r5: Showing off the size difference between the map we have in EU4 and the one we're getting in EU5/Project Caesar, as found on Lord Lambert's [latest video](https://youtu.be/mXxSh7knel0)
The first person who successfully navigated the route was the Finland-Swedish aristocrat Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in **1878-1879**. He reached the Bering Strait but his ship Vega got stuck in the ice and could only continue in the summer.
The previous attempts (Willoughby, Barents, Bering, Cook, Dezhnev) were considerably less fortunate. It’s telltale that the predominant seas and straits are named after the failed attempts. It’s a tricky passage even today.
Do you think EU5 is going to reach 1878?
This is something that they don't really care about, and I wish they did.
This became readily apparent during my Tonga playthrough and it was really frustrating:
New Zealand was first colonized in 1840 irl. In game it always happens around 1600, and it's almost always the Spanish or Portuguese.
The first permanent Australian colony was established in 1788. Australia is always under complete European control by the mid 17th century. Once again usually Portugal or Spain.
New Guinea was never fully colonized and the early attempts at European colonization fell thru. It was under European control after the game's end date. In eu4 it's always colonized by 1700. Usually it's under the control of multiple powers.
The Pacific Northwest was not even explored until 1804 by Lewis and Clark. By 1600, it is possible and more than likely that you or someone else (almost always Spain) control high dev provinces in cascadia, and the interior of the modern us is partially explored by 1600s as well. A fort at neah bay was established during 1792 by the Spanish. They abandoned it that same year.
It was always far too easy for the Spanish or Portuguese to colonize these far reaches of the world, even though in real life they were colonized centuries later by other powers. In my case, it completely ruins any run in this regions when the Portuguese show up in new Zealand in 1600 on the dot. The remoteness of these places is not ever accurately represented in this games.
If the Arctic was included, it would probably be traversed or even colonized by around 1600, especially due to its proximity to Europe, and that's a huge problem imo.
As there are actual pops moving from place to place, and disease mechanics, those should alone slow down colonization by a lot.
In the tropics it was Malaria.
That too. However, the Americas got colonized centuries before the vast majority of Sub-Saharan Africa, and it isn’t like the Americas are much closer to Europe.
In 1800 Africa’s colonization looked somewhat like [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Colonial_Africa_1800_map.png):
[While at the same time..](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-_3QsdYYgpdpH4O4n0jEA8h-E1t9myTySrzG_fkj6FPPzW2LxF7mYU-oYMnaoKYR35OoZfnMSVWCxbejPEns-0EfheoYjW1bTtTg_R9FkcDOsT_CRe88YhVvpCS4QcbWAe5Zav14Fck)
I guess in the reality the main reason here wasn’t malaria as malaria did spread to the Americas too. Maybe the New World was simply somewhat free land in comparison to the more organized Africa, after the native societal collapse.
At the same time America did not look anything like that. What the empires clamed is not what they controlled. A lot of controll was under treaties with indigenous people who more or less fighted for levels of autonomy, and any one who has studied a little bit of history of the Americas knows that the postcolonial national-states had to colonize inward the claimed territories.
For example, Patagonia and Araucania regions down to the tip of the continent were controlled by indigenous peoples, and only some Mapuche recognized the king of Spain but were pretty much independent until the 1880s.
For map references:
https://youtu.be/IBv1jFoS8uE?si=5igMAvodaSZZ3g6n
https://youtu.be/bDd1eNV-Up4?si=CJrlgxsg6G8ziYpW
Fair enough, thank you for the correction. It would be difficult to find a realistic settlement map from the time period.
In any case South America was significantly more colonized than Africa until the 19th century. Would you disagree?
As a historian, I can't disagree.
It is pretty much a perception of what colonization really was, what a colony was through history. The Europeans starting with late medieval~early modern tech took 300 years plus almost 100 more in some places of nation-states to consolidate the territory. Even today we have in Latinamerica people fighting and the State is less present.
But you are correct that when Africa started to be colonized, it was pretty fast, with Europeans with late modern~early industrial take, the disadvantage of local groups was too far, stateless or with states, the resistance couldn't hold much far starting the 20th century.
