Academic sources use the most common name first for better accessibility, they aren't RPGs meant to be immersed in. CK3 is in turn an RPG strategy game and uses the most immersive names: hence the theoretically plausible neopagan or made-up names are used instead bland "Norse faith" etc. In this case, I really think that Wagadu should be the name used, as "king of Wagadu" definitely sounds more immersive than "king of warrior king".
I don't say I totally disagree, and I can't rule out that eventually some day I might change it to Wagadu, but...
1) the game has huge RPG element, but it is still played by 21st century people. Most of these, especially those who speak English have probably heard of the kingdom/empire of Ghana, but not many did hear about the kingdom of Wagadu. Sad fact, but unfortunately a true. The Immersion works only as long as you can identify yourself with it. You can't identify/immerse yourself to something you barely know. For instance when discussing the upgrade of Benin, I was asked to change the name of Benin duchy to Igodomigodo, which was the local name of the duchy. But honestly, as a European myself I had hard time reading it, before I read it for the 20th time. Can you identify with something you can barely read? I'm not perfect. I don't. Maybe I will some time later release a localisation submod for Ibn Battuta's Legacy mod, where these titles will be named locally, but it won't be the basic version.
2) I take it also partly as a mission to educate people about Africa and its history. For me a video game is something similar to elementary school history teacher. The mission of the teacher isn't to give the children all the correct facts exactly as they were in history. If he would try to do so, he and his students will very soon end up in a mess of facts, dates and characters. My own experience of a radio reporter is that it's more important to tell the story in a legible and understandable way. You sometimes need to omit some facts in order to keep the story clear. If in a 3 minute story I would mention 15 names none of which is familiar to them, they stop listening. Even I do that when listening to radio, so I do understand that some sort of simplicity is often better than 100% accuracy.
That said, I want to give the people things they are familiar with, or things they can easily get basic information about and ignite a sparkle of interest by additional flavour and by telling an interesting story. Once the interest is ignited, I can continue in more details or they can do it themselves... and they will all eventually find out that the kingdom's historical name was Wagadu.
then there's also a point 3, which I will add below...
I think a mod like this, that aims to deliver a more accurate sandbox, immersion should come first. If sources speak of X or Y, but modern historians say Z, I'd go with X or Y.
Looking at you, Byzantines.
As I mentioned above, my main goal is to communicate with people of 21st century, not with medieval people who won't play this game unles some of us invents time-travel mashine.
You are partially right. But well... the point 3 is that my mod is not SWMH. I can't express enough how I admire the level of detail, proffessionalism and accuracy-entitlement of the team... but I don't want this to be semi-SWMH or mini-SWMH. That mod has its own principles and amazingly ambitious goals and it's good that the team sticks to them. If I would share those principles I wouldn't have left the team or I would have returned.
I, on the other hand, got to understand and identify with Paradoxes basic principles of game's legibility to wider audience, and I prefere minimalism over big ambitions.
I think it's good to have some variety in mods. For those who want perfect and total historical accuracy there will be SWMH and I will do my best to promote it (although I think it won't need my help
). For those who want a decent, but slightly better map than the vanilla's, there's Ibn Battuta's Legacy.
EDIT: Oh and btw, it's
the sources, who call kingdom of Wagadu as
Ghana. It was actually modern historiography, who discovered, that historically the Soninke people have called it Wagadu, but due to our reliance on sources people everywhere in the world have been calling it Ghana. And because even these modern historians admit that everybody knows it as Ghana for ages, they stick to that name.
I'm not here to judge whether it is good or wrong. My priority is to make more people know how great of an empire it was... and through that they will learn its true name
Yeah, looking at Spain at the barony level, the research was mostly sound (some notable exceptions), but then the shape of the counties and the assignation of temple or city status seems to have been done by another team (probably the balancing team), which is a shame.
Yes, there are certainly parts of map which are researched better than others. And I can also agree that while on the barony level (at least of the areas I am aware of) the research is done in quite deep detail, but their distributions into counties and other higher-tier decisions aren't always perfect. Anyway many of them are disputed even among historians and with no clear-cut solutions, many are in borderline areas where any clear borderline is wrong etc. From my perspective I believe I can understand many of the
wrong decisions and as much as I can understand, I disagree with some (and it even happens to my own decisions at times)...
as for the distribution of castle/city/church type of holdings - I can agree that they are often distributed quite randomly. As already explained somewhere, it's simply because the province history files don't have them defined in many/most cases and hence the game distributes them automatically.
I can understand it from the time-savvy perspective - doing the research itself consumes insane ammounts of time. Going this deep into detail also in the code would reauire another insane amount of time.
Frankly I don't mind if the base game didn't do it. At least there's a space for me to do my mod to fix this and yet stick to the vanilla principles... and still leave a great space for other mods with their own design choices