and in 1444 they hadnt yet. thats always the crux problem people have with eu and eu4 specefically - europe has yet to establish any form of dominance over anybody, but the game will go out of its way to make sure they can, the biggest being the tech differences, a super succesful china will always be inferior to europe and has to "westernize" to be able to be a true nation, even if they have built the westernization path via taking over eurasia between them and the closest western nation
It's very difficult to model things properly without doing this. If the base game mechanics were very open-ended with respect to how the world can develop from a 1444 starting point, you'd almost always have an outcome where the entire world develops at the same rate (see: Civilization games).
In order to create a game where Europe
usually dominates as it did historically, but not always, and the rest of the world has at game start the ability to progress in a similar manner (but does so rarely), you'd have to do one of two things. One, you'd have to leave the whole thing up to the random number generator to see if "European dominace" happens. That's heavy-handed and would be bizarre to play. The other option is to actually model all the different things that led to Europe's dominance. That's... difficult, to say the least; it's hard to make that into a fun game, it's hard to get it all right and balanced, it's hard to even figure out what all the proper components are, and it's hard to write a computer game that can then run this simulation at a reasonable speed.
Worse, even if you
could do it, it leaves the question... why? The American nations never achieved European levels of technological advancement primarily because they lacked sufficient beasts of burden (and because of
massive plague that predated European arrival). If you implement this in a simulation, you end up with something that's functionally equivalent to the New World tech group we have now, only more complicated for no real reason.
There did exist nations that
could have competed on even footing with the West -- China comes to mind in particular. However, at the 1444 start, you have, among other things,
many centuries of culture that prevented the Chinese from having either the government or the outside-of-China empire-building focus that would have been necessary. Pretending that none of this was there and taking China on a world dominating spree is essentially as nonsense as teleporting horses and donkeys into the Americas prior to European arrival.
That's why the game has tech groups, and that's why the game has Westernizing as a mechanism for erasing these components and elevating nations to the point where they can compete directly with Europe. It's a sufficient model for the most part. It has some rough edges, but tweaking the numbers is sufficient. You don't really need a complete redesign of the model.
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