Why is the Great Basin considered a wasteland?
- Thread starter kmelt93
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The lack of trees is making my eyes bleed.
Oh and Jomini, there were people in the Great Basin during the EU era. What in the hell are you on about? The reason there was little movement of Americans into the region has nothing to do with it being "inhospitable" and everything to do with it being a long god damned way from Virginia.
Foul language removed - Seelmeister
It had everything to do with being inhospitable to the people modeled in EU as settled provinces. Being a long way away from Virginia makes it inhospitable to the sorts of people who could raise musketeers by the thousand (let alone cannon). So you want to settle the picture shown above? Great that is a LOT of pine to cut down and extremely irregular terrain you will need to terrace. That means you are going to go through rough iron saw bands and ax heads quickly. Just punching a road through there with 18th century tools would take forever. You could try the New England method for clearing trees, but burning off the forest cover in the Rockies is a phenomenally good recipe for flash floods and disasters. After all, you don't have established population centers with the specialized craftsmen with which you need to have some trade linkages (yeah you might import a blacksmith, but making a good anvil is something only a few cities on the Eastern Seaboard could manage. So you need a way get something valuable to the Eastern Seaboard to pay for your anvil and a way to get it back cheaply enough to be viable. That just doesn't exist for the Great Basin in 1820. If you want to raise up 1,000 men with guns, well you need a lot of downstream tool production for that mass production of firearms. None of it existed in the Great Basin until after the Civil War.
As a soldier, looking at your picture shows a great example of terrain that would be impassible to an 18th century army. You have no space for wagons between the trees. Well great, you can send out pioneers to cut a road through ... well no if you look at the topography in the picture you see a lot of steep descents with soft soil - this will eat wagons with ease and a thousand marching men will churn the ground into terrible marching conditions. Trying to get cannon through that? Well you need to lay down McAdam roads. Laying down those roads - that requires a LOT of tools. Likewise the terrain is conifer - so you don't have good sugar sources for anywhere near enough meat to make a dint in the provision quantities an army needs.
Again when people actually made the trek from Winter Quarters (having gotten that far via steamboat which is outside of game period) to Salt Lake City they took hundreds of pounds of flour per person - because they weren't stupid and didn't want to die on the trek.
Again is the Great Basin is so hospitable - why did The Army of the West, detour hundreds of miles south from Leavenworth, ride the Gila, and then invade California from the south? It is a straight shot across the Great Basin from Leavenworth to California and the orders were to march on California ASAP. So if it is so hospitable to transiting troops ... why did they go way the hell out of their way around it?
That turns it into an AI blackhole. You have two choices here then - have the AI ignore it. Well great, now the play can abuse the hell out of thing (hey I took 50% attrition, but I invaded the Eastern Seaboard from California - flanking the AI's army on the Gila - and now I can steal/burn the in progress colonies and hole up in the mountains. So if we want the AI to use it, we have to be VERY good at programming its cost/benefit analysis for exactly the sorts of things that AIs are piss poor at - anticipating human actions. Likewise, if the AI is running me down and I retreat through the zero supply capacity province does the AI follow or not? After all if I just have 5K to the AI's 50K, one pass through the blackhole kills more men than if I lose everyone in the baiting.
The Devs picked the one and only route actually used by an invading army in the time frame of the game. Provinces in EUIV let armies march through them. While their were trade routes through the Sahara, few of them could support anything close to an army. As crappy as the one shown is, it is actually among the more hospitable for sending an army through.
Not every trading post had the potential to be a colony. For instance trade posts up the Frazer could work only for one type of good: Fur. The river has bad rapids or as it was described in period "I should consider the passage down, to be certain Death, in nine attempts out of Ten. I shall therefore no longer talk about it as a navigable stream". So you had a lot of portage to use the Fraser as a transit method ... however a few brave/foolhardy folks were out trapping furs in those areas. Fur had an extremely high value/weight and value/bulk ratio so you might be able to send out small parties to trade with hunter-gatherers who lived in small sustainable numbers off the game in the area. Moving through 1,000 men at arms is going to completely destroy the regiment. Hence why the now included Oregon trail is historical BS. Moving people through that area takes more poundage per person than any army in the EU era ever carried or could have carried. Going down the Dalles was a one way trip for anything but the lightest of canoes; it wasn't until you had a lot of better tools from the 1830s onward that you could open a road around the Dalles that might, might let army through (the first attempts by the US Army to transit the path shown in game failed miserably - decades after game end).
If a period army couldn't have made it through, then it shouldn't be open for colonization.
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The lack of trees is making my eyes bleed.
