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EU4 - Development Diary - 22th of September

Hey everyone! Today is the last day of us talking about the native americans and the rework they are getting. We’ll be talking about the changes to the Federations and the new world setup. As you’ll see on the pictures for the map, a lot of tags have been split up in order to represent federations properly. A prime example is the Iroquois who will now be several tags and start in a federation at game start.

So let’s start with how to form them. Since we are splitting up the federal tags like the Huron and Iroquois I still wanted to retain some kind of identity for them. As such when you invite the first member to form a federation with you, you get the opportunity to also name the Federation. There are some default options scripted that can be based on Tags and Cultures which it will suggest for you, but you can of course just write whatever you want here.

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We’ve also redone how leadership of the federation is decided. It is no longer decided on the death of the monarch of the leader in the tribe, instead we measure a cohesion value of the Federation. This value changes each month depending on the composition of the Federation but also some external factors. Keep in mind that any numbers & values are work in progress!

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If cohesion hits 0% then it will trigger a change in leadership. In order to keep the cohesion high you want to keep similar cultures within your federation, however having one or two of a separate culture group won’t really be problematic. Another source of loss of cohesion is also if there are members that are stronger than the leader. For later in the game to help you keep a large federation together, if you have any colonizers on your border it will help you keep it together by having an external threat increasing your cohesion.

If a leadership change is triggered it will try to pick the strongest member to be the new leader, if the leader is the strongest then the federation will be disbanded. This entire process is 100% done in script, from calculation of members strength to what happens during leadership change. Currently for testing the strength is calculated from the max manpower of members and is done as a scripted function with an effect and looks like this:

Code:
calculate_federation_member_strength = {
    effect = {
        export_to_variable = { which = our_manpower value = max_manpower who = THIS }
        set_variable = { which = federation_strength which = our_manpower }

    }
}

Here’s the current list of values that affect your cohesion
  • -1 For every member not of leaders culture group
  • +1 For every member of leaders culture group
  • -1 For every member stronger than the leader
  • +1 for neighboring hostile Europeans

The aim here is to make Federations more something you can count on, instead of having to try and keep your prestige high or stack diplomatic reputation at all times just in case your leader at some random point dies, you can now count on it instead and try to plan around what you need to do in order to keep the leadership position.


Now I’m going to hand it over to a member of our beta program. @Evie HJ who have done the excellent work of reforming North America’s setup making it a much more vibrant and interesting place.

It's a whole (new) New World we live in

The setup for North America hasn’t really changed much at all since the release of Art of War, almost ix years ago – and, as far as the list of playable countries is concerned, since Conquest of Paradise even earlier. The new changes to the Native game mechanics in this patch provided a perfect opportunity to take a new look at a region that has remained largely untouched for a long time.

In some ways, this overhaul is our most ambitious review of the North American setup to date. The province count does fall short of Art of War (though fifty-three new provinces, not counting wastelands, is nothing to sneeze at), but the list of new tags is more than we ever added to North America at any single time. In fact, with fifty-six new tags, we’re adding more North American tags in this one overhaul than we have in the entire history of the Europa Universalis franchise.

Those tags are not evenly spread out across the continent. Two regions (the South-East United States and the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence) get the lion’s share of the tags. Others like the Great Plains or Hudson Bay, get a handful of provinces or tags. The West Coast, for its part, where we know almost nothing of Indigenous people before the last century or so of the game, was entirely outside the scope of this overhaul. This applies to the provinces as well as the tags: in broad terms, we tried to add provinces in the same general region we were adding tags, to keep the amount of empty (or tribal land) provinces roughly similar.

With twenty-one new tags, it is the South-East United States that receive the most work in this new overhaul. The reason is simple: up until now, the 1444 setup in the game represented the historical situation around 1600-1650. The first 150 years of the game – a time when the last great cities of the Mississippian civilizations flourished in the region (the more northern city, like Cahokia, were likely abandoned by 1444)– were left out entirely. This was the first thing we set out to fix, and the new setup, as a result, emphasize the situation that early European explorers and archaeologists tell us about – not English colonists two centuries later. By and large, most of those new tags are settled nations, and (except the Cherokee) all belong to the Muskogean culture group. This is a compromise for some of them: while they spoke Siouan languages like Catawba, they were heavily influenced by the Southern Appalachian Mississippian culture, and it’s those cultural ties we chose to emphasize.

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In the new setup, the Creek Confederacy is no longer available at game start, and the Cherokee are reduced to a one-province statelet in the mountains. In their stead, the Coosa Paramount Chiefdom is now the major power of the region. Though a one-province nation in itself, it rules through a network of subject states (Satapo, an area stretching from the Kentucky border to Alabama along the spine of the Appalachians. Surrounding it are a number of smaller, independent chiefdoms, including both sites visited by the De Soto expedition (Altamaha, Cofitachequi, Joara, Ichisi, Chisca, as well as Atahachi, the future home of Chief Tuscaloosa) and of Muskogean towns that would eventually form the seeds of the future Creek Confederacy, like Coweta and Kasihta. Further west, in the valleys of the Mississippi, they are joined not only by more of the chiefdoms documented by De Soto, (Quizquiz, Anilco, Pacaha and Casqui, the last three corresponding to the Menard-Hodges, Nodena and Parkin Mound archaeological sites), but also by the Natchez people, who would, in later century, become the last tribe to embrace Mississippian culture.

Further north, our other focus region was the Great Lakes of North America. Here, the main concern was nothing to do with our setup representing the wrong date (except along the Saint Lawrence, where the Iroquoians of the sixteenth century were mysteriously missing), and everything to do with the fact that the two most famous (con)federations of natives, the Hurons and Iroquois, were represented as monolithic nations with no use for the in-game Federation mechanism. Once it was decided to represent each of the nations making up those two confederations independently, adding in the other relevant nations in the region was an obvious choice. As with the United States South-East, these are largely settled nations of Iroquoian cultures, although a handful of them are migratory instead.

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This gives us a sizeable five new nations where the one Iroquois tag used to be: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca (plus, starting much further south at game start but not forgotten, the Tuscarora). Opposing them are the less well-known member nations of the Huron Confederacy: Tahontaenrat, Arendaronon, Attignawantan and Attigneenongnahac. In addition to them, we have a selection of minor Iroquoian nations that can struggle to strike the right balance to remain neutral between these two powerful Confederacies. This notably include the aptly named Neutral Nation (Attiwandaron), as well as the Tionontate (or Tobacco Indians), the Wenro of far western New York, and the Erie of Northwest Pennsylvania (plus the already existing Susquehannock). As the last two (Erie, Susquehannock) represent nations that claimed large territory but with very little united government, they are represented as migratory nations. You can think of the migration as representing shifting balance of power among the different villages and groups of their respective nations, rather than actual physical relocation. Also represented as migratory are the first two Iroquoian nations ever encountered by European: Stadacona, on the site of present day Quebec City, and Osheaga (Hochelaga), in present Montreal. In their case, leaving them migratory was the simplest way to enable them to potentially vanish from the Saint Lawrence lowlands, as they did in the late sixteenth century.

Our changes didn’t stop at those new areas, though they received the bulk of the changes. Existing tags that represented larger confederations or culture group were split into (some of) their constituent parts: the Illinois are now represented by the Kaskaskia, Cahokia and Peoria, the Shawnee by Chalahgawtha, Kispoko and Hathawekela, and the Puebloan people expanded from Keres and Pueblo to Acoma, Zia, Ohkay Owingeh and Sandiat. In a similar vein, some particularly large groups that used to be represented by a single tag now have additional tags to represent them: this is the case of the Cree, with the addition of the Nehiyaw (Plains Cree) nation, the Ojibwe, who are now additionally represented by the Mississage for their easternmost group and the Nakawe (or Saulteaux) for their western bands, and the Sioux, now expanded to include the Wichiyena (Western Dakota) and Lakota nations. Historical confederations that were lacking some of their members or needing a boost also gained it: the Iron Confederacy gained the Nehiyaw and Nakawe, described above; the Three Fires now add the Mississage to their alliance, and the Wabanaki Confederacy of North-East North America can now count on the help of the Maliseet and Penobscot as well as the pre-existing Abenaki. Finally, three more tags are added on sheer account of their historical importance in the Colonial era, two as allies of New France, one as ally-turned-enemy of New England: the Algonquin of the Ottawa valley, the Innu of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and the Wampanoag of Massachusetts Bay.