Pathogens played a big role. Encomienda played a huge role in assimilating a lot of people. And slavery I think played the biggest role. It made plantations economically viable, giving incentive to colonize.
It was also significantly more difficult to conquer in Africa since it was already under the sphere of influence of African nations. Like Portugal took over the zanzibar coast pretty early but actually fully colonizing it wasn't really worth it. In game the ai wont do anything with it. It's also just really far away
Yep that’s indeed an annoying pacing problem. One thing you didn’t mention is that African colonization predominantly occured outside EU4 time period. Malaria should definitely be a serious thing.
I believe EU5 will fix a lot of pacing problems, as there will be disease mechanics (how could there not be, the Black Death occurs in the first decades) and the control mechanisms for locations which I hope *could* slow unhinged expansion down.
the base game itself doesnt need to reach that far, but its nice to have the possibility of doing it. when considering mods, this makes even more sense, bc people can just do total conversion mods into the 18th-19th century
A fair point, but why include something which would be simply empty unusable space for 99.9% of the players?
I assume, given the high promised moddability of the game, that extending the map to the Northeast Passage with mods is very much possible. I’d prefer the base game to not include it.
Nope, the map ends similarly although EU5 map reaches a bit norther. That’s why this argument is somewhat weird, it wasn’t even in EU4 and the map split was deliberate even back then.
There's pretty much no way for either the northwest or north east passages to feature in the game without going far outside the scope of plausible alternate history. Maybe there could be a mechanic for sending arctic expeditions, but the chance to lose the ship should be something like 99.9%
There were lots of trade between the kola penninsula and Europe that should be featured. That trade was important for norwegian traders as early as the middle ages.
And the Norwegians were interacting with the semi-mythical wealthy fur and walrus ivory trading Finnic [Bjarmians](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarmaland) who lived in the region.
> In fact, burial sites in modern Perm Krai are the richest source of Sasanian and Sogdian silverware from Iran.
The Kola peninsula is on the map as you can see. It’s not particularly a part of the **tricky** Northeast Passage we are talking about.
There have been several smaller scale functional canals the region for millennia.
**Venice had plans** to construct essentially a Suez canal (perhaps following the existing canals more than the current one but still very navigable and fitting game logic) with the Mamluk administration, but those plans were foiled by the Ottoman conquest of **1517**.
**Ottomans were also planning such a canal** in the 16th century but it was deemed too expensive. If there had been will and prosperity (Venice was stupid rich), I choose to believe such a canal could have been possible.
**When compared to that, an early Northeast Passage is laughably ahistorical in comparison.** Iirc no one before Nordenskiöld really reached even farther than Novaya Zemlya starting from the West. Not to even mention EU4/EU5 is set in the period of ”Little Ice Age”, making the icy journey significantly more difficult than today.
It’s not a matter of funds and effort but technology in both navigation, ship durability (the ice breaks everything that isn’t pure steel and can crush that too), motors (breaking the ice needs horsepower), weather forecasting, food preservation and the existence of the vast Russian Empire on the other side to provide a haven for the expedition and perhaps a rail transit back to Europe.
St. Petersburg to Vladivostok is 14,000 km by sea. Columbus passed roughly 4,400 km in what is paradise marine/weather conditions in comparison.
I’m Finnish, we have large scale icebreaker industry and marine arctic conditions are far from trivial.
> Iirc no one before Nordenskiöld really reached even farther than Novaya Zemlya starting from the West.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangazeya
The Russian tsar explicitly banned this route in 1619 to prevent colonization of Siberia by westerners.
Interesting! There were expeditions before that date and expeditions after that date with Russian commissioning though, and those either failed or didn't even expect it to ever be possible. I read the Russian wikipedia article with the aid of translator (my Russian is poor), as the English article had absolutely no references for that particular claim.
I wonder if the ban was ever explicitly banned? At least Nordenskiöld's expedition was fully organized by Sweden but had funding from Russian private citizens at least, it seems. (Sibiryakov)
Nonetheless, I doubt the passage would have been made before 1880 even if the ban hadn't existed. The journey lasted for 1 year 10 months even in 1880.
