Indigenous Australians

[Tizazef]

We know almost literally nothing about the Aboriginals before European arrival, so basically even if we made them an actual tribe, they'd be more or less complete OC. If you want an OC so much you may as well just use custom nation builder and you'll have a good chance or being more or less just as historical as the Aboriginals that Paradox could make.

Also it seems to me very strange that your only argument that Aboriginals were somehow this highly organized group is basically a single source by a nationalist author that mainstream historians evidently have given no damns about. If we were just following sensationalist fringe historians then Ming China should have outposts all over the Pacific islands and a foothold on California in 1451, but nobody argues for that more or less because it's complete gibberish that's bought in by no historian that actually matters. Same for the Aboriginals, it seems strange that people consistently argue that these natives were literal magic and had super advanced agriculture techniques that nobody else on the planet figured out despite being isolated from all sources of cultural exchange and having dubious crops and fertility levels in their homeland.

 

[hospitaller_knight]

As someone who lives in australia, I can testify there are basically no remnants, ruins or signs at all that aboriginals inhabited this country. It really makes me wonder what the hell they were doing for 40 000 years.

At high school we went on an excursion (led by an aboriginal) to some indigenous sites. One was literally a river bank with no signs of civilisation, another was stream off an old road where there were very faint marks on some of the rocks, it was claimed that the marks were caused by aboriginals smacking rocks there to sharpen them for primitive tools (stone age technology).

Another site was a car park next to a lake, which was claimed to be an aboriginal tribal meeting area. In most cases the only evidence that aboriginals were ever there is in the names of places.

In conclusion an absolutely primitive civilisation, with "nations" just being tribes of a few thousand people at most. I believe adequately represented in the games current mechanics.

 

[fetusthebard]

Finally, even were we to conclude that there is sufficient justification for including an Aboriginal tag(s), you will find that the vast majority will disagree with your first bullet point: they are not MORE deserving than almost if not all other tags. Further, when assembling a list of undeveloped regions, they won't appear near the top for most people:
- Several island kingdoms, particularly Hispaniola and the Hawaiians, are obvious.

I know that there's been a lot of posts here since the start, but I actually said this, and that I didn't think that Australia was the most pressing area in need of a tag. I cited the organized, heavily trading in incense, guaranteed independence by the United States of America Hawai'i as a perfect example of a known state that was far more worthy of having an in-game tag than the tribes of Australia. But some people here have been denying the facts that native Australia had the traits that are listed here at all. Which is just absurd. You don't need to be an organized, European, colonial state to design food that you can plant and farm.

I don't necessarily think that Australia presents as bad a case for tags as you seem to think, and they are certainly better than the Koryaks, but I do think pretty much every nation you listed deserves more.

 

[Tizazef]

You don't need to be an organized, European, colonial state to design food that you can plant and farm..

The problem is that there was basically nowhere on the planet by the time of EU IV besides tiny islands and some really remote regions of the Americas, Arabia, and Africa which doesn't fulfill the conditions of "is planting food". By this criterion you'd include most of the world even during the late Neolithic era which I have to say is more or less absurd, an EU IV state represents a government-in-being that has, among other rights and responsibilities, the power to meddle at least somewhat in budget, the ability to control religion on an organized level, the ability to have functional agreements with other states that theoretically last beyond the current leader, and has the ability to call upon an army-in-being or at least a group of warriors who are basically ready to roll at the drop of a hat, the ability to assign and reassign leaders of those armies, etc. etc. just from the actual buttons you can click in game. Having a farm doesn't make you a state.

 

[fetusthebard]

Having a farm doesn't make you a state.

That's why it's not my only listed metric on the other post. Again, I'm simply responding to people here that are denying Indigenous Australians ever did anything other than bang stones together, and trying to provide a larger context about the societies and webs of trade in a region where you could sail for weeks and not find a single soul. This region is unique, incredibly complex, far more technologically advanced than we give credit for (let Europe try sailing from New Guinea to Hawai'i in the neolithic, couldn't even get to Greenland smh), and had a giant advantage in government strength over the people being colonized in North and South America.
You know, the ones already present in the game.

