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

[Kolbrandr]

Will the topography also be open to feedback? I’m not sure how granular it can be, but it just felt weird that the area around and north of Vancouver is flatland when it looks like this:

 

[trooper828]

I can't possibly list out every possible improvement to the map in a way that i would be happy with so i would instead encourage everyone here, be they dev or community member, to watch the youtube channel Ancient Americas https://www.youtube.com/@AncientAmericas

From the start i can at least say that Florida should be more developed in the sense of the people in the area should be represented as states. The image provided is obviously not useful due to the year it is representing but the Calusa were a stratified, centralized and powerful society even prior to this date. def give that youtube channel a watch for anyone interested in pre-columbian America, it even delves into the (effectively proven) concept of the Polynesian people arriving in America and there being an exchange of sorts between the peoples. Ancient Americas Calusa video is one i have watched 3 times and love to bits

 

[SunshineSchmidt#2]

We'd like to have both individual colonies and some kind of '13 Colonies' common colony and federation/confederation, so it's up to the player to choose.

Definitely make it some sort of IO that may include more or less colonies and may continue post-independence.

 

[bokorthedust]

i assume they worked on the balkans before russia

They have multiple teams working on multiple feedbacks in parallel. The Britain feedback is notoriously late at this point because of Saint Dave's paternity leave, even though (I believe) they started work on it even before the Russian or Balkan maps appeared. It's a process with likely different team sizes and workflows, but they'll keep coming whenever they feel they are ready.

 

[Nikicaga]

Non-livable or non-crossable (by an army) areas.

Writing a suggestion on it now, but Northern Canada should definitely expand its colonizable areas, as there are quite a few places (southern Baffin Island, Southampton and Coats Island, northern tip of Quebec, further parts of Alaska and Hudson Bay) that were very much settled in this period by natives, and visited by Europeans late into it.

Technically even regions like south of Victoria Island, the north of Baffin Island or the north coast of continental Nunavut were settled, but those seem too isolated to represent (and having an open Northern Passage would not be historical)

 

[Hircene]

I strongly think the Calusa should be a proper country, they were settled, had a distinct capital, king and noble class.

 

[Maxipuchi]

In terms of borders, I much prefer the ones on the pacific coast.

As for the amount of countries, I would be very happy with the SOPs if they were playable. I imagine that for a lot of people, like me, one big concern about whether a state should be a land based country or an SOP is playability, I wanna be able to play as a lot of these tags, and if SOPs were playable then I would love to play them as SOPs, in a lot of cases that fits better how they were organised and makes for a more realistic experience.

However, at the moment you've said SOPs will likely be unplayable at release, and so I feel compelled to suggest societyies to be landed that should be SOPs, simply because I want to have options to play in this area.

 

[pheonicia]

I'd say areas should be smaller than the ones on the west coast, and more geographically shaped than the ones on the east coast. Seeing west Virginia have it's panhandle, or Virginia have the bottom of the Delmarva peninsula, or Michigan split as it is shaped today is all really off putting.

 

[RouteVenus]

Please tell me these changes to the map modes are permanent… was not a fan of the stained glass look

Also will we be able to rename regions/areas?

 

[Sapa Inca]

The level of details in the cultures in North America is awesome.

My hope for South America is a similar level of depth, I hope that South America research about native cultures is not too difficulty, in any case I will be happy to help with a few maps about natives in Brazil and in the South Cone in the near future.

 

[wilcoxchar]

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!

I much prefer geographic borders. If the game is going to even remotely model the actual process of colonialism of the era, it needs to recognize that the borders we ended up with in our history were not at all inevitable, and that alternate borders were much more likely. The borders of our one, singular data point of history, especially those of the straight lined internal states of the United States, are a fluke and not something that should be appearing in most playthroughs.

 

[Pavía]

Pavia, it took a lot of time for the balkan feedback but why so quick for the russia feedback?

It's been more a pipeline and organizational than the time spent in each, which hasn't been so disparate. In other words, we haven't rushed Russia in two weeks, it's just that it took us a bit more than usual to post the Balkan review, as the core part of it was finished some weeks ago.

 

[Cagallo]

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 latter. Absolutely 110% the latter. The artificiality of seeing US states when every other region in the world follows a much more organic design is… eww.

110% for me too, same reason. Death to straight lines

 

[Wolverine422]

Other people of Aridoamerica like the Hohokam of Arizona should also be settled people considering this was their heyday period before their decline in the late 14th century and throughout the 15th. They had a larger canal system than the pubelo shown as settled and these have been repurposed for the salt river water projects of today. Maybe add the final group of arid America the mogollon pubelo to connect these areas for fun game play even though they have less sites.