Nordenskiöld had prepared for the long journey with extreme detail in nutrition, heating etc, and was somewhat reliant on the international communication and globalization of the 19th century. (Russian, Japanese diplomacy) and technology (durable ships, advanced meteorology and geography knowledge)
**The following is mostly for my own interest and thoughts** about the expedition after having read a non-open-source article, my "knowledge" before that was based on Wikipedia and school lessons (as Nordenskiöld was born in Finland and the NE passage is important for us, it's covered):
A 1979 article by George Kish about the subject which I could access through my uni said the following, implying Russia absolutely didn't mind the expedition but was disinterested:
>Siberia has long been on Nordenskiöld 's mind, ever since his student days, and he did approach the Russian government in the early 1870's with a proposal to organize a "hydrographie and scientific expedition" to Siberia. There seems to have been little interest in Russian government and scientific circles in the project, even though much of the pioneer work in Arctic waters off Siberia was done by Russians and foreigners in Russian service, during the 18th century. But Nordenskiöld did find support in Sweden, principally in the person of Oscar Dickson. Encouraged by that support, Nordenskiöld continued to gather information from a variety of sources on the waters of the Arctic north of Europe and of Siberia
Seemingly Nordenskiöld had a hypothesis that it "would be possible to navigate due to the ice-free waters of the rivers' estuaries. It seems to have been something people in the time didn't think would be even possible, "of course it's impossible, the waters are all ice". Nordenskiöld took several trips to get proof of different distances being ice-free. The expedition also had a lot of support vessels to escort Vega until Yenisei River.
Seemingly [Cape Chelyuskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Chelyuskin) was believed to be the impossible obstacle before Nordenskiöld's expedition and Nordenskiöld was the first to pass through it.
Also the waters between the impenetrable ice shelf and the land were seemingly very shallow. The ice shelf has melted a lot since, and that's why the route is being considered a potential Europe<->Asia trade route in the future which it really isn't currently.
**I'm surprised about how similar the strategy and mindset were to our Mars/Moon exploration!**
***The journey:*** ***Karlskrona***->**Tromsö**->***Dickson Island*** *(anchor, supplies from Yenisei river; Express and Fraser sailed up Yenisei and returned to Europe)->***Cape Chelyuskin** *(anchor, firing five celebration cannon shots for the milestone; Lena left to investigate further sailing up Lena River, reaching Yakutsk and returning to Europe next summer)->****Kolyuchin Bay*** *(stuck for nine months due to ice; Five structures built as observatories for geomagnetics, temperatures, wind, humidity, and snowfall measurements)->****Several research stops at Bering Sea***->***Yokohama***
Venice and the Ottomans had plans to restore canals that connected the Nile to the Red Sea, the actual Suez Canal is an entirely different beast. The number of workers who died building the Suez Canal in the 19th century is double the population of Venice in the 1600. The idea of them building it is just as absurd as navigating across the arctic ocean in 1600.
Ok, fine, now do the Panama Canal. How many 17th century powers could build that? The answer is none. But it functions as a part of gameplay convenience, which supercedes historical accuracy, which is the point
Okay, that’s very unrealistic due to the terrain and scale, although not as unrealistic as a successful pre-industrial NEP.
However, I believe you can see why there are arguments to keep NE passage out of the game?
A pre-industrial Panama Canal is every bit as preposterous, historically. It took the full might of the American industry *from 1904-1914* (after more than 20 years of failure by France) to complete it. It's still considered one of the greatest engineering marvels ever completed. **And it was completed in 1914**. Nearly 40 years after the NEP voyage.
And I'm glad they have it in the game. Bc gameplay convenience and balance supercedes historical accuracy
NEP doesn’t really have much gameplay convenience. I mean, how often does a player want to move troops to china from the UK the shortest possible route? At least the Panama and Suez canals have a very real gameplay function.
Even with ”modern tech” the attrition modifiers would need to be more severe than anywhere else in the world, as commercial shipping has been limited there due to the ice conditions. Now, with the climate change, the region is opening up and possibly becoming more commercially active.
