How are Mesos/Andeans supposed to deal with 1st idea group at lvl 5?

[neondt]

How much did Mesoamericans know about the world beyond their borders? Maybe there's an argument to be made about having more territory explored from 1444.

 

[neondt]

It's not misrepresenting anything. A relatively tiny Spanish force conquered some very big empires.

Besides, giving the player an ON-OFF choice re tech-group solves all of the above problems. If you want Wanka to start without a tech penalty - no problem. If you want the Huron to fall in a few years under the yoke of a French musket, then again, it's your choice.

The only caveat being Ironman related issues (probably disabled if you opt to give everyone the same tech development level)

If you don't care about ironman, there's several mods that equalise tech groups over on Steam Workshop. Don't really see the point of adding this to vanilla.

 

[neondt]

Well yes. There is that. Which makes this entire thread a bit useless anyway, since the 'fix' is not very difficult to mod. In fact, it's almost a DIY job.

On the other hand, it is worth mentioning that the Steam Workshop does not work on Macs.
(so if you are a Modder, I would be most grateful if you can make your work available for direct download)

Quick DIY version: go to common/technologies.txt, copy it over to a mod (see modding forum for more info) and change all the modifiers to 0. That is literally it.

But yeah equalising tech isn't really the topic of this thread.

 

[neondt]

Don't actually do this, because I'm pretty sure that would mean North America natives get free tech since they have a 100% tech cost native advancement

That actually sounds like fun. But as TMIT says they couldn't tech for free. There's also modifiers like ahead of time penalty that'd hold them back somewhat.