New Map: Africa

[Garbon]

You still have tons of small provinces in the sparsely populated Sahara desert.

Huh?

Desert provinces include Adrar, Hodh, Arawan (all muslim)...Taghaza and Azaouad ( really just one name change from provinces that are already on the map)...and then Fezzan and possibly Air and Kawar (which I don't know anything about those provinces.

 

[Aetius]

Fezzan, Air and Kawan was the caravan route used by the Kanuri to attack/trade with Libya. There is after all more than one caravan route between North Africa and West Africa. Air is the main source for copper for the Nigeria/Niger area and also an important sultanate.

 

[Yakman]

...and possibly Air and Kawar (which I don't know anything about those provinces.

I know a little about Air from reading a book on the French conquest of the Sahara. Basically there's nothing there but a few tuareg camel routes, dirt, rocks, and sun.

 

[Garbon]

Short cuts are bad design. You can check my map for names of places in between, but its admittedly a tough task.
Denkyira-Kongo-Jenne suffers from the same problem BTW. You could split Kong in two parts with Bobo-Dioulasso forming the area to the south of Jenne.

You do recognize that as my map keeps evolving, the goal isn't to increase historicity but to decrease the number of provinces in fashion that will be useful in game? To that end, no I'm really not so happy with the Jenne, Niani, Korhongo, Kong setup...I can totally see how this could be broken up further. However, I'm not really sure that I see a point in adding extra provinces that aren't going to be useful to gameplay in some manner. Thats why I'm also not a fan of the interior Ivory Coast and Liberia provinces...we aren't going to have tags to represent these tiny kingdoms, so essentially we are creating provinces that we don't want anyone to colonize with high native values. So yea, provinces are growing large on my map, and they may not be exactly how they should, but unfortunately this is a game and sacrifices must be made.

 

[Yakman]

Some of those Saharan provinces should be PTI... to be modeled correctly, they'd have ZERO manpower, ZERO taxvalue... basically ZERO everything... not really worth it to me....

 

[unmerged(31425)]

Some of those Saharan provinces should be PTI... to be modeled correctly, they'd have ZERO manpower, ZERO taxvalue... basically ZERO everything... not really worth it to me....

They should have salt and probably 1 tax apeice like the current two. They contributed to regional trade and shared a part in the history of N Africa and W Africa.

 

[Aetius]

Ah I assumed that colonisation by Africans would be possible, e.g. the Fulani colonisation of Cameroon and Hausa states.

 

[Garbon]

Ah I assumed that colonisation by Africans would be possible, e.g. the Fulani colonisation of Cameroon and Hausa states.

Umm...yea, I mean we have a Hausa states nation in the AGCEEP, so it wouldn't really make sense to have them be colonized in the EU2 sense of colonization.

On that its also a difficult thing to allow African nations to colonize, as then they would compete for the coasts with Europe, which is not really desirable.

 

[Aetius]

Perhaps its best to simply split the coastal regions from the inland with PTI. AFAIK interior empires never had coastal provinces, PTI would isolate them from the coast. The Europeans would then be free to set up TP on the coast as in history and they would be prevented from ahistoric wars with the interior empires, at least unless they follow the Moroccan route through the desert.

Is there really much point in representing e.g. Oyo? The Yoruba never really expanded in any direction and consisted of a bunch of city states, Oyo and Illorin etc.. The Europeans didn't colonise Oyo either. The same could be said about e.g. Benin. The provinces would be better "spent" elsewhere either as more coastal provinces or as more interior provinces. The Hausa would be possible to represent as different states (using the Oyo and Benin tags), given the wars between them. The Fulani assault on Oyo didn't start until after the end of the EU2 game time too.

 

[Yakman]

Perhaps its best to simply split the coastal regions from the inland with PTI. AFAIK interior empires never had coastal provinces, PTI would isolate them from the coast. The Europeans would then be free to set up TP on the coast as in history and they would be prevented from ahistoric wars with the interior empires, at least unless they follow the Moroccan route through the desert.

This makes a lot of sense in West Africa. A line of PTI simulating the mountainous jungle highlands stretching from Sengal to Benin would be a good idea--you'd still have the interior Kingdoms and the colonizable coasts.

 

[|AXiN|]

I, too, really like this idea. It'd stop ahistoric European excursions into the interior, and also stop revolting colonies from joining random West African states.

 

[James Fox]

Okay, in response to some comments, here is my revised proposal for the Horn of Africa:

And also, Zimbabwe:

I have to admit I'm not very happy with the Zimbabwe map.

 

[James Fox]

Now, on to some of the comments people have made.

First of all, I'd just like to say that it seems kind of premature to talk about merging as many provinces as possible, keeping areas to a minimum, and so on. I know that sacrifices will have to be made, especially as the AGCEEP will probably run out of tags again, and when we must leave out a state, it makes sense to leave out a province associated with it.