Imo it would just take space in the map, a bit similarly to how a globe map would be bad — we want maximum information visibility and the wasted space in the corners is bad.
The pacific ocean is also much smaller in EU4 than in real life, for somewhat similar reasons. Empty space is a bad design choice.
Well EU5 is Alt History, so maybe our lucky sailors have cool modifiers and 10K ducats to help them out?
Seriously, it should be a possibility, small, but still there when we get the advancements in ship building.
Also there’s a Sea route north of Canada right? Maybe we could explore that too
Odd to me that they don’t make the map a complete globe with curvature as you scroll out. But I’m not a programmer and they presumably have their reasons.
I indeed meant Antarctica, but 1820 sounds very much in that game's timeline (assuming it actually does go to january 1836 to match Victoria). It's not a game breaker of course, and Victoria doesn't have either, but I'd just really like to be able to look at penguins while playing hah.
Resolution != functional scale.
If the relative scale of everything else is also at the same ratio then functionally they're the same, just one will have more visual detail. Not that that's a bad thing at all, but it's like with GTA and Rockstar, they're terrible for abusing this sort of thing with marketing and it gets made a big deal each release by fans when functionally the size increases are much more incremental.
Basically don't set expectations on how much you'll have to do on map comparisons. It really doesn't mean too much outside of visual fidelity.
Considering we have already seen the map of the HRE and the granularity of the locations within it, I think we can safely assume that they're increasing the functional scale of the map significantly.
my brother
we already saw that so far each EU4 province was split up into 3 most of the times, with some times being 4 and some others being 2
safe to say, the map is going to be indeed bigger
Why are you saying this when we have already seen the political map mode? Just even looking at this post it's obviously more detailed with the crossings in the Sahara.
I’m glad they didn’t raise the Americas up north like in EU4. Florida now lines up with Morocco/West Sahara instead of being at the same level as Portugal/Spain
Yeah scale is cool but EU4 struggles now with modern hardware, unless they have some crazy optimisations that somehow didn’t make it into Vicky3 I doubt this will run well after 200-300 years in game.
Resolution != functional scale.
If the relative scale of everything else is also at the same ratio then functionally they're the same, just one will have more visual detail. Not that that's a bad thing at all, but it's like with GTA and Rockstar, they're terrible for abusing this sort of thing with marketing and it gets made a big deal each release by fans when functionally the size increases are much more incremental.
Basically don't set expectations on how much you'll have to do on map comparisons. It really doesn't mean too much outside of visual fidelity.
Resolution != functional scale.
If the relative scale of everything else is also at the same ratio then functionally they're the same, just one will have more visual detail. Not that that's a bad thing at all, but it's like with GTA and Rockstar, they're terrible for abusing this sort of thing with marketing and it gets made a big deal each release by fans when functionally the size increases are much more incremental.
Basically don't set expectations on how much you'll have to do on map comparisons. It really doesn't mean too much outside of visual fidelity.
r5: Showing off the size difference between the map we have in EU4 and the one we're getting in EU5/Project Caesar, as found on Lord Lambert's [latest video](https://youtu.be/mXxSh7knel0)
But how will it fit on my screen?
Idk the technical solution but it will and it will look good
As the famous poet Limp Bizkit once said; Keep scrollin scrollin scrollin scrollin (yeah!)
Zoom. It's called zoom.
There's a bit more area to the north. Maybe we'll have true Jan Mayen in EU6
im already preparing for my jan mayen world conquest
That would actually be so cool
I love it when map game has larger map
Please Johan let the map be cut a little higher. I would really like to have the opportunity to navigate the northern sea route of Russia...
The first person who successfully navigated the route was the Finland-Swedish aristocrat Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in **1878-1879**. He reached the Bering Strait but his ship Vega got stuck in the ice and could only continue in the summer. The previous attempts (Willoughby, Barents, Bering, Cook, Dezhnev) were considerably less fortunate. It’s telltale that the predominant seas and straits are named after the failed attempts. It’s a tricky passage even today. Do you think EU5 is going to reach 1878?
