Calipah said:
Well, not a Years of Rice and Salt set up, but something were the reniassance starts in the east instead of the west, with China, India and Islam leading the forray instead of Europe,Could be an intresting experiment. dont u think?
It could be interesting, but it's a radical departure from the current setup. Here are some reasons not to have the East leading the way:
1. In MP games, players are likely to want to congregate in one area of the world. Strategically speaking, Europe and the Mediterranean form one of the most interesting areas because of the way land and sea fit together. Atlantic Europe is also better-placed than most of Asia to colonise the New World, which is a key dynamic even in Abe. Even in SP, there's the fact that Europe is packed with provinces, while the rest of the world gets short shrift; it's thus quite difficult to put as much detail in the rest of the world. Finally, there are some hard-coded aspects of Europe which don't happen elsewhere, such as mercenaries, though in theory these could be transplanted to Asia by renaming the continents in the province file. So I think the focus is likely to remain on Europe, at least for MP, though it will be a much weaker focus than in vanilla.
2. Many Asian countries were much more advanced than Europe in 1419, and we can represent this by giving them high starting tech. But if the East gallops even further ahead of Europe over the course of the game, we'll need to push down Europe in terms of the tech groups, and justify why in Aberrated history Europe advanced more slowly than in real life. That is, unless you want tech to be faster across the board!
3. The Renaissance and Enlightenment were principally Christian, European phenomena. There could have been surges of new thought and technology in other countries with radically different outlook, but the way in which it would happen would be very different, and not really recognisable as Eastern equivalents of what historically happened in Europe. For example, it makes little sense to have an outburst of secular thought Enlightenment-style unless the old religions have somehow been weakened or partly discredited (as early modern Christianity was by the Reformation and the continent-wide religious wars). If we want to create a whole new innovative movement, we have to think very carefully about how it would happen.
Having said this, we could make Asia a lot more competitive with Europe technologically, certainly for the first half of the game. What we could do, for example, is make Europe earn its tech advantage: it can start in a lower tech group than the advanced countries of the East (say Europe is 'Muslim' and advanced Asian countries are 'Orthodox'), then we can have events where the tech groups change as things like the Renaissance sweep through Europe, and as Europe starts getting more ideas from the East. The Muslim world, Persia, India and China OTOH could start with a high tech group, but complacent Asian empires which fail to adapt to new circumstances will get pushed down. This means that the tech game will evolve over time, and can be put at the mercy of event choices and what actually happens in-game, rather than what we think should happen.
