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Tinto Maps #28 - 29th of November 2024 - North America

Hello everybody, and welcome one more Friday to Tinto Maps, the place to be for map lovers! Today we will be looking at North America, which is very handy, as we can deliver some Thanksgiving turkey maps to our friends from the USA (and Canada)!

But before I get started, let me have a word on some (shameless) promotion. You may know that we in Paradox Tinto have also been in charge of Europa Universalis IV in the past few years. Well, I just want to let you know that there’s currently an ongoing sale on the game, with several discounts on diverse packages, of which outstands the hefty Ultimate Bundle, which includes all the DLCs developed and released by Tinto in the past 3 years (Leviathan, Origins, Lions of the North, Domination, King of Kings, and Winds of Change), and a whole bunch of the older ones. I’m saying this as you may want to support the ongoing development of Project Caesar this way! Here you may find more detailed information, and all the relevant links: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...toria-bundle-up-for-this-autumn-sale.1718042/

And now, let’s move from the Black Friday sales to proper Tinto Maps Friday!

Countries & Societies of Pops:
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For today’s Tinto Maps, we thought it would be a good idea to show both the land-owning countries and the SoPs. As I commented last week, we’re trying to follow consistent criteria to categorize countries and societies. This is our current proposal for North America, with Cahokia and some Pueblo people being the only regular countries in 1337, surrounded by numerous SoPs. I’m not bothering to share the Dynasty mapmode, as we don’t have any clue about them, and they’re auto-generated.

However, we have been reading and considering the feedback we received last week, in the Tinto Maps for Oceania, so we want to let you know that this is our current design proposal and that we want to hear from you what are your expectations regarding the countries that you would consider landed in 1337*, and also which countries you’d like to play with in this region, either as landed, or as a SoP.

As you may already know, our commitment is to make Project Caesar a great, fun game with your help, and we greatly appreciate the feedback we receive from you in that regard.

* This is already quite tricky, as most of our information only comes from post-1500s accounts when the native societies were already looking very different from two centuries ago. Eg.: The first reports made by Hernando de Soto about the Coosa Chiefom around 1540 points it out to be organized in a way that we’d consider it a Tribal land-owning tag, as confirmed by archaeology. However, that polity was not organized at that level of complexity in 1337, as there isn’t any contemporary data comparable to that of Cahokia. And some decades after the encounter with de Soto and some other European explorers, the mix of diseases had made the Chiefdom collapse, being more akin to what a SoP would be. This type of complex historical dynamism is what makes it so difficult to make the right call for the situation in 1337, and also for us to develop with our current game systems the proper mechanics that would be needed for SoPs to be fully playable (and not just barely half-baked).


Locations:
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Plenty of locations, at the end of the day, are a big sub-continent… You may notice that we’ve tried to use as many native names as possible, although sometimes, we’ve failed to achieve that. Any suggestions regarding equivalences of Native and Post-Colonial will be very much appreciated, as this is a huge task to do properly!

Provinces:
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Areas:
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Areas… And with them, an interesting question that we’d like you to answer: Which design and style do you prefer, that of the East Coast, more based on the Colonial and Post-Colonial borders? Or the one for the Midwest and the Pacific Coast, more based on geography, and less related to attached to modern states? Just let us know!

Terrain:
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Some comments:
  • Most climates are portrayed in NA, from Arctic to Arid.
  • The Rocky Mountains are rocky!
  • Regarding vegetation, we wanted to portray the forest cover in 1337, which is tricky, and that’s why some areas may look too homogeneous. Any suggestions are welcome!

Development:
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Not a very well-developed region in 1337…

Natural Harbors:
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Cultures:
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Lots of cultural diversity in NA!

Languages:
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And the languages of those cultures!

Religions:
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We have a mixed bag here: On the one hand, Eastern and Northern religions look more like the design we’re aiming to achieve, while on the other, to the south, you can find the splitter animist religions based on cultures that we now want to group into bigger religions, more akin to the northern areas.

Raw Materials:
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Wild Game, Fish, and Fur are king in this region! But we are also portraying the ‘three sisters’ (maize, beans, squash), the agricultural base for many of the native American societies, using Maize, Legumes (beans), and Fruit (squash). Cotton is also present in the south, as it was also native to the region (although the modern variant comes from a crossing with the ‘Old World’ one), and there are also mineral resources present here and there.

Markets:
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Two markets are present in 1337, one in Cahokia, and another in the Pueblo land.

Population:
Broken map! But as this is an interesting topic to discuss, these are the current numbers we’ve got in the region:
  • Continent:
    • 20.487M in America (continent)
  • Sub-continents:
    • 10.265M in North and Central America (we have a pending task to divide them into two different sub-continents)
    • 10.222M in South America
  • Regions (roughly 1.5M):
    • 162K in Canada
    • 1.135M in the East Coast
    • 142K in Louisiana
    • 154K in the West Coast
    • 43,260 in Alaska

And that’s all for today! There won't be a Tinto Maps next week, as it's a bank holiday in Spain (as I was kindly reminded in a feedback post, you're great, people!), so the next one will be Central America on December 13th. But, before that, we will post the Tinto Maps Feedback review for Russia on Monday, December 9th. Cheers!
 