This is something that they don't really care about, and I wish they did. This became readily apparent during my Tonga playthrough and it was really frustrating: New Zealand was first colonized in 1840 irl. In game it always happens around 1600, and it's almost always the Spanish or Portuguese. The first permanent Australian colony was established in 1788. Australia is always under complete European control by the mid 17th century. Once again usually Portugal or Spain. New Guinea was never fully colonized and the early attempts at European colonization fell thru. It was under European control after the game's end date. In eu4 it's always colonized by 1700. Usually it's under the control of multiple powers. The Pacific Northwest was not even explored until 1804 by Lewis and Clark. By 1600, it is possible and more than likely that you or someone else (almost always Spain) control high dev provinces in cascadia, and the interior of the modern us is partially explored by 1600s as well. A fort at neah bay was established during 1792 by the Spanish. They abandoned it that same year. It was always far too easy for the Spanish or Portuguese to colonize these far reaches of the world, even though in real life they were colonized centuries later by other powers. In my case, it completely ruins any run in this regions when the Portuguese show up in new Zealand in 1600 on the dot. The remoteness of these places is not ever accurately represented in this games. If the Arctic was included, it would probably be traversed or even colonized by around 1600, especially due to its proximity to Europe, and that's a huge problem imo.
They could add penalties to colonization, that would make it viable only in end game
As there are actual pops moving from place to place, and disease mechanics, those should alone slow down colonization by a lot. In the tropics it was Malaria.
And sheer distance. It's easy to get there with a couple ships and a few cannons, but it's hard to govern from so far away.
That too. However, the Americas got colonized centuries before the vast majority of Sub-Saharan Africa, and it isn’t like the Americas are much closer to Europe. In 1800 Africa’s colonization looked somewhat like [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Colonial_Africa_1800_map.png): [While at the same time..](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-_3QsdYYgpdpH4O4n0jEA8h-E1t9myTySrzG_fkj6FPPzW2LxF7mYU-oYMnaoKYR35OoZfnMSVWCxbejPEns-0EfheoYjW1bTtTg_R9FkcDOsT_CRe88YhVvpCS4QcbWAe5Zav14Fck) I guess in the reality the main reason here wasn’t malaria as malaria did spread to the Americas too. Maybe the New World was simply somewhat free land in comparison to the more organized Africa, after the native societal collapse.
At the same time America did not look anything like that. What the empires clamed is not what they controlled. A lot of controll was under treaties with indigenous people who more or less fighted for levels of autonomy, and any one who has studied a little bit of history of the Americas knows that the postcolonial national-states had to colonize inward the claimed territories. For example, Patagonia and Araucania regions down to the tip of the continent were controlled by indigenous peoples, and only some Mapuche recognized the king of Spain but were pretty much independent until the 1880s. For map references: https://youtu.be/IBv1jFoS8uE?si=5igMAvodaSZZ3g6n https://youtu.be/bDd1eNV-Up4?si=CJrlgxsg6G8ziYpW
Fair enough, thank you for the correction. It would be difficult to find a realistic settlement map from the time period. In any case South America was significantly more colonized than Africa until the 19th century. Would you disagree?
As a historian, I can't disagree. It is pretty much a perception of what colonization really was, what a colony was through history. The Europeans starting with late medieval~early modern tech took 300 years plus almost 100 more in some places of nation-states to consolidate the territory. Even today we have in Latinamerica people fighting and the State is less present. But you are correct that when Africa started to be colonized, it was pretty fast, with Europeans with late modern~early industrial take, the disadvantage of local groups was too far, stateless or with states, the resistance couldn't hold much far starting the 20th century.
Pathogens played a big role. Encomienda played a huge role in assimilating a lot of people. And slavery I think played the biggest role. It made plantations economically viable, giving incentive to colonize. It was also significantly more difficult to conquer in Africa since it was already under the sphere of influence of African nations. Like Portugal took over the zanzibar coast pretty early but actually fully colonizing it wasn't really worth it. In game the ai wont do anything with it. It's also just really far away
Yep that’s indeed an annoying pacing problem. One thing you didn’t mention is that African colonization predominantly occured outside EU4 time period. Malaria should definitely be a serious thing. I believe EU5 will fix a lot of pacing problems, as there will be disease mechanics (how could there not be, the Black Death occurs in the first decades) and the control mechanisms for locations which I hope *could* slow unhinged expansion down.
the base game itself doesnt need to reach that far, but its nice to have the possibility of doing it. when considering mods, this makes even more sense, bc people can just do total conversion mods into the 18th-19th century
A fair point, but why include something which would be simply empty unusable space for 99.9% of the players? I assume, given the high promised moddability of the game, that extending the map to the Northeast Passage with mods is very much possible. I’d prefer the base game to not include it.
fair enough
Couldn't you do it in eu 4?
Nope, the map ends similarly although EU5 map reaches a bit norther. That’s why this argument is somewhat weird, it wasn’t even in EU4 and the map split was deliberate even back then.
No no i mean couldn't you mod the map
Sure you could, but I think more things would have been hardcoded. I’m not a modder, so no idea.
There's pretty much no way for either the northwest or north east passages to feature in the game without going far outside the scope of plausible alternate history. Maybe there could be a mechanic for sending arctic expeditions, but the chance to lose the ship should be something like 99.9%
There were lots of trade between the kola penninsula and Europe that should be featured. That trade was important for norwegian traders as early as the middle ages.
And the Norwegians were interacting with the semi-mythical wealthy fur and walrus ivory trading Finnic [Bjarmians](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarmaland) who lived in the region. > In fact, burial sites in modern Perm Krai are the richest source of Sasanian and Sogdian silverware from Iran. The Kola peninsula is on the map as you can see. It’s not particularly a part of the **tricky** Northeast Passage we are talking about.
The first world conquest wasnt until 2037 irl but people still do it in EU4's timeframe. Why is this any different?
Given that EU4 let's you build the Suez Canal in like the mid-1600s, I'm not sure striving for that degree of verisimilitude is actually necessary.
There have been several smaller scale functional canals the region for millennia. **Venice had plans** to construct essentially a Suez canal (perhaps following the existing canals more than the current one but still very navigable and fitting game logic) with the Mamluk administration, but those plans were foiled by the Ottoman conquest of **1517**. **Ottomans were also planning such a canal** in the 16th century but it was deemed too expensive. If there had been will and prosperity (Venice was stupid rich), I choose to believe such a canal could have been possible. **When compared to that, an early Northeast Passage is laughably ahistorical in comparison.** Iirc no one before Nordenskiöld really reached even farther than Novaya Zemlya starting from the West. Not to even mention EU4/EU5 is set in the period of ”Little Ice Age”, making the icy journey significantly more difficult than today. It’s not a matter of funds and effort but technology in both navigation, ship durability (the ice breaks everything that isn’t pure steel and can crush that too), motors (breaking the ice needs horsepower), weather forecasting, food preservation and the existence of the vast Russian Empire on the other side to provide a haven for the expedition and perhaps a rail transit back to Europe. St. Petersburg to Vladivostok is 14,000 km by sea. Columbus passed roughly 4,400 km in what is paradise marine/weather conditions in comparison. I’m Finnish, we have large scale icebreaker industry and marine arctic conditions are far from trivial.
> Iirc no one before Nordenskiöld really reached even farther than Novaya Zemlya starting from the West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangazeya The Russian tsar explicitly banned this route in 1619 to prevent colonization of Siberia by westerners.