However, until we know how many additional provinces that people will allow Africa to have, this seems a bit premature. Personally, I am hoping that if the '300 extra provinces for the rest of the world' figure that I have heard is close to the final result, that it will not seem to be too horrible to let Africa have 30 or 40 additional provinces.

I know that many of you, concerned with only Europe or your own nation, will recoil at the mere thought of Africa having such attention paid to it, but please keep in mind that Africa was a continent with dozens of diverse cultures, and many large centralized states. The number of provinces does not necessarily reflect a nation's importance in world events, but is rather there to provide an EU2 style abstraction of history, and even with 30 additional provinces, the level of abstraction, given the complexity of the history in the area, will be much higher than in Europe. The detail will be much less.

On to some of the other comments:

First, when it comes to Oyo, I think that it should stay. While the Yoruba area was a mass of city states at the start of the game, Oyo managed to aquire a Sudanic-style calvary army, and around 1600, began conquering Yoruba-land. By around 1750, they controlled all of Yoruba-land, a considerable swath of the coast, and had vassalized Dahomey.

As for Benin, when the Portuguese arrived, it was the largest and most stable state in the area, controlling hundreds of miles of coastline.

When it comes to the issue of isolating the coast from all of the African states using PTI, I'll say right away that I find the notion bizzare. It would be like isolating Scotland from England, in order to prevent such 'ahistorical' things as England conqering Scotland, or having many English provinces defect to Scotland. Extremely high attrition rates, which are already there in Regular EU2, can serve to simulate the main barrier to European conquest of the region. A number of medium-sized African states, such as Oyo, Dahomey, and Ashante, did conquer to the coast, and it would seem rather arbitrary to try and cripple possible ahistorical expansion by player controlled nations, for no other reason than 'It didn't happen in history.'

 

[Aetius]

Re PTI I was proposing a way to get away from provinces that are not assigned to tags, since that seemed to be a problem.

Oyo would probably be better served with more provinces, e.g. Ife, Ogbomosho, Illorin, Owo. Without these provinces it doesn't have much space to expand, which makes its inclusion rather dubious. Benin is in a similar situation, it did have influence hundreds of km away, but AFAIK the strength of its control is largely uncertain. In EU2 terms there isn't much space for it to expand, again with the current number of provinces. I am not sure how to make Benin interesting to play without more provinces.
But of course if I had a choice I would put all the 300 provinces in Africa

 

[Aetius]

Zaria should be renamed Zazzau AFAIK. Not sure when they started using Zaria, but the name of the state was Zazzau for much of the EU2 period.

 

[Norrefeldt]

There might still be some very minor changes here and there, but the version that is already out is sufficient basis for publishing in the various threads. No time to lose. Try to focus on the issues at hand, changes to the map are very very likely to be included in the first release. It will all be for later releases.
For this thread, just discuss provinces numbered in white! The rest will be in other threads. Maps without the chicken scratch will replace this one as soon as I get my hands on it.
We need help with

• Make conversion list for old ID - new ID(s). This will be used for converting knownprovinces lists in 300 country files. They should be configured like this to be readble to Aegnor's program:
  
  One old to one new conversion:
  

  oldID1-newID1 #Old name
  oldID2-newID2 #Old name
  oldID3-newID3 #Old name
  etc..

  One old to multiple new conversion:
  

  oldID1-newID1 #Old name
  oldID1-newID2 
  oldID1-newID3 
  etc..

  One old can convert into several new ones, but never the opposite! It's no exact science as it's only for this sole purpose.
  If there is no new one that fits, as if it's been covered in PTI, write 0.
  
• Make the province.csv entries.
• Make the 1419.inc entries. (Not the knownprovinces part.)
• Make revolt.txt entries.

As default provinces coming from a split old EU2 province in the new map get the combined tax values of the old one +1. Countries need to invest some to get the value out of the provinces, and this addition is an easy way to make up for it. There's already too much manpower on the map, and armies are several times the historical ones, and require no investment, so I don't think manpower should be affected.

Example: Old province A (tax 7) is divided in X and Y. Their combined tax values on the new map is 9.


Also, this was discussed here: North and West Africa

Seyshelles is 846.

 

[Garbon]

Note, there are one or two provinces without names. If anyone can guess what they were supposed to be or find the post outlining them, that'd be great. Otherwise, I'll just keep sorting through my notes and old image files, till I find them. o

 

[unmerged(45766)]

Border between Sinai, Palestine, Transjordan & Tabuk : it's not very clear. I think it's a border between Sinaie and Transjordan but a little more larger border would be easier to spot.

 

[unmerged(5145)]

Africa map

Will there be an adjacency over the lake in the Rwanda/Burundi area?
Make sure the name "Tonga" isn't used twice in the global map (once for the African province and again for a Pacific island).
As Ambassador noted, there are again some very short boundaries that could potentially be obscured by game mechanics graphics.

 

[Garbon]

Will there be an adjacency over the lake in the Rwanda/Burundi area?

Only between Bende <---> Tetela & Luba