I have seen some strangely advanced africans, too.
EUIV seems to lead everyone to being around -3 to +3 techs from a world average. Some natives isolated from everybody are like -10 techlevels from the average, at best. So you're in tech level 20 and everyone else is at 17 or 23, with american and african peoples being at 15 max.
Compare to EUIII: Muslim techgroup started slightly ahead of the western techgroup, orthodox and eastern started more or less equal, it keeps pace for a while and then by 1500s or so the Western techgroup starts to get ahead of everyone else, and by 1600s you're looking at either westernizing or falling far behind the western techgroup. Beating a Western techgroup army is an archievment in itself.
Meanwhile the African and American techgroups are not even really in this race, you will lag far behind the better techgroups until some europeans come around.
The problem is that particularly in Africa (never had the same problem in the Americas for some reason), Westernization (switching from African to Western tech group) seems to happen way too easily. I have never played as an African nation, so I don't know exactly what it would entail.
IRL no African nation ever reached parity with Western technology, so it's absurd that it pretty much always happens in EUIV.
Consider the Matabeles, a typical sub-Saharan tribe from the Zimbabwe area which was beaten by Europeans in the 1890s in battles like this with massive discrepancy in numbers. The Matabeles agricultural level was slash-and-burn agriculture, meaning equivalent to a practice the Romans thought ridiculous and primitive when Germanic peoples practiced it around 100 AD. This has been around since the earliest neolithic in Europe, while it had reached Zimbabwe only around 1000 AD. The peak achievement of Africans in Zimbabwe is considered the "great Zimbabwe": a ruin consisting of stones put on top of each other without mortar - equivalent time period for these type of buildings in Northern Europe is around 4000 BC. They, or indeed any other Zulu tribe, never managed to create even a system of writing, which was first found in Europe in 1500 BC or even as early as 5500 BC, if you believe the Vinca tablets contain writing.
This is how Matabele warriors looked like in the 1890s (note that their armies technically had riflemen, but they only barely knew how to use them in battle):
This is what EUIV believes Matabeles typically look like in the 1700s:
It is when they start pushing this kind of weird historical fabrication that you realize how fucking batshit insane the current PC culture is.
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