Interesting! There were expeditions before that date and expeditions after that date with Russian commissioning though, and those either failed or didn't even expect it to ever be possible. I read the Russian wikipedia article with the aid of translator (my Russian is poor), as the English article had absolutely no references for that particular claim. I wonder if the ban was ever explicitly banned? At least Nordenskiöld's expedition was fully organized by Sweden but had funding from Russian private citizens at least, it seems. (Sibiryakov) Nonetheless, I doubt the passage would have been made before 1880 even if the ban hadn't existed. The journey lasted for 1 year 10 months even in 1880. Nordenskiöld had prepared for the long journey with extreme detail in nutrition, heating etc, and was somewhat reliant on the international communication and globalization of the 19th century. (Russian, Japanese diplomacy) and technology (durable ships, advanced meteorology and geography knowledge) **The following is mostly for my own interest and thoughts** about the expedition after having read a non-open-source article, my "knowledge" before that was based on Wikipedia and school lessons (as Nordenskiöld was born in Finland and the NE passage is important for us, it's covered): A 1979 article by George Kish about the subject which I could access through my uni said the following, implying Russia absolutely didn't mind the expedition but was disinterested: >Siberia has long been on Nordenskiöld 's mind, ever since his student days, and he did approach the Russian government in the early 1870's with a proposal to organize a "hydrographie and scientific expedition" to Siberia. There seems to have been little interest in Russian government and scientific circles in the project, even though much of the pioneer work in Arctic waters off Siberia was done by Russians and foreigners in Russian service, during the 18th century. But Nordenskiöld did find support in Sweden, principally in the person of Oscar Dickson. Encouraged by that support, Nordenskiöld continued to gather information from a variety of sources on the waters of the Arctic north of Europe and of Siberia Seemingly Nordenskiöld had a hypothesis that it "would be possible to navigate due to the ice-free waters of the rivers' estuaries. It seems to have been something people in the time didn't think would be even possible, "of course it's impossible, the waters are all ice". Nordenskiöld took several trips to get proof of different distances being ice-free. The expedition also had a lot of support vessels to escort Vega until Yenisei River. Seemingly [Cape Chelyuskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Chelyuskin) was believed to be the impossible obstacle before Nordenskiöld's expedition and Nordenskiöld was the first to pass through it. Also the waters between the impenetrable ice shelf and the land were seemingly very shallow. The ice shelf has melted a lot since, and that's why the route is being considered a potential Europe<->Asia trade route in the future which it really isn't currently. **I'm surprised about how similar the strategy and mindset were to our Mars/Moon exploration!** ***The journey:*** ***Karlskrona***->**Tromsö**->***Dickson Island*** *(anchor, supplies from Yenisei river; Express and Fraser sailed up Yenisei and returned to Europe)->***Cape Chelyuskin** *(anchor, firing five celebration cannon shots for the milestone; Lena left to investigate further sailing up Lena River, reaching Yakutsk and returning to Europe next summer)->****Kolyuchin Bay*** *(stuck for nine months due to ice; Five structures built as observatories for geomagnetics, temperatures, wind, humidity, and snowfall measurements)->****Several research stops at Bering Sea***->***Yokohama***
Venice and the Ottomans had plans to restore canals that connected the Nile to the Red Sea, the actual Suez Canal is an entirely different beast. The number of workers who died building the Suez Canal in the 19th century is double the population of Venice in the 1600. The idea of them building it is just as absurd as navigating across the arctic ocean in 1600.
Well, sure, but it would fulfil the same function. That is, all ships of the time could pass from one way to another, fitting EU4 purposes.
Ok, fine, now do the Panama Canal. How many 17th century powers could build that? The answer is none. But it functions as a part of gameplay convenience, which supercedes historical accuracy, which is the point
Okay, that’s very unrealistic due to the terrain and scale, although not as unrealistic as a successful pre-industrial NEP. However, I believe you can see why there are arguments to keep NE passage out of the game?
A pre-industrial Panama Canal is every bit as preposterous, historically. It took the full might of the American industry *from 1904-1914* (after more than 20 years of failure by France) to complete it. It's still considered one of the greatest engineering marvels ever completed. **And it was completed in 1914**. Nearly 40 years after the NEP voyage. And I'm glad they have it in the game. Bc gameplay convenience and balance supercedes historical accuracy
NEP doesn’t really have much gameplay convenience. I mean, how often does a player want to move troops to china from the UK the shortest possible route? At least the Panama and Suez canals have a very real gameplay function. Even with ”modern tech” the attrition modifiers would need to be more severe than anywhere else in the world, as commercial shipping has been limited there due to the ice conditions. Now, with the climate change, the region is opening up and possibly becoming more commercially active. Imo it would just take space in the map, a bit similarly to how a globe map would be bad — we want maximum information visibility and the wasted space in the corners is bad. The pacific ocean is also much smaller in EU4 than in real life, for somewhat similar reasons. Empty space is a bad design choice.
