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unmerged(20077)

unmerged(20077)

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Sep 26, 2003
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I've been thinking about what to do the with remaining two continents and was thinking along the following "What if..." lines.
South America - the Huari and Tiahuanaco empires survive and the Incas therefore don't become a major power - but can they stand up to the Chimu?
The Chimu are unchanged except that they get Atalaya (1483)
Huari owns Huanco (166) Ayacucho (167) and Lima (168)
Tiahuanaco owns Arequipa (170) Moquega (171) Titicaca (capital) (193) and Potosi (194)
Possibly these last two could start as allies. Manu and Cuzco might just have natives, if we want to lose the Inca altogether, or they could be a minor power, Tawantinsuyu (their name before the empire) here.
Central America - the Aztecs are beaten off by the Zapotec and Mixtecs and driven North.
Aztecs control Jalisco (24) Saltillo (25) and Tampico (28)
Zapotecs control Zacatecas (27) Tlaxcala (cap) (29) and Tehuacan (32)
Mixtecs control Michoagan (26) Atlixco (30) and Tehuantepec (31)
The Maya remain unchanged apart from losing a province to the Zapotec. This creates 4 states with 3 provs each.
North America - the great Mississippian civilisation, which ended just as EU2 begins, hasn't collapsed. There are no Shawnee or Cherokee states. The continuing Mississippian dominance pressure the Iroquois who absorb the Lenape. Some provinces will need natives.
MSP controls Arkansas (51) Yazoo (52) Tuscaloosa (53) Tennessee (56) Illinois (59) Miamis (cap) (60) and Kentucky (67)
Creek are a MSP vassal but otherwise unchanged.
The Iroquois add Susquehanna (85) and Delaware (86)

The next thing to consider is whether we want anything like the USA arising out of the Celtic colonial empires in N America... or if we want them to stay as they are, or if we want a native state capable of standing up to the colonisers somehow...
 
It would be interesting to have the possibility of a native state "westernizing" and becoming more modern...perhaps we could even make, instead of a revolt based USA, have one of the natives take that spot? When the Europeans make contact and they reduce their whiteman to zero, start a flurry of booster events, to try and catch them up in infra and trade and land tech to some degree, and a stairway approach to techgroup improvement, with them moving up every 50 years. Of course, this empire would be extremely inward focused except for trade, and would take huge stabhits and hordes of RR for this. It might be interesting, even if it is sickeningly unrealistic.

Anyways, let us keep in mind that these nations shouldn't (unless we make one like the above described state) be able to stand up to European invasion, and while they can survive past the 1700s or so, we shouldn't really consider it likely.
 
So if there's to be no native powerup, that's either tons of money and manpower for the colonisers or some sort of colonial independence events required...
Hmm, unless instead of a native powerup, we just let a big native nation convert to Christianity fairly early? That will at least slow down European expansion.
 
I think perhaps we should take a step in the oppsite direction, instead of making the Americas harder to colonize and thus less valuable to European powers, we should make them more profitable and lucrative. But much more competative by adding Arab, African, and Asian powers with the ability to reach American shores.
 
Personally, I like the idea of the Missisippian continuation. Also, if we want to use them as roadblocks to the inland lands, we could toss in a Comanche state in inland parts of Texas, and perhaps elevate the Cahuilla (in modern times, virtual proprietors of the City of Palm Springs) in inland California... although for the sake of colonization, I think that most if not all coastal areas should be left vacant.

In terms of making America more desirable, and thus perhaps more competitive, we could (in reflection of the sheer size of the provinces) boost the tax rates across the board. There is no reason, for example, that Massachusetts or Manhattan or Connecticut or Chesapeake provinces - all of which cover at least a whole modern US state - could not have a tax value high enough to rival Gascogne and Flanders and Provence... especially considering that these areas were historically settlled mainly with colonization in mind, not trade, and do in fact have relatively low value trade items, as well as climates much like Western Europe.
 
Sheridan said:
Personally, I like the idea of the Missisippian continuation. Also, if we want to use them as roadblocks to the inland lands, we could toss in a Comanche state in inland parts of Texas, and perhaps elevate the Cahuilla (in modern times, virtual proprietors of the City of Palm Springs) in inland California... although for the sake of colonization, I think that most if not all coastal areas should be left vacant.

