As I mentioned earlier, the Battle of Liaoluo Bay was preceded by the destruction by the Dutch of what was the most advanced fleet the Ming had ever constructed up to that time. The victory of the Chinese in their conflict against the Dutch would most be attributable to the ability of the Ming to immediately construct a replacement fleet of 150 ships, to face the same 9 Dutch ships (+ local allies) that destroyed their first fleet. It does not show any kind of naval technological parity between the Dutch and Ming, if anything the real life technological disparity between the two was even more severe than depicted in the game.
This is true, but highly misleading. First of all, while the Dutch did destroy an earlier Ming fleet, it was not in an actual battle. The Chinese docked and sailed into Amoy, not realizing that an enemy Dutch fleet was in the area, and the sailors were not actually in their ships at the time the Dutch arrived, to the point where Putmans had the ships dismantled by hand instead of actually firing on them. This is more comparable to the time the Dutch sailed up the Thames and burned the English fleet at harbor than the spectacular naval victories of the 19th century.
Moreover, the Dutch may have only had 9 ships, but they were backed by local allies which had at least 50 ships of the same type of he Ming ships, so while they were significantly outnumbered, the odds were not as overwhelming as they sound (especially since the importance of maneuver means that it is far more common for navies to defeat larger opponents).
As a result, while it is true that Europeans did have a naval advantage over the Chinese by 1633 (it is not obvious that this was the case in 1444, but let us allow it). But it also shows that the naval advantage held by Europeans was, while substantial, insufficient to overcome a fleet that Ming had assembled in less than a year. In my opinion, the most reasonable conclusion is that while Europeans definitely held a technological advantage by the latter half of this period, it is not obvious that it was sufficient to overcome much larger Asian states in open conflicts, even before consider the vast expense of transporting troops this distance, which is not modelled in game (Napoleon's expedition to Haiti lost over half of its men before the first battle; while most of this was due to Yellow Fever, a largescale expedition to East Asia would be several times the distance and require docking in several regions prone to Yellow Fever or Malaria, including Taiwan itself).
Remember, the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 may have been able to win every battle against more or less even odds it faced (showing technological superiority), but the forces Algeria was able to muster were sufficient that France needed a general mobilization in order to win, and even then was unable to conquer beyond the coasts.