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Ok, so I'm seeing a bunch of dead-end locations here, near the northern wastelands. Doesn't this cause any issues with pathfinding? I'd expect such provinces to be bad for war.

Regarding the religion map: could you group the southern religions into a "Peyote" religion? I think that's something most of them have in common in that area.
 
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ahhhh home.
But first things first, Pavia, is there a way to model the destruction of the native's organized political structure? I can propose a lot more landed countries, but most native landed countries should probably go through some sort of disaster when Europeans arrive so that landed native countries collapse. De Soto's expedition pretty much single-handedly depopulates America and causes the destruction of an 800-year society. I say all that because to portray America accurately; we must have a bunch of landed tags that historically would essentially disintegrate into the society of pops upon contact with European disease. We know there is a disease mechanic, but I assume that it mainly focuses on the population. In America, European disease caused the destruction of organized polities as well.
I think you're being a little too harsh on De Soto's accounts. The Mississippians were structured so that I believe they can all be landed in countries, and I think we can use De Soto's expedition, plus archeological records, to carve out certain political borders. Using the guidelines you have set up, pretty much all Mississippian groups fit the bill. They had organized bureaucracy, which is what really separates SOPs from landed countries. I will propose more concrete borders later, but I felt the need to stress heavily that Mississippians should all be aligned countries.
 
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Very nice that now the mosaic map modes use blue tones for water and other colors for land, I think we haven't seen that and it's way clearer!
 
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@Pavía isn't there a national holiday in Spain next friday? Constitution day or something?
Actually, yes, and I had already planned Central America and South America Tinto Maps for December 13th and 20th... That's what happens if you don't know which day it is! I'll just quickly correct it, thanks!

But this doesn't mean that there won't be maps soon... Russian Tinto Maps Feedback post to be published on December 9th!
 
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I feel like this is kinda hard to answer, I'm of two minds myself. On the one had, I'd prefer borders based on geography, since colonial borders are a sample size of one and it just as well could have turned out some completely different ways. On the other hand, I feel for those who'd strive to recreate the Thirteen Colonies as 13 different colonies, which would only remain possible of the constituent provinces get to be those shapes. So maybe try to keep those closer to colonial maps, but make areas (which aren't inherently a limiting factor for colonial charters) follow more of a natural geography based approach?
Did the 13 colonies even have straight borders? I am not familiar with UK history at that point, but if I look at maps from that time it seems they are better recreated with natural borders:
for instance:
 
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I beg you, please take out the black stripes from the uncrossable terrains and just put a location profile overlay on them. It hurts my eyes (also it'd make much easier to see which locations have which terrain)
 
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On the one had, I'd prefer borders based on geography, since colonial borders are a sample size of one and it just as well could have turned out some completely different ways.
But how is this any different than in other places in the world??
Is using historical French borders for areas bad because France is the only country that established them?
What makes the borders of the Thirteen Colonies different from borders anywhere else?

I don't get why people have such a hate boner for these specific borders, but the same comments don't show up anywhere else in the world, even though there are plenty of borders that aren't based on rivers or mountain chains.
 
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AMERICA FCK YEA WHAT THE HELL IS A KILOMETER???

One ten-thousandth of the distance between the north pole and the equator (or as close as they could measure in the late 1700s, which turned out to be surprisingly close).
That said, I'm not even gonna try asking what a mile is, since the only correct answer would be "which one?"
 
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Are the names of the areas just because you play a certain, presumably European, country, or is Virginia always Virginia, even if you play Cahokia, for example? Do they also have any endonymogical names? Or names not referencing a certain European monarch?
 
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will we (mainly as colonizers) be able to eventually create canals and connect the great lakes between them / to the sea? It's a shame to have those sweet seatiles without having actually any way to use them as significant ports
 
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But how is this any different than in other places in the world??
Is using historical French borders for areas bad because France is the only country that established them?
What makes the borders of the Thirteen Colonies different from borders anywhere else?

I don't get why people have such a hate boner for these specific borders, but the same comments don't show up anywhere else in the world, even though there are plenty of borders that aren't based on rivers or mountain chains.
Because those straight lines are Vic3 and not EU5/PC...

Tinto Maps Africa also didn't have the colonial straight borders right? Leaving them out of the America would also be consistent.
 
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But how can we suggest raw materials if we don't know if these raw materials should be present to their colonial extent (which is pretty much what you've posted in the OP with so much tobacco and cotton on the East Coast) or to their actual 1337 extent?
We did some clean-up on the very early design, which had colonial goods, but apparently some were overlooked...

To be entirely clear: what we want on the setup is the raw materials present and exploitable in 1337, while those goods introduced post-Columbian Exchange will appear in the region in a different way (which will be dynamic, not static). On a side note regarding minerals, as we usually put in the map those exploited during the game's timeframe (1337-1837).
 
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Will the locations be renamed once colonial powers are there?
Yes! And we'd also welcome suggestions regarding this!
 
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