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Have the end-Pliestocene megafauna extinction in the Americas not happen or be less severe and the Columbian Exchange might have happened very differently IMO.

I'm not sure I buy the idea of being disunited being an inherent advantage myself. Yes, unity means a single point of failure in government policy. On the other hand, disunity means more barriers to travel, trade, and the spread of ideas, more money sunk into militaries, and more wars with the...

Yes, but there was another thing I said in that post. In a China-dominated world I might be writing about how China was the only place with geography favorable to the formation of a stable megastate, the stability of which would then promote easy trade and spread of ideas within its borders...

Europe does have a lot of irregular coastline, and a relatively favorable position in terms of getting to the Americas. It seems like something that would up the odds of Europe developing a strong seafaring tradition, grabbing the resources of the Americas, and becoming a major maritime trading...

Assuming by "Asia" you mean East Asia and don't include West, Central, and South Asia (because just "Asia" is very broad) the tricky thing I see is that China has a lot of the good agricultural territory, so before the industrial era it's hard to see a nation in that region that would be a...

The world of 1500 would look pretty evil to us, so you really just have to find a way to strangle a lot of the social changes of the past couple of hundred years in the crib. A world still run by the kind of brutal authoritarian conformist militaristic sexist monarchies that ran it in 1500 would...

If you're thinking of ancient printing in clay, that actually happened. See the Phaistos Disk. It didn't really go anywhere because of a combination of technological and social reasons; there wasn't really a big advantage to the technique in the context of that kind of society. Jared Diamond...

Would a more successful Gnosticism or Catharism count?

That reminds me of an idea I've toyed with. A world where abolition never really got off the ground, and instead the main thrust of reform was to make slavery less horrible (put limits on the stuff masters could legally do to slaves, put limits on the amount of time a person could be enslaved...

I suppose if you really wanted to push the Muslim-wank you could imagine some kind of Muslim state based in North Africa that controls Iberia, France, and the British Isles, that might help. Of course, the challenge then becomes imagining how such a wank-state would arise.

Hmm, if you somehow prevented the Muslims getting kicked out of Spain, and then had the Spanish Islamic lands somehow become part of some North Africa-based state, would that count? That seems like the best bet for giving a non-European state a good jumping off point to the New World, offhand...

Aside from that, one idea I had: What about a society that has a similar attitude to economic power (i.e. money) that democracies have toward political power? Not communist or socialist in the conventional sense (although there might be a lot of socialist wealth redistribution involved), but...

One thing I find it interesting to play around with is how different ideologies arise in reaction against and imitation of each other. Maybe, instead of trying to create a novel ideology from scratch, create some cultural and religious predecessors or a different general cultural context and try...

Maybe one could come at this from the opposite angle? Instead of making Europe weaker, make somebody else stronger, so by the time Europeans get around to conquering other parts of the world they find somebody more powerful has beaten them to it.

I remember once reading a musing by somebody that fascism was a sort of social laser, taking the energy that might go into reforming society and directing it entirely into relatively authority/elite-friendly directions like militarism, SCIENCE!, and Hoover Dam style "big projects". So I guess...

All fair enough. I obviously am making a lot of stupid amateur mistakes. I will keep your advice in mind in the future. Thank you.

The criticism inspired me to do another map for farther along in the timeline, I know it's very quick and dirty but I just wanted a quick compare and contrast thing: Persian Empire after first round of break-ups: Lost Territories: 1: Restored Rus state 2: Eastern Anatolia ceded to...

Well, I figure they've been messing around in Central Asia for a long time, so by the industrial era they've got it pretty well under control - and then they expand into Russia and Siberia as the path of least resistance (since they've got Rome, China, and India hemming them in everywhere else...

Perhaps adventuring in far away places like Ethiopia and Arabia would be better left to the colonial/industrial era, when Rome might have the same kind of technological advantage over those peoples OTL Europeans did, and would have mechanized transportation that would make operating so far...

Why not? I mean, Russia manages to have Vladivostok despite being at the other end of the Eurasian continent, I don't see why this is much more outrageous. It's supposed to be a state with some broad general similarities to OTL Imperial Japan not a copy. But yes, I'll admit I was going for...