The History Of Europa Universalis 4: What are your sources?

[AurochsAway]

I don't think anyone's claiming that Haasa, Najd, or Circassia were actual polities at the time, but EU4 has no way to represent inhabited areas with no centralised power other than being ruled by some other tag. It'd be strange to have Najd under Hejazi or Omani control, so it's Najd. What is strange is that their NIs are largely based on Wahhabism, which was obviously not invented yet.

As for Finland, it did exist during the time period as the Grand Duchy of Finland, albeit not in 1444. However, it doesn't exist in 1444 anyway.

I'd like you to enlighten me when it comes to Timbuktu, Kham, and Uzbek, though.

IIRC the devs in the dev diaries specifically mentioned that Kham was an abstracted stand-in for a variety of smaller independent polities in the area, much like Baluchistan.

 

[doktorstick]

Well yes I'm a person that is interested in history (primarily 1650-1750 though). I don't see what's wrong with that. Most games that are ... well somewhat ... informed on the age they're trying to portray are better and more flavourfull games.

It wasn't meant as a slight. I wrote that because of historians that specialize in the wives of brothers to kings (as a hyperbolic example), we have all sorts of fascinating accounts of the kingdoms of men these past millennia. One of my favorite classes in college was medieval history, taught by this old Russian who had some of the most amazing information about political intrigue, murders, and treasonous plots.

 

[Golladan]

Such areas can be left empty, plain and simple. And tags which appeared later may be introduced through events in appropriate time.
Finland has cores, I believe. Independent Finland appearing before 19th century is weird.
Kham is a region, never was a unified polity.
Timbuktu is a town, not a state.
Uzbek did not exist until well into 19th century, neither as a state, nor as a culture.
But as I wrote before, I don't want to get involved in historical discussions. Another user asked me for examples, so I've thrown several of many. That's all.

They're abstractions. Not meant to represent a unified polity. Just like Kathiawar is meant to represent the various rajput tribes in the area. Are you really suggesting that the game map gets filled with patches of uncolonized provinces?

Timbuktu is a city. And a very important one at the time. The tag is meant to represent the tuaregs that controlled the city at the time before being conquered by Songhai some 20 years after the start of the game.
Really? The Uzbeks did not exist until well into the 19th century? The Shaybanids were not a thing?

 

[RockmanYoshi]

ninja'd

 

[Maq]

Are you really suggesting that the game map gets filled with patches of uncolonized provinces?

Why not?

 

[RockmanYoshi]

Why not?

Nobody likes ugly borders.

 

[Maq]

Nobody likes ugly borders.

To make nice broders you have to either conquer or colonize.

 

[FleetingRain]

Just because people are posting links, I'd like to post this one: MelayuOnline.

It helped me a lot while I was looking for late-bookmark tags in EUIV (there are a handful of them in East Asia), and it made me understand the Malay history a *bit* more (well, anything would help, considering I've never even heard of them in History classes and EUIV has no special DHEs in the region). It's written in Engrish though, so it may be difficult to understand at first.


Also, in-game Siak shouldn't even exist, considering the kingdom was formed only by the early 1720s. The Sumatra island is kind of a mess currently.

 

[neondt]

Just because people are posting links, I'd like to post this one: MelayuOnline.

It helped me a lot while I was looking for late-bookmark tags in EUIV (there are a handful of them in East Asia), and it made me understand the Malay history a *bit* more (well, anything would help, considering I've never even heard of them in History classes and EUIV has no special DHEs in the region). It's written in Engrish though, so it may be difficult to understand at first.


Also, in-game Siak shouldn't even exist, considering the kingdom was formed only by the early 1720s. The Sumatra island is kind of a mess currently.

Maritime SE Asia has to be fairly abstract because there's so little information about most regions before the colonial era. Sure the Siak Sultanate didn't exist in 1444, but the region was certainly inhabited and "civilised", and presumably not ruled by any known foreign power (though Malacca expanded in that direction a bit later). Since it hardly makes sense to create a country tag for a region we know so little about, I don't see a problem with using Siak as a placeholder to represent civilisation in the area.

Palembang, which is an uncolonised region in vanilla, was historically one of the most important cities on Sumatra, and it's very probable that it continued to be a major trading hub well into the EU period. There doesn't seem to be any record of who ruled it in 1444, and there's no name for the state that controlled it in the pre-colonial EU period. And yet given its importance as an urban center, spice producer, and trading hub it seems very strange to leave it "empty".

The thing about maritime SE Asia is that in English sources you'll often see things like "the Sultanate of X was founded in [year]", giving the impression that this represents the founding of an urban center or the emergence of a state where there was none before. The reality is that it more often represents the formal conversion to Islam by an existing kingdom, or the first recorded major power shift in a specific area.

This is what I've come up with for the region myself. Again though, there are by necessity plenty of abstractions:

 

[Maq]

http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/schwartzberg/