Oh and Jomini, there were people in the Great Basin during the EU era. What in the hell are you on about? The reason there was little movement of Americans into the region has nothin to do with it being "inhospitable" and everything to do with it being a long god damned way from Virginia.
Foul language removed - Seelmeister
40 miles east of Tahoe, you have dry, dead desert with nothing taller than a tumbleweed for hundreds of miles. I could see extending the map to the fringes of the Eastern Sierras, but absolutely no further. The only people who lived there were hunter-gatherer groups with an absurdly low population density, who lived a lifestyle which no European group would ever think of accommodating to. Do some research on how the indigenous peoples of the Great Basin actually lived, and you'll see why no Europeans wanted to settle there.
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But the grey area acts as a nice teaser to make you look forward to colonizing it when you import your game into Victoria 2.
Need room for Deseret to spawn via event in Victoria III
Wasteland in Africa? Needed for the era of the Scramble for Africa in Victoria III
Everything is secretly about Victoria III
Wasteland in Africa? Needed for the era of the Scramble for Africa in Victoria III
Everything is secretly about Victoria III
I think the Wasteland concept is stupid, just because those areas were not colonized historically it doesn't mean they should be uncolonizable
Only deserts that cannot support life should be uncolonizable.
Only deserts that cannot support life should be uncolonizable.
No, like the Sahara desert, or Greenland, and the Atacama desert. I am surprised it isn't a wasteland considering it is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.
Areas like Australia, Great Basin, Quebec, they should be open to colonization.
Just because it can support life doesn't mean it's colonisable. As said in other posts, the main issue is the lack of industrial era tools. There are reasons why certain places were not colonised historically. As much as it can support life, it's still inhospitable to colonists.
Colonists come in different flavors.
Native American colonists for instance wouldn't have a problem.
Eh, merely being a Native American doesn't give you superpowers. There's a reason most of the native inhabitants of the region tended to be nomadic hunter-gatherers.
A colony involves more than sending some people to a region and saying "you live here now."
I think it's safe to suggest that Native American colonists would have run into exactly the same problems moving an army through the Great Basin, or extracting an economic surplus from it, as European-descended colonists would have before the Industrial Revolution provided them with steam engines and reasonable quantities of decent steel tools.
A sizeable inland region which you can't move an army through and can't extract a meaningful economic surplus from has to be a Wasteland - because being not-Wasteland implies the possibility of moving an army through it and extracting an economic surplus from it. (And from a strategy-gaming standpoint, the "can't move an army through" is a far more crushing blow to its claims for provincehood than "can't extract an economic surplus from"; base tax 1 provinces with a crappy trade good will suffice to represent the latter.)
There was a reason why that whole area was called Great American Desert by early explorers.
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I've lived in or near the Great Basin and Colorado River areas for nearly my whole life, and have done my share of hiking, camping, and backpacking through its wilderness. I've also taken a class on great basin history, and although the class was kind of crap, I feel like I have at least an intermediate amount of knowledge on the subject of colonization in this region. The whole idea that the Great Basin could be represented in the same game on the same level as, say, the Great Plains, is impossible.
For those who don't know, the Great Basin, strictly defined, is a geographical area centering around current day Nevada, Utah, and a little bit of California and Oregon where rivers don't lead to the coast. The area is mountainous and dry, with lots of small mountain ranges and relative space between the mountain ranges that are filled with desert. That's not to say it's not beautiful and teeming with life. On the contrary, the mountains are like little islands of life, rising up from a desert floor. It's a big part of the reason why I like backpacking through them. The desert itself also has life, being more geographically similar to the Levant than a huge billowing sand dune like the Sahara. But it's really not hospitable to a centralized, permanent settlement kind of life. It never was until the invention of the railroad.
While "oases" like Lake Tahoe exist up in the mountains, traveling to and from those oases was a different story. Unlike the sand dunes of the Sahara, where specialized nomads could use camels to create supply lines, camels couldn't handle the the rocky terrain of the Great Basin floor, much less the mountain ranges. The hundreds of mountain ranges created a nightmare for pioneers trying to cross it into the lush lands of California. The Donner Party, which happened in 1846, is a great, horrible example of that.
The soil of the Great Basin was not fit for large scale agriculture. It's rocky, dry, and couldn't support staple crops like wheat that settlers depended on to create a surplus. In addition to that, the weather patterns and inconsistency of the ebb and flow of the Colorado River made Mormon attempts to colonize it in the mid 1800's a failure. The Colorado is nothing like the Nile with its consistent flooding and fertile river beds. The settlers had to fight to find small areas of fertile land along the river, and then they might have had one good year followed by three years of drought, leading to the collapse of the colony. All of these colonization attempts happened in the mid 1850's outside of the game's time frame, but even if it had happened earlier, not much would have changed. The natives were not able to tame the randomness of the Basin's climate patterns, either. On the contrary, the nomad lifestyle of the Shoshone and Northern Paiute fit their environment perfectly. But it wasn't suited to large-scale supply lines and the transport of entire standing armies.
