It doesn't represent West Africa well either. Ideally, there would be three African tech groups: West African, East African, and Central/South African.
You only need one new tech group to do this. "Sub Saharan" can be used for the southern countries (Kongo, Loango, Mutapa), and the eastern countries can be placed in the Indian tech group (works well for the Swahili, who were one end of an ocean-going trade with India, and OK for Ethiopia/Adal, who started the period more militarily advanced than most places in Africa but weren't on a par with the Mamelukes, Ottomans, or Omanis.) Then giving the West Africans their own tech group also lets them share a map amongst themselves, which works out very nicely.
Most of the West African states should get cavalry: arguably all of them because there's no way I can think of to mod in tse tse flies' effect on horses. (The West African states without cavalry weren't at a disadvantage because the others couldn't apply their cavalry against them.) But that can be handled, if so desired, through unit_type, since that's now a separate thing from tech group.
But
all of the African states should get forts. (Yes, their forts wouldn't have stood up to European armies in Europe, but Europe could only support expeditionary forces in Africa or the New World, not full fledged armies, and the forts could obstruct those.)
Adal nearly defeated Ethiopia in the 16th Century if it weren't for the Portugese. The Somalis operated the same style of cavalry as the Ethiopians, the same type of hill forts as the Ethiopians and had access to muskets BEFORE the Ethiopians.
The reason the Somalis etc. attacked them
was the Portuguese. The Portuguese spent the period 1510-20 attacking Muslim ports all the way along the east coast of Africa, and then in the 1520's there's an unprecedented coalition of small Muslim states attacking Christian Ethiopia? Not a coincidence.
While the Ethiopians received help from the Portuguese, Ahmad Gran had received help from the Ottomans so that's a wash.
Ethiopia was pretty damn fractured during the entire time period. Just read about the Zemene Mesafint it was complete chaos. And during the 14th and 15th century, there were independent 'vassals' of Ethiopia like Kaffa, Janjero, Semien, Ifat etc. etc.
Pretty much like France at the start of the game then
(And far less fractured than the HRE!) And yes, "Feudal Monarchy" describes Ethiopia at the time quite well, I think.
"Adal" in game is an abstraction. At any given time there were several small Muslim stats in that area, but the only one that was both large (we have two provinces! TWO!) and longlived was Adal, so Paradox made that into a tag and used it to represent the others. But really there were a ton of one-province (or less) minors in the area. Not counting the period
after 1550. :wacko:
