Tin requirement locks things out of mesoamerica and makes copper useless

[inland grail]

It's impossible to build quite a few things as Tenochtitlan (or any other mesoamerican nation) because there is not a sliver of tin on the market. I get that you're not supposed to make caravels and cross the Atlantic on your own (although that would be a neat, if weird, alternate history to try), but this also renders copper basically useless, despite there being a "copper works" tech for central americans, even stating that it would give us an advantage if we were to use it. Yeah, it probably would, if we could.

I think it would be better if we either were able to make tools (and possibly naval supplies, although I get why we can't) without a hard tin requirement, using either only copper or maybe a copper + gold mix?
That way, we'd be able to leverage the currently mostly useless copper mines, and copper tech available
(copper is apparently used for temple maintenance, but even without having built any mines myself, only AI built them, I still have a supply of 50 times the demand)

Either that, or have some small tin mines scattered through the Americas. Apparently, Aztecs had bronze by the 1300s, so they must've had a tin source

[solemn crane]

Just add tin RGOs to represent arsenic mining. Bronze doesn't require tin, plenty of societies used arsenic-copper bronze

[inland grail]

Ok so... You also can't explore at all because you need naval supplies, even the very nearby Cuba which I feel would be fair game, because you need naval supplies for an expedition, and you need tin to make naval supplies

Apparently there was an ancient tin mine in Zacatecas, and the Inca had ready access to tin bronze
(also yeah, arsenic bronze)

I was expecting pre-columbian civs to be more challenging, but not to be missing such a significant part of the game

[dire knot]

you need tin to make naval supplies

that's really odd...

[inland grail]

I've been doing some map stealing, there's not a single tin RGO in any of these

I'm a bit mad because there's a lot of copper, but you can't really do anything with it

[inland grail]

Wait apparently I missed the one tin RGO in the entire half of the continent
It's in the gulf of california, a little far from the coast
I guess it's colonization time

[rose dust]

💀

[rose dust]

@inland grail @dire knot @solemn crane https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3603040205

This is on the workshop, just do you guys know

[solemn crane]

Pog. Already gave up on my maya run due to the stone/tools death spiral but maybe I’ll give it another go

[rose dust]

Not sure if it’s in the area that’s actually possible for natives to colonise, testing now

(Akso to be clear, I’m claiming no credit for this mod)

[shut hull]

Yo holy shit are you the Joy of Sailing vintage story modder?? Didn't expect you to be here

[inland grail]

omg yeah that's me, I'm famous lol

[inland grail]

The existing tin is colonizable for aztecs if you steal maps from the guys up north, but it's hard to handle market access to it

In my run I had to create a separate market for them, and for some reason they can't export directly to the Tenochtitlan market so I had to pass them through another one of my markets (that's further away), just generally a hassle and I'd love to be able to use my plethora of tenochca merchants that just spend their days exporting gold to import tin instead, I'm now building a road there to see if I'd be able to get >0% market access there and incorporate them back

[rose dust]

Oof, sounds like a pain

Bit at least there is tin accessible

So the Aztecs can actually do shit

[inland grail]

Yeah, I'm still on my discovering-the-game run so there's a lot of stuff that I did wrong, but it's probably possible to colonize it pretty early. You'd still need coastal access or a lot of money to colonize everything in the way though, Tenochtitlan has neither in the beginning

[inland grail]

I found out that stone quarries apparently get priority in who gets to use the tools, I got out of it that way (+ the great pestilence helped a lot, weirdly enough)

But yeah, the "need wood to build stone RGOs, need tools to build wood RGOs, need stone to build tools" is more doomy than the doom mechanic imo lol

[rose dust]

How tf did the great pestilence help you?

Does that not lead to just immediate consumption by the Spanish

[inland grail]

Considerably lowered social groups needs, and I had a decent amount of tribals left and relatively low employement

[rose dust]

Social group needs?

[inland grail]

pop needs, idk, i played too much vic 3 lol

[rose dust]

That’s a thing!?

[inland grail]

Yeah

[rose dust]

…

[inland grail]

Like, nobility buys fine cloth n' stuff

[rose dust]

THATS A THING

[inland grail]

Yeah

You can see how much they spend on everything by hovering on top of the group in the top bar, then you see "spendings" or something, hover over that and you'll see details

In the Goods tab you can also see what your groups lack

[rose dust]

That’s very good to know

[inland grail]

So, having 4x less population meant 4x less people buying up all the wood lol

[rose dust]

Ahhh

How’d it go witg the Spanish?

[inland grail]

Currently I'm on good terms with New Spain, we're mostly staying out of eachother's business

[rose dust]

Thats… unexpected

[inland grail]

Well, they rivalized me but still got ~45 positive opinion

[rose dust]

Not that bad

Oh also

Do hospitals help with the pestilence?

[inland grail]

I tried supporting a nobility uprising but couldn't because you can't really join a war

[inland grail]

Barely

[rose dust]

Should I bother witg them

[inland grail]

imo you should bother with them because any single citizen you can keep is a good thing

Build them in your few largest cities

I think I had 4-5 of them

The pestilence has considerably worse debuffs than the black plague so don't expect to really live through it

[rose dust]

But it is possible to not immediately collapse

[inland grail]

(New Spain is also entirely contained within markets that I have control over)

[inland grail]

Yeah

It hits hard, but it's playable

[rose dust]

Right

[inland grail]

I had a succession war at the same moment so that was harder

[rose dust]

Oof rip

[inland grail]

~30 years later I'm up 500k population, still 7 mil to go but good enough

[rose dust]

You form the Aztec empire yet? Or still have a massive number of vassals?

[inland grail]

I didn't see the reform society option, so I annexed my vassals manually

I'm gonna be dragging the Altepetl nerf for my entire game I think

[rose dust]

Religion tab

[inland grail]

Yeah, I saw it after annexing half the continent and switching my main religion to maya lol

[rose dust]

You need to do all the religious reforms

Oof

There’s a mod to fix the doom issue

I’d recommend

After reforming society

[inland grail]

Yeah it's a bugfix at this point

[rose dust]

Yeah

[inland grail]

I'll probably start another aztec run at some point but for now I wanna see what happens with the spanish

• I'm just getting access to tin, and am finally propagating institutions from New Spain

[rose dust]

Oh nice

Also, is there any way to get European maps?

So you can see Europe?

[inland grail]

Not that I found
You can't spy spanish territories because they're vassals, and you can't spy Castille because it's too far

[rose dust]

Rip

[inland grail]

You can however launch explorations once you get tin and sailors

(subsidize fishing villages to get sailors, they're rarely profitable)

[rose dust]

There is a mod to replace the need for tin if you don’t wanna suffer as much

[rose dust]

Noted

[inland grail]

And I'm saying that, I'm not even sure you can get the range to explore Europe that way

You can explore the carribean sea

[rose dust]

Aztec Cuba frfr

[inland grail]

doing that already lol
Well, got Habana and the nearby area, the rest was colonized by spanish people

Cuba is mostly useless

[rose dust]

Is it possivle to become seafaring before Spain gets here?

[inland grail]

My best bet would be to explore the carribean, up to Florida, colonize Florida and try to see the Bermudes, colonize that and pray that you can see far enough into the ocean to explore the Açores and use that as a forefront to explore EUrope

[inland grail]

Probably, if you go for the tin early

But you need the New World institution to hire explorers

and can't have that

[rose dust]

Aztec Armada frfr

[rose dust]

Ah rip

[inland grail]

Alternatively, go the other way, colonize California, discover Alaska, then Russia, end up in China and go around Africa but that'll take a while

[rose dust]

Aztec Florida could work maybe, if Spain doesn’t get it fiest

[rose dust]

It would be much easier tbh as it’ll take Europe much longer to reach it

[inland grail]

It's not hard to get Florida, and you can get all of Cuba and the carribean, I just didn't bothered with it
(the people up north have maps to most of NA, and the tiny country in like Equador or something has maps to most of the caribbean)

[rose dust]

Really?

