I do have to wonder how things like farming methods will impact gameplay (if they do). As I understand it, West African farming methods and crops (with the exception of Sorghum) encourage villages to focus on locating gilgai, settling there, and using plots of strong soil and crops with a high calorie:land ratio. That, and I've never heard it suggested that something like serfdom would be feasible there. I got into a few discussions on other sites about this, and what I've gotten from this is that farmers could rely on ethnic ties to bail them out, and to restrict states, with many kingdoms having to negotiate with tribes regularly.
I'm kinda wondering how the ideas of population density painted by Mahmud Ka'ti (I know I mention him a lot, but it's important to me) and the 7k adjacent villages along the Upper Niger. Also, I want to see how they handle the expansion of the Sahara desert. As was explained in the "Mauritania Revisited" thread (link below), the areas out to Lower Mauritania (or Oualata) contained Acacia forests and were highly productive, to say nothing of other nearby area.
Just tell me if I'm wrong anywhere. I want to get this info right.
About 5 or so years ago, I posted a suggestion on how we could represent Mauritania in EU4. Eu4's representation of Mauritania at the moment is quite minimal; This representation has quite a few issues. It repesents that no cities were in this...
forum.paradoxplaza.com
Thanks and glad to see you here
As for your point about the
upper Niger being very densely populated, I can't but totally agree. You don't need to rely on Mahmud Ka'ti. There is plenty of archaeological sources showing that the area especially arounf the Inland Niger delta was very densely populated in the medieval period. And before the 13th century something similar was also in the core areas of the Ghana/Wagadu. The settlements were clustered - with several major cities (like Jenne-Jeno, Kumbi Saleh or cities in the Mema region), surounded by dense net of "client cities" - urban centers of crafts, but often with some craft-specialization and these were then all surrounded by net of smaller semi-urban settlements and dozens of villages. While in the areas of Wagadu this pattern of settlements declined after the second half of 11th century, in the Inland Niger delta it survived for much longer... and since the late 12th century the centers of population and political gravity shifted southwards to the upper Niger areas like Manding.
As for the thread. I haven't read it all, just checked the OP and few following posts. The part about productivity etc. seems relatively okay, but the map suggestions are awfully inaccurate, especially in the Ghana/Wagadu area (how the hell can one place Awdaghust east of Kumbi Saleh?)... but it does have some good points.
I do wish that Africa, especially in the Mali de jure empire and just in general around the Niger had more and denser provinces though more provinces across the board would be nice. There are some very big provinces down in de jure mali, and it'd be nice if there were just more provinces to play with down there. Mali is like a little over a third the size of the HRE in terms of provinces, when that obviously just isn't quite accurate for representing the power of these states.
Like it has been already said, having relatively larger counties doesn't necessarily mean the region is weak. Looking at the whole map, the province density in Mali isn't very different from province density in Anatolia and Spain, which were both very wealthy and powerfull regions.
I would avoid judging whether it is good or wrong before we can see what is the density of baronies and how developed the areas are. As I posted elswhere, I can imagine the region to have similar density to the most developed areas of Trans-Alpine Europe.
For instance here is a map which I used some 4-5 years back when I worked on SWMH mod:
Although there are some errors which I have later fixed, you can see that the Sahelian area does have enough
regions for having nicely dense county layout. On a slightly different note, here is a more recent map of Maghreb as I compiled it around the time of Holy Fury (there are some minnor updates which are more recent, but no major ones). Take it just as a comparison of increasing level of detail. The difference in accuracy in West Africa is much larger, although I didn't updated that part of the map recently.
I don't actually play Crusader Kings, but I guess I have a few name suggestions:
Gola -> Kpelle
Gabou -> Mende (seems like Gabou is just a name varient of Kaabu which is already a separate place)
Kru -> Bete
Upper Gurma -> Dogon
Edo -> Eshan (this one is important, Edo is the ethnic group native to Benin itself. So having separate Benin and Edo provinces is silly)
Religion wise: Darfur should not be Kushite. Not sure about Kordofan either.
Siguic covering Burkina Faso through to Sierra Leone is a very weird choice. I think Bidaic would be a better choice for Sierra Leone and for the Soninke area (Ghana/Wagadu).
Technically Akom shouldn't cover Kru peoples of Liberia/western Ivory Coast. They're pretty different. But I don't know if it's worth it to make a whole new religion.
I really hope that southern Nigeria gets some more detail (Yorubaland, Igboland, Ibibio/Calabar, to some extent Benin and Ijaw areas). It has always been a very populous, diverse part of Africa and one of the most urbanized. Akan areas as well.
Another thing is that, this game uses a lot of names that come from the early modern period, like Kong or Ashanti, that didn't really exist in this period. In fact, I think the colonization of Ghana by Akan peoples was still ongoing during this game's period, or maybe Mande migrations to the coast. Not sure how that could be represented, since history gets fuzzier if you look before that stuff.
Yup, the places are often little anachronistic. Although I would say that Kong at least touches the CK timeline - documented presence of Mandé Dyula people there is from 15th century onwards and archaeology suggests that they came to a place which was already existed before... and from the trade contacts of the Sahel with the Brong people we can assume that the Mandé merchants would have been passing through Kong already during the CK era.
