Tinto Maps #14 Western Africa Feedback

[Pavía]

Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Maps feedback post! Today, we will be reviewing the region of Western Africa. However, I want to start today with some caveats regarding it, given the feedback we received last week regarding the Horn of Africa review, and to make for clearer communication.

1. For the Western Africa review, we mainly focused on adding the missing region of what is today's Central African Republic, inhabited during most of the game's period by the peoples of the Banda, Zande, Gbaya, and many others. Back in time, we had some doubts and issues regarding how to add it properly, but now we've been able to incorporate it fully.
2. Besides that, we also prioritized the redraw of the coastline of the Gulf of Guinea since it was noted that it looked a bit too artificial, so we made it follow more the topography and rivers of the area while still keeping the 'outpost' gameplay functionality. We are aware that there were a lot of proposals to add many more locations, such as those of @Gouda_boy or @Bosporus , but we also evaluated that they would add much more location density than the one we were looking for in this region.
3. There's still WIP to be done, such as a rebalancing of the Settled and SoP countries, as we received a ton of feedback on these. We also reviewed the pops we want in this region, and we agree with you that we need to raise its numbers; if it's approximately now 6M pops now, we plan to make it about 12.5M. We resumed the pop work recently since we have now fixed the already-mentioned issues, so it's not yet implemented; therefore, we will also share it with you in the future.
4. However, even given all of this, we didn't want to delay this Feedback post more than planned since we also have other valuable changes to share and get your feedback from, such as the breakup of the Animist religions of the region or the Languages maps. What we will do, then, is to share with you later on the changes we make about the previous issues, as we already said we'd do with other regions.

With that said, let's take a look at the change log and then at the new maps:

ADDITIONS

Added the following:

• Locations (44):
  • salamat
    sarh
    moissala
    ouham
    gbabiri
    gribingui
    ndele
    birao
    bria
    djemah
    kotto
    mobaye
    ouaka
    krebedje
    boali
    mbaiki
    mambere
    baoro
    sangha
    bangui
    bosobolo
    uele_ca
    isiro
    dungu
    kadey
    bomokandi
    aoukale
    bertoua
    abong
    sanaga
    akonolinga
    sangmelima
    nyong
    bakas
    eseka
    edea
    ebolowa
    ambam
    ebibeyin
    mongomo
    evinayong
    pende
    tiwal
    bahr_salamat
• Lakes
  • Iro lake
• Wastelands
  • niefang_jungle
  • maan_jungle
  • nkam_jungle
  • korup_jungle
• Cultures (13)
  • sara_culture
    mbay_culture
    mandja_culture
    gbaya_culture
    bulu_culture
    baka_culture
    gyele_culture
    madi_culture
    banda_culture
    bomassa_culture
    gula_iro_culture
    ngbandi_culture
    fang_culture
• Religions (4) - On top of the Folk African split
  • Ngbandi
    Ori
    Bua
    Banda
• Languages
  • bua_language
  • moru_madi_language

CORRECTIONS

Locations

• Completely redraw the locations on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea to make them more natural

Raw Goods

• Added Beeswax and reworked resources according to feedback

Terrain

• Reworked the entire Topography of the region

Religion

• Total Review, dividing the region into several Folk African religions

Countries + Societies of Pops

As mentioned in the intro, we already have planned to rework this intensely, we'll share with you when that is done, but we also wanted to share with you the SoP's already present since they weren't in the original map post. Also, there's a weird bug in how the border lines of wastelands and corridors are generated, which has already been reported, and we look forward to fixing it.

Locations

The first map shows all the locations of the region, including corridors, etc. The second shows the redrawing of the coastal locations. The third shows the entire new area added, that of the current Central African Republic.

Provinces

Areas

Topography

Development

There might be so future tweaks on this related to adding some more development to the lands of the Oyo people.

Harbors

Cultures

On the cultures, we plan to do some of the rework along with the country rework, so it's more efficient for us. You may see the new cultures added to Central Africa, any feedback on them would be appreciated.

Languages

We had to do some naming that we're not entirely happy with, such as the Nigerian or the Adamawa, so we might also be open to reviewing that.

Religions

The new religious distribution of Western Africa!

