Europe VS the world
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Thats highly debatable. I think this picture (showing population esimated from about 20 different people) shows the problem http://www.operationmorningstar.org/amer-pop.gif. The majority of those people disagree, but its certainly still an open question.
I'm not sure how much that graph is worth, considering how utterly dated many/most of those estimates are. The youngest is 16 years old; only four date from the last quarter-century, and eight more from the quarter-century before that. The other ten are all 60+ years old, which in term of native history is antediluvian.
Honestly, of that lot, given how quickly our knowledge of natives has evolved, I'd summarily discard anything before Coe or so as outdated, and be wary of the leftovers.
Not that any of this leave us closer to an answer, or make the assertion any less debatable.
Honestly, of that lot, given how quickly our knowledge of natives has evolved, I'd summarily discard anything before Coe or so as outdated, and be wary of the leftovers.
Not that any of this leave us closer to an answer, or make the assertion any less debatable.
That's because Castille is practically forced to DOW Morocco due to its missions. If you take those missions away the problem is solved. Nothing to do with Europe vs ROTW.
They can do this because they can ship an ahistorical number of troops to the Indies. Up to the very end of EUs time frame it was more or less a death sentance for Europeans. If it were possible for a European country to transport a large, well-equipped army to India, and keep it supplied and reinforced at minimal expense, they probably would have conquered India fairly rapidly. Again, has nothing to do with tech or military disparity.
I disagree strongly. I've repeatedly seen circa-1500 European minors steamroll large Indian states with five or six thousand soldiers, routinely destroying armies two or three times their size. Not "defeating soundly," literally killing off the entire army in a week of fighting. For such an early timeframe this is absolutely a major military disparity. Adding logistics would only do so much to compensate for the fact that Latin units are killing machines.
I've stated it before, but in my modding experience this problem isn't so simply dismissed by removing missions. The Maghreb is often conquered by the Europeans, Castille particularly, because it's the perfect target from the AI's point of view. They're relatively weak, their navies usually aren't strong enough to prevent an invasion, they are of a different culture, they are of a different religion, and there's an amazing CB against them. Removing the missions may lower the aggressiveness a bit, but it will not by any means halt it. I had to throw extensive and repeated commands at the AI in D&T to keep them away from Africa and the Near East. Even then, it doesn't always succeed.
5000 Europeans in AD1500 cannot conquer India. If you're going to make up anecdotes, at least make them believable.
It seems weird to go to so much effort to prevent the AI going after North Africa, but fine with Ottomans taking Ireland, Castille grabbing Finland, France grabbing Northumberland, etc. The only difference in North Africa's case is the predictability of it.
Actually you can. Personally I would not bother to do it with that few as I can easily get a doomstack to India and cleanse it.
I think everyone has a problem with that, but it absolutely off-topic.
Random things happened in history. Very strange decisions, by our standards, that we only consider normal because, hey, they happened. It'S not a bad thing for the game to go and have such things happen occasionally; to have us go "Uh, how did that happen?" It should perhaps be harder, but it's not a significant issue as it is right now.
But when they happen all the time, it's not "How did that happen?" anymore. It's "Oh for crying out loud, not AGAIN!"
The problem is that those are random conquests, not driven by static conditions but instead by changing opportunities. They are not both frequent and predictable. Castille or some other European power almost always seems to conquer North Africa, usually within the first century of the game. This is because of the reasons I previously outlined. When a problem becomes that predictable and easy to explain, we can take measures to mitigate it.
Several things:
1: This is just a computer game. It can't and doesn't try to 'simulate' history. Real history is made up of a complicated interwoven tapestry of different decisions by different individuals. Attempting to approximate this with game mechanics is not going to produce the same results. Many of the reasons why Europeans for instance conquered the Americas, or failed to conquer China, are impossible to represent in a computer game of this type. I'm not going to get into the debate about why the 'great divergence' happened or how extensive it was or whatever. That has already been done to death, I would just be re-iterating points that have been made before ad-infinitum.
2: A lot of the problems for non-western countries are caused by the unfair multiple penalties that are heaped against them, rather than solely the tech goups. The tech groups are a handicap themselves of course, but on top of that you have the unit groups. Meaning that a non-western country will almost always have poorer soldiers than a western one, even if they are matched in military tech. Then there's how poor the non-Christian religions are, a mechanic that's hopefully going the way of the dinosaurs as it did in CK2. Then there's the low province density, which has been discussed here before. Not only does that damage base tax levels and such, but also means that provinces are vast and difficult to traverse. Then there's the rebels, who are in the western unit group regardless of who they are rebelling from. And the rubbish tribal governments that can't be escaped from. And finally the obsession the game has with religious conflict, granting all sorts of overpowered CBs allowing strong European nations to wipe out pagans and Muslims nearly without consequence.
