Sometimes, I'm thinking about building a spaceship and going to live as far as I can.
Europa Universalis IV Nations - Native Americans: Aztecs (with Quil18!)
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Sometimes, I'm thinking about building a spaceship and going to live as far as I can.
Yeah, sure, I totally believe you can conquer Europe in 100 years without breaking the limit or claiming thrones...
not all of Europe. But I could conquer areas that even dafool would admit are stronger than the Aztecs - I'm sure I could annex bohemia as France, or Austria as the ottomans. But do the same thing a hundred years later to a civilisation 2000 years less advancd and people scream racism.
I'm pretty sure a bunch of people have complained about annexing Europe, which is why EU4 prevents this by giving you lots of overextension, agressive expansion penalty, and making large peace deals cost a lot of diplomatic points.
Meanwhile, the Aztecs can probably still be annexed in 1 war...
Hopefully yes. There's a difference between integrating a European state into another one, and a stone age society that's been destroyed by war and is only good for the material resources it possesses.
But I'd agree in general that expansion is far too easy. Too many cores from events and missions for one, though anyone who thinks expanding in the hre in eu3 was easy is kidding themselves...damn emperor.
So, because this society didn't correspond to Europeans standard, it means they were stone-aged ?
I have to say one thing, I think that current Europeans standard are the one I prefer in the world. And, at this time, I still prefered this europeans systems to the american one. So, I might be a bit eurocentrist, but I don't insult Aztecs or Maya only because they were different...
You can't say a society was better than another one only because they had gun to kill millions of people. The winner is not always right, and, even when he is, a bit of tolerance is still needed.
I have to say one thing, I think that current Europeans standard are the one I prefer in the world. And, at this time, I still prefered this europeans systems to the american one. So, I might be a bit eurocentrist, but I don't insult Aztecs or Maya only because they were different...
You can't say a society was better than another one only because they had gun to kill millions of people. The winner is not always right, and, even when he is, a bit of tolerance is still needed.
Which doesn't seem to be the case in EUIV. Not sure about events, but the rewards for missions were seriously toned down, so I suspect no free core from there anymore.
Well the lack of wheel doesn't help them when you try to categorize them.
And what was the source of Labour on whatever it was that wheel was attached to? Was it from people or from animals? Because moving goods around using human labour, even on a wheeled instrument, is very inefficient.
If you sat down an worked out the extra Labour required to move goods from one place to another due to a lack of pack animals, I expect we'd see per capita productivity compared to the west (or the east, which was probably even further ahead) as being many times smaller.
But it never occurred to them that those things were useful for anything else.
Sir, It's not because productivity is inferior in meso america that those people are comparable to the stone-age ones.
ps:
During the second half of XVI century and the first half of the XVII, the Mughal Empire and the Ming Combined had a production which was a lot higher than European one. Though, population too was a lot higher, so, I don't know about productivity, does anybody have information about it by the way ?
edit: I know, Grubnessul, and it always felt weird to me. How did they build pyramids and great buildings without the wheel? For eaxmple.
ps:
During the second half of XVI century and the first half of the XVII, the Mughal Empire and the Ming Combined had a production which was a lot higher than European one. Though, population too was a lot higher, so, I don't know about productivity, does anybody have information about it by the way ?
edit: I know, Grubnessul, and it always felt weird to me. How did they build pyramids and great buildings without the wheel? For eaxmple.
Kyoumen:
Actually the soil at Tenochtilan was better than a lot of Europan soil, acre per acre. On some of the chinampa we are told there were 7 different crops harvested per year. The Aztecs grew a truly stupendous amount of food. It was worse per man-hour, you needed a lot more labor to get the same amount of food out of the ground.
My point is that their agricultural surplus was relatively low. If you have two societies where one has 100K people and 99.9K spend all their time maintaining the subsistence farming while another has 20K people and only 18K maintaining the subsistence farming, the latter is more efficient. The first ends up with only 100 people to build wealth and long term investment. The latter has 2000 people to build wealth. And this is a very fluid definition of wealth - it includes writings, math theories, religious buildings, weapons, etc. When you have a society based on a corvee system, you almost always have a low efficiency (e.g. China grew less food per man-hour of labor than Europe) and that tends to show up in wealth accumulation. Aztec society was built off a huge population base with a low agricultural surplus. Once you lose the huge population base (as will happen with disease on contact), you are not going to be able to compete against a society that has a lot man-hour efficiency without adopting at least some of their implements.
Like China, the Aztecs had a stable system that worked. Also like China, the rate of technological progress appears to be slower because they had a well functioning system based on corvee labor and had little impetus to develop alternative methods (like metal hoes).
