EU4 mechanics make wasteland more historically accurate than the result of not representing it with wasteland. These nations didn't interact outside of themselves and the scramble for Africa didn't begin circa 1600. There shouldn't be fully modernized states in that region for centuries - but given how westernization is effectively guaranteed, it just breaks the game for anyone wanting to play Eu4 into VIC2's time period (and/or converting).
We don't know the specifics of the implementation so that's a little early to say.
Perhaps they did not interact with outside powers but if you want to play them to play inside the sphere they did work in why should you not? Why is it that africas history in this era should be left unrepresented just because it wasn't yet colonised, that is a very eurocentric sentiment.
If there was no or only negligible outside contact, this region would better be represented in a game of its own, with a map that doesn't extend to the coasts..
The Kingdom of Kongo was no more a tribe than Portugal.
How is that any different from, say, Europe?
I agree, but that's a completely different argument than the one you made just above.
The overwhelming majority of European states of that time period were neither centralized, nor nations.
The game doesn't model the transition from feudal to territorial states in 15th century Europe, it doesn't properly model Muslim, Indian or East Asian state structures, it doesn't even properly model the Sengoku Jidai.
Yes and it would probably have been better if they had shown up later like the nation up by ethiopia that appears in colonial provinces at a certain year. But since they want them playable and they pretty mcuh only have one start date these days I guess this is what they have to do.
Who said that europeans would be able to colonise the area?
They could if more sucessfull than in reality interact with other african nations if never directly with the europeans.
But we don't know that it's not represented by game mechanics. And while yes they may not have interacted with others in real history in a game where they or other (already in game) african states end up more sucessfull they may well interact with each others.
True but the same thing may eb said about a lot of tags already in the game like many north american tribes. And the non coastal african tribes could have had interactions with other african countries in an alternate history, eithe rby them unifying better than they did or by other african powers doing imperialism of their own more sucessfully.
In adding nations into the interior of Africa, you make it inevitably possible for Europeans to take over and colonize it. Unless they add some new special mechanics to simulate the lack of any infrastructure suitable for an army and how damaging disease which prevented the Europeans, the European states will begin to get into there eventually.
