Tinto Maps #30 - 20th of December 2024 - South America

[Pavía]

It is a cultural necessity.

This is exactly what our Uruguayan coworker says...

 

[Aldaron]

Este é um mapa incompleto da minha proposta, veja que (Pará e Mato Grosso não foram feitos) e algumas partes estão em andamento (Rio Grande do Sul). Não diga que fui apologista: Muita gente pediu no começo para acrescentar mais localidades e eu me opus, não porque não quisesse, mas para ficar equilibrado. Veja o terreno intransitável entre Cananéia e Paranaguá (quando pode não ser, mas acho justo) ou no oeste do Maranhão. Garanto que as regiões de São Paulo, Jacareí e Campinas são uma obra-prima.

View attachment 1233818

Note: the map does not open on mobile devices because of its large resolution (10K) To be continued.

Did you do that map with GIS by chance? If yes, please do share the shapefile files so that we are able to use it if we need it.

 

[SaintDaveUK]

Could you please include a colourblind option for the colour gradient maps, so that some of the maps like dev can use different colours whne the game releases?

Good idea. I'll make a note of it.

 

[Pavía]

First off, i have to thank all the devs for their wonderful work and for being open to listening and taking seriously all the feedback being given.

Second is that, like for my fellow brazilians and south americans, this Tinto Map has been very underwhealming, for a couple of reasons:
1. The amount of locations is way lower than it should be, and the fact that almost half of Brasil is impassable terrain doesn't help either.
2. The arbitrary usage of Areas. I cannot comprehend why this decision was chosen, when North America was made to follow exact state lines. I'm not criticizing the devs, since i'm loving their work and the effort put into this game, but the arbitrarity of making the use of this Area format in SA when NA follows their irl state format.
3. The geographical and terrain maps, while not bad, could be better.
4. The naming of Areas and Province names, in some places is a bit weird, so i would love to see where the sources for the names came from.

Since i'm not form the regions affected by the impassable terrain (mostly Sudeste, Sul and Norte of Brasil) i won't dwell too much on them, since a lot of the comments here have done a wonderful job in giving better feedbacks than i can ever give. But i'll comment a bit on my region, the Nordeste, and more specificaly, my state, Ceará.

---

While less affected by the impassable terrains, there are still some weird decisions:

1. The lack of granularity, in my opinion, is the main problem, as it affect the representation of cultures, terrain, borders and markets.
About that, i think the proposal made by the user Braziler, in the Brasil proposal Thread is very interesting and should be used as the main parameter for the re-drawing of Brazil, and i'm excited to see their proposal in this thread.

View attachment 1233844 View attachment 1233845View attachment 1233862
[Current Tinto Ceará Setup - Map of Ceará between the end of 17th and the start of 19th century - Map of Ceará during the 19th century]

2. On Ceará, the addition of some more locations to the north of the state is good, helps represent some important villages that began growing in importance during the 18th and 19th century (such as Acaraú, that should be a small relevance port, as it served to export goods that came from the enterport of Sobral coming from all of North Ceará and Piauí. Other ports should be Fortaleza, that would become very relevant during the end of the 18th century and 19th century with the start of the Cycle of Cotton in Brazil).

View attachment 1233859View attachment 1233882[Here's a map of the 18th century that shows some of the Cattle routes and points of interest (Also differentiate between "White/Colonizer Villas" and "Indigenous Villas" as well as a map of the colonization routes of the northeast, in black the "Sertão de Fora", of the Pernambucanos, and in red "Sertão de Dentro", of the Baianos.]

3. However, the lack of locations in the south of the state is noticeable (As well as in the neighbor states of Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba):

-The south of the state being reduced to only two locations is, imo, a bad idea. The villas of Icó, Crato and Jardim were very important and relevant. With Icó growing from a small fortified settlement (to protect people from the attack of the indigenous Icós) to a relevant villa because of it nature as a enterpost for cattle routes and trade center for the travelers, it would be the first of the hinterlands of the Ceará during the 18th century.