If 0 = 1400 Europe, at least -50 and most likely something much more negative. The point is everyone in the integrated Eurasian trade block had the means to do these things, the places that might not (some of the steppe hordes?) should be starting at tech 0 and certainly have compensatory technology. Stonehenge is insanely old but is monumental stonework. Roman arches without mortar are well known. Accurate calenders were well known to the Jews, Muslims, Chinese, and Persians; and even the creeping error of the Julian calender was known (calculating the offset was trivial in Europe, getting everyone to change the flow of church feast days was a cultural, not technological, problem). Terrace farming was possible in Europe (having built retaining walls for millenia), but not viable due to the abundance of land, shortage of manpower, and other available methods to improve yield. Look, the Mesoamericans were literally reinventing a lot of stuff that other people had already done. Any infrastructure improvements that they can build are either going to be unique to their local area, or are going to be things that the poorest European provinces have had for centuries.
Ignoring the model, we still have the fact that we know how long it took everyone else to make the jumps from the tech the Mesoamericans had (roads, monumental stone building, terrace farming, hand paper beating, bronze alloy metallurgy, etc.) to get to the things present at game start for everyone (oceanic transport, butreesses, iron plows, paper mills, iron alloy metallurgy, etc.). The Mesoamericans aren't going to make that jump faster than anyone else pre-contact. So yeah, from a historical standpoint, all the fun new infrastructure the Europeans get to build should be completely unavailable to the Aztecs until contact.
Post-contact all bets are off. All of my analysis is arguing that until contact the Aztecs (or anyone else) historically should be doing nothing until contact as all their tech is rolled into level 0; post contact they should be rapidly moving up in technological progress. Technological diffusion can happen in all manner of ways, but any surviving Mesoamerican state is going to have to adopt iron, draft animals, probably mass writing/paper production, and eventually gunpowder, muskets, and a lot of other Eurasian technology. I thought the process of adopting these things would be the first step on "westernization" and I'm fine with some alternative method if that is too limiting, but being true to history means that almost all the improvements the Europeans tech & build in the 15th century aren't viable for the Aztecs until post contact.
Actually the soil at Tenochtilan was better than a lot of Europan soil, acre per acre. On some of the chinampa we are told there were 7 different crops harvested per year. The Aztecs grew a truly stupendous amount of food. It was worse per man-hour, you needed a lot more labor to get the same amount of food out of the ground.
My point is that their agricultural surplus was relatively low. If you have two societies where one has 100K people and 99.9K spend all their time maintaining the subsistence farming while another has 20K people and only 18K maintaining the subsistence farming, the latter is more efficient. The first ends up with only 100 people to build wealth and long term investment. The latter has 2000 people to build wealth. And this is a very fluid definition of wealth - it includes writings, math theories, religious buildings, weapons, etc. When you have a society based on a corvee system, you almost always have a low efficiency (e.g. China grew less food per man-hour of labor than Europe) and that tends to show up in wealth accumulation. Aztec society was built off a huge population base with a low agricultural surplus. Once you lose the huge population base (as will happen with disease on contact), you are not going to be able to compete against a society that has a lot man-hour efficiency without adopting at least some of their implements.
Like China, the Aztecs had a stable system that worked. Also like China, the rate of technological progress appears to be slower because they had a well functioning system based on corvee labor and had little impetus to develop alternative methods (like metal hoes).
The question is how quickly could this happen? In China it took them several centuries to ramp paper production up to the levels seen in 1500. In Europe it took them less time, but then they mooched heavily off China and the Islamic world. Let's assume that the Aztecs (who already used the bulk of their paper simply for religious expression) developed a huge need for more paper. How are they going to go about getting more paper. Well, being the Aztecs my first guess is that they will change the tributary demands on other states. But that just pushes the question out one step. How do you produce more paper? Well you might start boiling the paper or adding lime to the boil. However bulk production of paper really requires water power (which all bulk users of paper in the EU era used) or draft animal power. The latter is out for the Mesoamericans and the former requires a lot of unrelated experimentation. Further building paper mills goes a lot easier with bulk metal tools and a myriad of other up stream innovations. Yeah, uninterrupted they might make the leap to bulk paper production in half the time it took Europe (being very generous), but that still puts us at 200 years to equal Europe at game start.
We can, however, establish some upper bounds via entropy calculations and currently, as far as I can recall, this has shown that the quipu are not directly related the Quechua in their entropy distribution. From what I recall, they had 4 possible knots and some positional data, this places fairly hard limit on how much formal information (as defined by Shannon) you can store per quipu. Further, because they code in three dimensions, quipu will take a lot more physical manipulation to read and write than traditional paper marking. There were a very elegant solution to the problems at hand, but they just don't hold enough information to deal with the amount of data flowing from a center of trade like Seville.