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Along with all these changes, we finally introduced Wasteland mountain ranges to North America. Not in the Rockies (where the handful of connections already represent major passes through the mountains), but rather, in the East, along the Appalachian mountains. While they may not seem like much today, they were formidable obstacle to westward expansion in colonial time, when it was said that there were only five paths from the East Coast westward that could be taken by large groups of people: around the mountains to the south in the Piedmont of Georgia, through the Cumberland gap on the border of Virginia and Tennessee, through the Cumberland Narrows of western Maryland, the Allegheny gaps of Pennsylvania, and finally through the valley of the Mohawk river, in New York. In addition, through it didn’t allow for east-west travel per se, the Great Valley of the Appalachians was another significant route through the region, running from Alabama to Pennsylvania. All of them are now represented in the game, along with the mountains that bordered them.

We also tried to adopt a somewhat consistent standard in the naming of provinces, and revise province names accordingly. The new standard prefers the self-given names of a Native group (tribe, nation, band…) who lived in the region where we can find one. If none can be found, other options include a name given to a local people by a neighboring tribe (provided it’s not derogatory), or a geographic name in a local Native language. In all cases, we now tend to favor native spelling where we are able to find it, though symbols that are particularly unusual in the standard Latin Alphabet may be set aside or approximated for our players’ benefit.


That’s it for today, as usual I’ll answer questions in the thread however there’s one I want to address yet again as it keeps getting asked and I can’t answer every single time it gets asked. People have asked if these features will be applied to South America or the Siberian Natives etc. It all depends on time, the main focus is to rework the North Americans and if I have time I will make sure it plays nice with others that can also benefit but it is not a priority. Next week will have it’s development diary written by Johan.
 
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The problem is, if we make the development realistic for 1444, then we need effectively unavoidable events that wipe out most of that development right back to low levels once the Columbian Exchange takes place and our friends smallpox, measles and the rest start spreading. Frustrating for anyone trying to play the region knowing that they're wasting their time and any effort they make to actually develop will be negated less than a century into the game.

The development stayed consistently high, despote the bump on the population caused by first contact. Centres in Meso and Andean America remained urbanized for centuries, up to the present day. They didnt ''lose development'', in gameplay terms, as much as recieved a nasty modifier and disaster that made the local stability, income and manpower dip significantly for some crucial decades which were exploited by the Spaniards. While the population drop was significant, they were not halpless spectators to the spanish in conquest, resistance, collaboration or simply staying in their own corner of the world like the Mapuche did. The very same Mapuche, the only people to defeat both Inca and Spanish empires, are currently a OPM in a province longer then belgium, being the same religion as Ryukyu and Manipur, and have no gameplay except copy pasted concepts from North America, which is where all care went to. These population centers like Mexico City were crucian in becoming the basis for the wealth and power of New Spain. It would take centuries for the rest of the new world, such as Brazil and the USA, to catch up in population. Unless population is directly related to development? Because Cahokia, a ghost city in 1444 whose population peaked around 20k, has around 10 dev in EU4 right now, so that doesnt seem to be the case.

The conquest of the Meso and Andean american worlds was not such a clear and certain factor as one may think in hindsight, and the Inca state especially resisted for decades despite a crippling and decapitating blow at Cajamarca right after a brutal civil war and pandemic; its not that absurd to think that in player hands, such states could have resisted; i mean, Byzantium is far more doomed in 1444 and gets loads and loads of content despite it being a glorified city state. And its not like the Columbian Exchange didnt affect the modern day USA either, it did so and quite harshly; but development is incredibly high, almost fantastically so, in the 13 colonies area. Before GC, the 13C area had 430 development (!!!!!!), the entire carribean had less 220, all of ''Colonial Mexico'' had 481, barely beating the 13C, and Brazil still has just 321. Colonial Peru? Even less, around 220. How exactly is this even remotely based on native population, and not a strong recency bias that seems to interpret all of South and Central America as ''poor''?

And again, the ''tropical'' malus, which frankly, if you pardon a little bit of humour, seems like a swede's list of places ''too hot to live in''. severely cripple any worth south america could possibly have. The malus makes your colonies slower, weaker, worth less money... Its frankly quite daft how that thing is applied currently, and as mentioned, it literally follows the modern day political borders of brazil, which is just baffling, to be frank. The absolutely awful trade flow, which is by the way completely inaccessible if your capital is in Asia making conquering Peru as say Ming quite literally worthless, also contributes in making the situation even worse.