Raw Materials

Markets

And that's all for today! The next Tinto Maps Feedback will be in two weeks from now, on Monday 28th, for Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. See you!

 

[Pavía]

I have a question that isn't directly related to this (but rather the info we got on Saturday), but considering there's no coal rgo in this region, maybe a bit relevant.
Since the game includes charcoal in the coal good, does that mean that locations that produced a lot of charcoal could also get the coal rgo?
I'd assume not, because there are probably late advances that make coal production better.
It just makes the charcoal building look like it's supposed to be a substitute for coal if you don't have access to it in an rgo, even though it was basically the opposite in real history for most of the time period of the game - charcoal was the industrial fuel used everywhere around the world.

Are the pop updates going to be posted in each individual thread, or combined as a new Tinto Maps edition?

1. No, we are adding just 'pure' Coal locations for the RGO. For the Charcoal Kiln, it works well for locations that have lumber as resource, since it can only be built in places with lumber and also uses that resources as input.
2. Hmm, we might need to think a bit about it, since there are pros and cons to both options.

 

[Pavía]

View attachment 1281016this might just be me being ignorant on the history, but why is Kano higher development in (presumably) their capital than Mali is in their capital?

It's because of how we've calculated development, because we haven't gone one by one over the thousands of locations in the game. The location of Kano has some better terrain modifiers compared to Niani, which are the base for the starting calculations, then we add some regional modifiers, and some location modifiers on top of them, if needed. Thanks to feedback like this, we are now available to adjust it further, either by making any change in the area development, or by adding a location modifier to Niani.

 

[Pavía]

I think you should reconsider having Nigerian as one language at all. Nigeria is extremely diverse linguistically

I know, as I made the culture pass on it, and well, it was challenging. This language is made up of the West and East-Benue-Congo languages. But as I said, we're open to review it.

 

[Pavía]

All this saffron in the pepper coast definitely looks weird, considering there's pepper as a good in the game...

It's a bit problematic, indeed, since before the Spice break up, it was representing the Malagueta Pepper and Kola Nuts present in the region, and if we change it now to Pepper, it would 'override' the Pepper spice trade with India and Indonesia. It's a pain point we want to address eventually, although for the moment, we decided to keep it being Saffron from a pure gameplay perspective.

 

[Pavía]

Is there content for the decline of Kanem and the enstablishment of Bornu, are they two separate tags? Because if not then I would prefer it was called Kanem-Bornu Empire

There's content for the country, yes.

 

[Pavía]

Where are the government type and rank maps? You gave them to us last time!

We'll provide when we review the tags, there's a fair amount of work for them regarding what in 1337 was a SoP, what a Settled/Tribal country, and what a Settled/Monarchy country...

 

[Pavía]

There are now 15 saffron locations in West Africa (Which never grew the plant) to Iran's 8 (While it should be producing the most by many times any other region on Earth). How does this serve the gameplay but to devalue saffron, instead? I can't see how saffron is going to remain the worlds most valuable spice when you're adding it to places it was never grown.

That doesn't sound like it's helping gameplay, just shifting the problem to a totally different area. Rather you should look at addressing the root cause of why West African pepper didn't compete with Asian pepper to any large degree past the 15th century. Have an event about the European palate shifting and West African pepper falling out of favour, cutting down the number of locations, or allow European countries to ban trading in it, as I've read Portugal might have done. There are a ton of competing theories on why the spice stopped being as relevant, any one of them would model this dynamic far more accurately.

My personal favourite best would be to add Kola Nuts and Malagueta Pepper as separate goods, along with others that we removed that previously existed, as Johan has mentioned a couple of times. But you know, we had some balancing issues that we're trying to address, and by restricting the number, we're now going in the right direction gameplay-wise. Nonetheless, this is a specific issue we also want to tackle because, as you say, the current Saffron setup in Western Africa is just weird; we already have a couple of ideas on top of your suggestions that would try to make for a good trade-off between immersion and gameplay, because that is what we want to achieve at the end of the day.

 

[Pavía]

I know like everyone else that there has to be a limit but adding, say, a dozen more raw materials than there are now would have a truly significant impact on performance ?

We are done with the review of raw materials, unless we find in our internal playtests something related to good demands that is completely off and requires a further change to be made (something that is unlikely, TBH).