-The region of the Valley of Cariri (named that way because of the indigenous Cariri people), in the south of Ceará, was first settled before the Dutch invasion, and the rumours of gold and gems in the region brought many people to the region, making some villages grow in importance such as Lavras da Manganbeira and Crato. However, like the Dutch before them, they didn't have any success in finding those riches. The region would, however, still become very populous and important because of the availeability of fresh water, fertile land and strategic location to cattle routes. So having gold and gems in that region may be incorrect, the better resource in that region would be agriculture of sugar-cane and subsistence farms of corn, beans, rice and cassava.

View attachment 1233888
[Map of the Evolution of villas/municípios of Ceará, with the leftmost one being close to the end date of Project Caesar.]

4. Another good that could be relevant for the region is Cotton as it historically took over as the main lucrative good in the region with the decline of Northeastern Cattle trade (because of the increasing success of cattle production in the South of Brasil, another important reason to have a look in those regions! However, both coexisted and complemented eachother, with cattle being fed the remains of the cotton plant after the harvest and using its excrements as fertilizer for the next cotton harvest). Cotton was produced in the Hill/Serras of the state, such as Baturité, Uruburetama, Meruoca, Pereiro and Aratanha, as well as the villas of Fortaleza, Aracati, Icó and Sobral.

I thank all the devs for the work and I hope they can use this feedback to help.


*edit1: Grammar

---

My sources:
- História do Ceará by Airton de Farias 7º Edition - 2018 (Personal copy)
- Map Source (In PT-BR) - A Metrópole híbrida: Uma perspectiva histórica da urbanização de Fortaleza by Ricardo Alexandre Paiva
- Map Source 2 (In PT-BR) - Formação do território e evolução politico-administrativa: A questão dos limites municipais by Lana Mary Veloso de Pontes

Thanks for your kind words and feedback, this is exactly what we're looking for, both in the tone and in the sources given to us.

 

[Pavía]

The cerrado is further inland! Those Wastelands are Mata Atlantica, which is fertile soil.
Besides, even the Cerrado wouldn't be uninhabitable like the vast swaths of wasteland in the maps of project Caesar.

Facts:

Brazil's South and Southeast are the largest agricultural producers of Brazil, have the largest population and wealthiest economies. Making the South of Brazil a wasteland is unacceptable.

Look at the population density from the IBGE (Brazil's official Census from the government) of the Southern half of Brazil, right on the "wastelands" proposed by paradox. And it's not a new thing from the 20th century, the South of Brazil is populous when compared to the rest ever since the old times of the Capitanias Hereditárias, in the 16th century.

View attachment 1233906

One methodological note: 20th-century density maps are not always aligned with the population density of previous centuries. One case that I know very well, from my background: the region that is today Castilla y León in Spain was among the most densely populated in the Iberian Peninsula in the 14th and 15th centuries, but in the 21st century, it's among the less densely populated in entire Europe.

I am not saying that these maps are not useful at all, but that they need to be handled with care, as they might be misleading for the period covered in Project Caesar.

 

[Pavía]

Alright, then. Time to get to it...

I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS:

1.1 - Wastelands: I won't tire the point further, as I think the feedback is clear and other people can and have provided more detailed map proposals and sources, but the Atlantic Rainforest's wastelands should mostly go. They cover very much inhabited areas, historical routes, and reduce the location density of an important region of the country. I believe the Amazonian Rainforest's wastelands also warrant some limitation, at least along some of the Amazon's tributaries, and I am in favour of at least a corridor between the forest and the andean region.

1.2 - Societies of POPs: The Tupi-Guarani peoples were agriculturalists from their amazonian origins, could organise themselves plenty enough to wage war with one another and the europeans, and certainly had a chiefdom authority, at least (source in portuguese about the guarani specifically). With this in mind, I believe they fulfill enough criteria for every Tupi-Guarani culture to be represented in SoPs. Many of the conflicts in colonial history across the brazilian coast and the Platine Basin — such as the War of the Tamoyos (PT) or the War of the Seven Reductions — would likely not be a possibility without the stateless native populations being organised as such.
For the Jê peoples, the picture is more complicated — they are traditionally regarded as hunter-gatherers in this period, but, at least in Southern Brazil, they would move closer to their Guarani neighbours in organisation under the pressures of the times and archaeological evidence suggests they might have already been there, at least in terms of population density and permanent settlement, pre-contact (PT). I don't think there's a particularly strong argument for a SoP here at the start, however, and once more the apparent impossibility of SoPs to emerge during gameplay is unfortunate, as I think it'd work well in their case.