Speaking personally, it feels like poor gameplay and poor use of research resources. At the end of the day, EU IV is a game, and that means some compromises need to be made.

A wierd way to put it. The same could be said about the North American natives, if one were so inclined. Designing gameplay around the warrior bands of Tupi or the actual religions of Mesoamerica sounds like something that can be done. Because the crux is: South America is the single most boring, worthless continent in the entire map, and it is so because everything about it is an afterthought. There isnt a single mechanic designed for it from the ground up, and its so poor and hard to steer from its almost never worth even taking. All it does is reuse assets from elsewhere, like the asian Animist religion, the Inca faith system which is basically the Mayan one with sprinkles, and all natives behaving like north american ones, migrating long distances into random directions.

Tarascan Empire remain the common name of that state in English. Which is the standard naming practice for such things. It probalby shouldn't be the common name, but it is what it is. Note that the culture (that is to say, the people) is called Purepecha in the game.

Tarascan (and the Sioux for that matter, doesnt it literally mean ''Snakes''? Or is the screenshot where they appear is WIP) is still fundamentally a term that is is a ethnic slur. I for one know it as the Purepecha Empire, and it had an endonym which i cannot hope to spell without pulling google, but it's still known to us. Maybe its just something that has not well made it into the english lexicon, which makes changes such as these all the more important considering games such as EU4 are often the first glimpse of folks into pre-colonial meso america. Naturally endonyms cant be implemented everywhere, but its not like the term ''Tarascan'' is as solid a feature of the english language as ''India'' or ''Japan''
 
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Do you have any inside info that I don't? Because it is pretty common knowledge that SEA is indeed NeonDT's passion-project.

Which of course brings up two questions:
- How much of the SEA-rework did Neon do in his spare-time?
- Are we only getting passion projects now?

If you know more please enlighten us.
I went back and double-checked all the SEA DDs and looked at all of Neondt’s posts. There is nothing that implies that it is a “passion-project” in the same manner that Groogy has expressed this NA content is. In the very first SEA DD, Neon mentioned right at the start that he was the only person who wasn’t on vacation at the time, and so for most of that time period he was probably the only one working on the content. He also expressed that SEA is an area near and dear to his heart and one that he’s been waiting 2.5 to be able to work on.

However, as he expressed in comments of the Khmer DD, quoted below:

Never took one. All of the content in these dev diaries is made on company time according to a design I wrote last year under Jake's guidance. As much as I love my job I certainly wouldn't do all this for free.

Emphasis mine. So yes, per Neon himself the SEA portion of the update is on company time and is by the strictest definition of the term, “paid work-time”. Neon, as a content dev, may be/have been the one taking point on the development of it within the team, but waiting 2.5 years to work in an official capacity and update on an area you’re passionate about is not the same as working on an area you’re passionate about in your spare time.

Of course, either of them are free to correct me and set the matter straight, but otherwise, as far as I can see I am not incorrect in what I stated initially, no “inside info” required
 
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Something I think would provide more interest in the north american region would be a wasteland representing the everglade swamps in Florida. In real life, the everglades acted as a massive barrier for most europeans in Florida, and Florida was mostly settled only in the 50's, again due to the giant swamps dominating the swamps.

I think you should also add the Seminoles- an important tribe I think has been lacking from the region. One of the seven civilized tribes, who fought two wars with the United States out of Florida.
 
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5. Splitting totemism into many smaller religions is not really an easy task - the number of actual religions we'd need would be very high (at least one per culture goup, often one per culture, sometimes one per tag), with very little information or even individual names for them. The icon is problematic, but so would any other symbol we could use. It may happen some day, but I wouldn't personally see it as a good use of my time right now.

Exactly 100% why I said it should not be done at this point. It is a undertaking to say the least.

My "suggestions" were to explain why overhauling the religious system in north american natives would be implausible for this update.
 