In terms of making America more desirable, and thus perhaps more competitive, we could (in reflection of the sheer size of the provinces) boost the tax rates across the board. There is no reason, for example, that Massachusetts or Manhattan or Connecticut or Chesapeake provinces - all of which cover at least a whole modern US state - could not have a tax value high enough to rival Gascogne and Flanders and Provence... especially considering that these areas were historically settlled mainly with colonization in mind, not trade, and do in fact have relatively low value trade items, as well as climates much like Western Europe.
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Those provinces didn't have as high a population as equivalent provinces in Europe, not until the late XVIIIth century, so a higher tax value at start is not the right course of action IMHO.
As a kind of indication, for the whole USA-to be provinces, there were :
- in 1700, 250.000 inhabitants
- in 1750, one million
- in 1800, five millions
In the same time, England had 7.5 millions in 1750, 11 M in 1800. I'm ready to bet that in EU2, even in 1700, England would make more profit from the NA colonies than from their home country. Albeit the major economic/demographic expansion of the USA was made during the 1850-1920 period, which is much later. ;)

OTOH, events could be made wich could fire after 1700, to represent the increasing arrival of colonists in the already settled provinces. This would give some increases of population in the colonies, and a few increase of base tax value, but few, small and late. But don't forget that american provinces have mostly high value goods, like tobacco, furs, cotton, except in the Midwest (which would be colonized much later) where many provinces produce grain.

EDIT : also, I don't think we should make the colonization of America (both north and south) more difficult. We're already reducing the possibilities of colonizing India, and adding some would-be colonizers in Asia, which would have an easier time colonizing Siberia and Indonesia, and probably the west american coast and australia.
 
lawkeeper said:
OTOH, events could be made wich could fire after 1700, to represent the increasing arrival of colonists in the already settled provinces. This would give some increases of population in the colonies, and a few increase of base tax value, but few, small and late. But don't forget that american provinces have mostly high value goods, like tobacco, furs, cotton, except in the Midwest (which would be colonized much later) where many provinces produce grain.

EDIT : also, I don't think we should make the colonization of America (both north and south) more difficult. We're already reducing the possibilities of colonizing India, and adding some would-be colonizers in Asia, which would have an easier time colonizing Siberia and Indonesia, and probably the west american coast and australia.
Click to expand...

The population events exsist already. They are in the HUGE colonization file, so you do have to dig for them. They are ussally right after the core events. I also think that we should make America easier to colonize to make up for the loss of other areas to compitition.
 
I agree with Lawkeeper. Colonization is already becoming a less attractive option for Europeans with a stronger India, and presumably a stronger Indonesia and colonizing Chinese state/Japan as well. Raising tax values, as well, seems somewhat unhistorical.

I don't think the problem is that serious, though. Unlike standard EU2 South America shouldn't be monopolized by Spain and Portugal, so as long as the continent can be divided up among a few powers (Eire and whoever else) things should be fine.
 
What I'm trying to point to is this: in the vanilla game, England usually loses the USA. If they didn't, an England doing reasonably well would become an unstoppable juggernaut by 1800 with all its American possessions. Are we happy to have all these provinces available for ever as colonies, or will there be sufficient competition in N America to stop that happening?
 
The Impaler said:
What I'm trying to point to is this: in the vanilla game, England usually loses the USA. If they didn't, an England doing reasonably well would become an unstoppable juggernaut by 1800 with all its American possessions. Are we happy to have all these provinces available for ever as colonies, or will there be sufficient competition in N America to stop that happening?
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That's another matter entirely, different from strengthenning the native countries.

I'm not sure colonial revolts should happen everytime, nor that only northeast america would revolt, and no more that it would happen between 1750 and 1800. So, IMO, there should be a possibility that homogenous groups of colonies would revolt, perhaps a dozen groups or so, spread across the world.
I propose : canada, northeast america, texas-florida, mexico, california (in fact, all west coast), "venezuela", brazil, perou-chili, argentina, south africa, west africa (tough I have doubts since that's only one-province wide, unless we account for some pagan-conquest-conversion). These revolts would be triggered by ownership of at least 6-10 key provinces (mostly coastal ones), some DP-sliders requisites, or so on. Perhaps previous events (tax-raising, defense of the colonies, etc) could be made some 50 or 100 years earlier, much like the current events for England.

