In actuality, it's more historically inaccurate to allow the New World tribes and confederations to advance AT ALL in tech. Historically, though some of them (The Aztecs, Mayans, and their cultural subsets come to mind) had some very efficient systems in place and troops that fought well in their territory, they were technologically STAGNANT. For millenia, in fact, historically. There were obviously examples to the contrary, for instance the implementation of maize led to more agricultural ability which led to larger populations that were more sedentary, etc. However, by and large, and CERTAINLY compared to the West, Middle East, and Asia, they were completely technologically stagnant for one very simple reason- without intending to be, they were entirely isolationist when it came to cultures that were technologically different from them. In fact, it's even reflected in the way disease raged across the populations of the Americas upon contact with Europeans.



Now, my first question in grade school when I heard about Europeans introducing plagues to the Americas by simply being there, was.... why didn't the Europeans become plagued by American diseases? My teacher at the time didn't really have a good answer. I had to look it up later on. It turns out that because the Native American groups didn't use livestock in the same way, nor have population centers on the same scale, they didn't have the same spread of diseases. A disease was able to mutate to attack those of the strongest genetic predisposition to immunity when it was in the Old World. This meant that over time diseases became more and more powerful, more and more able to attack those who would be strongest against it. This meant that when the Europeans came to the Americas, super-plagues were placed into an environ with no resistance. If you want evidence that the technology had stagnated and was therefore FAR FAR behind European levels, that's it right there.



As I said, it's actually historically inaccurate to allow the Native American nations to advance at all. But we allow that because it's an alternate history game, and theoretically it's less far-fetched than some of the other things that happen.



And before I get a whole bunch of quotes saying I'm racist, I'm 1/4 Cherokee. Even I accept that my forebears were NOT technologically able. It doesn't mean they were stupid, far from it. It means they were in a culture and surrounded by circumstances that weren't conducive to technological advance at ALL.





Edit: Sorry, I left out a big part of my argument. Why did I bring up disease as a showpoint that the American nations were less advanced, or perhaps less advance-able than African nations? A big reason that the slave trade took off so much was that most of the African slaves already had resistances to European diseases. This meant at least one of two things, possibly even both:

1)They had direct contact with more technologically advanced cultures, leading to the spread of said disease. It's easy to assume, then, that they would also have direct contact leading to some technological leak.

2) They were advanced enough in their own right to develop enough diseases to have a better immunity towards them. This is less likely but is potentially a factor.