Well now we are getting into semantics. The point is that at some point the bulk of the population adopted Spanish language and polity. Such resistance as continued lacked anything resembling a state sponsor and tales of enduring native political structures are fairly limited. I grant it took Spain 100 years to pacify and assimilate the place, but it did happen.
If 0 = 1400 Europe, at least -50 and most likely something much more negative. The point is everyone in the integrated Eurasian trade block had the means to do these things, the places that might not (some of the steppe hordes?) should be starting at tech 0 and certainly have compensatory technology. Stonehenge is insanely old but is monumental stonework. Roman arches without mortar are well known. Accurate calenders were well known to the Jews, Muslims, Chinese, and Persians; and even the creeping error of the Julian calender was known (calculating the offset was trivial in Europe, getting everyone to change the flow of church feast days was a cultural, not technological, problem). Terrace farming was possible in Europe (having built retaining walls for millenia), but not viable due to the abundance of land, shortage of manpower, and other available methods to improve yield. Look, the Mesoamericans were literally reinventing a lot of stuff that other people had already done. Any infrastructure improvements that they can build are either going to be unique to their local area, or are going to be things that the poorest European provinces have had for centuries.
Like it or lump it, the model for EU tech is a linear progression on a national scale with modifiers for policy and the like. Pre-contact Mesoamerica following the existing model means that getting upset about them only reach 2 by contact is wildly inappropriate.
Ignoring the model, we still have the fact that we know how long it took everyone else to make the jumps from the tech the Mesoamericans had (roads, monumental stone building, terrace farming, hand paper beating, bronze alloy metallurgy, etc.) to get to the things present at game start for everyone (oceanic transport, butreesses, iron plows, paper mills, iron alloy metallurgy, etc.). The Mesoamericans aren't going to make that jump faster than anyone else pre-contact. So yeah, from a historical standpoint, all the fun new infrastructure the Europeans get to build should be completely unavailable to the Aztecs until contact.
Post-contact all bets are off. All of my analysis is arguing that until contact the Aztecs (or anyone else) historically should be doing nothing until contact as all their tech is rolled into level 0; post contact they should be rapidly moving up in technological progress. Technological diffusion can happen in all manner of ways, but any surviving Mesoamerican state is going to have to adopt iron, draft animals, probably mass writing/paper production, and eventually gunpowder, muskets, and a lot of other Eurasian technology. I thought the process of adopting these things would be the first step on "westernization" and I'm fine with some alternative method if that is too limiting, but being true to history means that almost all the improvements the Europeans tech & build in the 15th century aren't viable for the Aztecs until post contact.
No they are stone aged because virtually all their normal use tools and weapons used stone. While bronze and other metal implements were known, the fact that the bulk of the soldiers were armed with stone tools says a bit about just how deeply into the bronze-age these societies were. Yeah stone-age is used pejoratively by some people, but stripped of any of that - it is a highly accurate term.
These societies used stone and organic implements for the vast bulk of the labor performed. Hence they are stone-aged. In time, they might have had the mass adoption of bronze that we saw in the Eurasian Bronze Age, but what I've seen tends to show that they were slowly moving through the end of a stone age civilization.
This makes no moral judgments and just talks about how they actually lived and fought.
Stone age is actually a terrible term in this context. First, It draws parallels between two cultures ("stone age" Americans and stone age Europeans) that had nothing in common aside the material they used. It also implies there is a progression of ages (first 'stone', then bronze, etc), which while was true for the Europeans, it is not the same in America. Sure, they used mostly stone tools, but in most areas they were clearly much more advanced than European stone age or even bronze age.
I know you did not meant badly, but the term is not a good one. At best, it causes pointless confusion and at worse it is used as a justification to say they were primitives.
I know you did not meant badly, but the term is not a good one. At best, it causes pointless confusion and at worse it is used as a justification to say they were primitives.
Stone age isn't even a term used in any science related to Anthropology or Archeology...
Indeed. The fundamental problem with stone age is that in popular culture today, stone age = cavemen. And while the Natives certainly used stone tools (although from my reading, it would appear the Tarascans were in the process of transitioning to bronze and copper tools by the 1500s), they just as certainly were nowhere near cavemen.
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I'm glad you're reminded often because it bears repeating. Are you going to argue that the game is not European focused?
Look, the video dev diaries almost all focus on Europe, unless they're explicitly talking about non-European features. When you start up the game, you're looking at a map of Europe. The interface is European in style. The advisor portraits are all European. The music is European. Even the metagame (concepts like having rigid borders) is mostly European. Native American concepts of land ownership are not represented in this game because it's a game focused on Europe.
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