Madagascar should not rival Britain on count or density, nor even Cuba for density, but it should have a handful of provinces at minimum - it was in a decent location, St Mary's Island was relevant at the time, and the French had settlements. Tons of low base tax and low production smaller provinces there with a large and aggressive native population would make it unwelcome to settle, largely unproductive, but potentially rewarding for either a nation who wants a safe base off the mainland that they can more easily defend... or the nation with native integration bonuses in its NIs who settled it historically. I also used Madagascar as a quick example, there are certainly many other places on the map where they decided it wasn't overly important and so just lumped on a couple overly-large provinces and called it a day.



I'm suggesting that a larger number of lower-tax/production/manpower provinces is WORSE in value (but better for the game) than a smaller number of high-value provinces. If you give Africa (and others) more province count, and reduce the value of it, you can keep the same net value of the region while doing all of the following:

- It takes far longer to colonize everything, or allows more people to establish a base for jumping to the next region without any one power monopolizing all the coast.

- It will most likely be more difficult to develop the region with the new system, because you'll need to spend points on more total regions.

- If you do go forward with the heavy commitment of development, you have the expensive potential to have something significant.

- This means slower penetration into Africa (and other regions like it), less rewarded effort for sprawling colonies there, more expensive to develop, but more overarching potential if actually developed.



As it stands the low province count in many places doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad, it means that huge tracts of land are filled up with minimal colonizing effort. It means I can have the entirety of south and east Africa colonized within a century or two. Madagascar is done with a whopping 3 colonies. Double the province count without doubling the wealth (would need to be after changes to base production value to accomplish) and suddenly it takes twice as much effort for the same effective reward. Now, I'll be looking to grab the good spots and move on to better things - as I should.