If you take on the role of a Native American tribe in Europa Universalis IV: Conquest of Paradise, you will have some interesting new tools in the expanded Native American gameplay mechanics, new tribes, a chance to form federations with your peers, new events, ideas and buildings.
A Modest Proposal: Why not just give them access to death lasers? That makes about as much historical sense as a "playable Aztecs." How about adding some flying dragons! That would be fun. (It would actually).
It was possible to colonize and completely replace Native Americans for only 1 reason and it's not technology: 90% of their populations died of European diseases for which they had no immunities within 100 years of first contact. Without that, the Native Americans would still be the dominant culture today, and there would be about as many people of European descent in North and South America today as there are in the former "Dutch East Indies", or in China.
This turns EUIV into a fantasy game, which is not all bad. I LIKE fantasy games. An EUIV set in Middle Earth would be a blast.
But, let's call this what it is. Why stop with a random map? If you're going whole hog into a fantasy world with random generated continents, why stop with the Americas? Why not a fully RANDOM world generated map? Why not randomize other aspects of the game?
Seriously? Why not randomize the entire world map? Now that would be a difference! I for one would buy that game and pay a full new game price for it. (They'd have to add some new content for the fantasy countries).
Is it so that gamers can pretend it's got some tenuous connection with historicity when all such has been clearly abandoned?
In any game which models, however tenuously, the actual historical conditions of the age of Exploration and discovery, the New World Natives had no chance, because their populations immediately began dying of horrific epidemics when the Spaniards arrived. In game terms this is reflected in the fact that they are terribly weak and easy to conquer. (You'd be easy to conquer too if you were suffering from Smallpox).
It's difficult to see what could have saved them, unless they would have built a huge navy and sunk every European explorer in the sea before he could land and infect them.
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