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Raftz

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May 11, 2018
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I had a bunch of spare time suddenly, so I decided to compile information about every area in Africa. The attached PDF, or images, list every Area in Africa's location count, province count, and all relevant population Data we have. Hopefully this helps someone with their suggestions or research. If not, oh well it was fun to make.

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  • 80366ed0-3239-442d-b565-68f083438ca5-0002.png
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Wow... 1,138 locations total... that is very impressive!

... If you don't consider how 425 exist in Iberia alone, and Africa as a whole is 52 times larger... while it only has about 3 times the amount of locations. It's a bit telling of a few things, if you ask me.
 
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Wow... 1,138 locations total... that is very impressive!

... If you don't consider how 425 exist in Iberia alone, and Africa as a whole is 52 times larger... while it only has about 3 times the amount of locations. It's a bit telling of a few things, if you ask me.
It's really not.
There wasn't much there at the time period.
Comparable to Sami or Western Siberia, or Finland (maybe). Iron, some small "cities", no writing.
Not every civilization was equally impressive.
 
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To compliment this, here is a combined map I compiled a while back, with all of Africa's country tags & SOP tags as of most recent dev posts for each region.
1753126457367.png
 
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It's really not.
There wasn't much there at the time period.
Comparable to Sami or Western Siberia, or Finland (maybe). Iron, some small "cities", no writing.
Not every civilization was equally impressive.
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.

Wow... 1,138 locations total... that is very impressive!

... If you don't consider how 425 exist in Iberia alone, and Africa as a whole is 52 times larger... while it only has about 3 times the amount of locations. It's a bit telling of a few things, if you ask me.
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.
 
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It's really not.
There wasn't much there at the time period.
Comparable to Sami or Western Siberia, or Finland (maybe). Iron, some small "cities", no writing.
Not every civilization was equally impressive.
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.

I don't think anyone here has claimed that sub-saharan Africa was as advanced as Europe - I certainly don't. But it is simply ridiculous and ahistorical to say that there "wasn't much there" and it demonstrates your lack of knowledge about the region.
 
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Wow... 1,138 locations total... that is very impressive!

... If you don't consider how 425 exist in Iberia alone, and Africa as a whole is 52 times larger... while it only has about 3 times the amount of locations. It's a bit telling of a few things, if you ask me.
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)
 
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I think populaition is a lot more important than location density in this game. Obviously Africa is a huge continent but quite a lot of land area is taken up by the Sahara and parts of the Congo rainforest which were not densely habitated which makes the land area comparison a little misleading. If the population numbers are being low balled that is a concern but I think PDX has been pretty diligent in trying to reconstruct the numbers despite not having access to great records for a lot of areas.
 
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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.

And theres fact that control is not based on pixel distance. But rather on how many locations the control has to pass through. So it'll probably exacerbate this problem even more since control can more easily pass through a large amount of territory.

I really dont want late game Africa turning into a blob fest like it is in EU4 and CK3. The place is supposed to feel gargantuan. But I guess we don't have the processing power to allow it.
 
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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)
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.

So given location density is being driven by anticipated player preferences, unless you're also on the China-related threads talking about how little China "achieved" during the period of the game as a reason to not increase Chinese locations, I see no reason for you to be discussing that on this thread. It frankly comes across as overly dismissive at the kindest, and blatantly disrespectful at the worst. Do you think Japan, a nation which didn't successfully expand beyond its islands until the 1900s, has an extremely high location density because the Japanese "just did that much more" than China? Or do you think it's because the devs clearly like Japan a lot, expect their players to as well, and therefore have pumped it to the brim with flavour? Your guess is as good as mine.

However, if you would like to actually learn about how and why you are wrong over whether Africa "achieve[d] much in period" (which I take as your opinion on whether or not the continent has enough "going on" to fill that increased location density with content), there are hundreds of replies on the dev posts for each region of Africa, which might be a great place to start. These include detailed suggestions for how location density could be increased in Africa, as well as suggestions for how and where new country tags and SOPs could be added to the continent.. Many posts in the latter category are qualified by their posters with an acknowledgement of the limitations placed by the current location distribution.

There is absolutely a historical merit to increase locations in Africa; it's up to whether the devs want to or not.
 
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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.

And theres fact that control is not based on pixel distance. But rather on how many locations the control has to pass through. So it'll probably exacerbate this problem even more since control can more easily pass through a large amount of territory.

I really dont want late game Africa turning into a blob fest like it is in EU4 and CK3. The place is supposed to feel gargantuan. But I guess we don't have the processing power to allow it.
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.

Like, sure India and China certainly have issues with locations based on population metrics, but on size, both are doing just fine, but Africa? Yeah, uhm... it's bad on a much larger problem area. The Iberia metric I provided is only an example, but it's poignant that a continent 52 times the size of a peninsula is 3 times as hard to conquer as that peninsula when it should probably be considerably harder to conquer all of Africa.
 
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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
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.
Well there is Malaria which seemingly will not be solveable in game. Though I guess you could conquer Africa and just hold it without settling it.
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.
 
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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.
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.

There is no large-scale colonization of Africa during the game's time frame. The most you get is vassalized local rulers (a strategy of limited success), and loosely controlled "feiras" out in South-East Africa.
 
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