Central Africa UN division contains DR Congo, R Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, C.A.R., Angola, and kind of awkwardly Chad which doesn't fit anywhere else. Personally I am really weirded out by the inclusion of Zambia, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi in the "East Africa" part, wasn't it done only because of them being English colonies and using Swahilli? Geographically and historically I'd put them too in 'central' category. And UN "eastern Africa" also contains Zimbabwe lol, which is quite controversial notion as you could just as easily say it is 'southern' Africa.
Honestly, someone has to say this, Central Africa, both in narrower and wider definitions, is one of the parts of the world with the poorest "density of urban - state - civilizations across history". I had a period of going through all African countries and cultures, and the only entities from this area I could envision added to this game were those kingdoms in Angola and south - western Congo (there were several but I'd just put them under umbreela terms "Kongo" and "
Angola"). I vaguely recall Zambia and south - eastern Congo had some serious iron - age proto - civilizations, but archeology in this region is extremely underdeveloped still, so it's not enough data to base a faction around it. There were also tiny
Ugandan kingdoms but once again: not nearly enough data, at least across the amateur Internet.
Saying Chad has a rich history of civilizations is really stretching it, because Kanem kingdom and its Kanuri people are like 85% based outside modern Chad's borders. Almost all Subsaharan civilizations that are IMO actually viable for this kind of game are in Western or Eastern Africa, with the vast majority of Central and Southern being extremely sparsely populated until 20th century.
So far we already have "Niger river civilization zone" well covered in games like this, which are starting to routinely employ Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Ethiopia and (finally) Nubia are also in a safe space. What is really unexplored is Nigeria - Ghana zone and coastal Eastern Africa. My personal favourite which I'd love to see added in a game like this is whatever from Nigeria. Nigeria is in a really weird place, as it is
the country with population density and "civilization density: unparalelled in comparision to most of Africa across last 2000 years, and yet its history and culture are completely and utterly overlooked even in our extremely niche "broad awareness of global civilizations" subcultures
Within Nigeria you have powerful nations of
Hausa,
Fulani,
Kanuri,
Igbo and friends, Edo (
Benin kingdom) and
Yoruba (Oyo kingdom and others). You could make several distinctive civilizations out of it. My favourite is Yoruba by far, probably one of the most obscure world civilizations in comparisions to their achievements.
From the rest of West Africa you have very well documented
Akan people in Ghana and neighbors (Ashanti kingdom), Dahomey kingdom in confusingly named country of Benin (although honestly I'd call it a city state, not a major civilization), maybe arguably
Jolof/Wolof in Senegal, and maybe arguably
Mossi in Burkina Faso, but they are obscure as hell, could never learn more about them. Modern countries of Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and most of Ivory Coast generally didn't organize state societies and urbanization.
From eastern Africa we have mainly
Swahili,
Zimbabwe,
Somali and
Malagasy (let's just call them this way, as Merina is kind of exclusive and Madagascar is an awkward name of an island). The problem with the first two is documentation and city list, we mostly just know they did exist and performed great trade, also good luck with leaders; it is especially awkward in case of Swahilli, because its leader in civ5 and civ6 mod was essentially a Persian guy made very very brown skinned in mod graphics
as it is the best documented one... Somali and Malagasy are great civilizations, so they'd work, only with the sad meta "problem" of those countries being in a horribly disastrous state nowadays, which could impact getting them right.