All in all, we don't know much about what was there other than this, so we can either have the place as wasteland, or have some small anachronisms. I'm glad that Paradox prefered anachronism over leaving the place empty.
As for Akan migration - yup, it happened right in the middle of CK time period, so it certainly is incorrect to have Akan people in the area in 867 or in 1066. On the other hand, as far as I tried to research, there is no information about who lived there before the Akan people, so again if I can chose between keeping the place empty, or give it to the first people we know lived there, I prefer the latter.
The same thing can be said pretty much about the entire empire of Guinea, except Yoruba and Igboland.
On the other hand if we look at the Niger bend area, we can see that there aren't the Mossi, who have migrated there from the 13th century onwards, but the Gur.
Although this isn't perfect either, I still consider it far better than having the area filled with the Mossi. Especially since we have archeological evidence of some settlements which pre-dated them and are attributed to the Gur people.
And that's the same with not having the Dogon there. As we know the Dogon emerged in history just after the end of CK era and their ethnogenesis is tied to "emigrants" from Islamization of the Sahel and surrounding areas.
I'm myself not really happy abour seing the Marka people in the later Dogon county, especially since there is very little information about the Marka (I couldn't find more than few paragraphs), but unlike in the case of the Akan migration, we at least know they were there before the Dogon emerged in history, so I guess it's better than having the Dogon there.
That takes us to the problem of Siguic religion, as pointed out also by
@Atimo3
Having most of the area Siguic deffinitely isn't correct. I don't really want to argue about the name of the religion, because I'm anything but an expert about these religions and I'm certainly don't think religions (or actually anything) need to be 100% accurate in this game, especially for religions which are only partially historical and many their elements needed to be made up. We're still talking a game and I actually prefer if it's 60% accurate and playable/fun/understandable, than being 80% correct (the maximum we can achieve), but unrecognizable, unfun and unplayable.
To be honest I'm very discontent about the religious setup in the entire area. I'm happy about Bidaic religion being there as well as being dominant in areas culturaly or otherwise dominated by the Soninke. But all the other religions?
What area should the Siguic religion cover, if it's ever to be present? Well, judging that the name derives from Dogon rituals and the Dogon were a culture created by non-muslims of various cultures emigrating from areas dominated by Islam, I don't think it's actually bad to have it as a religion representing the areas of unknown religious cults and mainly areas which were, at some point dominated by the Mandé people.
It's pretty obvious that the Akan /Akom religion should not cover areas where the Akan people did not live. Honestly, I would actually prefer if the game would allow characters and provinces to have no religion, and sometimes even no cluture, and only then become shaped by the game, depending on their contacts with their neighbours. But since I don't know about better setup I don't dare to criticize and instead try to understand why the choices we can see were made.
This is kind of a different but related topic (and if you don't mind,
@elvain, I was wondering if you had any insight into this given your research into the Berbers) - how reasonable would an
"Afro-Latin" or "Afro-Roman" culture be? Or would it be mostly represented by the Butr and Baranis even at the earlier start date?
First of all, I should say that from how long we know each other, we know that we both have quite different approach to cultures... and unfortunately I don't share your enthusiasm about small cultures such as these.
Having this in mind, I tend to be a bit sceptical about these. From the little I have read about them, I would say they would be a legitimate culture present in some of the Maghrebi cities and towns... in some of which they might even constitute a majority all the way into the 11th century. But I wouldn't dare to make them a majority population in not a single province of the Maghreb
I think these are one of the people who would greatly benefit from some sort of minority system, if this game will ever have one. I think the game should have some sort of community system, allowing smaller communities to exist along with the dominant population of the place.
It would then allow the existence of these Latin speakers in Maghreb, the Wangara and Dyula merchants in the Sub-Saharan cities etc. It would be amazing addition to the game. But without such a mechanic, I don't find their presence in game reasonable. But again, that's my personal opinion, I don't think I'm neutral here... and as far as I know the devs like various tiny-but-interesting/funny cultures.
One thing I find interesting is the Baranis culture on the CK3 map is that it is not contiguous. I'm surprised that there isn't a connection of sedentary tribes through modern day Algeria. But I'll admit I don't know a lot about the region during this period.
The
Baranis are sort of umbrella culture, at least as I suggested them in CK2 for Holy Fury. Let's be honest, I still hoped about the possibility of introduction of at least some part of my suggestion for desert tribes to be included one way or another. Since I first learned about them, I was always surprised how har accessible are more sources about them, how was it possible that they didn't even have a wiki page etc. Later I learned that that identity, still present in medieval times, was gradually vanishing as the Sanhaja, Hawwara, Kutama, Zanata, Masmuda or Ghomara identites evolved into more solid identities.
They are split like this because the central parts of Maghreb (the Maghreb al-Awsat or what has later became Algeria) were dominated by number of nomadic, mainly Zanata tribes, which is easy to understand if you imagine the region's geography (see the map of Maghreb above). Unlike the plains of Qamuda, Gharb or Tamasna, or hilly areas like Kroumerie or Tadla they weren't very good for sedentary agriculture (although many Baranis tribes were pastoralists or semi-pastoralists rather than pure agriculturalists).
The split represents how the various tribes of Baranis origins were distributed - the Sanhaja and Kutama in the east, the Masmuda, Ghomara and others in the west, with Zenata and other nomads in between.[/QUOTE]
