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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:
Countries.png

SoPs.png

SoPs2.png

SoPs3.png

SoPs4.png

SoPs5.png
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:
Locations.png

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Locations4.png

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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:
Provinces.png

Provinces2.png

Provinces3.png


Areas:
Areas.png

Areas2.png

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:
Climate.png

Topography.png

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Vegetation.png

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:
Development.png

Not a very well-developed region in 1337…

Natural Harbors:
Harbors EC.png

Harbors WC.png

Harbors3.png


Cultures:
Cultures.png

Cultures1.png

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Lots of cultural diversity in NA!

Languages:
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And the languages of those cultures!

Religions:
Religions.png

Religions2.png

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:
Raw Materials.png

Raw Materials 2.png

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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:
Markets.png

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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Might be a stupid question regarding the sealanes

But to me without any knowledge it seems weird that New York is so "cutoff" from to and from and bermuda seems weirdly not "integrated.

So is theres any reason the red parts couldnt be included in the lane? Or cut it in two areas at the blue so its a ocean lane and a "splitter" although that might go agaisnt design decisions with these lanes.

View attachment 1223621
Sea lanes is something we want to review, as in general terms, they're more functional than pretty.
 
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Do you want event/flavour suggestions in this thread or somewhere else? I remember you saying you were going to do flavour posts next year
Better in another thread, either independent, or in the one with flavor event suggestions.
 
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Regarding the Area Borders of North America being modern or geographical.

I think a Mix of Both would be perfect, make the Areas based on Geography but add province and Location borders that coincide with modern State borders so that we could achieve Colonial borders by giving out different provinces and locations from different areas to a Colony
 
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1732893976699.png

Is this a corridor or a location? I remember questioning in Persia feedback if some of these super long locations should be corridors instead, if this is a location then same applies to Canada I guess lol.
 
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I can't wait for a yet another Georgia vs Georgia achievement in EU5

It's a staple for Paradox games at this point
Sadly, HoI4 already has the 'Georgia on my mind' achievement...
 
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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.
Just renamed them.
 
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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!
100% it should be more geographical like the West Coast and imo, the decision is trivial. It doesn't even come close.
 
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Voting for colonial area borders. I know that in 99% of my playthroughs, my interaction with this land will not be from the native PoV.
The issue with colonial borders for the US in particular is that US state borders are ugly, arbitrary and nonsensical. I don't think players should be forced to remake such aberration to good taste.
 
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@Pavía could you please provide a more zoomed in photo of the Great Basin and Rockies areas? This is the area I will be working on a few proposals
Also the Pacific Northwest if you wouldn't mind :)
Sure:
Rocky.png

NW.png
 
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You're missing a capital letter in the Chawasha location.

And it seems a cat walked on your keyboard here:

Alaska.png


[Is it some kind of a spelling in a native language? But why, when all the other areas' names around the world are in English?]
 
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What are your standards for what makes a good natural harbor in North America? If you were using the same standard as Europe, there wouldn't be any black on the east coast. Although I know from other Tinto Maps that you use different standards in different areas.
These are our current (Spanish-centric) standards, which we're trying to make as viable as possible in the rest of the world:
# -25 - Cliffs - South of Chile
# 0 - Flat Coast - Barcelona
# 25 - Bay - Palma de Mallorca
# 50 - River Port - Sevilla
# 75 - Deep Bay - San Sebastián
#100 - Closed Very Defensible Estuary - Ferrol
 
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100% agreed. Especially when I saw some dev confirm that Yuan could just colonise other Asian countries with high enough PP.
Yuan won't be able to effectively colonized anything, their main culture is mongolian and there probably are like a million mongolian pops at best
 
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How? You couldn't recreate historical borders without them.
Many historical borders suck, though!

More seriously, I'm afraid you're swimming against the current of people just not liking straight lines on a map, especially big, obvious ones that cut directly through major natural features.

I'm of the opinion it's preferable to have geography-based area borders whilst preserving the outlines of at least the Thirteen Colonies' borders in the province level. That way, the colonies themselves can be easily recreated without marring the areas so much.

I also just think more agnostic geographical areas fits better for the sake of the different possible colonial outcomes - that's part of the appeal of the game, after all.
 
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What do wastelands actually represent?

In Eurasia, the northern wastelands are reserved for areas of permafrost. Canada seems to just have them not only everywhere with permafrost, and not only everywhere with a subarctic climate, but also across most of the country's continental regions as well.

What does the wasteland in southern Nova Scotia represent? What do the wastelands a mile from the north shore of the great lakes represent? In southern Quebec where the vineyards are? Are these places too far from a navigable river for Europeans to bother settling there, or just forests that are very thick?
 
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