Discovering America

[Furious Mental]

I didn't realise that someone had already mentioned this. But anyway, I still think it's a valid point. The Vikings did encounter local opposition when they visited the Americas. In fact, if you read the Vinland Sagas you get the distinct impression that the Vikings thought the eastern seaboard of America would be a fabulous place to live (much better than Greenland anyway) but could never settle permanently because of intermittent hostility on the part of the natives. A large ocean going power would probably have had little trouble overcoming them but we're talking about expeditions of only a couple of hundred people- from Greenland, itself a not terribly populous place. But if Total War games are supposed to let you rewrite history I don't see why you shouldn't able to, for example, send a fleet from the North Sea via Iceland and Greenland to the New World, rather than waiting for some Italian to blunder, with the help of revolutionary navigational tools, into a continent which was fresh in the memory of North Atlantic geographers and historians and could have been reached centuries before by any group of canny sailors with a decent ship.