A wierd way to put it. The same could be said about the North American natives, if one were so inclined. Designing gameplay around the warrior bands of Tupi or the actual religions of Mesoamerica sounds like something that can be done. Because the crux is: South America is the single most boring, worthless continent in the entire map, and it is so because everything about it is an afterthought. There isnt a single mechanic designed for it from the ground up, and its so poor and hard to steer from its almost never worth even taking. All it does is reuse assets from elsewhere, like the asian Animist religion, the Inca faith system which is basically the Mayan one with sprinkles, and all natives behaving like north american ones, migrating long distances into random directions.

Note that I was talking - specifically - about the idea of adding development to match 1444 levels.

On the idea of developing the South American nation: I'd be for it, but I have little power to do it myself, because I lack the awareness and personal interest to do it as a passion project in my free time, and that's all the ability I have to affect what gets developed. I hope Paradox does it, or another person on staff takes it on as a passion project, but yeah.
 
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Naturally endonyms cant be implemented everywhere, but its not like the term ''Tarascan'' is as solid a feature of the english language as ''India'' or ''Japan''
Endonyms should probably be applied in this case, considering how even well established exonyms such as 'Vienna' and 'Japan' are sidelined in-game. The relevant trade nodes are instead named 'Wien' and 'Nippon' for some odd reason. (All the other trade nodes bar Sevilla and Rheinland are named according to their exonyms instead however E.G. Venice not Venexia, Aleppo not Haleb, Genoa not Genova) The exonym of Tarascan is, admittedly less settled in English than both Vienna and Japan, and it's derogatory on top of that. Unless Paradox adopts a policy of going exclusively for exonyms or endonyms, there's no reason to use Tarascan, especially considering how nomenclature-wise the current game is a inconsistent mess of mostly exonyms with random endonyms thrown around.
 
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Note that I was talking - specifically - about the idea of adding development to match 1444 levels.

On the idea of developing the South American nation: I'd be for it, but I have little power to do it myself, because I lack the awareness and personal interest to do it as a passion project in my free time, and that's all the ability I have to affect what gets developed. I hope Paradox does it, or another person on staff takes it on as a passion project, but yeah.
I complety understand this and must deeptly tank you @Evie HJ for your work on this and previous upgrades. I think this additions would make the game both more interesting to play and closer to represent the historical context of these regions. Myself want to provide many more info for Paradox to improve the historical gameplay but other matters leave little time to do it.

Also I put myself in the role of the people that ask for similar upgrades on other regions, because there are some good arguments for it (most notorious case South America). But I think that the best we can do now is to try to work as community on a gameplay wise, historicaly robust and performance+programming friendly suggestion. There are already many good suggestions but seems like is time to rework them on a more solid one.

Hope we can bring more content to Florida, Western North America, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Siberia, Oceania and of course my fan favorite Mesoamerica :p

Cheers to everybody!
 
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It looks like North America will be a much more interesting and dynamic place after this update. In the past I kind of avoided it as a player because a lot of it just seemed like "sit on your butt and wait until Europeans show up so you can actually do something", but this actually looks viable.
 
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Endonyms should probably be applied in this case, considering how even well established exonyms such as 'Vienna' and 'Japan' are sidelined in-game. The relevant trade nodes are instead named 'Wien' and 'Nippon' for some odd reason. (All the other trade nodes bar Sevilla and Rheinland are named according to their exonyms instead however E.G. Venice not Venexia, Aleppo not Haleb, Genoa not Genova) The exonym of Tarascan is, admittedly less settled in English than both Vienna and Japan, and it's derogatory on top of that. Unless Paradox adopts a policy of going exclusively for exonyms or endonyms, there's no reason to use Tarascan, especially considering how nomenclature-wise the current game is a inconsistent mess of mostly exonyms with random endonyms thrown around.

Trade nodes, provinces and countries generally don't have the same naming rule.

Vienna (province and trade node) is Wien, but the formable country is Germany, not Deutschland. Korea is Korea, not Hanguk, and so forth. And Japan, the country tag, is Japan. Exonyms are the general rule for country tags. Provinces, in comparison, are much more likely to be given in the appropriate local language. And I have no idea what the convention, if any, is for trade nodes.

All that said, I actually now agree the current name has to go, albeit for different reasons.

As it stands, they're not the Tarascan State or Empire. They're Tarascan, without any additional signification, due to a naming convention rule that was developed for the Ottomans, and that really doesn't work in this case, because it implies the tag represent the Tarascan people rather than a specific organized country. Which is also the main problem with naming the tag Purépecha, incidentally: both of them represent the tag as a people, not a country (ie, like they're some kind of unorganized North American tribe).