[inland grail]

You just need maritime presence to colonize

[rose dust]

I eould be thought it would be hard as Spain gets there

[inland grail]

As soon as you reform you should get that, and if you go straight for it that should be a century before spain gets there

[rose dust]

Ahh

[rose dust]

As in get exploration?

Or get maps

[inland grail]

Maritime presence

The maps, you can get immediately

[rose dust]

hhh

[rose dust]

How?

[inland grail]

Steal them from the folks up north and down south

[rose dust]

Ahhh

Spy thingy?

[inland grail]

Yeah

You need 40 spies, then in Diplomatic actions, clandestine actions you can select "steal maps"

Then pick which region you want to steal

It'll rack up antagonism though

[rose dust]

That just means your enemies will come to you

[inland grail]

Yeah it's manageable

Especially since afaik you rack up antagonism in the region whose map you stolen

So like, nomadic tribes

Not a big deal

[rose dust]

Right okay

Thanks, that’s many things I’ll take into consideration

[glass jasper]

Can you not use stone to make tools?

or even iron

[lethal citrus]

is this not accurate though? I remember reading somewhere that a significant reason for metallurgy not developing as much in pre-columbian america was because of the lack of alloying materials, among other things

[dire knot]

no

stone tools suck

[uneven gulch]

Certainly not for the Andes region

[rose dust]

Mesoamerica is an outlier to that, even if most of the rest of north and south did lack metallurgy

[glass jasper]

playing as aztecs, I'm managing to balance tools, and even have a +7 to stone in my market right now

obviously, it's definitely not perfect and does limit growth, but it's possible

[inland grail]

Wow nice!
Pre or post-pestilence?

[glass jasper]

pre

this is with like 10-15 million pops or whatever in mexico

[inland grail]

wow

congrats

[vale wing]

huge to this thread
literally only thing why I wanted to play natives is to make reverse colonizing shenanigans but now this idea is completely pointless and I feel very sad...

[snow orbit]

scroll up, there was definitely tin in Zacatecas in antiquity

also the Andean regions should have plenty of tin

[vale wing]

Im not 100% sure but the main reason why American tribes didnt develop metallurgy is because they didnt have coin minting as the old world had (they traded using corn, cloth and other useful materials) and usage of metal for other utilities was pretty much nonexistent, limited to rituals or decorations. no need of metalworking = no demand for metalworking = no desire to develop metalworking

[inland grail]

Yeah, there's one tin RGO in the gulf of California where an ancient deposit was known, but it's tribal so it has to be colonized to be brought to market

(found it after creating the post, made a Reddit post about it)

[sacred gazelle]

they just need to make natives (uncolonized) markets more wiespread and therefore more accessible to landed natives

so that the aztecs could feasibly import some tin from the arizona because they had literally traded with arizona irl for stuff like gems

[quartz sigil]

I think they should just add some tin RGOs to the americas. Either there was an actual pre-columbian tin mind there or it’s no more of a stretch than many of the 19th century RGOs.

[nocturne ledge]

they just need to scrap Pop-Based Countries entirely tbh. it was a neat concept that they failed to capitilize on properly thanks to a lack of focused design

as it stands they are functionally just the same as the tagless "natives" that occupy uncolonized provinces in eu4

[vale wing]

they are planning to change these tho. I hope even make them playable at some point

[nocturne ledge]

I think it makes more sense for most of the PBCs (in North America at least) to get pushed into the other categories

but yeah, I do hope something happens to them

bc as of now they're literally just sitting there doing nothing which is very disappointing

[rose dust]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3604876501

this mod adds tin and copper to the new world, alongside general Aztec fixes

[snow orbit]

They should be in the Andes and accessible via trade. The Mesoamericans had bronze, they just didnt have much use for it and didnt make a lot

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17742754/

[dusky hazel]

I am having similar issues with Muscovy and building artillery early game. I have to fight Kiev and Chernihiv who have around 10 and 5 forts but no tin in whole region so I cannot build artillery/cannons. I am almost ready to form Russia and have 436 locations and around 10 vassals and still no tin...

[sacred gazelle]

mesoamericans didnt trade with the andes tho lol

[snow orbit]

I didnt say they did.

[soft quarry]

There's definitely going to be a whole Americas dlc in the future.

[vale wing]

they actually did
this is how mesoamericans got their melting technologies - via trade

this happened over time, in many waves

[sacred gazelle]

[citation needed]

Ive asked sonnet 4.5 he says they had no trade or knowledge of one another

[vale wing]

asking AI about academic knowledge, sweet Jesus...

[vale wing]

here you go https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1988.90.4.02a00040

[sacred gazelle]

id rather trust ai that literalwho on discord

but thanks for the link ill check it out

see what claude makes of it

[vale wing]

and whats the point of asking for a book?
you arent even going to read it

[sacred gazelle]

do u actually have access to that paper

[sacred gazelle]

scihub is down rn

nevermind got it thru annasarchive

okay but thats still just a trade network

thats like saying iceland traded with china

some technology did spread, but surely u arent saying iceland should be able to purchase stuff from the yuan in 1337

[vale wing]

and? this doesnt deny that technology did spread from south americans to the Mexico

[sacred gazelle]

but we arent talking about spread of tech, the original post said mesoamericans should have andes accessible via trade thats what i had replied to

i mean theoretically they had found like venetian beads among north-western american natives that got there way before europeans actually reached that area

[vale wing]

this doesnt change anything
they didnt invent it themselves and got technology from south americans, this is my point

[sacred gazelle]

i mean, sure, but thats not what we're discussing here

[vale wing]

ofc Andeans were unable to trade with them directly due to lack of advanced shipbuilding

[sacred gazelle]

we're discussing whether the aztecs should be able to trade with peru

anyway u shoudl use AI more. im a medical doctor by profession (ironic, i know) and it is an amazin tool for these sorts of questions about topics i am not an expert in/know little about

[vale wing]

btw can you share the link? cant find it there

[sacred gazelle]

(for legal purposes i totally got this through my university's access absolutely legit 100%)

[vale wing]

main problem with AI is that it hallucinates a lot
if it cant find anything or doesnt know about existence of something or if sources are not plenty - you wont get accurate info

[sacred gazelle]

depends on the questions IMO, but as u get experience with it u kinda learn where it never hallucinates and what statements might have been hallucianted and that u need to double check

also better ais like modern paywalled versions of chatgpt and claude hallucinate little actually

[vale wing]

considering the amount of work required to get 100% correct info you can just look stuff up yourself
like in our case get the book > ctrl+f > andean > get all related info, 24 mentions on all pages dont require a lot of time to read through

[winged lynx]

And if you are not able to verify the answer of the AI you have to pray that the statistics model designed to give you an answer that pleases you actually gave you truth and not a hallucination.

[nocturne ledge]

they dont lmao they just hallucinate in a way thats more believable to people who dont know better

the only analysis an AI does is word correlation lmao. they are literally machines designed to make up real-sounding sentences

truth has nothing to do with it. you are literally just doing the online equivalent of asking an 8-ball

except an 8-ball won't actively encourage schizophrenic delusions whereas an "AI" (LLM) will

the last thing you, as some amateur hobbyist online, should do is trust chatGPT or another AI to give you real historical information and analysis

[nocturne ledge]

like kakimoto said just learning elementary knowledge-acquisition skills such as skimming texts for keywords will serve you much better than just plugging a billion prompts into an AI til it spits out an answer you agree with

