Yeah, disease would be big, though for the game setting I was thinking of it'd be easier to off Cortez and maybe sink fleets of ships than to save much of the population. Still, if you can slow down the invaders while the population evolves resistance, or prevent strongholds from being established...
And in Africa disease partly ran the other way, slowing down Europeans, with the slave trade doing much of the damage -- plus maybe livestock disease, I've heard something about rinderpest killing off native cattle, then something happened with tse-tse.
You still get evils, you just don't get colonialism's evils. For example, the Aztec empire may keep on chugging, or the Inca totalitarianism (AIUI), and Europe might turn on itself more. But for a 1600s game setting it's nice to protect places for the Europeans to explore while not having a re-hash of history... of course, for a fantastic alt-hist, I'm not sure there's any solid reason the Americas or Africa have to be left as we found them, my sympathies for Diamond not withstanding.
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yati
Re: Colonialism in fantasy
Date: 2007-02-06 08:20 pm (UTC)And in Africa disease partly ran the other way, slowing down Europeans, with the slave trade doing much of the damage -- plus maybe livestock disease, I've heard something about rinderpest killing off native cattle, then something happened with tse-tse.
You still get evils, you just don't get colonialism's evils. For example, the Aztec empire may keep on chugging, or the Inca totalitarianism (AIUI), and Europe might turn on itself more. But for a 1600s game setting it's nice to protect places for the Europeans to explore while not having a re-hash of history... of course, for a fantastic alt-hist, I'm not sure there's any solid reason the Americas or Africa have to be left as we found them, my sympathies for Diamond not withstanding.