The TAR tag represent a country. Not a people. And its name should reflect a country, not a people. If Tarascan State is not possible due to naming conventions (on top of any issues with derogatory terms), then it should be named what the local called it: Tzintzuntzan (or Iréchecua Tztintzuntzan, but that just means Land of Tztintzuntzan).
 
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Trade nodes, provinces and countries generally don't have the same naming rule.

Vienna (province and trade node) is Wien, but the formable country is Germany, not Deutschland. Korea is Korea, not Hanguk, and so forth. And Japan, the country tag, is Japan. Exonyms are the general rule for country tags.
Fair enough.

Provinces, in comparison, are much more likely to be given in the appropriate local language.
With some notable exceptions like Constantinople, Macao, Corinth, and the Baleares/Majorca. Still not sure why these aren't endonyms.

And I have no idea what the convention, if any, is for trade nodes.
Out of the 77 trade nodes in the game, 73 of them are either exonyms or don't have Anglicised exonyms and are hence named after their respective endonyms. Only Wien, Sevilla, Nippon and Rheinland do not follow this rule, due to unknown reasons.
 
Trade nodes, provinces and countries generally don't have the same naming rule.

Vienna (province and trade node) is Wien, but the formable country is Germany, not Deutschland. Korea is Korea, not Hanguk, and so forth. And Japan, the country tag, is Japan. Exonyms are the general rule for country tags. Provinces, in comparison, are much more likely to be given in the appropriate local language. And I have no idea what the convention, if any, is for trade nodes.

In any event while Purépecha is an endonym, the state, in the Purépecha language, was never named after themselves . The only actual Purépecha name for the Empire that can be documented is Iréchecua Tzintzuntzan (Land of Tzintzuntzan), which we could probably sum up in game as Tzintzuntzan.
Another option is to use the nahua exonym Michhuacan or the spanish derived Michoacán, this name mean "place of fish" being more neutral that the Purepecha based Tarascos that mean "brothers in law".
 
I mean, at that point if we're not using a recognizable English name, we might as well go for the original article. Tzintzuntzan is really growing on me.

Besides which, if we can have Galicia-Volhynia (and, as of this overhaul, Attigneenongnahac*), I'm sure the players can handle Tzintzuntzan.

*Fun fact: I've had to spell that one so often in the past week or so working on the overhaul that I can actually write it from memory at this point.
 
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I'm really glad to see all this work put into North America. That said, it's unfortunate the west coast of North America isn't getting covered. Not tinkering with the political situation is understandable, given how sparse the historical record is, but the geography could really use some cleanup:
  • British Columbia has a weirdly large number of provinces, while Oregon and Washington have barely any.
  • Frankly, there's just not a whole lot of provinces in general, which is weird because it's a fairly productive part of the globe.
  • Cascadia and California are the only two colonial areas forced to share the same trade node, which is odd and occasionally annoying.
  • The boundaries of provinces tend to look a little arbitrary and they don't always match up well with local geography.
That last part is always going to be a bit of an issue; the province system means you're going to be making arbitrary divisions somewhere. But western North America is particularly noticeable because the provinces are being stretched to cover enormous swathes of land.
 
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British Columbia has 12 provinces for 944 000 square kilometers (about 40-50% of which is wasteland). Oregon and Washington have 11 (Salish, Chehalis, Quileute, Yakima, Spokane, Palus, Chinook, Siuslaw, Kalapuya, Klamath, Umatilla) for about 450 000 square kilometers.

Don't see what's weird. Seems to me they have comparable province density. Actually, given the wasteland chunk in Oregon, Oregon and Washington probably have the higher density.
 
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No. Rather than have a scripted event that wipes out provinces and development and let the RNG destroy the overwhelming bulk of an NA player's nation, we accept a lower starting development and the tribal provinces mechanics.

Until and unless someone comes up with a fun, interesting AND tasteful way of representing the Columbian exchange epidemics, it's the best compromise we can have in the game.

Why the "we accept a lower starting..."???

Are you speaking in the name of the whole beta program members or in the name of all devs? Have you already had this discussion and got to that conclusion?