So to answer the OP's original question, "Why is the Great Basin considered a wasteland?" The answer is, "Because railroads." Railroads, the great equalizer of supply. Without them, Reno wouldn't be any more than a pioneer outpost and Las Vegas would be nothing more than the ruin of a small, failed Mormon settlement.
For those who don't know, the Great Basin, strictly defined, is a geographical area centering around current day Nevada, Utah, and a little bit of California and Oregon where rivers don't lead to the coast. The area is mountainous and dry, with lots of small mountain ranges and relative space between the mountain ranges that are filled with desert. That's not to say it's not beautiful and teeming with life. On the contrary, the mountains are like little islands of life, rising up from a desert floor. It's a big part of the reason why I like backpacking through them. The desert itself also has life, being more geographically similar to the Levant than a huge billowing sand dune like the Sahara. But it's really not hospitable to a centralized, permanent settlement kind of life. It never was until the invention of the railroad.
While "oases" like Lake Tahoe exist up in the mountains, traveling to and from those oases was a different story. Unlike the sand dunes of the Sahara, where specialized nomads could use camels to create supply lines, camels couldn't handle the the rocky terrain of the Great Basin floor, much less the mountain ranges. The hundreds of mountain ranges created a nightmare for pioneers trying to cross it into the lush lands of California. The Donner Party, which happened in 1846, is a great, horrible example of that.
The soil of the Great Basin was not fit for large scale agriculture. It's rocky, dry, and couldn't support staple crops like wheat that settlers depended on to create a surplus. In addition to that, the weather patterns and inconsistency of the ebb and flow of the Colorado River made Mormon attempts to colonize it in the mid 1800's a failure. The Colorado is nothing like the Nile with its consistent flooding and fertile river beds. The settlers had to fight to find small areas of fertile land along the river, and then they might have had one good year followed by three years of drought, leading to the collapse of the colony. All of these colonization attempts happened in the mid 1850's outside of the game's time frame, but even if it had happened earlier, not much would have changed. The natives were not able to tame the randomness of the Basin's climate patterns, either. On the contrary, the nomad lifestyle of the Shoshone and Northern Paiute fit their environment perfectly. But it wasn't suited to large-scale supply lines and the transport of entire standing armies.
So to answer the OP's original question, "Why is the Great Basin considered a wasteland?" The answer is, "Because railroads." Railroads, the great equalizer of supply. Without them, Reno wouldn't be any more than a pioneer outpost and Las Vegas would be nothing more than the ruin of a small, failed Mormon settlement.
The only reason the Mormons went into the Basin at all was that no one else thought the land COULD be settled in the 1840's. 20 years after the end date of EUIV and well after America had started gaining her knowledge of how to survive and farm in other "uninhabitable" areas like the Great Plains. After the heartbreak of Nauvoo they were after a place so remote and inhospitable, that even after they'd settled and improved the ground, there still wouldn't be vast numbers of jealous neighbors hungering after their land as there had been in Ohio, then in Missouri, then in Illinois.
Yeah, the Mormons were a little crazy, but they did have some advantages that made them uniquely suited to what they were trying to do. They had a highly organized society and a system of colonizing new areas that had been well-practiced thanks to the persecution they'd dealt with and the number of times their society had had to move, and they were up to date with the latest technology and ideas of the time. And even with that. the Basin put their skills to the ultimate stress test and there was a lot of failure to go with their successes. I don't think an attempt to seriously settle and make a proper state out of the Basin would have had a prayer 200 years or more before the Mormons did it. The technology was not there, and the neighboring infrastructure that the Mormons had to depend on to survive was not there either, and I doubt either could be realistically postulated much before the end of EUIV.
Yeah, the Mormons were a little crazy, but they did have some advantages that made them uniquely suited to what they were trying to do. They had a highly organized society and a system of colonizing new areas that had been well-practiced thanks to the persecution they'd dealt with and the number of times their society had had to move, and they were up to date with the latest technology and ideas of the time. And even with that. the Basin put their skills to the ultimate stress test and there was a lot of failure to go with their successes. I don't think an attempt to seriously settle and make a proper state out of the Basin would have had a prayer 200 years or more before the Mormons did it. The technology was not there, and the neighboring infrastructure that the Mormons had to depend on to survive was not there either, and I doubt either could be realistically postulated much before the end of EUIV.