And, to add randomness, we could make some AI-events, starting at the start of the GC, that could randomly sleep some of those events (using the probabilities of AI choices to determine how often such events should be 'open').

Comments ?
 
Just one quick comment. Doesn't the game already have modifiers for population, such that a province with a far smaller population but the same tax base will actually produce less taxes? I thought it did, and this would reflect the American situation just fine.

And I wasn't advocating a huge power-boost to the American provinces... just something more in line with their relative size compared to, say, the Carribean islands or the Western Europe provinces, both of which average far smaller but have comparable tax bases in-game. Boosting the American provinces from their current 4-6 range to perhaps something like 8-10 (similar to some of the richer French and English provinces) was more in line with my thoughts. (The provinces I compared by name to have 11's and 12's, I think.)
 
Sheridan said:
Just one quick comment. Doesn't the game already have modifiers for population, such that a province with a far smaller population but the same tax base will actually produce less taxes? I thought it did, and this would reflect the American situation just fine.
Click to expand...
No, it doesn't. Tax income is only modified by wrong-culture, wrong-religion, state-religion, stability, oversea penalty (depending on LAND DP-slider), RR.

Sheridan said:
And I wasn't advocating a huge power-boost to the American provinces... just something more in line with their relative size compared to, say, the Carribean islands or the Western Europe provinces, both of which average far smaller but have comparable tax bases in-game. Boosting the American provinces from their current 4-6 range to perhaps something like 8-10 (similar to some of the richer French and English provinces) was more in line with my thoughts. (The provinces I compared by name to have 11's and 12's, I think.)
Click to expand...
But this would mean those provinces are richer than most of the european provinces, which I disagree with for the the EU2's 400 years. If the problem is the relative wealth of american provinces, then decrease the wealth of the carribean islands. But there are reasons why they have higher tax value : they were more heavily settled than the north american provinces, where settlements extended in the innerland only very late.
 
Lawkeeper, have you familiarised yourself with the colonial events yet? They have both population increases and independence events, so you could first look at the wheel we have and then rediscover it if needed. ;)
 
Even so, there were significant cities in North America - perhaps not on a European scale, but Boston, New York and Philadelphia were all important shipping centers in the period, and in Boston's case there were other ports nearby as well. Just because the settlement was limited to the coastal region... well, that still supports boosting the coastal provinces.

The main reason England did not derive much in taxes was their policies, not the population; in 1765 the Americans on average paid 1/30th of the taxes of Englishmen. But that is represented in game (to a point) - it's like not building tax collectors there.

Thinking ahead on that... perhaps the presence of tax collectors should be one of the prerequisites for the revolt/independence event chains? The American colonies didn't revolt until England tried to impose England-like taxes in the late 1760's and onward....

Still, I don't think it's entirely accurate for even the richest parts of North America to be on par with below-average French and English provinces. Perhaps, if you're judging by level of development, that would be accurate, but that doesn't take into account that the American provinces are much larger as well. This would balance out some of the deficiency, wouldn't you think?

Certainly at least Manhattan - seen in the Revolution as the strategic linchpin to the entire Thirteen Colonies, due to its access to inland waterways - should be up there with at least Normandy, especially considering that the area on the map includes Long Island and most of New Jersey as well....
 
How about an muslim/christian America, with both factions raiding each other and killing each other?Granada could get an event to try and colonize a specific part (or whatever) and that state could break up into a nation on its own vs other colonial nations with events.Ameriika Juhad :p would be fun....

I have ideas for names : Dawlat Bani Al-Ahrar or Mamalakat Al-Andalus :p
 
Granada does already get the same colonization events as anyone else would... assuming they have explorers and conquistadors, which I'm pretty sure they do. Giving them a specific area would be too deterministic in the eyes of the original team.
 
What Im saying is that they get a choice to go where the infidels are OR just wholly ignore it.Like an event of a sort, and that would trigger the Land of the Free events, Ard El-Ahrar .Just a suggestion.
 
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