Just to back track on this for a bit, I know you guys were discussing egypt - but maybe you also have thoughts or had input into this too... I've been reading about medieval Nubia for the past 3 weeks almost non-stop - the k_nubia seems like it could use a lot of work?
-There's modern place names all over the place, arabic names for places over greek or nubian ones (which predominated at this time) - the barony selection in particular is frustrating.
-Meroe county in in Napata region instead of in the area where Meroe was located (opposite sites of the nile).
-Makuria itself is a duchy not a kingdom, same for Alodia.
-Makuria occupys the middle nile area exclusively - whilst we don't really know the borders of Makuria/Alodia, having Alodia basically sitting on the city of Soba south is a configuration i've never seen on any map of the area before - usually the border is just split from area of c_karghas or c_atabara.
-There could be more counties between Aswan and 'old Dongola' the Makurian capital, there were settlements, forts, churches, monasteries all over of Makuria - we know of over of 60 churches from records in lower nubia, and more than half a dozen bishoprics.
-K_nubia should probably also be called Dotawo and not Nubia.
And as someone slightly obssessed with Kushitic history at the moment, having k_nubia as de jure e_abyssinia gives me stomach pains lol. Not only is that empire a made up fantasy empire (acceptable in game terms, there's heaps of these due to pdx's design of having an empire for every de jure kingdom), but it's premised on 'ethiopian' hegemony, which is an insult to Kush/Nubia, which was the premier state of this region. Axum was a comparatively small trading kingdom compared to Kush, and even it's successor states. I'd like to see a e_nubia consisting of k_nubia, k_beja, and k_darfur, and leave Abyssinia for the horn.
/rant over
Oh yes, I also find Nubia very fascinating. After the first 3 weeks of my own reading about Nubian history I would probably agree with most your points. But since my original reading/research of the area any my firs modding overhaul of the area for CK2, I have myself invested far more time than that on the region and re-evaluated many if not most of my original assessments. And from that perspective I find the actual vanilla setup far less wrong than you seem to do.
I will answer in more detail later when I'll have more time to check it with my sources, but from the top of my head:
- Meroe is located correctly. The Meroe you seem to be speaking about is the ancient Meroe. There was, however also a post-Meroitic Meroe, which was "in the Napata area".
- as for naming - yes, there are many Arabic names used. As far as my knowledge of the region goes, it does show the names you can usually find on the maps depicting known settlements of medieval Nubia. I need to admit, though, that the most essential book I ordered for Nubian history got lost on the way and I received it months after I had time to update
my map of medieval Nubia which I passed to Paradox.
- Dotawo vs. Nubia - we are at the naming conventions such as Ghana vs. Wagadu, Bohemia vs. Čechy, Germany vs. Deutschland etc. I guess we discussed this matter. Nubia is how you find the medieval region described in 99% of both popular and academic sources, hence the name I consider correct. Also Dotawo was a name of Nobatia rather than the entire Nubia.
- more counties and baronies - sure, there certainly
could be more. Especially in some parts of Nubia. OTOH from a gameplay and other perspectives, Nubia already is more powerfull than it should be compared to its neighbours.
I did spend some time considering placement of the baronies and frankly I found it difficult to increase their number significantly. I could, but increasing barony density in some areas would mean either misplacing some important settlements or gaving some of the added baronies way too small.
- As for the Alodia/Makuria border - you are right that the real border was slightly more downstream than it actually is. It was neither stable nor clear (to our knowledge), but it seems that it passed somewhere between the 6th cataract and Nile-Atbara confluence (although some maps do place it as far as 5th cataract), which means the Nile-valley area of c_abwab was in Alodia and so probably was the most upstream part of c_atbara. However - quick checking my maps tells me that there aren't any known settlements on the left bank of the Nile (upstream from the confluence) to place a barony and create another county there. And without a county there it would be hard to reshuffle the duchy setup in the area
- reshufling the de jure setup, moving some counties to different duchies, making some duchies larger, or splitting them and creating slightly different kingdoms setups is something I could imagine as possible.
I know I had some other setups in my mind already but none of them I found significantly better. But I do admit that mostly I didn't want to have Makuria, Nobatia and Alodia as separate kingdoms as I sort of never minded the idea of them being in game petty kingdoms.
From another perspective, having them as actual kingdom tier titles would make the kingdoms smaller and less powerfull and hence it could bring better ballance to the area, especially in regards to Egypt and the Beja tribes to the east of Nubia.