3: From the perspective of a player, I agree with the assertion of the OP. It is far too easy to sail around the world stomping out natives. There is no challenge to such tedious map-painting. That's why it's often so much more fun to play as a HRE minor or another land-orientated European country. Part of me worries that this is because of the increased focus on multiplayer games. A game with human players in France, Castille, England and Portugal might be interesting, with all the intrigue over who will take the next colony and and where, but playing as a coloniser against AI rivals is not.
4: I play mods, so most of this is moot. There are plenty of good mods around that fix a lot of the problems with balance, especially between east and west. It's not as big an issue to me as the game's terrible combat system and the AI, which are impossible to mod.
1: This is just a computer game. It can't and doesn't try to 'simulate' history. Real history is made up of a complicated interwoven tapestry of different decisions by different individuals. Attempting to approximate this with game mechanics is not going to produce the same results. Many of the reasons why Europeans for instance conquered the Americas, or failed to conquer China, are impossible to represent in a computer game of this type. I'm not going to get into the debate about why the 'great divergence' happened or how extensive it was or whatever. That has already been done to death, I would just be re-iterating points that have been made before ad-infinitum.
2: A lot of the problems for non-western countries are caused by the unfair multiple penalties that are heaped against them, rather than solely the tech goups. The tech groups are a handicap themselves of course, but on top of that you have the unit groups. Meaning that a non-western country will almost always have poorer soldiers than a western one, even if they are matched in military tech. Then there's how poor the non-Christian religions are, a mechanic that's hopefully going the way of the dinosaurs as it did in CK2. Then there's the low province density, which has been discussed here before. Not only does that damage base tax levels and such, but also means that provinces are vast and difficult to traverse. Then there's the rebels, who are in the western unit group regardless of who they are rebelling from. And the rubbish tribal governments that can't be escaped from. And finally the obsession the game has with religious conflict, granting all sorts of overpowered CBs allowing strong European nations to wipe out pagans and Muslims nearly without consequence.
3: From the perspective of a player, I agree with the assertion of the OP. It is far too easy to sail around the world stomping out natives. There is no challenge to such tedious map-painting. That's why it's often so much more fun to play as a HRE minor or another land-orientated European country. Part of me worries that this is because of the increased focus on multiplayer games. A game with human players in France, Castille, England and Portugal might be interesting, with all the intrigue over who will take the next colony and and where, but playing as a coloniser against AI rivals is not.
4: I play mods, so most of this is moot. There are plenty of good mods around that fix a lot of the problems with balance, especially between east and west. It's not as big an issue to me as the game's terrible combat system and the AI, which are impossible to mod.
What's confusing alot of people (including Paradox staff) is that they are taking 19th occurrences (such as the Scramble for Africa and the Opium Wars) and applying them to the game's time frame. In EU, there's no such thing as "European dominance" or "Westernisation" and no steamships or machine guns either.
Europe definitely dominated the world for the latter half of the game's timeframe. They just hadn't got round to conquering and colonising large chunks of it due to primarily logistical limitations.
Logistical limitations... I'm sure the Empire on which the sun never sets would have conquered the planet Mars too if it hadn't been for logistical limitations.
It's more like "the last century", if you talk about domination - Europe got better than the rest of the world in 1600, yes, but the difference started showing strongly just at the end of the timeframe and got absolutely crushing just around the half of Victoria II. Mauricians & Co. (LT 18, average year: 1530) are enough to crush everything beyond Western Europe. For "crushing", I mean "conquering the whole Far East before the end of the Holy War casus belli as TPM Holland".
I actually brought up the same anecdote last time I ran into you in a ROTW thread (several months ago- I've been keeping away from the EUIV forums). It involved OPM Navarre effortlessly dominating the south of India, their expansion only contained by the Aragonese, who showed up with ~15,000 instead of ~5,000. Total annihilation of armies was alarmingly frequent. By 1600 two-thirds of India was divided between two European states and Delhi, Rajuptana and Bihar only survived because the Aragonese and Navarrese were occupied fighting each other.
The real experience of European colonization from 1500-1600 was the maintenance of small, defensible enclaves defended by playing local powers off each other and throwing numerically superior but less-disciplined armies into disarray. In-game, if even a very weak European country turns its attention to India it can carve out a large empire with minimal effort. I don't see how you can chock that up to nothing but logistics.
Agreed. And that is because of the over-kill penalties that non-western nations were given in EU3. I would suggest keeping only tech penalty while removing the military one & giving more provinces to rest of the world. In real world, Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb for example was able to utterly crush the East India company forces in late 17th century so the scenario u described of EU3 is completely wrong & should never happen in a fairly balanced game. I hope they do it right this time, Mughals (India) are in 2nd tier this time.
I don't understand why people resist OPness of Europe. Europe needs nerf at the initial stage of the game and a mechanism to ensure its rise of power. That is all.
I'd say it has something to do with the name of the game
Europe isn't OP at the start, they just have a better tech group. In fact all the arab states have higher tech at the start giving them an advantage. In the EU3 timeframe the only serious threat to Europe was Ottoman empire