1.3 - The Cassava Question: The cassava is a important staple food in the tropics around the world today, being the third most-common source of carbs in these regions today due to it's resilience and adaptability to more marginal soils and decent micronutritional profile. It has reached these heights after being exported from South America to Asia and, more impactfully, Africa by portuguese traders. This story should ring some bells for europeans reading it, because it sounds quite like what the potato got up to in more temperate climates.
I understand if it simply does not make the cut as an independent raw good, but I urge the developers to at least consider the proposals for representing it as the potato trade good — it's a far better alternative to the legumes it's not even related to! They are both resilient tubers from South America which would become very successful subsistence crops in the Old World, and I believe this classification would help represent the Columbian Exchange even better — it's impacts in Subsaharan Africa could be properly represented, then. I think it would be a deep shame if it weren't represented at all, given the clear effort and intent to show the exchange of crops and goods between the New and Old Worlds.

1.4 - Languages: I think Tupi-Guarani at least shoud be split into, well... Tupi and Guarani. It's a very broad group of languages which are not generally mutually intelligible. I couldn't tell you much beyond that, alas, so perhaps the more linguistically-minded have better suggestions.

1.5. - Religions: I am generally very pleased with the splitting of Great Red Boarism Animism. However, I do think that the Kaingang/Kanhgág and Xokleng/Laklãnõ should not share the same religion with their Guarani neighbours. I do not have the anthropological chops to really put forth the argument that strongly, but these are decidedly unrelated groups of people, and the guarani are even relatively new to the region as they'd have migrated in, at the earliest, some 100 years ago at the start of the game. The southern Jê peoples, meanwhile, have likely inhabited these lands since the first century AC. The guarani are not such apt missionaries, I suspect. Even presently, I have gathered the impression these peoples have rather different cosmologies, though I haven't the experience or knowledge to really speak on specifics.

II. THE SPECIFIC BITS:

...Which is to say, Southern Brazil — I trust my compatriots will handle the rest.

2.1 - Locations: Lord Almighty, what have you done...

View attachment 1233920
Notable Colonial-Era Settlements - Violet: Pre-1700, Green: 1700-1750, Yellow: 1750-1800 — Large font settlements should all be present, in my view. Positions are rough, I know.

The would-be states of Paraná and Santa Catarina are largely consumed by the wastelands, and so is northern Rio Grande do Sul. This cannot do. Even if the region wasn't widely settled in the period, it remained an important source of conflict between the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns, and this sort of low-density is just sad-looking. Now, I'll refrain from offering strict borders for the locations, but the map above has settlements marked out — diamonds are portuguese settlements and circles spanish ones, with some jesuit reductions as crosses. There are admitedly not many, so some anachronistic settlements will likely have to be used. FleetingRain's excellent suggestion thread could be a good start for finding those, in my opinion, even if the modern borders obviously don't make much sense. There are several rivers that could be used, too, as seems to have already been the case in RS.
The fields of Guarapuava would not be formally settled by europeans in the game's timeframe, but as you can see the city is tentatively marked on the map as Koran-bang-rê, the Kaingang term for the area. I would prefer that to just calling the location "Kaingang", if that's what that location is supposed to be. Tentatively, "Agûarápuaba" could be used as the tupi-guarani name for it, as well, though it's technically from the Língua Geral.
For some other quick naming suggestions:

• Curitiba (Portuguese) - Kuri’ytyba (Tupi-Guarani)
• Castro (Portuguese) - Guarapiaba (Tupi-Guarani - name of a tribe, not a place)
• Ciudad Real del Guayrá (Castillian) - Guairá/Guaíra (Portuguese)
• Xetá (Tupi-Guaraní/Xetá) - Umuarama (Portuguese - later settlement, but it lines up well with the location if it isn't meant to be Guayrá)
• Apyrete (?) -> Meiembipe (Carijó name for the island of Santa Catarina)
• Tapes -> Porto dos Casais/Porto Alegre (Unless there's some other reason for that name, the actual town of Tapes would be in the location of "Icabaqua")

Several of the existing locations also seem to be missing diacritics — there are likely more I haven't noticed, and I haven't even noted the ones in the 'Guays or Argentina:
Jaguarao -> Jaguarão
Cangucu -> Canguçu
Ibicui -> Ibicuí
Ibirapuita -> Ibirapuitã
Jacui -> Jacuí
Carijo -> Carijó
Vacacai -> Vacacaí
Icabaqua -> Icabaquã
Laklano -> Laklãnõ
Xeta -> Xetá
Guaiana -> Gûaîanã/Guaianá (Old Tupi/Portuguese)

On another note, lots of rivers and tribes, I see. Amusingly, you've gotten the Carijós there twice — once in the usual portuguese from in RS and another further north as "Karai Yo".

2.2 - Cultures: I was very pleasantly surprised to see the Xetá on the map — though it's a bit unclear whether they'd have existed as a distinct identity in the 1300s, the fact of the matter is that we do not know much about them, alas. I don't think they should at all be removed, however — Heaven knows they've had enough of that already.
I'm glad to see the Kaingang/Kanhgág and Xokleng/Laklãnõ as separate, but related cultures. They are conflated, sometimes. Still, my main complaint with them is the simple fact that much of the territory they inhabit is occupied by wastelands in the current map.
I think the Carijós — I assume they're the pink-purple culture on the coast? — are being shown with too much restraint. They should really be present from roughly the current location of Mararaiama (?) south to Carijó itself, even if as a significant minority.
The Ava culture is a pretty chonky Guarani culture, but I think that's fair enough, especially since their migration south into the Platine Basin is still relatively recent in 1337.

2.3 - The Matter of Mate: I think that yerba-maté should be represented by tea, even if on only a few locations. It is a culturally significant product in both native and colonial culture, and though certainly far too regional to be it's own thing it'd be a shame if it was entirely absent. Economically, it was a good of some note and, in particular, was harvested and grown by the jesuit reductions for export. It would later — admitedly after the game's timeframe — play a significant role in the settling of the interior of Southern Brazil, even if as a third fiddle to cattle and coffee.

2.4 - Gold!: There is (some) gold in Southern Brazil! Although the Brazilian Gold Rush is mostly remembered in the context of Minas Gerais, the earliest significant gold mining in Brazil took place in what would become the state of Paraná (PT), though the precise date is somewhat controversial. Indeed, this is a big part of why the First Plateau of the state would be settled, and Curitiba in particular had it's start due to gold mining. Drying veins and the truly absurd deposits discovered further north would eventually leave this early rush thoroughly dead and buried, although, believe it or not, there is still some gold mining ongoing near Curitiba to this day (PT).
That's all to say Curitiba should have gold as it's trade good. Maybe it should run out eventually, but it should certainly have it.

III. CONCLUSION:

Brazil is big and I hope to have helped a tad.

I'm very happy that the developers over at Studio Tinto have been so willing to read, work, and change things in response to forumite feedback. Indeed, I think this game'll be great because of that, and it has been nothing short of wonderful to read the discussions and revelations on here. Thank you all for making it possible.

I'm sure we'll have lots to complain about the Tinto Flavour for colonial South America, too!

Very nice and informative feedback, thanks!

 

[Pavía]

Are there instances of armies with supply wagons and cannons crossing the Sahara from north to south?

Moroccan invasion of the Songhai Empire - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Not entirely sure if they were carrying cannons, but they had for sure gunpowder weapons and supply wagons carried by horses and camels.