Totally agree, the Hohokam should be settled. Would be cool to see the mogollon too, there were more people living in the mimbres valley (where a lot of their villages were) in the 13th century than there are today .

 

[eddin2]

I guess I'm going to be in the minority, but I like having area borders be based on actual borders that existed during or shortly after the timeframe, rather than on completely made-up "natural" borders.
I absolutely do not understand why so many people don't like straight borders, they appear in other parts of the map as well...

I would understand it, if it's about some random map, or location borders inside provinces/areas, but I think in a history strategy game, having borders being colonial/post-colonial is self explanatory.

 

[Jjjace55]

Wait where is block island??

 

[Zebulon_Wallace]

I'm curious to know if Pavia referenced any of the Pacific Coast expeditions by the Spanish.

 

[51states]

Great map, sad that I have to wait 2 weeks for the Caribbean.

 

[Bisonmask]

The Great Plains boast the largest amount of contiguous farmland in the world. I like how maize covers that to a degree but I’m disappointed to not see as much farmland, even if it didn’t start out as that and had to be deforested.

It was really bad farmland until the advent of mechanized agriculture, aquifer irrigation, and chemical fertilizers. The good farmland during this period is east of the rain line (which is why everyone lives there)

Last thing: I know waterways and rivers aren’t playing a key role in PC, but we NEED the Mississippi. The Mississippi River is akin to the Rhine and equally as important. It’s what made the USA into the powerhouse it became and that should be represented in some fashion. It’s important from a strategic standpoint as many borders were created to follow its path. It’s important from a population standpoint as many large cities sprung up along its banks (New Orleans, St Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, etc). The river and its tributaries were and still are the water highways of America.

Agreed, it might just not be implemented on the trade map right now but iirc it was already key to regional trade networks long before colonisation

 

[Densetsu VII]

Speaking as a 'Murikan (though admittedly an interest in history is not terribly American overall), I favor a more geographic view of the provinces. Especially the ones like Georgia which have no business existing in a time before King George (assuming you're unable to change the province names over the course of the game). I think having the colonies themselves take on the correct names in generally the correct areas would be plenty.

The SOP situation is a tricky one for sure. NA has always been in a tough spot for the EU series since there's clearly a lot going on there and a strong desire to roleplay an alternate history, but equally, historical evidence comes from a post-colonial time when disease had clearly ravaged pre-colonial societies, making them seem more disorganized and sparse than they may have actually been. With that said, I want to look at this from a gameplay/player-desire perspective for a moment: I feel like making most of the country unplayable SOPs feels bad. I picked up EU4 because I wanted to play 'every country in the world' or at least have that freedom (how much more American can you get than that?) Not even being able to play as the Iroquois's predecessors (and yes, I get that they probably weren't there as we would understand them), feels incomplete in terms of the historical experience I want to explore as a player.

I will grant that making SOPs interesting can fall in the auspices of a DLC, but it's hard to wait for that if Tinto won't commit a little bit to saying "we will do this". If Tinto can't commit to it, then push a few more SOPs to the fore as playable in some way. 5 playable tags for all of NA is crazy, and disappointing as a player. Many here have suggested Etowa (or rather, the chiefdoms which occupied the space we now call Etowa, ie the Coosa) as one alternative. Honestly, I think there's enough historical ambiguity that we could consider some tags the Europeans encountered and extend their presence to this time period. I get that this is a more liberal approach with history, and the ideal would be to have them all be *playable* SOPs, but if we can't do that, I'd rather have a couple representative playable tags in each area. They can be weak, but they should be there.

One thing that puzzles me is that even IF you don't do this, there appears to be culture in every area, but not necessarily SOPs in each area especially in the west. The Tongva people in particular, in the modern LA area, had trade networks, were not decimated by disease before European contact, lived in hundreds of villages, and some evidence pins them as being here for thousands of years. How does that not quality for at least an SOP if not an outright playable tag?

The Coastanoan/Ohlone peoples of San Francisco had definitely inhabited that area long before the start of Project Caesar and even by the 1700s when the Spanish decimated them through disease and slave labor, there were over 100,000 in that area (see Wikipedia, Ohlone, citing Bean, John (1994). The Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region ).

To reiterate; I understand that SOPs are difficult to make fun in the current game. We can't really make good suggestions on how to fix this without playing the game; I don't even get how playable-non-landed countries works (in terms of how that experience is fun). But IF IT DOES WORK, then I think SOPs should become playable one day. Until they do, North America will feel very empty. And California most of all, as it lacks even the SOPs which should probably be there.