An event destroying large chunks of development should be much more interesting (and realistic) not only IMO but in the eyes of many other players.

Other different stuff that could be present in the game is some mechanics that made non-African tags having a hard time trying to keep provinces and armies in the interior of Africa (out of Mediterranean region). It so weird European powers conquering the whole Africa in EU4 while in Vic2 the same powers need to tech before trying so.
 
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British Columbia has 12 provinces for 944 000 square kilometers (about 40-50% of which is wasteland). Oregon and Washington have 11 (Salish, Chehalis, Quileute, Yakima, Spokane, Palus, Chinook, Siuslaw, Kalapuya, Klamath, Umatilla) for about 450 000 square kilometers.

Don't see what's weird. Seems to me they have comparable province density. Actually, given the wasteland chunk in Oregon, Oregon and Washington probably have the higher density.
British Columbia is extremely mountainous and it's on a latitude comparable to Moscow. The existing wasteland is underselling it, in my opinion. It's definitely missing the Coast Mountains in the southwest, which to my knowledge are essentially impassible. That's not to say that British Columbia was uncolonizable or even unproductive, but it was definitely a fairly peripheral area of the world. British Columbia still starts with a total development of 45 in 13 provinces. On the whole I think that's fair; it is a pretty big chunk of land, if nothing else.

Oregon and Washington are less rugged and more temperate. They're drier on their eastern side, but they're supplied by rivers coming off the Rockies. The exception is southeast Oregon, which is somewhere between a steppe and a desert, and as you noted it's a wasteland in the game. They have some really great agricultural land, and those river systems I mentioned are great for trade. So I'd expect Oregon and Washington to have more provinces or to have somewhat higher development on the provinces they do have. Instead, Washington + Oregon start with a total development of 37 in 11 provinces.

Comparing that to how things have panned out historically, the current map feels slightly arbitrary. And while we're on the subject, it really doesn't help that outside of San Francisco, the provinces are all basically at the same level of development, even when that doesn't make a lot of sense.

I mean, it's not ruining my immersion, it doesn't break the game mechanically, and it's not a big deal in general. It's just something I think could be improved with a fairly small amount of effort, and this is probably the most relevant thread to mention it in, so I'm giving my two cents.
 
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Note that I was talking - specifically - about the idea of adding development to match 1444 levels.

On the idea of developing the South American nation: I'd be for it, but I have little power to do it myself, because I lack the awareness and personal interest to do it as a passion project in my free time, and that's all the ability I have to affect what gets developed. I hope Paradox does it, or another person on staff takes it on as a passion project, but yeah.

As i said in the previous post, 1444 levels as of right now are a huge problem because they are extremely biased towards North America and the eastern seaboard. which also doesnt have any of the nasty, nasty maluses and large, unwieldy provinces like South America does. I cannot stress enough how much in terms of gameplay the low dev and tropical malus affect South America negatively.

And as mentioned in my first post in the thread, and this is more for other readers than Evie, dont hold your breath. Paradox sure has come a long way in its portrayal of North America, Asia and Africa (even if the latter still has the term ''fetishism'' being used in EU4... but that's a story for another time and thread) but South America remains in the shadow, and will remain for the time being since fundamentally it's just never a focus, or something remotely important, in any expansion, content pack, patch and so forth, getting just some scraps off the table. To be quite honest, i dont expect anything at all before EU5. And i know that isnt that near at all.

I mean, at that point if we're not using a recognizable English name, we might as well go for the original article. Tzintzuntzan is really growing on me.

Besides which, if we can have Galicia-Volhynia (and, as of this overhaul, Attigneenongnahac*), I'm sure the players can handle Tzintzuntzan.

*Fun fact: I've had to spell that one so often in the past week or so working on the overhaul that I can actually write it from memory at this point.

Yeah, that was the endonym i was referring to. Wasnt really confident in typing it correctly, but its most certainly better than Tarascan, and more accurate too, since it more properly reflects that the state was a political entity centered around that city. There are other tags where this is an issue ( Tapuia means ''Enemy'', Sioux means ''Snake'', Cheyenne is a Lakota exonym for two tribes that didnt merge until the 1820s, and so on and so forth ) but i feel like this is a especially easy to deal with case since it has both an endyonym for the culture and one for the state, but also a slightly less bad exonym in Michoacán.
 
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