Thinking a little more on the spice locations and there's still some significant improvements that can be made. The current distribution of cloves is far more widespread than it should be and many of the clove growing locations grew pepper in reality. There seems to be a mistake of showing areas that traded cloves from the Malukus as growing them instead.
| Area | Current # of Clove Locations | Suggestion |
|---|---|---|
| Malukus | 8 | Keep as is |
| Sumatra | 7 | Most should be pepper, as the region was known for black pepper. Some of these probably represent fragrances, and should be changed to incense or something similar. The rest should be whatever good cinnamon fits best into. |
| Borneo | 2 | Change to pepper as it was well known in this region |
| Java | 2 | Change to pepper to represent black pepper |
| Lesser Sunda | 1 (Alor Island) | I can't find much on historical spice production on the island. That said, I've seen plenty about its sandalwood - so I recommend changing to Incense or something like that. |
| Malay Peninsula | 1 (Malacca) | This location is not particularly well known for growing spices in this period - and certainly not cloves. If it grew spices, it was probably pepper - but I imagine another good entirely would work better. |
Right now you just have Cloves as the catch all spice for any spice grown in Indonesia, even if it overlaps with one grown in other areas. Meaning black pepper in Indonesia is under the Clove good, and black pepper in India is under the Pepper good. This makes makes having these different spice goods way less impactful - and makes the Malukus less valuable than they should be as the only significant source of cloves and nutmeg.
It feels like you followed the letter of the request to 'split the spices' without following the spirit of it, which was to create more interesting economic niches and facilitate trade within regions while driving more historical gameplay. You still haven't given Indonesian players a reason to value the Malukus over Sumatra and Java, as those two combined now produce more Cloves than the spice isles. You also still haven't created the conditions that allowed Cloves to be so readily monopolized by those that traded in them - which is that they came from a very narrow region. Right now a monopoly requires controlling most of maritime Southeast Asia's market.
We've seen similar issues with you using a regional rather than realistic system resulting in things like Saffron in West Africa and Madagascar - rather than pepper - and Pepper in Kashmir rather than Saffron. I hope you rethink that approach.
That said, if there were a way to later change some of these locations to produce cloves - say if the tag owning the location also has control of a clove location - that'd be pretty cool and could be used in other places that nutmeg and cloves were later transported - like Sri Lanka, Zanzibar and Madagascar.
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