 

[Selzro]

Well since people "Respectfully Disagreed" with my facts here's your citations!
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2013.0486
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8486076?selectedversion=NBD26504676
If you'd kindly stop downvoting facts that could be researched with literally two clicks I'd appreciate it though.

The first paper you cite gives a total population of about 770000 to 1.1 million people for the whole of Australia. That may sound like a lot until you realize those people were spread out across an entire continent. The Capital Region may have had hundreds of thousands of people, but were they politically united? Other parts of the world had much higher population densities, yet they don't get tags. The highlands of New Guinea had a very high population density, with elaborate farming practices (which they had invented in isolation), but all those people were split up into so many competing clans that it would be impossible to do them justice. How is Australia any better? Do we know of any large, organized tribes there?

 

[Tizazef]

This region is unique, incredibly complex, far more technologically advanced than we give credit for (let Europe try sailing from New Guinea to Hawai'i in the neolithic, couldn't even get to Greenland smh)

But it doesn't matter how advanced they are for the purpose of this thread if by most metrics they barely qualified as tribal confederations let alone states. Also let's be completely honest and admit that people might not "give them credit" for much but they were pretty goddamn backwards anyway, maybe not as backwards as people like to say but neither as advanced as you seem to be attempting to portray them. Sailing from New Guinea to Hawai'i wasn't necessarily done on purpose in the neolithic.

advantage in government strength

The Inca and Aztecs were by all accounts complete empires with up-to-date infrastructure and government strictures. I find it hard to believe that the Aboriginals had even a single edge over those guys when it comes to government strength.

 

[klingonadmiral]

A great deal of Africa and SEA are high-native-count and untagged.

Hell, we know there were kingdoms on the southern coast of Brunei during the golden age of Majapahit, and that Lombok was the site of several dozen petty fiefdoms competing with one another. Those would be too small to represent of course, but there is precedent for PDS putitng several micro-states together into one entity large enough to be represented on the map. Circassia is the big example of that if I recall correctly.

Ternate also should have a lot more territory, the north of Sulawesi as well as Ceram and Ambon. Perhaps even the western tip of Papua.

But apparently adding some more totally inconsequential minors to Germany is more important.

 

[fr-rein]

This region is unique, incredibly complex, far more technologically advanced than we give credit for

I asked one thing, I didn't hear it yet.
What countries/tribes were there? And were they existing at all? I agree that you can bash under "primitives" a great deal of backwardness, but could you say that there were tribes or organizations like that? If no, then it is pointless as we can't make up that.

 

[DerGrößteRitter]

Oh boy, one of these....

 

[Kazanov]

Hey, so it turns out indigenous Australian history being a history of hunter gatherers is becoming increasingly obviously a load of bullshit white settlers made up to peddle Terra Nullius. Not really sure what this means in terms of eu4, but keep tabs on what Bruce Pascoe is doing (author of Dark Emu). We may be realising there were actually full blown native Australian nations before UK showed up soon. In any case, what we do know is they had some extremely advanced agriculture that made a large portion of that wasteland desert you've got habitable to a significant degree. I can't really do it justice, but if you hadn't already, start looking into native Australian history before the next dlc relevant to the area, at the very least. Bruce Pascoe is a good place to start.

In that case, there were more native american nations that the ones depicted in EU4, and they were way more developed than the Indigenous Australians, and i can recommend a bigger bibliography to PDX that document what im saying.

But i also like the easy colonization of "empty land" that this game provides, anyways.

 

[Sverige]

If you can prove they were politically unified and had a system of government, add them. The only thing farms prove is that Australian provinces should have higher dev.

 

[MilosM]

I would say it's pretty pointless to argue about the complexity of Aboriginal societies without pointing out that native tags doesn't do too much in the game besides adding somewhat level of immersion.