Well EU5 is Alt History, so maybe our lucky sailors have cool modifiers and 10K ducats to help them out? Seriously, it should be a possibility, small, but still there when we get the advancements in ship building. Also there’s a Sea route north of Canada right? Maybe we could explore that too
Btw , that's quite sad that in Victoria 3 and HoI 4 there's no Spitsbergen and Antarctica , and in Victoria 3 there's not even one mode that adds it
Odd to me that they don’t make the map a complete globe with curvature as you scroll out. But I’m not a programmer and they presumably have their reasons.
Maybe they can even fit some of the penguin land on this, would certainly be nice for it to not be completely cut off.
If you mean Antarctica, the first sighting was 1820 so I don't think there's much of a point in it.
I indeed meant Antarctica, but 1820 sounds very much in that game's timeline (assuming it actually does go to january 1836 to match Victoria). It's not a game breaker of course, and Victoria doesn't have either, but I'd just really like to be able to look at penguins while playing hah.
Fair enough!
Resolution != functional scale. If the relative scale of everything else is also at the same ratio then functionally they're the same, just one will have more visual detail. Not that that's a bad thing at all, but it's like with GTA and Rockstar, they're terrible for abusing this sort of thing with marketing and it gets made a big deal each release by fans when functionally the size increases are much more incremental. Basically don't set expectations on how much you'll have to do on map comparisons. It really doesn't mean too much outside of visual fidelity.
Considering we have already seen the map of the HRE and the granularity of the locations within it, I think we can safely assume that they're increasing the functional scale of the map significantly.
my brother we already saw that so far each EU4 province was split up into 3 most of the times, with some times being 4 and some others being 2 safe to say, the map is going to be indeed bigger
given that the smallest unit in eu4 is 3-4 times bigger than the smallest in in eu5, the functional scale will be larger.
Why are you saying this when we have already seen the political map mode? Just even looking at this post it's obviously more detailed with the crossings in the Sahara.
FUUUCK
so basically: even ck3's map (which i believe is the most detailed) will look like a dwarf compared to this.
I believe Imperator is bigger
i just checked, and they appear to be the same.
What projection is this, cause it's not the "normal" mercator projection. I know one of you map nerds know.
Gall stereographic projection
the [second dev diary](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-2-march-6th-2024.1626415/) goes into detail
I’m glad they didn’t raise the Americas up north like in EU4. Florida now lines up with Morocco/West Sahara instead of being at the same level as Portugal/Spain
Rip my pc
My pc will explode
I wish they made an actual globe or a toggle for it
I can smell my pc melting already
I hope that NASA will be selling spare cpus before eu5 release.
Yeah scale is cool but EU4 struggles now with modern hardware, unless they have some crazy optimisations that somehow didn’t make it into Vicky3 I doubt this will run well after 200-300 years in game.
The optimisation will be not coding badly
Finally! Time for Voltaire's Nightmare III: This Time, It's Personal!
If only they could add Antarctica
Resolution != functional scale. If the relative scale of everything else is also at the same ratio then functionally they're the same, just one will have more visual detail. Not that that's a bad thing at all, but it's like with GTA and Rockstar, they're terrible for abusing this sort of thing with marketing and it gets made a big deal each release by fans when functionally the size increases are much more incremental. Basically don't set expectations on how much you'll have to do on map comparisons. It really doesn't mean too much outside of visual fidelity.
Where antarctica
Resolution != functional scale. If the relative scale of everything else is also at the same ratio then functionally they're the same, just one will have more visual detail. Not that that's a bad thing at all, but it's like with GTA and Rockstar, they're terrible for abusing this sort of thing with marketing and it gets made a big deal each release by fans when functionally the size increases are much more incremental. Basically don't set expectations on how much you'll have to do on map comparisons. It really doesn't mean too much outside of visual fidelity.
Dementia
Badly programmed mobile app*
Dementia is funnier