If you aren't coming up with arcane archaeological and ethnohistoric research papers, you most likely aren't seeing all there is to know about any particular state in Africa or anywhere else in the global south. It's definitely true in the areas I'm more knowledgeable of.
According to a historian I met from the Rwandan Army when I did a stint with Africom, if you have some obscure paper that has a better knowledge base than a professional whose day job it is to know this sort of stuff, I'm all ears.
I was more referring to Polynesia, since my knowledge of Africa is pretty sketchy, but I'm finding that the EU4 devs' understanding of the history of the global south is pretty lacking... Pohnpei and the Society Islands kingdoms I mentioned have enough documentation to easily come up with unique idea sets... even India and Germany have a bevy of indistinct polities when their history is relatively well-known, and could easily be overhauled to introduce more variety. I don't know much about Macina in particular, but if you asked me about, say, the Chane in Bolivia, I could tell you that they were an Arawakan chiefdom who derived their wealth from critical trade routes between the Andes and the Amazon, that the Inkas built a castle for them because of its economic importance, that they were repeatedly invaded by the Avaguarani hordes to the east and north, and were eventually overrun shortly after the Spanish arrived. For a relatively insignificant Andean polity, that's more than enough to crank out a unique set of national ideas and maybe some events.
So in other words, your entire paragraph here (and Wikipedia's entry) is less than a decade of history for even European minor. And frankly, ideas are the easy thing. What makes the Chane distinct from the Guarani or any of the other statelets nearby? Most of these sorts of states have very little recorded history (e.g. less than 1000 pages of primary text) and the tags just become a blur.
Maybe I missed something since I'm not reading this thread that closely, but where is it stated or implied that any new tags have to be connected to Kongo or the east coast?
To keep the AI from imploding. Do you have any idea how many loopholes you'd have to close to have isolated land not screw the AI over? Weird stuff - like one of the interior kingdoms going Christian, getting inherited (say by a Catholic Kongo) and then having Kongo getting nuked by teleporting rebels is something you'd have to code against.
Adding an empty province between them would likely solve it, or barring that, wasteland (and then only give Luba/Lunda access to a separate stretch of colonizable coast). It sounds as if you're assuming they all have to connect.
So, let me again ask, what the heck is the point? You adding a bunch of tribes, which lack any recorded history from the EU time period. Their oral tradition is spotty, and to shoe horn them in you are going to open up inhospitable land?
For the record, M&T does exactly that, and I'm having a fun game as Sicily as we speak.
I could go on, the truth is that the real world literally dealt with territories at the acre level. at some point we have to cut things off like Baarle-Hertog. So again, what do these states actually add to the game other than sucking down clock cycles, dev time, and making the AI worse?
If you compare the OPM in North America, South America and Siberia (which were really pretty much unorganized tribes) with the kingdoms in the Rift Valley, Uganda and Luna+Lunda which do you think deserve more to be in-game? To be fair, if we added te mentionned tribes we should also add the african kingdoms.
Also if you say these areas were not accessible in the EU4 for Europeans we could (assuming this logic) erase Tibet, Uyghuristan, Najd, Kirgyzstan and Afghanistan...
If you look at the map Africa has the largest areas of Wastelnads (I suggest we keep the wastelands in Sahara (except traderoutes), Kalahari, Namib dessert and the rainforest of Congo (NorthwesternDRC, northern Coingo-Brazzaville), and maybe the Omo valley of Ethipia. Everything elese in Africa should be turned into regular provinces ... similar to the way it was dealt with in South America nad the NA.
Oceania should get represented also if we got the Siberian OPMS and Arawaks in*game.... or are you trying to say that the Maoris, Polynesian and Tonga were more desorganized than the random tribes in NA/SA/Siberia??
Nope. Adding in many of the tribal states is already a horrid idea. Most of them lacked the real world ability to do many of the basic things required of states in EUIV. North America and to a lesser extent South America are already too vastly open for historical accuracy. Marching an army across the American Great Plains was not possible in 1840, let alone 1500.
Part of African history in this period was that states there were not European ones with clearly delineated borders, road networks that spanned from one end of the continent to the other, and the vast majority of arable land was under cultivation. Instead Africa had vibrant hinterlands with divided polities, a slave trade that utterly dominated state level relations, and geographic isolation for its states. This reflected the fact that African watercourses are far less navigable, African agriculture had different needs than European, and most African states had secure flanks (particularly those south of the Niger delta).
And please don't waste time on silly strawmen. Afghanistan, Najd, etc. all have recorded interactions with Europeans. More, there are numerous records of large scale incursions into or out of those areas. Luba, Lunda, etc. have
none of that. In spite of having slavers to the West in Ndongo and Kongo, there are zero recorded instances of large scale slave raiding from the coasts into Luba and Lunda. In spite of the Swahili coast staging slave raids in Madgascar (a tag that should be added) thousands of miles away, they appear to have never raided into the Southern DRC. We have records of slave raids from Somalia to Juba, but nothing for just the much smaller distances between the interior African societies and either coast. And we don't just have to rely on records. The genetics of the slave trade shows far, far too few interior African haplotypes made a dent in the largest migration (forced, evil, and terrible) in at least 1000 years to have had large scale raids into the interior.
To whit, these states show every sign of being historically isolated. They should stay historically isolated. Multiplying tags just "because" results in the game losing historical strategic tensions and turns Africa in Europe, just slower. This is bad. Regions of the map should retain their historical character and Africa was definitely a place where lateral movement of armies in the interior
did not happen.
