone Age culture” communicates a very clear and demonstrably accurate idea: a culture of people who exclusively used tools and technologies based on wood and stone, and had no metalworking capability.

Of course there are different types and incarnations of stone-and-wood technology: Stone Age Mesoamericans had huge urban settlements; Stone Age Polynesians had
maritime technology that rivalled the Vikings; but the fact remains that “Stone Age culture” is a clear and comprehensible description.

For precisely the reasons you outlined (and I touched on above), I went on in my post to sketch some of the other sociotechnological developments that Australian and Polynesian peoples lacked in 1444 which mean they’re better represented as “natives” than as tags:

They didn't have even the barest beginning of an understanding of seagoing vessels, centralised governance, logistics, complex-society-scale land use and resource management, population control, monopoly on the use of force, specialisation of labour, institutionalised structures of influence and responsibility or projection of power. They didn't have a population density—they didn't have a population base—that would enable the centralisation and projection of power.

I also observed that some of the tags in question had some of those things, but rather than one or two you need all or almost all of them to function as the kind of entity which EUIV tags are.

In the case of Aborigines, they had knowledge of agriculture, for example. Some cultures were sendentary practising agriculture lifestyles. Other cultures made the choice of hunter-gathering.

Firstly, agriculture is a Stone Age technology. Neolithic peoples throughout the world have used agriculture to supplement their diets.

Secondly, having agriculture is not enough to be a centralised political unit, which is what EUIV models. You need (for a start) to have agriculture so efficient and reliable that it produces food surpluses capable of supporting whole social classes of non-agricultural specialists: bureaucrats, diplomats, religious leaders, warriors, governments. There is not a single Indigenous Australian culture which produced that kind of surplus and had that kind of structure.

Thirdly, no one chose hunter-gathering. Have you been to Australia? The overwhelming majority of Indigenous cultures were hunter-gatherers because the landscape simply couldn’t support agriculture: the soils are thin, dry and poor. Nothing would reliably grow. Which is why food surpluses couldn’t be produced, which is why centralised political units couldn’t take shape, which is why there were no unified polities with monopolies on the use of force and the capability to project authority and why there was no development of post-Stone Age technologies, which is why they should be natives and not tags in EUIV.

In short, i think there are some notions mentioned in the thread that are based on old ideas, and not label them as "Stone Age tribes".

In short, I stand by my original post and suggest if you want to participate meaningfully in the conversation, please stop your pointless cavilling.

 

[Ashantai]

I think this thread has reached the point of being as productive as it's going to get.