[vale wing]

its Kakimito 😭

[nocturne ledge]

type, sorry

typo*

[vale wing]

np

[nocturne ledge]

my phone keyboard doesnt work the greayest

[sacred gazelle]

u guys smell that?

thats copium

[nocturne ledge]

but yeah the andes & mesoamerica absolutely did trade with each other, albeit indirectly. they were both participants in the trade networks of the pacific coast

[sacred gazelle]

i love the smell of copium in the midday

[nocturne ledge]

ok kid

[sacred gazelle]

sir this is a video game discord server

[nocturne ledge]

dont call me sir

w/e, kid's earned itself a block

anyways to bring this thread back around to actually talking about eu5 the game does absolutely need to rework its RGO setup in the Americas

[vale wing]

I think RGO situation in south America is fine, they have lots of tin. like 10 sources or so. no European county has this much

[uneven gulch]

no

like 6 of those sources are in the middle of the amazon

and not a single one of them starts as part of a nation

so you can't use bronze at the start

[vale wing]

well
yes
but thats a lot better than for mesoamericans

[vale wing]

lets begin from that most Andean tags cant even access sea at the start

[uneven gulch]

?

what point are you making?

[vale wing]

naval supplies

[uneven gulch]

?

[vale wing]

they require tin

[uneven gulch]

?

[vale wing]

...

[uneven gulch]

what point are you making?

[vale wing]

scroll up and read whole discussion, i dont know what else you want

[uneven gulch]

What does this have to do with the fact that the tin representation in the Andes is unacceptable?
Andean society had a long history of bronzeworking before 1337

[vale wing]

1)once again - this is a comparison. mesoamerican situation is much worse
2)I know

[sacred gazelle]

I think had I been redisigning that, Id make it so that actual natives (uncolonized provinces) still contributed SOME share to the market that they are in

Aztecs traded with the north, like Arizona or something, there is a tin location north of the mesoamerican civs

Waht should happen is that 1) there should be more native american markets, eg those in uncolonized/uncivilized/no tag provinces

2. uncolonized provinces should contribute a little bit of resource to them

3. one such market shoudl be in arizona and mesoamericans should have trade range to trade with them

[vale wing]

I think for this to happen we also must have these SoPs have technological ability to process ore into shiny stuff. because otherwise whats the point of mining ore if you dont even know what is "ore"

[rancid badge]

Tin deposits def exist in Virginia area IRL

it was super hard to achieve anything when i played a native due to this bottleneck and the fact that reserching later dye tec's also hurt you due to no alum or ability to make older dye guilds

[dire knot]

there is tin in Karelia

and you can import tin from Riga node if you have access to Novgorod

[vale wing]

for anyone wondering: we won. this line is from 1.0.5 patchnote (6 hours ago)

[mystic oar]

does it only update on new saves? My north american tribe still doesnt have Tin anywhere up to Cahokia and texas

[vale wing]

Im pretty sure that yes
But I cant check sadly

[uneven gulch]

That's historical

There should be no tin in the east.
None of this tin/arsenic was exploitable with 1337-1837 technology.

You're asking for something that shouldn't be the case.

[mystic oar]

So there isn’t any alternative way to make naval supplies at all? 13 colonies imported all of that to try and build ships?
It makes a navy or even sailors completely impossible which is terrible balancing. Maybe give a worse way to produce the goods with other inputs?

[uneven gulch]

So there isn’t any alternative way to make naval supplies at all? - I don't know why EU5 uses that PM, I presume it's because of some bronze part.
13 colonies imported all of that to try and build ships? - Yes!

America still imports 77% of its tin

[mystic oar]

I see, thank you.

It still feels a bit off from a balancing perspective, but I get it.

[dire knot]

yes
tin is a very rare ore IRL

[inland grail]

hell yeah now we've got business

[rose dust]

Said the Ghana Empire, selling lots of gold… and slaves

[winged lynx]

Are your pops that much more worth sold for a lump sum to work for another nation for their profit rather than employed in your buildings for your profit?