It's really not.
Forgive my ignorance - are you telling me that they've found dozens of cities in Siberia with over 100,000 residents? How exciting! Would you be so kind as to forward me the sources for this? I'd love to read more about these settlements! I assume that must be what you're referring to in equating Africa to Siberia, of course, because anyone with even an elementary grasp on Africanist literature would certainly know that Africa was not lacking large-scale socio-political organisation. And surely only someone with a strong grasp on the literature would dare make such sweeping comparisons. Surely.
It is, and this isn't really disputable if you ask me. The devs themselves have acknowledged that location (and, for that matter, population) distribution is a reflection of gameplay priorities over a strict adherence to what might be "historically accurate" per se. Fortunately, they've also confirmed that location density does not do much to affect development potential.
It likely isn't. Many players unfortunately share this mindset
Dont you know? The Timbuktu manuscripts are all blank pages.
I'll try to keep this response simple. First of all the original point you were replying to was talking about the whole of Africa. If you deny that North Africa had a sophisticated civilization you're historically illiterate. Second, "no writing" is just blatantly false. Literacy spread with islam, so that you could find Arabic literature in the Mali Empire and the Swahili city states and so on, with occasional adaptation of the arabic script to vernacular languages. Ethiopia and Nubia also had their own written languages complete with unique writing systems, plus Greek and Coptic were used as additional literary languages in Nubia. The EU5 map already shows many settled countries across the continent, and they are not made up out of thin air. Although the map is definitely imperfect, paradox has made it clear that they have fairly strict criteria for adding settled countries.
Nice work.
What significant things do you want africa to do in game, given it didnt achieve much in period, and locations matter less than pops (which sub saharan african will be terribly behind on)
Well the issue of ease of expansion to me is an obvious one. Assuming warscore costs are adjusted and balanced around more location dense regions, It would then make campaigns in Africa more snowbally for the player and AI. This is already a thing in other paradox games where you can just do a little bit of warring and easily conquer vast swaths of Africa simply because there really isn't much locations to conquer at all.
Location density is something that people have discussed here with respect to every part of the world - from China to South Asia to the Americas. The developers have made it abundantly clear that location density is not being driven by "historical importance" or "achievement" (your metrics, clearly ill-applied in this discussion) so much as anticipated gameplay directives. This makes perfect sense when you consider the increased compute power likely needed per location added to the game.
This right here is a huge reason as to why I'm worried about it, because, as far as I can tell, there are no systems in place to curtail people from conquering the interior of Africa as a European colonial power, and the disparity in location sizes help to exacerbate this for African nations as well, look at Ethiopia or the Cape Colony regions, those are dense with locations, and when you leave them, it becomes much larger, more of a stark contrast, and if a nation such as Ethiopia or a Cape Colony tag were to start colonizing outside of that region, it would be obvious rather quickly how flawed the current set up is. The fact it's more snowbally because the rest of the world is more balanced really worries me, because as far as I can tell, this was the only region to have provinces large enough where their location name appeared on that map of the world we had a while back.
There is one and it's called malaria. Non-immune populations have to deal with 20% fatalities constantly, which will make it impractical to have anything more than trading posts along the coast. Of course regions without endemic malaria won't have this constraint, but then those regions were colonized far earlier than the rest of Africa.
In theory you could get an african subject to colonize it for you, but that's it. Since most of africa is uncolonized you will need a local power to conquer. And good luck conquering africa regardless since your armies will suffer deaths from malaria too.
The only regions "without endemic Malaria" in Africa are North Africa, and Southern Africa. Neither was thoroughly colonized within the game's time frame. By the early 1800s, Europeans were virtually unawares of the Tswana 'cities' of the "far" interior (many within South Africa), some of which had populations equal to or larger than contemporary Cape Town. I also think we all know of Portugal's failed invasion of Morocco.
