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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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Because colonization of Africa AKA The Scramble for Africa didn't occur until entirely after the game's timeframe

Colonization of America began in the late 1500's (Of course didn't truly establish until the early 1600's, but the 13 colonies borders/early US borders were most definitely established by 1836)
But for me that would result in emersion-braking straight lines during 400 years of game play, just to accommodate for a century (at most) of borders which will be highly unlikely to be precise at this location anyway.
 
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The locations in NA seem really large in comparison to everywhere else in the old world.

The PNW seems off. Someone else commented on the climate which I agree. It's pretty strange to see the Cascade Mountains listed as flatlands / hills when they stretch much farther north and are close to impassable in the winter. I'm also uncertain that Puyallup is an appropriate location name as that location is centered on the modern day Seattle metro area which was inhabited by the Duwamish people.
 
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The West Coast with only 154k is absurdly low, California was the most densely populated place in the Americas north of Mexico. California alone should have somewhere between 250k-350k.
Keep in mind most population estimates are for 1492 or sometimes the 1500s - after over a century and a half of population growth. Also I have always doubted that "California was the most densely populated area" meme given that they didn't really have agriculture, urbanism, or chiefdoms/states unlike the eastern half of the country.
 
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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.
Those are lakes, not proper locations, so no issues.
 
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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!

The current setup is good in my opinion. Mixing colony/state borders (which existed during the game's timeframe) on the east coast with geography-based areas on the west coast (which was not subdivided during the game's timeframe) is perfect.

I'm getting a kick out of people complaining that the east coast's borders are too "artificial", as if borders elsewhere in the world as somehow more "natural" and based purely on geography. Barring glaring exceptions like the Alps or the Rhine, most political subdivisions are just as arbitrary and unnatural as the current setup on the American east coast.
 
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Could we get a more zoomed-in location map of the Acadia/New Brunswick areas please? I'll be able to give ideas regarding dynamic colonial names, possibly some more stuff as well.
Sure:
Acadia.png
 
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Should provide sources, and also bear in mind that not everyone agrees with every population estimate.

The lowest figure we have is from Kroeber, who gives the population of California as 133k. Assuming this is accurate it leaves only 20k for the entire rest of the West Coast, which seems off unless the "West Coast" being described is much smaller than expected.

I have more detailed sources that I don't have access to at the moment, but this page has a good summary of some different estimates. The current population seems too low for all of them.
 
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I'm not sure how this could be represented, as raw materials do not represent tannins in any meaningful way, but I'd like to talk a little about the hemlock trees of Northern New York. The leather industry, from the dutch colonial era through the american Civil War (the union army's leather was made in northern NY) was heavily concentrated in the area. This is specifically because of the hemlock trees, which are a massive source of tannins used for the tanning process. The leather industry was large in this area only because of the abundance of hemlock.

So, a raw material that was a direct ingredient and requirement for an industry specifically within this time period, feels like there is no way for it to be represented. I'm torn, because I don't have any suggestions for how to dwpict it, but I'd like to see an important part of the area I grew up in's history represented.
 
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Sorry last comment for a bit here, as areas are certainly controversial in this Tinto Talk. I for one am in the camp to have the areas relatively as they currently stand. I think showcasing the idea of the encroachment of colonization and the establishment of modern states up to what occurred in the game's timeframe is actually really good, while retaining the naturally occurring borders of "the Wild West" as colonization barely began in those regions. I think the combination provides a really interesting picture into the way colonization played out in North America especially
 
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I think you need some farmland in the mississippi bottomlands and the black belt. Also, a lot of the southeast used to be open pines, that would be better represented as savanna.
I'd put a few locatoins producing tea or medicaments along the South Carolina and Georgia coast to represent Yaupon Holly, and a few medicaments locations along the New England coast to represent Sassafras (popular as a cure all in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries)
You're also missing some salt producing locations in the US southeast. I'll post something on that later.
 
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Keep in mind most population estimates are for 1492 or sometimes the 1500s - after over a century and a half of population growth. Also I have always doubted that "California was the most densely populated area" meme given that they didn't really have agriculture, urbanism, or chiefdoms/states unlike the eastern half of the country.
Regardless of the specifics, I haven't seen a population estimate for California that's below ~130k and I don't see how you can get the current population for the West Coast with any of those estimates. But yes, the "most densely populated area" may not be fully accurate.
 
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imo for countries that are on the line between SoP and centralized countries, it would be better to lean towards making them centralized if SoP aren't playable at release.

Also, SoP should have some sort of representation on the map, maybe like Victoria 3 does it. Having there be terra nullis on the default map mode feels odd to me.
 
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I do prefer the more natural geographic look for areas that the one based on colonial borders.

Also a suggestion, I would renamed California to 'Alta California' (or Upper California) and Baja to Baja California (or Lower California), that seems more apropriate for the time period, specially since the original California was the Baja California peninsula.
 
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