 

[Pavía]

Topography review

Summary:

• This time I went 'freeform' here and there, where I think some Locations should be reshaped to follow the topography a bit closer.
  • E.g. Colombia's valley between the Cordillera Central and Oriental is currently non-existent, but in reality has flatlands all the way past Bogotá
  • Readjusted some mountain range edges in freehand drawing to more accurately approxcimate their map position.
• Some expansions of the Andes mountains
• Some reshuffling of Wetlands
• In Brazil a reshuffling of hills with plateaus
• Coastal Andes of North-Central Chile is significantly elevated above sea level (-> Plateaus)
• Some choices of Andes wastelands seem a bit odd to me (minor hills as impassable, while huge ranges are acessible)
  • I added a few imo essential ones, but most I leave up to interpretation.

General Topography

Tinto's Topography Current	Suggested Topography	Suggestions 'changelog'
View attachment 1234339	View attachment 1234340	View attachment 1234341
View attachment 1234352	View attachment 1234353	View attachment 1234354

Elevation & Terrain Ruggedness

• I'd like to bring up that above 2.5 km elevation, human physiology is stressed significantly. Only peoples that have lived here for centuries, and have an adapted physiology can have relatively normal life expectancy. For this reason, the purple indicated such places, and these in particular are over 4 km (!) in height.

Terrain Ruggedness (translated to Tinto's categories)	Expanded TRI, with indication of plateaus > 2.5 km	Digital Elevation with exaggerated color scheme
View attachment 1234342	View attachment 1234343	View attachment 1234344
View attachment 1234355	View attachment 1234356	View attachment 1234357

Wetlands

• Most of the wetlands occur in the wasteland areas. E.g. The Paraguay-Paraná Wetlands are fully located in the wastelands
• Argentina has a unique wetland-like region with an enormous amount of lakes, West of Buenos Aires

100 year-event Flood Risk	Global Wetlands and Lakes Database	PeatML: total percentage of Peatlands per km²
View attachment 1234347	View attachment 1234349	View attachment 1234350
View attachment 1234362	View attachment 1234363	View attachment 1234364

Great feedback, as usual, thanks!

 

[Pavía]

Overall pretty decent map, one of the biggest problems I see is the wild inconsistency in location size in some areas, particularly in Mato Grosso/ParaguayView attachment 1234485

It greatly depends on the information available. We've been trying to follow here the 3:1 rule (a location cannot be more than 3 times bigger than any of the neighboring ones), but we will double-check, nonetheless.

 

[Pavía]

Chilean wine experienced a "boom" in the 19th century, after the many European grape varieties were introduced. For much of Chilean history, the País grape was predominant.

Flavor involving Chilean wine is something that could be done in Victoria 3, not in the Not-Eu5 timeframe.

While your point is accurate, historically speaking, I think it rises a deeper feedback discussion regarding the what-if nature of this game.

Indeed those wine varieties arrived in the 19th century. But they 'could' have also arrived earlier, from 1700 onwards. Because it was in 1700 that the House of Bourbon took power in Spain, greatly opening trade and transit of goods between the Iberian colonies and the rest of Europe, particularly after the Free Trade agreements of the 1760s. Free trade in the colonies was something the Habsburg tried to prevent as they maintained a monopoly on the American products.

So historically speaking, events for the introduction of certain goods in colonial nations could happen randomly starting in the 18th century. 'Historically'.
But ingame, what if the Bourbons sit in the Spanish throne earlier? Or what if Spain picks a different colonial policy from the beginning, or changes it during the game? Then these types of historical events could definitely trigger at different dates.

In the particular wine example we are discussing, the event occurred because the climatic conditions of this area in Chile were particularly suited for European wine varieties, not because it was the 19th century per se.
Many events in the game could occur earlier or later, depending more on if their necessary conditions are met, than fixed dates, and of course with a level of randomness in the activation probability.

The New World is a complex area in terms of events and flavor, really. These nations depend on both their own conditions and also greatly on conditions regarding whatever has happened in Europe. I think a fair amount of lienancy regarding specific dates is required, and more attention to specific triggers.

There will be a way to make wine cultivation possible in Chile.