At least show the developers that the Aboriginal societies were as complex politically as the North American tribes *AT 1444*.

They actually break immersion for me, which is why I used to remove those. Hell, even European countries are way more centralized than they should be, but having tribes as nations is ridiculous.

 

[Less2]

Exactly how much unified resistance did these people put up to Europeans in terms of "conquering" or "colonizing" them? I think that's the biggest reason to decide in whether something deserves to be a tag or not. This should be something that is pretty clear from the historical records, were there any major large-scale battles or significant armies that needed to be deployed to contain them? If not and they were just a minor annoyance to settlers on the grand scale, then that's what the current colonization mechanics are for.

 

[fr-rein]

but having tribes as nations is ridiculous.

It is fine. You can be just a collective will as well when you are OPM.
But the current "primitive" status is working very meh. Especially how we colonize the other territories or how you can pour dev in development instead of techs. Or how there are no primitive estates. Or how you can't reform at all unless someone arrives. Or how little politics is there for them.
I don't even mention having your tribe break off in two as part of it separates. Would be quite fun.

It needs a revamp. And government mechanics may actually be good frame for the reforms instead of a separate window. Estates and dev are free, so changing how primitives work is possible now... And hopefully they are enhanced when South America may gain new touches.

 

[BeyondExpectation]

They actually break immersion for me, which is why I used to remove those. Hell, even European countries are way more centralized than they should be, but having tribes as nations is ridiculous.

I sympathize, but don't see any way around it under anything approaching current game mechanics. CK2 on the other hand has a mechanic which approaches the way to treat them, where provinces have holdings within them, which allows that game for finer political divisions.

 

[Tizazef]

How you can't reform at all unless someone arrives

More like how utterly absurd it is that native tribes can instantly become up-to-date with the click of a button.

 

[RAID186]

And New Zealand has Maoris which could be considered.

As a Maori descendant- there was no united Maori regions really, tribes just had their areas and there were no states, just the odd wars and even more wars once the British came with their muskets. A united Maori nation in the game would be horribly a-historical and if they decided to split them all well, there would be no sources for ideas for each one.

 

[fetusthebard]

The first paper you cite gives a total population of about 770000 to 1.1 million people for the whole of Australia. That may sound like a lot until you realize those people were spread out across an entire continent. The Capital Region may have had hundreds of thousands of people, but were they politically united? Other parts of the world had much higher population densities, yet they don't get tags. The highlands of New Guinea had a very high population density, with elaborate farming practices (which they had invented in isolation), but all those people were split up into so many competing clans that it would be impossible to do them justice. How is Australia any better? Do we know of any large, organized tribes there?

A great deal of people have been asking about state organization and tribal organization while ignoring that North American, South American, and Koryak tribes are all represented in-game. Many with populations in the thousands and governmental structures so weak that historians can't agree on successions, much less trying to design a governmental hierarchy among the in most cases dozens of tribal villages that the tag represents.

And if one more persons disrespects Hawai'i we're going to have a problem. It's the single most glaring omission in the game. Hawai'i had temples, government buildings, non-tribal villages. We know ancestry and succession laws intimately, because when Europe found them they had Kings ruling, and had records of rulers down to their multiple wives from many generations previous. We have at the very least evidence they were as advanced in this matter as the Aztecs or Inca, the Pacific islands were not known for their large complex empires, but many of them were infinitely more advanced in government (see having any governmental structure) than some of the tribal unions already presented in the game.
I'm not prepared to die on the hill of Aboriginal Australia, but I sure as hell am prepared to die on the hill of a nation that was Guaranteed Independence by the USA during this game's timeline.

 

[pedrito_elcabra]

What, you want MORE tribal pseudo-nations fielding 6k troops and able to create The Most Developed Province in the World™ through magic monarch power?

I'd vote for throwing out a good amount of the currently existing ones. Start with those Siberian ones.